As one year comes to an end and another begins, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the spiritual lessons you’ve learned.
Your soul learns from its experiences. That’s why it comes here in the first place. If it simply observed life from the safety of the Astral Plane, there’d be little growth. As someone once said, “A ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are for.” Your soul is an intrepid explorer, and knows that to get the most out of life on earth, it has to get out there and be involved.
According to my Spirit Guides, the experience is not the lesson. The spiritual lessons are what you take from the experience.
To gain the most from what you go through, you need to process to bring the appropriate lessons to bear. Most of us travel through life at such a rate that we rarely have time to process all that happens to us. The problem is that if our experiences are not analyzed, examined, and interpreted, then we run the risk of repeating them until we get the lessons we seek.
Perhaps someone you loved died during this last year. Or maybe you suffered the breakup of a relationship. You might have struggled to make it through the year in a job you can’t stand. Those are the experiences, not the lessons. And unless you stop to reflect on them, you might leave important spiritual lessons unlearned.
One of my clients lost her father earlier this year. She nursed him through his last months of dementia, and was with him when he passed. She spoke to me six months later, and was still grieving. We worked on processing her experience, and finding the lessons she could carry forward with her.
Her biggest spiritual lesson was one of compassion, but what she didn’t expect to find was a major lesson in self-love. During the time she was taking care of her father, she had ignored her own needs, isolated herself from her friends, and put her creative work on hold.
By processing the experience, she drew from it a powerful spiritual lesson about the importance of taking care of herself. She’s now getting back into her art, taking yoga classes, and drawing on a past-life ability by learning to bake bread.
The spiritual lessons we learn from our experiences help us to grow, and to put us in a better place to deal with past life’s challenges as we move forward.
I urge you to review this last year, list the major events, and look for the positive spiritual lessons you can glean from what happened. In my experience, the clients who actively work to implement actions like these are the ones who experience the most profound – and long lasting – spiritual growth.
As you move into the next year, your soul will thank you for your efforts.
Thanks for the reminder, Ainsley. My past year included both the examples you provided; the passing of my father-in-law and the decline of an important relationship, as well as my marriage and other key events. We spent part of New Year’s Eve extracting lessons from the major events of the past year as you suggested, and it felt quite productive.
You wrote that, “Most of us travel through life at such a rate that we rarely have time to process all that happens to us.” From my experience it’s more that people rarely choose to make the time to process what happens to them. From what I’ve read so far, our soul is here to learn from experiences, so seems like such an important exercise, and if you can’t spare at least an hour once a year to do this then it seems you’re destined to repeat past lives and not progress, but of course you’d know better. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and insights with us.
Thanks Rob. That’s just what I’m getting at.
Late in 2014, I learned that I had to have major surgery on my cervical spine because my spinal cord was pinched in half at C5. I underwent surgery on 12-30-14 to prevent quadriplegia, and had to leave my career on a disability. This was the fourth major surgery I’d had on my neck. I was in constant neck and shoulder pain; I was unable to swallow without choking, and to speak with any volume, and then only for very short periods. For a critical care nurse, who had become an educator, this was a tragic blow. But it took something this catastrophic, to STOP me. I had been working 80-100+ hours a week, travelling all over the US, and completely neglecting my family, my friends, my health and most importantly, my soul. I had experienced alot, but wasn’t learning from the experiences, and I certainly wasn’t listening to my “still small voice,” except to tell it to “Be quiet!”
For three more months I remained in a physically debilitated state; my stores of resouces were seriously depleted. It took my physician another three months restore my homeostasis. As my body began to recover, it became clear to me that the care and feeding of my spiritual existence was integral to my complete recovery, and I was frankly ashamed that I’d put my work (and income) before those things that truly matter. Decades of nursing others hadn’t prepared me to take adequate care of myself.
As the summer progressed,I grew stronger and I began to reprioritize my life. My career was ended, but in truth, I realized that I stayed in it for too long for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t until the autumn of the year that I figured out that whatever I was going to do with the remainder of my life, it absolutely had to promote my SPIRITUAL well-being. I couldn’t use any of my talents just to make money. I had to heal more than my body. My soul was crying out to grow and to be heard, and AT LONG LAST, I was listening again.
I finally surrendered. I put down all the baggage that I was carrying and asked to be open to Spirit. That’s when I started to LISTEN again.
Soon after, the world began opening up to me once again. It ultimately lead me to Ainslie MacLeod and his Spirit Guides. What I’ve learned from them wasn’t entirely new to me. What they gave me was validation that what I knew was true and valuable. This spiritual freedom came with some fabulous benefits. I’m lighter for have set down old baggage. I’m stronger for losing the fear of loss. I’m braver for facing my fear of Inferiority. I have a strong voice that will speak out without fear of rejection. And the cherry on top of it all? I have less neck and shoulder pain than I’ve had in years!
This old soul is deeply grateful. Keep it coming, Ainslie!
I’m truly honored to be a part of your healing journey, Kate. Talk of spiritual lessons learned! It’s a big one for healers to learn that they are as valuable and deserving of care as their patients. I’ll keep it coming, you can count on that!