Making Difficulties

Why do we make difficulties for ourselves?

Thank you for listening. More talks and courses with Sananda and Christopher at www.heaven-on-earth.co.uk.

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Welcome. This is Sananda. Why do you make it difficult? The question makes assumptions. Perhaps you don't make it difficult, but let's assume that just sometimes you have recognised that you've made something more difficult for yourself than it needed to be; and then you might broaden your perspective and look at humanity at large and consider that, even if you've developed the skill of letting things be easy or relatively easy for you, there can be a sense that, for many anyway, that skill is nascent. There are a lot of different ways of looking at this and we will play with some of them. Let's begin with you as an energy being in an energy universe. So you are part of the energy that is the totality of the Universe, not separate from it. Therefore, you are in a relationship with all of the Universe all of the time and your experience as a portion of that totality of energy, your chosen experience, is that you are not all that the energy of the Universe is and therefore there can be a degree of not knowing for you when you encounter all the energy that you consider is not you.

2:09

For if you knew it all, it would really effectively be part of you: that would be your understanding, I would suggest. So your experience is that the Universe, being not wholly known to you, is very capable of presenting you with surprises, challenges, conundrums, questions, choices. Part of the joy of taking on human form and living in the reality that you do is that you're able to explore choices and often to explore them in very considerable detail. You learn an enormous amount through making choices and therefore when you consider making things difficult for yourself, you might say to yourself that this is an entirely valid experiment, that you're interested in discovering the outcome of the choices you make and if you're going to do that with a degree of thoroughness, then sometimes you will make choices that seem at least to offer an easy path forward. But you might actually fundamentally enjoy the contrast of choosing sometimes choices or paths that your sense is are going to be difficult. So when we look at this question, why do you make things difficult for yourself? it's good at this early stage to see if you can release yourself from judgement here, to perhaps accept that at least in the past you have sometimes made things difficult for yourself, but that's not necessarily a failing or a fault in you. In this larger context I'm offering, it may be an entirely valid experiment from which you learn much.

4:15

Indeed, you could find within yourself a guiding principle that says easy = bad, difficult = good, in the sense that your take on the Universe is that it's the difficult choices that bring the greatest harvest. If that's the case, if that's your opinion, your consideration, it can certainly be worth examining that opinion. It might be a little bit too much fixed, a little bit too much rigid, a little bit too much other than the fluidity of life being lived. And so here again, is another opportunity to look at this question in relationship to you, the life you are living, and to notice if you've got that kind of opinion, that kind of view that says the difficult choice is the best choice and let go of that way of assessing, recognising as I've suggested, that it can be too regimented, too rigid, that it discourages flow in your life. And we would suggest that this is a lifetime in which you have wonderful opportunities to increase your sense of flow. We'll probably come back to that. 

5:49

So what criteria might you use, then, when you look at choices, if you're not simply saying to yourself difficult = good, easy = bad? Instead, we would encourage you to take an internal reference. For those good / bad ideas, they’re essentially external references; they’re not really fundamentally there in you. They're learnt. Many of them are socially conditioned and some of that social conditioning has happened over very many generations. So a lot of those opinions are not simply based on the world in which you currently live, but on its past iterations, the notions of generations. And if you are making choices based on the opinions of previous generations, it's going to be a bit of a hit and miss process. Sometimes it can work very well. Your ancestors were not idiots. They learned a great deal and they passed that on to you as best they could. At the same time, they didn't know everything. Part of the reason for creating a world in which you grow generation by generation is to give you that opportunity to build on what has gone before and to create something new. 

7:18

So what is that internal reference we encourage you to take to? It's not really judging whether something is difficult or easy. It’s looking at it in this other way, which is to move, in a sense, as deep within yourself as you can, to come to your inner knowing, your spiritual knowing, the guidance of your soul. There are many languages we can use to describe this inner knowing - find your own. But you're moving past the structures of the personality, those conditioned structures built out of the ideas of the world around you and of previous times, and you're connecting with something that exists beyond time, beyond your personal history, that is fully present, that is the now. You're saying to yourself, ‘this moment is unique. Although I have learned much from past moments, the uniqueness of this moment means that I grant myself freedom to cherry pick, to choose from the wisdom of the past, the learnt lessons from the experiences of the past, to select those that feel valid in this moment, or indeed to allow to arise within me a knowing that feels somehow to come beyond time that just says this is the way.’

9:01

So then if we come back to the notion of making things difficult for yourself: actually, how would you know? You are granted the one choice that you make. The others remain no more than figments of your imagination, shadows, sketches that you guess at, but do not truly know. You may therefore choose an experience that turns out to be very difficult without having that intention at all. It just felt like the right thing for you. Something draws you to climb a mountain. It's difficult. It may take a long time. It may demand considerable courage and so on, a fine sense of balance and willingness to endure the cold, but something within you says, I wish to be on the top of that mountain. I want to breathe the air there. I want to look at the world. I want to feel that I've achieved something in my life. Whatever. Allow these feelings to exist. They do not need to dictate to you, but they can be there.

10:28

And then when you consider that same choice I've created as an example, choosing to climb the mountain: on the one hand, it is a difficult choice - the mountain is steep. It requires considerable skill and strength and stamina. But even though it's difficult in itself, it might actually be for you the easy choice. This is you making it easy for yourself. Somewhere within yourself you may know that you wish to develop the quality of courage, for example, and actually this way of developing that courage, climbing a mountain, might feel to you absolutely the easiest way. There is something about climbing a mountain that is joyful to you for all its difficulty. It stimulates you in so many different ways. It encapsulates not just the development of courage, but lots of other skills you're wanting to develop. At the physical level, for example, you may wish to develop your balance as well as your courage, and rather than creating two separate sets of experiences to do that, you are blending them, you're bringing them together. So again, grant yourself the benefit of the doubt. Let go of the habit of looking back and calling yourself an idiot [laughs], a chump for having made the choices you've made. They always seem to you to be the best choice at the time.

12:12

But as we've said, also consider the criteria that you're using allows the voice of your innermost joy to be heard. That inner voice of joy often will choose for you what turns out to be the easiest path, but not necessarily. As we've said, as you know, there can be stimulation in meeting a challenge, even if that challenge is really quite difficult. But then of course there's a different way of looking at the meaning of difficult here or making it difficult for yourself. You may have observed in yourself you being, as the saying goes, your own worst enemy, that some part of you knew very well that the choice you were making was going to make things unnecessarily difficult for yourself and yet something within prompted you anyway, regardless, to make that choice to travel that path. Even here, grant yourself the benefit of the doubt. Be kind to yourself. It is sometimes said that you keep on banging your head against a brick wall until you discover that you don't need to. And maybe that choice that you made, where really you knew it wasn't the best choice, was just you finishing off a series of banging your head on brick walls to the point where finally the penny drops (to mix our metaphors) and something within said, I don't think I need to do this any more.

14:00

Does that mean that all those times you've banged your head on the wall have been wasted? Not really. It's up to you what you make of them. They're just experiences. You can criticise yourself. You can condemn that idiot part of yourself to some eternal jail for its folly, for a pain it causes you, the pain it deliberately, knowingly, caused you. You can do that or you can admire the persistence that led you to keep on doing that which hurt you and say, well, I can use that persistence, that was something I developed - good. So you open up choices for yourself again. We’ve spoken of the way in which you're moving into a time in which flow is becoming more tangible, we might say, in your lives, more real, that the sense of experience flowing into experience into experience and on, that helps you to realise a sort of continuous present. All of that supports the kind of suggestions I'm making about how you make choices: that you refer inwardly, you find the sense of flow, the feeling of being in your own right path.

15:28

Here we come back to your relationship with the Universe. You are a small flow, we might say in a certain sense, that is part of a much larger flow, and so you find yourself in your relationship with the Universe all the time having the choice to go with the flow of the Universe or to oppose it. Again, it's not that one is intrinsically right and the other intrinsically wrong. You learn from going against the flow, just as you can learn from going with the flow. They take you to the same destination just at different speeds. And so recognise that you have that capacity for choice. But we are suggesting that in this epoch in which you're living, so not just the lifetime you're currently living, but a larger tranche of time, a larger span, there is a deep interest in human consciousness in understanding more of the flow of the Universe. 

16:39

In certain ways we could say that the Earth has been in a kind of backwater for a while, the whole solar system turning around in a little eddy, and that now you are looking at you as individuals, but all of your solar system, the Sun, the Earth, the planets, all understanding that this is a time of moving back into a flow of energy that moves through the Universe, in a local sense moves through and within your Galaxy, and that therefore part of your reason, if we call it, for making things difficult for you on occasion is simply that you have been choosing to have that experience of being in an eddy, being in a backwater, being a little bit out of the flow of the Universe, in order to go certain processes. There's a process of cleansing, of releasing, a process, of making peace for the past, and so each one of you listening to these words has played a part in this, are playing a part in this. Each one of you elected to sample some of that more stagnant energy, shall we say, of the backwater, of the eddy, and to embody that, to live it within yourself; and as you have found ways of making peace with those contradictory elements within yourself - insistence sometimes on making it difficult for yourself would be an example - as you've made peace with all of that, so you are facilitating this movement back into the flow of the Universe.

18:22

So it is of great value for you, and not just for you, when you choose, when you find yourself meeting choice, to pause even if only for a nanosecond or even less than that. It is not about thinking, it's about sensing and sensing is virtually instantaneous for you, acknowledging that ability you have to sense the choice that's right for you, a choice that may in the living of it be wonderfully easy, a glorious glide through experience or may turn out to be extremely challenging, very demanding, very, in that sense, very difficult. But that's not you making things difficult for yourself. That's you choosing things consciously that you recognise may be difficult, but something within says, ‘Yes but, that's fulfilling. I shall grow through that. That will be wonderful.’

19:30

So again I come to the subject of forgiveness. Keep on forgiving yourself. Do your best not to make assumptions for the reasons behind the choices you've made. Some of the choices that you made are down to causes that you know to some extent, but if you look, if you stand back or shift your perspective to a higher aspect of your own being, then very often you will find that the reasons that you thought were yours for taking a particular action or choice were really just a cover story, a kind of disguise, that something else was going on, perhaps something entirely different, something completely different from that underlying purpose that you assigned to the choice you made.

20:34

And even where that's not the case, you'll find that there are layers upon layers upon layers that lead you to make any particular choice. Granting yourself forgiveness, giving yourself that blanket assumption that you did the best that you could at the time and letting go of it is empowering for you, not least because it means that you're letting go of energy that is invested in past ideas, memories, experiences where it's not doing anything very useful to you and bringing it into the present where you can use it. As you know, the present is really the only place where you're going to be able to use your energy. That's the way the energy of the Universe operates.

21:18

But then forgiving yourself also (this is part of the releasing process) makes it far more easy for you to know in the moment what choices are right for you. What is the easy choice in the sense of what is the choice that is part of the flow, what helps me be part of this flow of the Universe. Then if on occasion for a little while you find you're pushing against the flow of the Universe, then recognise that each time you do that you're going to learn more about the nature of the flow itself and you've still got the choice, you can still go with the flow or go against the flow.

22:14

Enjoy as well. Enjoy choosing. Whether the choice you make is easy or difficult, let the choosing be easy. So often the choices you make, however much they be covered by thought processes are not actually made by thought. You make them from that inner knowing. That's why I encourage you to notice your inner knowing. It's not that your thoughts have no functional or use. As has been said, they're excellent servants, but very poor masters. Once you've made your choice, then the mind can be very useful in facilitating the action, manifesting the choice, the detail of it, dealing with the externals on the earth plane, great. But if you tell yourself that it is your mind, your thoughts that are making your choices, then either you're deceiving yourself or you're not giving yourself the best opportunity to make the choices that work for you. Still enjoy your thoughts, but regard them perhaps a little more playfully. That's their nature: monkey gymnasts, your thoughts are: delightful to watch, but you don't entirely need to believe the dance they lead. It's entertainment, nothing more. 

24:07

So allow then choosing to be easy, even if the choice made turns out to be difficult. Trust that. Trust yourself. And understand that you are not really separate from the Universe. You're not separate from that flow. Anytime you believe that you are separate from the Universe, then yes, you are making things difficult for yourself and you don't need to. That belief in the Universe as separate from you - it may be largely unknown to you, but it's not separate from you. You are so much more than you've tended to think of yourselves as being. You are all that is. You're coming to know that step by step. It takes its own time. That doesn't matter, but let go of the notion that somehow there is you and there's everything else. No, you are part of a continuum. You are part of the current, and as I say, you have choice within the current: flow with it, flow against it. It's creative either way; you’re changing the Universe, you're changing yourself. It all works out in the end. 

Thank you for listening. Go well.