We're Each Here For A Reason

Almost everyone finds their life comparatively difficult, with events that give the impression their sheer existence is a constant struggle. Many people find themselves in situations similar to Sisyphus, with an endless stream of struggles. Sisyphus was the Greek king who was punished by the gods to push a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down when it nears the top, repeating this for eternity.

While we may feel like we're being punished, the adverse experiences and challenges in our life are actually designed to be lessons to help our spiritual growth. Ad astra per aspera is a Latin motto that roughly translated means growth through adversity. This is similar to the lessons we try to teach our children. For example, we can endlessly tell them not to touch the hot surface of the stove, yet the words fall on deaf ears. It's not until the child actually touches the hot stove and experiences the pain that the hard lesson is finally learned.

What does any of this have to do with the spirit world? Every challenge we face is part of our learning as students on this "earth school" so we can advance to the next higher "grade", as it were, until we graduate. In fact, while we are in spirit, we establish as part of our life plan what challenges we want to experience to help our spiritual growth. Perhaps we want to learn patience, so we set up lots of experiences causing frustration. Maybe we want to learn forgiveness, so we add others' transgressions against us as opportunities to grow and part of our life experience.

Over time we have a tremendous number of challenging experiences in our life. All of these force us to grow in different ways, both as human beings (maturity) and as spirit beings (spiritual evolution). As Dr. Wayne Dyer has said, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. As spirit in human form, we are trying to experience the difficulties of the human life and the lessons they bring that will help our spiritual evolution.

The next time you catch yourself complaining about how unfair the world is or all the problems in your life, stop and see these as blessings in disguise. Without these difficulties, we would never grow or evolve. We'd be un-evolved souls existing in eternity without any improvement--like Sisyphus. That doesn't sound like any kind of existence I want.

No doubt it's really hard to see it this way. But that's the entire point. The harder the lesson, the more we learn.