What to Do When Life Doesn’t Go as Planned
The purpose of spiritual awakening is to realise the truth of how things are, not how we want them to be. This can be challenging and even painful, but it's an essential part of the spiritual journey.
In this episode, Lorin explains why we need to be present and embrace what’s happening right now, rather than thinking “this shouldn’t be”. This doesn't mean giving up our passions or desires, but operating in harmony with the spirit.
Mentioned in this episode:
The Deep Polarity Program
An 8-week immersive journey to unlock the deepest intimacy through masculine & feminine dynamics.
Transcript
Today we'll talk about the dark side of spiritual awakening.
Speaker:We will cut through the spiritual fluff, the love and light.
Speaker:We will shed the common myths.
Speaker:We will talk about the romanticization of the spiritual journey, how you can avoid falling into common traps that are so easy to fall into.
Speaker:And of course, for you to experience why you are doing this work in the first place, to experience more abundance, more love, more freedom in your life and your relationships.
Speaker:Welcome to the Masculine and Feminine Dynamics podcast.
Speaker:My name is Lorin Krenn, and I'm a coach, author, and hypnotherapist.
Speaker:I help you to understand men and women better, and to create the relationship you want.
Speaker:Let's dive in.
Speaker:We believe spirituality is solely here to make us feel better, more positive, more Happiness, more joy.
Speaker:Sounds amazing, and there is truth to that.
Speaker:But at the deepest level, spirituality is not here to make you feel better.
Speaker:Spirituality or spiritual awakening means awakening to the truth of how things are.
Speaker:Now, what does this mean?
Speaker:Allow me to give an example.
Speaker:As a child, you might have had a really seemingly loving relationship with one family member, and then growing up as an adult, you start to realize all kinds of things that actually the relationship was not at all the way you thought it is, and actually they were.
Speaker:They're very hijacked by their shadow.
Speaker:They're envious, they don't selflessly give and want the best for you.
Speaker:What is that?
Speaker:That is an awakening to the truth of how things are.
Speaker:An awakening from an illusion, from a fantasy that you believed, of course, unconsciously.
Speaker:No one chooses consciously to believe in a fantasy.
Speaker:The same applies to a romantic relationship.
Speaker:You might have had an initial two, three months with someone that were, that felt really connected, where you really felt, wow, this is an amazing relationship, this has so much potential.
Speaker:And then you start to awaken from a seemingly illusion, you start to awaken to their shadow or perhaps even there is addiction or things that weren't said, secrecy, lies, and you suddenly start to wonder, wow, how could I, could I have not seen that?
Speaker:All these things are very, very challenging.
Speaker:But these are the things that teach us the most.
Speaker:Do they make us feel better?
Speaker:No.
Speaker:Initially they make us feel sadness, grief, anger, even an in internal conflict, perhaps even a sense of distrust and doubt, and worry about whether we can actually trust ourselves.
Speaker:And that going through that process teaches us so many things.
Speaker:It teaches us to look for truth and to not look for the illusions and fantas you want to believe him.
Speaker:And later down the line, this protects us.
Speaker:In this example, from the shadows of others.
Speaker:Later down the line, it sets us free, but initially it doesn't make us feel more free.
Speaker:It makes us feel more in pain.
Speaker:We experience more suffering.
Speaker:And that is so important to understand about the spiritual journey.
Speaker:Yes, later down the line, if you choose to go all the way, if you choose to go deep, later down the line, you experience more abundance, more love, more bliss, more joy.
Speaker:However, to get there usually the most profound growth happens with the darkest nights that our soul goes through.
Speaker:A relationship breakup, losing a loved one, seeing through any sense of illusion that perhaps we believed we wanted to believe, and then we realized actually this is not how things were, or this person is not the way we initially thought they are, or wanted to believe that they are.
Speaker:This is where the most profound growth lies, but often we have to go through a very dark and ugly process there.
Speaker:And that is part of the spiritual journey.
Speaker:Allow me to give another example.
Speaker:I.
Speaker:Great things are happening in your life.
Speaker:Amazing.
Speaker:And then you somehow get in touch with someone who is suffering.
Speaker:Perhaps they're a close friend of yours.
Speaker:They get terminally ill, and they've always been a good person.
Speaker:They always treated everyone with respect and integrity.
Speaker:Everyone loves them and two weeks later they die.
Speaker:And you ask yourself, why is this happening?
Speaker:How can this be?
Speaker:This person was so loving, this person was so perhaps even conscious.
Speaker:And um, now the family's struggling.
Speaker:Now they're in a really, really tight and difficult spot.
Speaker:And this will too, will lead to a sense of pain, to a sense of, look at the injustice of life,.
Speaker:And at the same time, it will create a deep sense of empathy inside you, and it will make you realize, awakened to another truth, that there is suffering in this world, and there is actually quite a lot of suffering in this world.
Speaker:Does that mean you should be afraid of it?
Speaker:Does that mean you should be pessimistic?
Speaker:Absolutely not.
Speaker:Because that is a choice.
Speaker:You can see suffering and then being pessimistic.
Speaker:That's a choice.
Speaker:But that there is suffering is a fact.
Speaker:And you might even have thoughts.
Speaker:How can this be that others who treat everyone really badly live a long life and then others die early, who seemingly were the nicest people?
Speaker:And you start to have these realizations that maybe life is not as controllable as you think.
Speaker:Maybe things are not the way you want them to be.
Speaker:Things are the way they are, and we get to decide whether we accept it and we are in harmony with it or we fight it.
Speaker:Another example, you, you start a business and you really pumped about it, and you really feel in alignment with it, you feel it's the right thing to ,do and it fails, you lose money, you get into an argument with your business partner.
Speaker:It takes you months of wasted time and energy.
Speaker:And being in conflict, and you start to realize how can this be?
Speaker:It felt so aligned at the beginning.
Speaker:It felt so in harmony.
Speaker:And that everything fault us.
Speaker:Everything falls apart, and now you have to deal with the aftermath of this situation.
Speaker:You cannot just meditate this away.
Speaker:You can't just spiritually step away from this.
Speaker:Yes, you can protect yourself energetically to not be too emotionally attached to that experience and, but there's a sense of spiritual death that happens here.
Speaker:A death of the realization, wow, I felt this was in alignment.
Speaker:Everything fell apart, and now I'm left with two choices.
Speaker:Either I'm really down and allow this to, and add additional suffering to this by shaming myself and feeling, telling myself why this happened and it shouldn't have happened and all these things.
Speaker:Or I actually realize, okay, this is really painful, and now I will just have to deal with this in the best way I possibly can without losing myself spiritually.
Speaker:Now, by this point you might think.
Speaker:Lorin, what's the point in explaining this?
Speaker:Should we not just not focus on these things?
Speaker:By just focusing only on the good and the positive is that not the solution?
Speaker:And definitely focusing on the good is extremely important.
Speaker:Focusing on the things that you are grateful for, selective awareness, what you focus on grows.
Speaker:So yes, that's a huge practice of mine to focus on the things that I'm grateful for, the things that are going well in my life, as this naturally creates an internal state of abundance for you to draw in more abundance into your life.
Speaker:And at the same time talking about the dark side of spiritual awakening, this is important.
Speaker:Now, you might say, wow, okay, this doesn't sound very optimistic.
Speaker:But I'm going somewhere here, so I urge you to stay with me.
Speaker:At the deepest level, spiritual awakening is a complete annihilation of who you think you are, what you think of the world, and how you see other people.
Speaker:You realize the more you awaken, there's most of how you see others, how you see yourself, what you think to be true is a fantasy story.
Speaker:And if you're truly awakened, these things become shattered.
Speaker:These things are being taken from you.
Speaker:There is a sense of deep identity loss that comes with a spiritual awakening.
Speaker:You awaken to the raw truth of life.
Speaker:Not to how you want things in people to be, but to how things actually are.
Speaker:And now you might ask, how does this give me joy?
Speaker:How does this give me freedom?
Speaker:We'll get to that in a second.
Speaker:Awakening to the raw truth of how things are, and you are constantly awakening.
Speaker:You are constantly seeing through relationships, seeing through illusions you believe about yourself, about the world, that do not serve you, that keep you from awakening.
Speaker:The journeys an ongoing evolution.
Speaker:There's two really reactions you can have.
Speaker:You can become very negative and pessimistic about all of this, but then you are missing the point.
Speaker:Or you can choose to go a level deeper, and you start to realize that you have no control.
Speaker:Yes, you might have heard you can manifest everything in this world and you can be absolutely anything.
Speaker:Yes, you can absolutely do a lot of things and at the same time.
Speaker:You have no control over most things that happen to you.
Speaker:Now, this might make some people pessimistic and anxious, but I'm gonna tell you why this actually will set you free.
Speaker:You start to realize life is not the way you want it to.
Speaker:Life is the way it is.
Speaker:It has its own divine intelligence.
Speaker:An intelligence that goes much vaster and beyond the understanding of our rational minds.
Speaker:We call ourselves spiritual, and yet here we are trying to artificially construct our reality, controlling everything, trying to be on top of everything, trying to understand everything, trying to figure it all out.
Speaker:That is not awakening.
Speaker:That is you trying to control things.
Speaker:That is you or our shadow, our ego believing it knows better than life.
Speaker:We never know better than life.
Speaker:Everything that happens happens for a reason, and often you don't know the exact reason.
Speaker:It might take months or even years or decades for you to understand why something happened that seems so absolutely unfair and unjust only later to have a profound awakening and growth, and understanding that goes beyond some conceptual understandings, but that lead you deeper into your heart, that somehow lead you deeper into your truth, deeper into freedom.
Speaker:This leads us to the, actually to the only realization that you really need on this spiritual path.
Speaker:The one realization, and that is life is not the way you want it to be.
Speaker:Life is the way it is.
Speaker:Therefore, our spiritual practice is to honor life.
Speaker:To do and create and make the best out of everything that happens to us.
Speaker:The good, the bad, the ugly, the dark, it doesn't matter.
Speaker:Everything that comes has already come.
Speaker:That's the intelligence of life.
Speaker:Don't try to understand it.
Speaker:Don't try to label it.
Speaker:Look for the lesson in it, and if you don't know the lesson, going even a level deeper, this is my understanding that all our challenges, all the things that seem bad or negative, are actually things that are meant to invite us or push us to surrender.
Speaker:Because when you surrender, you give up your ideas of how life has to be.
Speaker:You give up your stories that limit you.
Speaker:You embrace the present that what is right now fully.
Speaker:And in that lies an indescribable freedom.
Speaker:From that place, you naturally create more abundance.
Speaker:You experience joy that comes from your deepest being and not from external circumstances.
Speaker:The paradox is all the dark and painful and challenging things that happen to you, especially those that don't make sense, those that you can't figure out are just ways for you to learn how to surrender, to stop trying to control everything, your faults and your reality, and, uh, 'cause all of that is insecurity.
Speaker:All of that is fear.
Speaker:You're still not trusting the highest intelligence.
Speaker:You're still not in harmony with life, with the universe.
Speaker:And I say it as as if it's easy.
Speaker:It's an ongoing practice for me.
Speaker:I fail at it.
Speaker:I fall.
Speaker:I falter, and then I remember again, and then I exhale with relief again.
Speaker:Most people are so afraid of this, but this is real spirituality.
Speaker:This is a real spiritual awakening.
Speaker:Not trying to control everything and understand and figure it out.
Speaker:But to go deeper, to transcend.
Speaker:This is what it means to transcend our current circumstances, our current challenges.
Speaker:The reason why people are so afraid of this is because their identity is built around their need to control, the everything around them, the people around themselves, and this idea of total surrender, and trusting life.
Speaker:And giving yourself to life in a devotional way creates this survival fear.
Speaker:But this fear is only our own shadow that doesn't want to die.
Speaker:And when you surrender at first, the pain might seem unbearable.
Speaker:The wounds are so intense and you don't realize how, what, why?
Speaker:And if you surrender even deeper.
Speaker:Then eventually love starts to fill your heart, an ancient and sacred love, and you realize that all this time you were simply being pushed by your greatest ally, the universe, but a fierce teacher, of course, to surrender.
Speaker:You are asked to release your ideas, your limiting beliefs, your fantasies and illusions about yourself and the world.
Speaker:And in that place, you stop asking all these questions.
Speaker:Everything starts to make sense at a deeper level.
Speaker:You realize that there is something deeper within you that has always got you, that holds you that guides you, that is always there right with you, and that is only attainable by releasing control, by releasing to artificially manufacture somehow your reality.
Speaker:And to lean in and to say, I give myself, I trust the sacred intelligence that has created me, that is moving through me.
Speaker:The idea is not that you become a go with the flow only person.
Speaker:You still have ambitions and goals.
Speaker:Surrender doesn't mean giving up.
Speaker:Surrender doesn't mean you release all your passions or what you want to create in the world, but you now operate from a different energy.
Speaker:Not from an energy.
Speaker:Energy that is holding on and controlling, but an energy that is one with spirit.
Speaker:You are creating and operating from so much more power.
Speaker:The power of spirit rather than the power of control that is fed by insecurity, fear, the shadow, survival.
Speaker:The dark side of spirituality is actually the light.
Speaker:It only seems dark because your old identity dies, and as you are on your spiritual awakening, this is an ongoing process where parts of yourself die and you have to let it go.
Speaker:Let it go and surrender more, and surrender more, and give yourself to this highest intelligence.
Speaker:All the parts where you're still trying to control, all the parts, where you're still trying to hide and escape.
Speaker:All of it.
Speaker:You become a seeker of truth because this is what it really means to be a spiritual seeker.
Speaker:You say, I choose truth above all things.
Speaker:I rather experience the pain of awakening from an illusion than the comfort of being stuck in the prison of a fantasy.
Speaker:This doesn't make you happier immediately.
Speaker:It doesn't give you more joy.
Speaker:It doesn't make you feel, wow, how amazing and positive.
Speaker:But it does give you one thing.
Speaker:Clarity.
Speaker:Clarity is part of truth, and clarity means alignment.
Speaker:When you are clear, you are aligned, you're operating from a different energy.
Speaker:One that is rooted in something deeper.
Speaker:Surrender.
Speaker:Surrender your ideas of how healing has to look like.
Speaker:Surrender your ideas of how the spiritual journey has to be.
Speaker:Surrender everything until there is nothing left of you except who you truly are.
Speaker:That which is always holding you, that which is always guiding you, your true center, your true power, whatever name you choose or want to give that.
Speaker:As long as you are surrendering, you are letting go of control, and you are embracing and going into the dark.
Speaker:You are awakening to the truth.
Speaker:And no matter what that means, and no matter what happens in the short term, in the long term, it'll always make you happier, freer, more abundant, and that is the ongoing practice.
Speaker:To conclude, life is not the way you want it to be, life is the way it is.
Speaker:You have two choices.
Speaker:Accept it and be in harmony with it, or fight against it.
Speaker:If you fight against it, you'll say, you know better than life, and you will keep experiencing disappointment and pain after pain.
Speaker:Every time you think you've got it figured out and you've got it all under control, everything collapses.
Speaker:Or you say, I'm here to awaken to the highest truth no matter what.
Speaker:That is the path of spiritual warriorship.
Speaker:And believe it or not, that is the hardest thing any being can do.
Speaker:Saying yes to the truth, even if it means our comfort is being stripped from us, our illusions that seemingly make us feel safe and protect us.
Speaker:And to allow yourself to fall into nothingness, trusting that eventually the universe is going to catch you.
Speaker:Spiritual awakening is a death.
Speaker:Everything dies until only death remains, which is truly you.
Speaker:This is shadow work.
Speaker:This is true awakening.
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