Our Life Journey: Exploring the Depths
“ Where you stumble, there your treasure is….The world is a match for us and we are a match for the world. And where it seems most challenging lies the greatest invitation to find deeper and greater powers in ourselves”
-Joseph Campbell
When life gets difficult and pushes us all over the place – especially in the darker recesses where we can get lost, fearful of finding our way back – we may very well tremble. We may very well reel back in horror from the thought of impending crisis looming on our horizon threatening to take our life away into darkness and doom. Yet this may be the very spot of transformation where the tide turns, where the darkness starts to slowly give way to the light. Our problems in life are never permanent, never fixed in their scope and intensity. They are constantly emerging, shifting and dying in a complex dynamic that we overlay with subjective meaning and interpretation. All spiritual traditions, despite their widely different theological underpinnings, attempt to recognize problems in terms of opportunities presented to us as a challenge which will assist us with further personal growth and expansion. The saying: “ The usefulness of difficulties “ expresses this succinctly. Difficulties sweep into our lives for many different reasons but there is really only one response and that is to work with them efficiently and effectively as we can. Difficulties are seen as our spiritual masters here to sharpen our practices, to make us grow as full, human beings. And the greater the difficulty, the greater is the potential to grow from it – to scale new personal heights. Nothing is, in reality, problem free everything comes with inbuilt contradictions / dilemmas that we all have to confront. That’s the complexity of the world we live in but the obligation always remains the same – to match the difficulty with even stronger resolve to overcome it.