Challenging times
There are seasons that strip everything familiar away.
This essay is an invitation to meet those seasons differently, not as punishment, but as curriculum.
What if your hardest moments are asking you to release something you were never meant to carry?
Have you had seasons where nothing seems to be going right? Where everywhere you look, everything is unrecognisable, and nothing makes sense anymore? You try to manage, but your solutions do not seem to hold, and you find yourself in the same loops of thoughts/behaviours.
I have and it is not pleasant. In fact, it is a very challenging life experience because everything seems in disarray and, nothing seems to make sense. I have come to call these seasons the Soul Learning Seasons because they seem to be complex, hard and most of the time, really confounding!
I think these seasons are challenging because we face our core challenges of life at that time. I think our hardest seasons and the challenges they present, tap into the soul lessons that we have yet to learn.
It could be that these challenges pertain to a specific area of our lives (i.e professionally) or a general challenge that affects other aspects of our lives (i.e., time management/planning). I believe we are here to learn specific things for our growth as souls.
Our hardest seasons ask us to engage with these challenges so that we can build awareness and have agency in our lives to shift and move forward. These challenges typically hold certain energetic impressions that match the stories/beliefs we have been carrying/are carrying subconsciously and unconsciously
These beliefs typically impede the growth of our souls and therefore require experiences that loosen them from our consciousness and sever our attachment to them energetically, mentally, and spiritually.
Unfortunately, this can be very difficult work because we have lost our connection to the Spirit world and the know-how of how to navigate with one foot in this world and the other in the spirit world. We have lost our ability to recognise the signs of the spirit world and soul work, but we are regaining these tools slowly but steadily.
Challenges & Beliefs
When we look at some of the hardest seasons in life and ask what feels challenging about them, I think we will find that it is attached to a belief/story that no longer works for us.
For example: “I can’t seem to catch a break, my life feels hopeless.” This can translate to: I have never seen/had a successful role model in my life that doesn’t sabotage their own processes and success, I don’t feel I’m worthy, therefore catching a break means I am cheating somewhere, I am too scared to ask for help when I need it, I can’t trust good things in my life that come easily because I have never known anything without hard-work…
All these different translations point to core challenges that we are invited to release and change. They represent conditionings, beliefs and stories that do not serve the soul. It might have been imperative at one point to have these beliefs/stories so as to survive, but there comes a time to shed them as well.
As such, as in the example above, the challenge might be welcoming the opportunity to find/create a support system that mirrors success for you, learn to feel worthy, learn to trust yourself, learn to ask for help when needed, or trust that good things can come with ease.
Challenges are a method in which the soul can learn and develop the skills that it has yet to master or has tried to master but has been unsuccessful.
When we don’t know something, the learning curve is usually steep, especially the older we get, as we are already conditioned to think/act/behave in certain ways.
Some challenges are more difficult than others and require a much more nuanced understanding and life experience. The duration is also dependent on how calcified the energetic imprints are, and how much of the stories/beliefs correlating to them have shaped us. There are exceptions to this as well, as there are challenges that are bigger than our individual selves and speak more to the collective challenges.
The hardest seasons invite us to investigate these statements that act like portals into our psyches to recognise their roots and origins. Understanding and recognising our deepest challenges simultaneously lets us know what we are here to learn and also gives us agency as to how to navigate them.
Knowledge is truly power, and knowing when you are in the hardest season and that it may be a manifestation of your soul lessons can be a source of some peace.
Knowing that you are in the midst of your hardest season and that it maybe a soul lesson allows for courage and curiosity to lead the way. We become curious as to what the challenge actually means, and with curiosity, the intensity of hopelessness, despair, loss of faith or whatever else you might be feeling diminishes.
Curiosity leads us to ask questions, prod and analyze our sensations and thoughts until we come to a conclusion that feels right to our bones. That kind of knowing is not rational, it’s embodied knowing, something that you know with the entirety of your being to be a resonant truth.
Without curiosity and courage,
we can never get here as we would be in our fight/flight/freeze responses during our hardest seasons.
When we get to this knowing with our bones, the intensity of the emotion(s) we have felt, correlating to the challenge, becomes manageable and lessens its hold over us. It is here in this place that we can minimise its power over us and start seeing life with fresh eyes. With knowing comes the ability to act and change.
Knowing our greatest challenges is helpful and also humbling. Our greatest challenges are not faced once but multiple times in different scenarios and capacities in order to ensure mastery. In other words, it is a lifelong endeavour, and its presentations might differ from one phase of life to the next.
Additionally, as we learn to master our challenges, we release the conditioning and the beliefs/stories that created them in the first place. These are what create the energetic imprints that then become the enslaving capsules that hinder us from connecting and relating to other more positive energetic resonances
As we learn to lessen the amount of energy we give to the emotions associated with our beliefs/stories that correspond to our challenges, we then have the capacity to reach and associate with new stories/beliefs that have other energetic imprints.
Emotions and thoughts create stories, stories create beliefs, beliefs create energetic patterns.
Every time we engage with an emotion/ a thought that corresponds to a certain belief, it creates an energetic pattern and gives it life. The more we do this, the more it creates an energetic resonance that vibrates and attracts the same frequency in others. That is why it is imperative to rethink our beliefs as they are critical to our understanding of ourselves, each other and the world.
Our challenges and the coinciding beliefs/stories associated with them give us a road map to understand ourselves better. They also give us insight as to what we are here to learn as souls
It might not be easy, and it might require multiple challenging phases of life, but it is this work that lightens the soul and gives us that glow that others find so enchanting and magical.
The next time you find yourself in a hard season in life, get curious and start analysing what you find challenging about it. Within the challenge, you will find that you are holding onto something that no longer serves you.
In this way, your own consciousness, your soul and the universe are conspiring to help you release it so that you can find a new more fitting belief that you will eventually shed. In the meantime, enjoy the harvests of your new found story.
CREDITS:First Photo: Path in the forest by Pierre-August Renoir. Photographed by Vallerie Mwazo at Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany Second Photo: Frost in Giverny (Le Givre à Giverny ) by Claude Monet. Photographed by Vallerie Mwazo at Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany* Third Image sourced via Pinterest. All rights belong to the original creators.*