“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.” – Eckhart Tolle

The body is a miraculous thing. When it’s sick it develops symptoms that tell us that something is wrong. When our spirit is sick our bodies also provide us with symptoms, which manifest as feelings of anxiety, deep emotional sorrow, panic attacks, depression, heart ache, hopelessness, helplessness, frustration, and despair.

Very few of us pay attention to the physical symptoms our body gives us when it comes to our emotional health. We all know that love feels great. We know when we’re experiencing those feelings, but what about when we’re experiencing, I’m being disrespected feelings, or, he/she is using me and doesn’t really love me, feelings?

A lot of us have relationships that aren’t working, but we’re determined that they’re going to turn out the way we want them to. We keep trying to make it work, keep living Einstein’s definition of insanity. It’s like we keep trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. We’re smashing and smashing this poor peg trying to get it to go through, but it just won’t.

For whatever reason, when we’re emotionally involved, we can’t comprehend the idea that only a round peg is meant for a round hole. When we keep trying to force that square peg, all we do is get frustrated and we destroy the peg and the hole and we blame ourselves in the process. It’s like we stop using our common sense and our intuition. We get tunnel vision and we are determined to make two things fit that aren’t supposed to. We develop an allergic reaction to the truth. We don’t pay attention to and miss, what would be easier and what actually will work, because we’re too preoccupied with what isn’t working.

I met a woman years ago that could speak to the dead. Really. Like John Edwards and Long Island Medium kind of speak to the dead. During our conversation she said to me, “There are people in your life who are meant to come and go. Once they have fulfilled their part in your life and have taught you what they’re supposed to, they’re supposed to move on and no matter how hard you try to make it work, or how much you deny it, it will never work out because it’s not meant to go any further.”

The Carrot or the Stick

I was bound and determined to make my relationship work with my Narcissist. I had physical symptoms, my body was twisted up in knots, I felt hopelessly lost, I was miserable beyond belief, but none of that mattered, nor was it enough to sway me to let go.

Pema Chodron, author of When Things Fall Apart, tells us that in life, we either get the carrot method, or the stick method and if we’re too dense to follow the carrots, we get the stick.

My mind was so wrapped up in my relationship that I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on around me. I knew something wasn’t right, but I continued to ignore it, because for whatever reason I wouldn’t let go of the picture I had in my mind of how it was supposed to be.

So life did what it always does when you aren’t going in the right direction – it gave me the stick. I lost everything in a matter of weeks, my spouse, my mother, my house my job, my car, my boat….and all things material.

The Universe knew it had to do something drastic to bring me back to life and reunite me with my true self. It had to take the option out of my hands, because if given the choice I would have continued to make the wrong one every time. This time it felt like the rug had been pulled out from underneath me and I had nowhere safe or familiar to land.

“Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” J.K. Rowling

I was beyond terrified, had the universe not made the choice for me, I would still be in that awful, abusive relationship. I would still be in my high-paying/soul-sucking job, this blog would never have come into existence, my writing career wouldn’t have taken off and I wouldn’t have grown and evolved into the happy, strong, fiercely independent, self-love warrior that I am today.

If I was to compare my life then to now, anyone would say, “Oh girl by far you are in a much, much better place, financially, emotionally, spiritually, physically….” There is no area where my life isn’t better, but at the time, all I could see was the loss of what I had – not the opportunity that was waiting for me.

Starting over is scary business. But when you’re in this position you have two choices, you can a) keep doing what you’ve always done, or b) do something completely different and travel down a different path. An unfamiliar path.

I had to reach out and take the life that I wanted. This is the point in the road where a lot of people turn back. Not only is it a scary place, but it’s full of uncertainty and fear. How can you move towards something so unfamiliar where the outcome is 100% uncertain? It’s no-mans-land. In Chodron’s book she talks about how being in no-man’s-land is utterly terrifying to most people and when you are scared, you’re on high alert – all senses are revved up to the max.

Imagine walking through a jungle and all of your senses are attuned to your surroundings, ready to react to any threat. This is what it’s like to be in no-man’s-land. Chodron says this is the time when you are really alive – because when you’re in this place, you are highly focused, fully present and completely awake.

When you step through that door and stop doing what you’ve always done and you take a step in a new direction, an unfamiliar and uncertain direction, you gain control. That’s where your life is. Your real life. It’s where you find yourself, who you really are and once you move in that direction, you won’t be the same person anymore. Once you’ve chosen the red pill instead of the blue pill, you can’t go back and you won’t want to.

You will never go wrong walking away from something that harms your soul. The key is to move towards your purpose and what makes your heart sing, and not to keep moving towards the same harmful choices you’ve always made, because you will repeat this lesson and this scenario until you learn to step forwards and not backwards or sideways.

The Universe sends us clues, our bodies, also tell us, when we aren’t living authentically. The signs are all around us. Oprah Winfrey has said that, “Your life is always speaking to you,” but what she left out is  that, only those who are fully awake in their lives, are the ones that will hear the message.

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