When You Are On Your Souls Path, There Is No Such Thing As A Real Obstacle

Today in your life there is some sort of obstacle. It could be a small one or a large one. That obstacle might have a few flakes of dirt on you, or you could be covered in the mud from head to toe. What I do know is that if we have the intention, and keep taking just one more step, we will bloom and blossom as we grow.  Obstacles make life interesting, overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.

The struggle of life is one of our greatest blessings.  It makes us patient, sensitive, and Godlike.  It teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

  – Helen Keller

I love this quote from Goldie Hawn – because she might be one of “those people” that you would put in that category of having a perfect life. She is beautiful, talented, famous and undoubtedly rich, and seems to have a strong relationship with Kurt Russell – yet notice what she says.

The lotus is the most beautiful flower, whose petals open one by one. But it will only grow in the mud. In order to grow and gain wisdom, first you must have the mud — the obstacles of life and its suffering. … The mud speaks of the common ground that humans share, no matter what our stations in life. … Whether we have it all or we have nothing, we are all faced with the same obstacles: sadness, loss, illness, dying and death. If we are to strive as human beings to gain more wisdom, more kindness and more compassion, we must have the intention to grow as a lotus and open each petal one by one. 

 ― Goldie Hawn

We all live in an imperfect world and obstacles are going to show up in our lives. At some point someone that we love is going to grievously dissappoint us. We will lose our grandparents, parents, friends to death. The “trolls” of the world will attack us personally and sometimes viciously. Everyone gets sad and has some depression at some point in their life. The question is not whether you face an obstacle, it is whether that obstacle becomes the picket fence that you surround yourself with and then live your life behind. The “I can’t do that” excuse that we use whenever the obstacles in our life show up.

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life.  I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have – life itself.

  – Walter Anderson

Obstacles teach us just how powerful we are. With each obstacle we get to choose to keep from growing, or to grow from it.  My mom was diagnosed with lung cancer and passed away over 20 years ago. She asked that she could die at home and so for the last almost three months I took care of her with my aunt and my mom’s best friend. One of us had to be awake 24/7 because with the amount of morphine she was taking she had hallucinations and would forget she couldn’t get out of her bed.  I come from a big family, being the oldest of seven. What was interesting in the last month of her life was how hard it was for my sisters to come see her. Some sisters came once or twice a week, some didn’t show up at all, and some came everyday. At her memorial service some came and some didn’t. When we had a family gathering in the summer to spread her ashes same thing.

We cannot change our past . . . we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way.  We cannot change the inevitable.  The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.  I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.  And so it is with you . . . we are in charge of our attitudes.

  – Charles R. Swindall

What I discovered is that even though it was hard on me financially (as I took an unpaid leave of absence), even though my husband and kids were far away (we lived in another state), even though it was hard to watch the cancer take her; even though it was hard to see her notice who came to visit and who didn’t – that was the greatest experience for me in so many other ways. But I didn’t see the growth and positive things that were happening until after she had passed. I was so blessed and happy that I did the hard thing.

It is when I struggle that I strengthen.  It is when challenged to my core that I learn the depth of who I am.

  – Dr. Steve Maraboli

The excuse was that they couldn’t handle it. What I have discovered for me personally, is the reality that I can handle anything I think I can handle. It doesn’t make it easy, but I learned early in life, that obstacles don’t kill you. It sometimes feels like they will. The fears inside me tell me to run and hide. And sometimes I do, but then I turn back around and make myself take one more step. It is always just about taking one more step.

Currently I am facing this obstacle.  I keep pushing up against this wall that pushes back. But I know that if I just keep chipping away on it, that at some point I will have weakened the wall enough, that it will fall down. Whenever my life feels as though it is in chaos, I know that I just need to take a breath, ground, and continue doing the small things. 

You would free yourself from so much stress and drama if you just understood and embraced the truth that you are enough.

  – Dr. Steve Maraboli

I am in Goldie Hawn’s mud at the moment with it. Wrestling with it, but I am determined to overcome.  I may have my moments of indecision. I may have my moments of being stuck in the mud.  But I don’t unpack and live there.  I refocus and keep moving forward, one step at a time.  Whenever I get discouraged I look back at previous obstacles and the gifts they brought into my life.  I realize they are not my enemy, they are in fact my secret weapon.  They are what builds character.  They provide me with a purpose and what I need for the next path on my journey.

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