I was in a Headless Way Zoom meeting yesterday, and Richard said something that I think most of us have experienced, although it’s a good reminder, and it’s sometimes good to have it more in the foreground of our attention.
What we learn from problems is something we can’t learn any other way.
Life gives us koans, challenging situations that we can’t solve or resolve or live through gracefully by using our habitual ways of dealing with it.
Life asks us to find another way, and it can take time, receptivity, and trails and errors to find that other way. It may require us to be humbled by life and the limitations of our habitual ways1.
I would add that it’s often a visceral learning, more than mental insights. It’s a lived process and a lived learning.
For me, the words I would use for different insights may be similar to what I would say earlier in life, even in my late teens or early twenties. When I look at my journals from that time, the mental map there is often very similar to what I write here some decades later. It did come from experience even then, but now, it’s fleshed out with the inevitable added experience that comes from living through more situations. The words may be similar or the same, but the lived experience behind it is different. The experience of it is different. I have been changed by life and how I respond to it and live it.
So the questions then are:
What is life asking of me now?
What are my habitual ways to deal with it, and how may it come up short? Where am I stuck?
What’s a kind way to relate to this situation? Kind to myself and others and life. (Which may be to be more assertive, have clearer boundaries, and so on.)
How is it to ask life to take all of me and transform me, to better relate to this situation?
How is it to find genuine receptivity? To ask life for guidance? To be willing to find another way?
This changes my relationship with challenging situations…. I remind myself that I can viscerally learn something from them I can’t learn other ways. I am invited to explore them as koans. I am invited to notice where I am stuck and how my habitual patterns come up short. I am invited to be humbled or find humility in myself. I am invited to transform this human self so I can relate to the situation in a better way. A more kind and effective way.
NOTES
- This is very similar to working with koans, in my limited experience of only working with them over a few years.