Do we get what we want in life, or do we get what we need?
Hold your horses! Stop fuming! I know life does not always feel like we get what we need, or at least what we think we need. But bear with me for a moment.
We all have more or less an idea of what we want our lives to look like, of what we would like to achieve in life, of who we want to become. But sometimes it feels as if we don’t always get what we wanted, it may feel as if we failed to achieve something, or as if we got the short end of the stick.
Let’s have a closer look at what is happening in our lives and how that makes us feel.
The sooner we let go of thoughts like ‘this is what I must achieve in life or else I’ll be a failure’, ‘this is how my life must look like’, ‘when I can achieve that, I’ll be considered successful’, and so on, the sooner we’ll be at peace with what happens in life. Because those thoughts are our ego talking, that is our fear talking, our fear of not being good enough. The moment we let go of the specific outcome, our ego quiets down as it can’t get it wrong anymore. The moment we belief our Highest Self knows our purpose, the moment we know that, when we are living from our heart, we can’t get it wrong, the less we need to listen to the controlling, scared voice of our ego.
Our ego is like a filing cabinet in our subconscious mind* where we have stored all of our experiences, all of what people have taught us, all of what our surroundings ‘fed’ us as ‘the truth’. But it is not always, hardly ever even, what our Highest Self would do, it’s not what we would do when we were to live from our heart, completely void of angst, of worry about what others might think of us.
Mind you, don’t be harsh on your ego either, don’t kick yourself for ‘hearing’ that voice in your head, no, it has served you to arrive where you are right now. It always meant to protect you, but it cannot see what else is possible. It only looks at what is has in the ‘filing cabinet’, at what you have experienced so far in life. But it does not let your heart speak. Your ego gets scared every time you are about to do something it has no file on. Whenever your ego interferes with what your heart is telling you to do, just be conscious about the fact that it is your protective self, your ego, talking and that you do not need to listen to it anymore. You can ‘thank’ it for trying to protect you, and say you do not need it anymore, because from now on, you want to listen to your heart. When you are grateful and kind to your ego, you are vibrating on the frequency of kindness, of gratitude and that is where you’ll encounter what your heart is longing for. You are now letting go of what you thought was the way you needed to live your life, of what you thought you needed to do to be accepted, to be loved. You are now starting to live from your heart, you are now starting to live your purpose, you finally start trusting the Universe, you finally start feeling ‘at home’. The Universe will always give you what you need to keep fulfilling your purpose. Even though you might not always see it yourself the very moment it occurs. But when you take a step back and you look from an emotionally more detached point of view, you will see that it was what you needed. Everything in life is our teacher. It’s up to us to decide to learn.
The sooner you start living from your Highest Self, from within, from what your heart tells you to do, the sooner you’ll ‘know’ what your purpose is, the sooner you’ll start feeling good about your life, about the things you do and about the things you do not do anymore. That is why I would like you all to take a closer look at ‘what you want’ and ‘what you get’ in life.
The more you focus on the end result, the more you will set yourself up for disappointment. You can, and should, work towards what it is you would like to do or get in life, but always let go of the very specific end result. Because you may think that this particular outcome is what you want or what is ‘best’ for you, but ultimately, it may be something very different after all, as we, as humans, don’t always see the bigger picture. The more we trust and have faith that all will work out for the best and the more we let go of the very specific result, the more we will get what it is we need at this particular point in life.
You may not get the job that you wanted, only to find out that there was something else that was what you really needed to fulfill your purpose. It may not come the same week but when you can take a step back and look at the whole picture, you’ll realize it was a blessing in disguise that you did not get that job.
You may get sick or have an accident, and no way you will immediately say, thank you, that was exactly what I needed today. No. But after a while, when you took the time to look deeper and see what it has taught you, you can start seeing that, because of that event:
you are more conscious about your health,
you are more conscious about safety,
you are more conscious about how we take everything for granted,
you are more grateful for everything you have in life,
you are kinder to people who suffer because you now know how much it can hurt,
you start doing more meaningful things in life,
you stop wasting your time on unnecessary, meaningless, mind-numbing stuff,
you start living from your heart.
I know this is not always easy, it hardly ever is, and it takes complete and brutal honesty towards yourself to finally see the positive side of a painful event. But honesty brings you to a place of ‘no more playing the victim’, of ‘no more ‘using’ your situation to get people to feel sorry for you’. Because those things are not what you really need. What you need is to pull yourself together and say: “Do I want to become bitter because of this, or better?”
Bitterness will put you on a low vibrational frequency, where you’ll attract all that is vibrating on that same frequency and then of course, you’ll get your confirmation that life really sucks.
Choosing to become better because of it, will lift you up, will let you catch your breath again, will make you feel alive again, will put you in the driver seat again. You’ll ‘climb’ onto a higher frequency of the Emotional Guidance Scale**. The higher you’ll climb, the better you’ll feel, the stronger you’ll get, and the more you’ll feel you can handle life again.
The same goes for things you would never even consider as something you needed, or as something that you could ever benefit from, but given time, in hindsight, and when you have the courage to be completely honest, you do realize it has made you a better person. But it takes courage, that’s for sure. Annemaree Rowley*** describes courage as ‘Accepting the challenge of the unknown.’
Of course, there are things, we as humans, will never be able to see the benefit from, but that is where trust comes in. When we have faith that all is happening for us, and when we understand that life is not something we can control, that is when we can start to let go of end results. When we have faith that the Universe has our back**** and when we learn to see the positive side of what we considered to be a bad thing happening to us, we will free ourselves from holding on to the beliefs we have about how our life should look like, we will free ourselves from the control we all think will bring us happiness.
As this quote from Panache Desai illustrates, we can never control life, we can only learn from it:
“Life will always challenge you in order to bring you from rigidity to flexibility, from controlling to allowing.
Once we find that place of allowing, we are finally free. That is what I wish for all of you:
Find the courage to let go of what you want as an end result, and train yourself in seeing that the Universe is working with you. The more you live from your heart, the more the Universe will give you what your heart is yearning for. Show the Universe what it is your heart wants, and you’ll get more of it.
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Katrien
*’The Trouble Is, It’s All Up To You, The Good Thing is, It’s All Up To You.’ Medium Article by Katrien Degraeve.
**Emotional Guidance Scale by Abraham-Hicks, Esther and Jerry Hicks.
***Guided mediations by Annemaree Rowley on Insight Timer.
****’The Universe Has Your Back’ Gabrielle Bernstein.