Gaining Momentum from Negative Experiences in Life
Day 9: Learning from those dark days in life can help you raise your energy
Stepping towards the light and out of the darkness is one of the most difficult parts of the path in life. However, it is something that we must constantly do in order to learn and grow our spirits and our lives. As I delve into how to learn from the darkness here on day 9 of my 100 day journey through the beautiful book The Infinite Self by Stuart Wilde, I am reminded of countless times where I have learned from negative experiences. I am grateful for them for teaching me the lessons I needed to learn.
“Collapse” is the way people learn that they have to change their game plan and raise their energy. We’ve all been through hard times in our lives. And isn’t it true that when you went through a rough patch, there was a moment when you turned it around? You grabbed the bull by the horns and said, “Hey, I’m not going to take this anymore.” You started to generate enthusiasm, energy, action, healing fixing things, looking at yourself and saying, “Wait a minute. I’m a victim of my ego here. I’m going to do something about it.” -Stuart Wilde
Today I am reminded of the many times that I collapsed. I had a breakdown. I cried. Something didn’t work out. Something went wrong. I had to experience the pain of that collapse in order to rise up again and try something new. I remember one of the greatest lessons I learned was when something crashed in my life and I had to start to rethink my dreams.
For many years I was involved in food businesses: baking, cooking, and cafe chef service as well as other jobs and businesses related to the food industry. A couple of years ago I thought I had one of my dreams in my hand. I had dreamed of owning my own cafe. I had an opportunity to do all of the cooking and baking in a local coffee shop. I was there before the sun came up and I went home in the late afternoon. It was thrilling and had many ups and downs. In the end, the coffee shop was doing poorly financially and could not stay open. As a team we decided that it was time to let go. It was very difficult. I remember sitting on the couch crying, eating chips and watching videos. My son brought me tissues and was very concerned.
I am so very happy in a strange way that the coffee shop closed. I learned that I don’t have the personality to run a cafe. I am a very hard worker and put a lot of positive energy into things, but I need a different type of personality to be a leader of such a business. I feel that I learned this so that I could keep moving on to things that are more aligned with my heart and soul.
From this dark experience of the coffee shop closing, I had to raise my energy and get started again. I decided to start up my baking business again. From there I got a job baking at a local farm cooperative. It was a beautiful place and I was there a few months where I learned more lessons. After that, I finally decided to start my professional organizing business. I decided to make a major pivot onto a brand new path. During this time of just getting started I decided to take a part time job doing customer service at a local bakery. I learned even more lessons there about how I function best in my own business. I am deeply grateful for that job because there I learned that I work well with others but I really like to have the freedom to create my own schedule. Soon, I was able to leave that job to pursue my business full time.
Sometimes you need to learn a lesson many times in order to fully commit to a path that your heart was meant to be on. For me, I had to learn the lesson 7 times before I broke free of a pattern. Life will keep trying to tell you something until you are ready to come out of the darkness and see the light.
I am grateful for each of those 7 lessons. Each of those businesses and jobs that I tried along the path. They all lead me straight back to my heart. Usually reality and life whisper to you, but sometimes in order to grow, we need to loud messages, we need the collapse, we need the hard lessons. We need to actually go through the difficulties, the pain, the strife, the frustration in order to truly realize what we are meant to do and who we are meant to become in the process.
The Infinite Self has a cute delivery system, which sometimes takes you — sometimes hauls you — to the next stepping stone. You will never see far ahead, but you have to learn to hop from one stone to the next, like a cheery little frog. -Stuart Wilde
My prayer and intention for you today is that you look back on some negative experiences in life, or something difficult you are going through now, and see the lesson in it, see the wisdom in it. Where is reality asking you to grow? What lessons did you or are you learning? How can you raise your energy from this point on?
How can you rise up and raise your energy today?
I am tagging my fellow writers here who are following along on this journey so that I may share this path with them: Michele Thill, Chowa Sekai, Henery X (long), Dr John Rose, Gurpreet Dhariwal, Terry Mansfield, Chirag, Amy Marley, Aurora Eliam, CMP, Taha Abbas, Rasheed Hooda, KeepingItRealWithAnnick, Typewriter, Charlotte Zobeir Ali and many more! Thank you Illumination Family!
Trista Signe Ainsworth is a professional organizer with Joyful Minimalism. She helps working women clear the clutter, overwhelm, and shame from their homes and lives so that they can truly live in joy.
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