Everything is a Lesson. Everyone is a Teacher.
Do you run away from problems or toward them?
It’s easy to avoid our problems. But problems are like bullies. They pursue us relentlessly and make our lives miserable. We cannot escape them. But, when we run toward them, they lose their power over us just like the high school bully.
Richard Rohr tells a story about a Navajo woman who showed him a beautiful rug she was weaving. She pointed to an imperfection in the weave and told him that she did that intentionally.
The Navajo culture believes that only the creator, or the divine, can create something that is truly perfect and that human creations will always have imperfections.
I have wasted so much emotional and physical energy trying to be “perfect” instead of embracing imperfection and welcoming it into my life. How could there even be a concept of perfection without imperfection?
Jett Psaris calls these “imperfections” or “problems” spirit doors in her book "Hidden Blessings: Midlife Crisis as a Spiritual Awakening."
The spirit door is a metaphor for a transformative experience that can open up new possibilities and ways of being. It's a threshold that one must cross in order to move to the next stage of their life or spiritual journey.
The problems in my life that were devastating at the time, now appear to me as spirit doors. My life would have been easier if I had been wise enough to walk through those doors at the time.
I have learned, however, that the door never closes. It’s always open and inviting us to walk through and learn from the teachers that have appeared to us in disguise throughout our life.