Every fall CAN be a fall forward

Some spiritual teachers say that we always fall forward. Another saying is also that life happens for us and not to us.

I believe that these two statements go together. I’ve also come to believe that the second statement is always true, while the former only is true if we make it true. And in a sense, we have to make the second statement true as well.

What do I mean by this? Well, it all depends on how we process it on the inside. If we choose to just resist our hardships and not learn anything from them, it will feel as if life is happening to us and a fall will just be a fall. Maybe in the grander scheme of things, everything that happens, including total defeat and death, is a learning experience. But if we don’t want to wait until after death to see if our failures might have taught us something, we need to start paying attention to how we process things.

The day before writing this I had a fall. It’s of a personal nature, that is not suited for this blog. At least not at this point. 

I’ve fallen in this way before. But something interesting happened. I didn’t fall as hard as the last time. And it made me realize that I have to deal with my stress. That I need to take care of myself in more ways than just working out, meditating and eating healthy. But there will be a separate post on this. 

What I want to get at, is that there is a lesson in all of our experiences. Even the ones that we and our lack of character are the causes of. It’s so easy to get into negative self-talk, with thoughts like: “I’m hopeless”, “now I’m back at square one”, “I’ll never take control of my life” and “I’ll never amount to anything”.

But this is very limited thinking. And that’s all it is. Thinking. We can change our thinking by choosing whether we want to believe our thoughts. And when we understand this, it also becomes easier to choose our thoughts.

For one, our “bad” behavior is never the whole truth about ourselves. If we take a step back and observe our thoughts, we can see that we convince ourselves of all kinds of stuff that we regret later.

But if we instead resist what is happening, explain things away and refuse to learn anything, we will likely just get more and more lessons, until we get a lesson that destroys us. In most cases it’s unlikely that things go this far since the lessons become clearer and clearer. But we can make it more and more difficult for ourselves. 

The real big things happen on the inside, when we choose to take to heart what God is trying to teach us. Because often it is quite obvious what we need to do to make things work better, whether it concerns our relationships, careers, finances or something else. We just don't want to be humble or uncomfortable enough to actually do it.

And depending on how we process things in our minds, we will either fall backward or forward. Depending on how we process things, we will either take control or let life happen to us. And paradoxical enough, real control begins with us letting go and trusting God. Because as long as we let the ego take charge, we haven’t learned the biggest lesson yet.

This is something that I still struggle with by the way.