Wisdom or Pain. Your choice.

I spoke about this a few years ago. It came to me one day - we can learn from wisdom or through pain. When we use wisdom to learn we do not have to necessarily learn from experience. We can listen to our own knowing, intuition and self trust. We can basically choose to listen to our own instincts BEFORE we walk down wrong paths. 

When we learn from pain we are often ignoring our intuition, our inner signs, the whispers of uncertainty that plague us. Perhaps we don't want them to be true or we aren't sure and we have the need to know, to prove to ourselves or believe something different. 

When we go this route it always leads to pain. That's the cost of ignoring our own intuition. And each time we do it, it doesn't just repeat, it gets worse. People say "what we don't learn we repeat". I say bullshit, what we don't learn we repeat and escalate. 

You won't actually make the same mistake with the same outcome. If you go down the same path - pain - you will endure more pain each time, the outcomes get worse, the losses get worse. 

In spite of this we often watch ourselves making these mistakes and feel powerless to change directions. Even when we know better we can fight against fear and belief systems that can feel as if we are fighting for our very survival. 

I have learned many of these lessons - how moving from fear leads to painful destinations and yet a few years ago I watched myself, knowing full well, that I was making the wrong decision. I told a close friend of mine, wrote it in my journal "I'm making a move that I know is wrong and yet at the same time it's as if I must go down this path, I cannot explain this feeling, the knowing that I COULD choose faith but it feels impossible, as if I might pass out. I know that I am choosing fear because I am not ready to choose to believe in myself or have faith.". 

I had done this before. 

And I had promised myself I wouldn't do it again. 

And here I was, not only doing it but watching myself do it as if I had no choice in the matter, knowing that I could pull back, use my own tools, ground in my own power but I was washed away with fear. The fear was so debilitating that I have no doubt the stress turned on all of my stress hormones and triggered the autoimmune condition I ended up with. 

On top of that I lost belief in myself because I couldn't shake the fear. And I eventually lost everything I worked for years for. 

All because I wasn't finished suffering. I wasn't ready to let go of learning through fear. 

We are conditioned to be afraid. We are kept running the treadmill of life because we are afraid. We are taught to stay the course, hold the line, do the things that are sensible, that make sense, that are rational, even when everything in our body screams NO. 

I know I had to learn more, to experience the real cost of selling my own soul, the cost of operating from fear; the destruction to health, body, self esteem and confidence that comes from walking away from your truth. 

We can learn from wisdom by doing the work that will help us stay in faith and our power, as scary as it is, or we can learn from pain by operating from fear and having to crawl out of the ditch - over and over again. 

If you've found yourself "here again" then I'm willing to bet fear is at play in your life, just like it has been everytime I found myself "here again" crawling out of a place I never wanted to be but that was caused by making choices that weren't aligned with truth but were aligned with fear. 

Stay Wild,

Tonya