Author Barbara De Angelis
discusses how learning from life’s lessons is a journey that will lead
to enormous happiness and wisdom.
If you’re experiencing a particularly difficult time in your life right
now—whether that be the end of a relationship or an arduous year in your
practice—you may feel like you’ve hit a dead end. Maybe you’re
in denial. “It’s not that bad,” you say. Or perhaps your approach
is to just ignore the situation altogether. The last thing you want to do is
question how this happened or admit that you’ve made a mistake.
Or it could be that it’s not one event in particular that makes you uneasy;
rather, it’s that feeling of marking off everything that’s been
on your checklist of success, only to find that something is still missing,
something is still incomplete.
Regardless of whether you feel like you’ve been blindsided by life or
had it uncomfortably sneak up on you, chances are, you are at a turning point—and
that may be the best time to find a gift in your experiences, learn from them,
and ultimately gain wisdom, as Barbara De Angelis, Ph.D., presents in her latest
book, “How Did I Get Here?”
“An experience becomes a lesson the moment you’re willing to approach
it with the intention to learn from it, the moment you apply your consciousness
to it,” says De Angelis, the author of 14 books and a transformational
teacher, in a phone interview from her home in Santa Barbara, Calif. “The
most powerful way to navigate through challenging times is to immediately open
ourselves to lessons. It starts rewarding you immediately. We experience lessons
when we find meaning in things. You need to look for the meaning.”
Looking for meaning is exactly what De Angelis herself did. In her book, she
lists some of her most painful experiences: divorce, being cheated by dishonest
business partners, creating alliances with companies that went bankrupt, battling
an unfair lawsuit, and losing friends to cancer, to name a few. It wasn’t
always an easy journey to find lessons in these hardships, De Angelis acknowledges,
let alone to accept them as gifts. De Angelis lists common roadblocks that she,
along with her students, often had to pass on the path to wisdom:
The first step in turning
experiences into life lessons is acknowledging the truth by first acknowledging
the turning points, transitions, and wake-up calls. Sometimes, the truth hits
us when we least expect it; other times, it’s been there for a long time,
simmering, waiting for us to lift the lid and see what’s inside. “Some
wake-up calls are not initiated from something outside of ourselves, but from
within,” De Angelis writes. “It is as if a timer has been set to
go off inside you at a certain moment, and suddenly, without any warning, it
does, waking you into realizations that will be radical, disruptive and life-changing.”
If hearing the wake-up call is the awakening, then getting out of bed is the
action, De Angelis says. Hitting the snooze bar may be tempting. Writes De Angelis:
“You can’t learn anything by doing nothing. You can’t discover
your future by remaining, unmoving, where you are. Make a choice. Decide. Act.
Then the universe will correct your course and point you in the right direction.”
For some of us, however, it feels as if we keep reaching dead ends. Our career
may feel unsatisfying, or our marriage seems like it has stalled. Unfortunately,
too often we use these moments as an excuse to not move forward, whether we
realize it or not. The key to moving beyond this feeling of being “stuck”
is to view these moments not as dead ends but as doorways. De Angelis writes
that the obstacles in our path are not blocking us; rather, they are redirecting
us:
“What appear to be dead ends in our relationships may be powerful opportunities
for deeper intimacy, or new love beyond what we can imagine. What appear to
be dead ends in our work or career may be powerful opportunities for new avenues
of creativity and new realms of success. What appear to be dead ends in our
happiness may be powerful opportunities for new experiences of rediscovery and
regeneration. What appear to be dead ends in our faith and hope may be powerful
opportunities for new levels of wisdom and awakening.”
Another key point on the road to wisdom is embracing the past. We’ve all
had those moments in our history that make us cringe, and those that we would
rather forget altogether. But in essence, you’d be ignoring your entire
self. “Everything that has happened to me still teaches me, supports me,
reminds me, is there so I can access it to help other people,” De Angelis
says. “I have this huge library of emotional experiences I go to on a
regular basis. Nothing is suppressed, hidden, or forgotten.”
“I think it’s essential to look in to these experiences. There is
no ‘looking back.’ Everything accumulates inside of us. We are our
past. We are everything that has happened to us. We are every moment of joy,
every wound. It’s a question of how can we use it as opposed to how can
we cut ourselves off from its influence.”
The truth we discover may lead us to a new life altogether. Be prepared for
friends and family to hold you back, which De Angelis calls a “loving
conspiracy.” These are people who want to cling to the “old”
you, fearful that your changing may leave them behind. In her own life, De Angelis
has been in situations where she did not receive support during her revolutionary
growth.
“I have experienced in intimate relationships with men, a lack of celebration
of my own expansion and awakening by somebody who was terribly threatened by
it,” she recalls. “It resulted in [their being] passive-aggressive
and critical. I know what it feels like to not be supported. I work with so
many people who are struggling with this.” De Angelis’s suggestion
is to continue on the journey for wisdom, knowing that others who have already
started their own journey will be traveling alongside you.
Furthermore, the voices in your head can be your own worst enemy. How do you
differentiate between those that are holding you back from those that are saying,
“Leap off the cliff. A wonderful world awaits on the other side”?
“It takes a lot of contemplation,” De Angelis says. “The reason
we need to do regular work is so that we’re familiar with the inner voices
that sabotage us, so when they speak to us, we can say, ‘I know you,’
as opposed to ‘This sounds really brilliant; I should listen to you.’
At least you know your tendencies and can identify them, as opposed to being
taken by surprise. Voices that come from fear and limitation almost always give
you the experience of contraction. If a thought contracts you, it means it’s
coming from that place a lot of the time.”
Though you may not believe it during tumultuous times, De Angelis believes that
we can find a gift in every experience. “This is the amazing miracle of
being a human being,” she says. “There actually is a gift. Some
are easier to discover than others. It doesn’t mean we’re still
not suffering. A gift doesn’t mean freedom from pain. The gift can be
along with the sadness. I do believe in the intentiality of the universe. I
haven’t seen anything that doesn’t have a lesson, gift, or reminder.
Some are just very strong reroutings of our lives that eventually bring us to
a good place, but it doesn’t feel like a gift at the moment.”
One of those gifts is time. While it’s unhealthy to linger in those times
of transition, don’t feel the need to rush the process of learning a lesson,
either. “Once we’re into something, we think, ‘Can I just
please get the lesson and get out of here?’ And that’s because we’re
in pain,” De Angelis says. “That’s natural. We don’t
like [feeling] disoriented; we don’t like not having a map. It makes us
feel unsafe. That is just human.” In the book, De Angelis cautions against
rushing through this “rebirth” and misinterpreting our own voids
and emptiness.
Learning from life’s lessons is really about digging deep for wisdom.
And with that newfound wisdom comes sharing it with others. “We need to
share wisdom because all of us are promising a commitment to this school called
Earth,” De Angelis says. “We’re in this together. It’s
about our growth not independently, but collectively. By offering wisdom, we
ground our own knowledge. It’s a very powerful part of our own process.
And it’s a gift to others. If you have extra food and give it to someone,
that’s the loving thing to do.”