Life is a Tacher--What Lessons Are You Learning?

Life is a Teacher: What Lessons Are You Learning?
By Michelle L. Casto, Ph.D.

Welcome to the School of Life! You are here to learn many lessons, why not choose to learn them the fun and easy way?
You came to this life to shine as the bright light you are and to live out your divine destiny. When you become a Divine Human and learn to master your own life, you will become the person Goddess intended you to be, have the thoughts God would have you think and live the life you were born to live.

Your daily life is your classroom, and each person, place, and opportunity is a teacher you can learn from. The reason to “get smart” about how life really works is so you can feel fulfilled more often….to celebrate your life and fill it with all the good stuff: love, laughter, joy, adventure, fun, peace, prosperity, and contribution.

What I have come to understand is that learning is the crucial connecting process that unites your human limited mind with your divine unlimited Mind. Think about it. Reflect on all the things you have learned in the course of your life. There have been minor, major, and graduate level lessons and the learning never stops until you leave this world. There is a saying in the self-help industry, if you are not growing, you are dying.

Remaining stuck happens when you fail to learn. Have you noticed that there are a few core lessons that keep coming around again and again until you finally “wise up?” Many of these lessons are from unresolved childhood wounds that we keep subconsciously re-creating, feelings like abandonment, unworthiness, anger, fear, frustration. Related to these emotions, there is a unique message built in, such as the ability to love yourself, become a gracious receiver, or how to go with the flow, etc When you wake up and transform your core lesson, you become free!.

Learning is a powerful tool for life success. It empowers you to become self-aware, make more conscious decisions, and begin to express more of your True Self. A simple definition of learning is to gain knowledge, comprehension, or mastery of through experience or study, to become informed, or to find out about something.

Most of us make the mistake of thinking that formal education is all the learning that we need to concern ourselves with. But what I have found is that the most important education we can receive is how to make our life work at its absolute best. The more we learn, the more self-aware we become, the more self-aware we become, the more self-expression we share, and the more we express our true self, the more we are able to radiate our God-Self.

An important part of starting down the path to self-awareness is to pause to reflect and go deeper with your questioning and thinking processes. The first stage in learning is to recognize that something needs to change. You may experience pain of some kind that is sending you a message. Next, unlearn what is an insult to your own heart and soul.

Throughout your life, you consciously and subconsciously inherit, absorb, or otherwise gather ideas about many aspects of life, and what you may have learned is often untrue. A good place to begin making room in your personal operating software (or default program) is to delete all that no longer serves you. Clean up your inner database and make room for what lifts you to a higher level of thinking, knowing, and living.

What I have seen is that there are 3 options to living:
1. The Victim, where you believe that life happens to you.
Here you are a victim of circumstance, get caught in the blame game, go round and round, never really getting anywhere.
2. The Victor, where you believe that life happens by you.
Here you strive to overcome all odds and force your way through life with much effort and struggle.
3. The Divine Human, where you know that life happens AS YOU.
Here you surrender and trust that you are being supported and that your main focus is to allow divinity to shine through in all you do.

To graduate to the divine human lifestyle, there are 4 some simple human skills you can master.
1. Pay Attention
Taking in the world means being an observer of what is going on within you and what shows up in your reality. As W.H. Auden so wisely said, "Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be." By fully using your God-given gifts of sight, hearing, taste, touch, reason, and the 6th sense, you can immediately get clued in to what is being brought to your attention. Spiritually smart people are able to move through emotions and challenges with more resilience and less stress because they pay close attention!

2. Ask Powerful Questions
Once you notice something, start asking questions about it. Francis Bacon once said, “Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.” Powerful questions allow you to think new thoughts, find new solutions, and make better choices. There is a critical thinking component to questioning, in that you are looking at the topic from many angles and using your reason and intellect to form a conclusion. The word question has “quest” in it, representing that you alone must do an investigation of the truth. A quest is going on an inner journey to find the answers you seek.

3. Experience Epiphanies
Once you have new questions, welcome the Aha moments. Saint Thomas Aquinas once said, “Reason in man is rather like God in the world.” The ability to have consciousness is tied to reason and understanding. According to Wikipedia, epiphany is a sudden realization or comprehension of the essence or meaning of something. The term is used in either a philosophical or literal sense to signify that the claimant has "found the last piece of the puzzle and now sees the whole picture," or has new information or experience, often insignificant by itself, that illuminates an insight or answer to a problem or challenge that you have been working on.

4.Repeat
Once you have had some Ahas, you will see and hear the same Truths over and over. Soren Kierkegaard once said, “Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.” In learning, repetition is a good thing because you keep seeing and hearing the same messages over and over again until they eventually build a new neural pathway into your brain.
Many times God/The Universe tries to get your attention the first time around, but somehow you may miss the signs and signals and then miss the lesson. To avoid excessive repetition, remember step number one---pay attention to the patterns of your thinking, habits, and outcomes.

Kierkegaard might have been right, if you keep learning the hard way, life can become quite cumbersome. However, I know of a better, easier, and lighter way to experience life. And that is to bring consciousness to your learning. Set your intention that you are open to receiving ideas, lessons and information that will accelerate your path of enlightenment. Pay attention, ask powerful questions, experience epiphanies, and repeat until you finally get it!

By committing to the process of lifelong learning, and the pursuit of self-knowledge, you become a vessel for the light of God within, to light the path before you. When you experience what I call “everyday enlightenment,” every conversation, every book, everything in your life becomes a teaching tool. Then you will walk forward feeling completely guided, bold, and confident---dancing with all of life’s changes, challenges, and decisions. When you learn your lessons in life, your mind and heart stretch to divine dimensions and you can begin to actualize your humanity and mature into your divinity.