Last week, I wrote about bullying in my other blog-space Living Your Whole Life reason being that I had started to recognise how it had been a long-running theme of my life, showing up in my health in ways that mirrored my outer experiences, and vice versa, and had a lot to tell me about my perception of the world and how this had created my experience. This was not a standard article about bullying being this terrible experience (though I don’t negate that at all) but, rather, an effort to look for the gift lurking in some of those terrible circumstances.

This wasn’t a new perspective, as such, but the degree to which I understood it was accelerated when I matched it up to the long-running saga of my health, which had been telling me something important all along. As soon as I had reached this new level of appreciation of how situations that once felt bullying had fuelled my own evolution, I had another layer of understanding come to the surface within a matter of days and this is it. Just because you realise some of your biggest quantum leaps to date have occurred off the back of resisting or fighting-off things and situations that you didn’t like (one bit) doesn’t mean you have to seek out or or expect more ‘bullying’ situations to give your life the evolutionary shove you think it needs. It may well be possible to look back and count, on more than two hands, times when an unsavoury situation helped lever you towards some unexpectedly good outcome or a character-building exercise in survival that you are now grateful for…and I am a big advocate of finding those pearls in life’s soup…but, at the same time, no need to condition yourself to believe that unpleasant things, struggle and even fighting (for survival) are the only ways to manifest what is good for you. I would go as far as to say ‘fighting’ only elongates a process that can be simplified to cutting to the chase of extracting the gift, without all that conflict and suffering. The pitfall of having always regarded life as a long-haul of one survival tactic, one struggle, one recovery-plan, one concerted effort and one problem to be solved after another is that you can get to a place where you are so accustomed to struggle that you keep manifesting more of it as its the only way you know how to be.

The penny dropped on this, for me, when a situation that felt like another huge uphill struggle manifested in my world this week, making me feel like resistance and more ‘battling it out’ was the only way to safeguard what is so near to my heart in the face of a bully-energy that has appeared right on my front doorstep. This time, instead of taking months, years or a decade to get through it to the pearl at its heart, I set about feeling into this situation, soul-searching it, asking ‘what’s in it for me?’ Very quickly, in ways as subtle as their timing was remarkable, the situation that had seemed so threatening recalibrated until it had lost all those aspects that I had been in most resistance to; the situation literally shape-shifted on the outside as I asked these questions on the inside. What I was left with was a largely disarmed version of itself and I start to see how what was left of it might contain a very real gift for me; a blessing, you could say. This thing that I still really don’t like stands as a reminder that if I don’t accept it being there then I have other options and those options may serve to get me out of a stuck place, a status quo, that prevents my own greatest expansion because it is probably time to consider moving on anyway and I had been afraid of ‘change’ and uprooting to a degree that no longer served my best interests, my personal growth or the aspirations I have for the future.

What started out feeling like another ‘war’ on the simmer has turned into a gentle pat on the back saying ‘perhaps its time…’ and pointing me at exciting new horizons, opportunities to reinvent life, which I am already playing with. It makes all the difference in the world to feel like you are operating from a place of intuiting highest purpose and best possible outcome, divine guidance if you will, and not because you are running away, resisting, avoiding or being bullied out of a situation that you wanted to maintain. This super-accelerated perspective can get you quickly to the pearl in the middle of a bad-seeming ‘situation’ (in other words, exactly when you most need it) instead of catching up with it much later with all the poignant beauty of hindsight. This can literally transform ‘everything going on’ in the here and now because, suddenly, life is recognised as working with you and not against you, plus you realise that what you seek is not this far-off goal glittering somewhere over there, on the horizon, but something that has its roots in what is happening in this very moment, however that looks on the surface; in other words, you are already well on your way to achieving everything that you aspire to.Your wellbeing is no longer conditional on outside circumstance; it is self-driven and fuelled from the inside – how empowering is that!

In short, if you look first for the gift in any given situation, its incredible how any apparent ‘threat’ disarms itself as its whole message can tone down so that you can hear what it is really saying. From that perspective, life doesn’t seem quite so challenging any more and you get quickly onto the shortest, most direct path of your own highest evolution, without all the struggle.

Related post

The article I wrote last week explores the healing power of releasing (the effect of) all bully-energies, both inside the body and in your outside environment. Its a version of that old truism, when we succumb to fear (in all its many forms), the only person we really harm is our self and, while its a subtle transformation to explain to others, when you ‘meet’ that bully-energy in a new way, you disarm it and so heal your own situation in the process. My recent experiences have played this out in the most tangible of ways, realised as a whole new level of healing in my body. That article, if you are interested, is Healing by releasing all bullies, inside and out.