BE GRATEFUL FOR THAT SLOW PATCH

For anyone who is interested in personal growth along with material success, a negative event or situation actually represents only an opportunity for growth. Each crisis, each dead end in our evolution is merely a message, an opportunity to go in a different direction. Our egos might not like the new direction at first, but our higher self can always recognize a new plan implicit in the challenge.
Many times it happens in life that we are successfully cruising along a particular path – and growing along the way as well in self awareness et al – when suddenly we reach a dead end – or – realize that often after a point nothing seems to be moving forward, nothing seems to be happening – and- we start doubting whether all this while we were on the right track at all or should we be giving it all up!
But such a thing happens or occurs when because the growth that we have been able to achieve, we start to assume that now we can reach out most far-reaching goals very quickly. This may be caused when, due to the success achieved thus far, somewhere the ego again starts raising its stubborn head as we cruise along our dream run. Then if we do not reach our goals according to our set timetable, we assume the negative and either blame ourselves or others in some way, or worse still, start to think that the whole process is invalid. In truth, a dead end usually signifies that we are still short of energy somewhere or the energy we have has got diverted in the wrong issues (for example, in re-strengthening our ego) – simply implying that we have still not fully resolved the central issues that should have got resolved till then! Hence the Higher Self takes recourse to a slow down or rest period, where it tries to help us return and contemplate on the issues of personal clearing and the need to discover more inner love for ourselves and security within ourselves. By doing this we are able to free our energy that had got entangled in those issues, thus re-gathering our energies to take us further along the path. To free ourselves from the ego we require time and space, and the dead end, or negative event or slowing down of pace allows for this! The bottom line hence is that to increase our real growth we have to reduce our ego, because only when we are free of ego can we proceed objectively in life. Those dead ends or slow phases provide us time to delve further into ourselves – do some more exploring and weed out the obstacles so that the energy can flow again and help us move forward. When we are on our ‘dream run’, we just never have the time to introspect or collect ourselves and regroup our energies, because we are so caught up in the run - we fail to look around! But remember, a 100m sprint is quite different from a marathon run and the one who keeps rejuvenating his/her energies at regular intervals or as an when the need arises, is the one who can then marshal up all his/her energies and is able to push hard in the last leg of the race to make to the winning post!
If during our slow phases, when our ego takes a beating, we take the right perspective, it is a grand opportunity sent to us by our higher self so that we learn to get more humble and thus more receptive to others views and needs. Thus we start to become more aware of things that are happening around us, helping us further in the learning process as more and more truths and realizations about others and ourselves, dawn on us. Then empowered with all the knowledge thus gained, we can maneuver ourselves better not only on a personal or spiritual level but also in our dealings in this material world! Hence be thankful for those slow phases or dead ends that that your Higher Self has devised for you so that you keep moving forward – not only on the personal and spiritual level, but also on the materialistic front! Well, it not for nothing that it is said the God’s ways are indeed mysterious and mystifying!

Dr. Poonam Mehra