Kahlil Gibran said this in The Prophet: “Much of your pain in self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity.”
Does this mean we are all suckers for punishment because we keep choosing pain? No. It is much more than that.
Before we are born, we choose the experiences that we will have in this life. We enter into contracts with role players who will put us through these learning experiences. We then live the experiences so that we can gain wisdom.
So yes, we do choose our pain ourselves – as part of a much bigger picture that is our entire incarnation. This sentence does not refer to any petty nonsense that we sometimes choose to waste our time on. In the greater scheme of things, is it really important if I have a sister who imitates my choice by buying the same curtains that I have, or the same dresses that I like? By the way, this is just an example of what I sometimes hear from clients. Yes, it is true that in this example the sister imitates my every move, and it is true that this is stifling to say the least. But is that the real issue?
What if the sister has no sense of self-identity, and uses my identity to give meaning to her life? What if my role is to love her and encourage her to make her own choices? What if she needs to learn to be more dependent on self-approval and less dependent on what others think of her?
In this example I don’t do anyone a favour if I simply focus on me, myself, and I, and how I experience the situation. If I am to be a teacher to my sister, then I need to be my own teacher as well and examine that bitter potion, whether it is frustration or resentment or anger or jealousy or any other potion that I need to acknowledge myself so that I can heal from the potion.
That attitude of acceptance of life and its poisons will help you to then discover the wisdom in an experience sooner rather than later, and the result of that is your own healing and becoming One with your Creator.
Next time when you want to complain about what ‘they’ do to you, remember that on a different level you chose the experience, and you allow people to ‘do that to you’ because it is part of your own bitter potion that you have to drink. Then remember that no experience is complete until you have discovered the wisdom and thanked the teacher for the experience.
The silence and tranquillity that you gain from the experience is worth all the pain that you go through.
Namaste
