When Your Curse is Your Blessing
Handling life’s constant pressures, transitions and conflicts stresses body, mind and spirit. Sharon Brown offers individual, couple, and group awareness facilitation counseling based on following heart, the original spiritual therapy.
In both Firekeeping and Processwork, we talk about “The Field,” the invisible flow that surrounds and permeates everything, always. This is the realm of essence and spirit. It’s the flow of the Tao, a constant flux of energies in balance and motion.
From the Field’s perspective, no polarity can exist without its opposite pole. No view can be expressed without invoking its other side. This is also the realm of Heart.
People commonly say, “My blessing is my curse.” But it’s rare for us to hear, “My curse is my blessing.” From Heart’s standpoint, problems can become our greatest gifts
Here’s one example. A very talented and over-controlling manager alienated others on his team so severely that he ultimately lost his job. During some Processwork role playing, his facilitator modeled what it might be like for the manager to “pick up” and accept some of his co-worker’s accusations as true.
As the client reversed roles and became his accusers, he suddenly “got” what his co-workers had been saying: he hadn’t been able to listen without filtering what he heard to match the reality he wanted to see. The realization made him dizzy as the ground he’d always dominated shifted in the light of the new awareness.
As he integrated seeing himself through the eyes of the others, he was filled with a mix of painful and compassionate emotions. He felt humbled to realize how isolated and stubborn he’d been. He felt connected to his former staff in a new way as he recognized that he had feared their contributions.
But the most surprising emotion was the joy he felt for the gift he’d been given. For the first time in his life, the hard shell he’d worn to fend off vulnerability broke open, revealing a self-awareness he’d never known. He felt more relaxed about “being wrong” or “making a mistake.” He could tell his life would be forever changed.
His curse of being fired became a gift that allowed him to achieve deeper connection with others than he’d ever before experienced.
When we are in the detached, transcendent moment of achieving a new self-awareness, even extreme states have a purpose and make sense for the “bigger view.” From this place it is possible to see that problems can be the best gift we could possibly receive because they are opportunities to grow and change.