Why is Life So Hard?
Have you heard that you have a pain body that causes you to struggle and makes life so hard? The Buddhists and others say that all life is suffering. What do you think about that?
Certainly as you look at world news you see a lot of pain, struggle, and victimization, and you may wonder why is life so hard and is there is a solution.
In your own life, you might notice you seem relentlessly programmed to make choices and decisions that lead from one suffering to another. Have you ever found yourself saying, “What now? I feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop!”
Have you noticed that little voice inside your head that criticizes you and tells you that you’re not good enough and that you’ll never get it right? This negative self-talk can cause you to doubt yourself and make you feel worthless, and program you to make bad decisions and even fail.
Your Contracts for Why is Life So Hard
When you do get something good, a part of you often says, “Oh, that was too easy. You need to sweat a bit more so you can really feel like you earned it.” This pattern exists because everyone has contracts with themselves. These contracts are why life is so hard and they have two major components.
1. One component holds that when you seek your dreams, there will be obstacles and challenges. A variation on this is that all your dreams and desires will be filled with hidden problems. The unwritten contract requires struggle to pay the price to compensate for feeling unworthy of the dream. In other words, because deep down inside you don’t feel like you are worthy or deserving, your dream has to be earned and that usually requires pain, loss, or sacrifice. Do you see how this answers why is life so hard?
2. Another variation on this contract requires that people come into your life to play the role of villains so that you will suffer for believing you are unworthy. Then once you believe you have suffered enough, you can allow yourself to have your dream.
This last contractual demand is like wearing an invisible label that says, “I need to suffer in order for me to fulfill my contract.” You then oblige yourself by fulfilling the need to be taken advantage of in some way.
Notice how each of these contracts is a slightly different version of the same pattern. Do you see how these contracts answer why is life so hard? It is necessary to neutralize these contractual provisions to stop feeling it is necessary to suffer because of guilt for having something you think you didn’t deserve. This contract with yourself is actually a belief that is held at a very deep level. It has not truth in it, but it is derived from faulty conclusions the ego-mind has deduced based on its very limited knowledge of understanding.
What is the Source of Your Contracts?
Because these belief patters are deep in your unconscious they appear to surface spontaneously out of nowhere. In fact, most of the time circumstances that lead to pain seem beyond your control. Here’s an example: You’ve undoubtedly noticed how people can trigger reactions in you before you even realize how it happened. It seems to happen automatically, doesn’t it? You hear something on the news, a friend says something to you, someone is rude to you, and that creates an automatic reaction such as:
- Feeling afraid and having anxiety.
- Feeling angry, resentful, and holding a grudge.
- Feeling discouraged and futile.
Where do these reactions come from? That is a more important question than you might think because there are very few sources of these programs. You can be sure they are not coming from your soul, which is incapable of such things. That leaves either ego programs or negative energy you’ve absorbed from someone else, or a combination of the two. You see we acquire subtle-energy programs from others when we interact with them. Their fears, anger, guilt, and depression can impact you and cause you to feel those negative emotions thereby joining with your own fear-based ego programming.
If left unaddressed, these destructive programs can destroy your self-confidence, your sense of worthiness, your ability to trust yourself or others, which are all things that are necessary for a happy life. This further addresses why is life so hard.
Let’s Dig in Deeper
You have probably heard that you have a shadow self or a dark side. Some call this your pain body, and it is more commonly called your ego. I distinguish the pain causing aspects of the ego as negative ego.
Negative ego is a destructive force that takes over your life if you let it.
The negative ego is a complex collection of memories what work like programs in your subconscious and other unconscious places such as your aura and chakras, to try to protect you from what it perceives to be danger. It is trying to keep you safe and secure, but it uses fear as its driving force. Uh oh! You can quickly see there is a problem with that can’t you?
You see, the ego doesn’t know what perceived threat could turn out to be its doom, so it exaggerates potential threats or even creates them in its imagination when there is little or nothing threating. In the process of doing that it can also keep you from discovering your potential by making you feel like you are flawed, defective, less than others, or not good enough, smart enough, or worthy enough of anything great.
Your questions and doubts can lead to negative outcomes like low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety as well as poor relationships and job performance. When you listen to those inner critical voices, you can start to question everything that happens in your life from the smallest details to the biggest moments. You wonder whether anything that you do has any real value or meaning for anyone but you. Do you see why is life so hard?
The ego has been the backdrop to your conclusions about every experience of every lifetime. It has a vast warehouse of memories of all the suffering it has witnessed and you’ve experienced. It uses those memories to guide and control you every day. A big part of the problem is that all of its conclusions are faulty because they are based on fear of what might happen, could happen, or what was believed would happen, but in most cases never did. Most fears are never experienced, but they none-the-less influence your choices and decisions.
When living with the influences of the ego, a person feels cut off from everything wonderful, beautiful, and loving. At its core it has loneliness, abandonment, horror, fear, insecurity, emptiness, futility, depression, and more misery. These are all it knows, so it lives and constructs life from these perspectives. This accounts for the human condition of suffering and this further addresses why is life so hard.
The Ego Has No Solutions
The ego cannot find solutions to its pain. It only knows how to look through its own experience to try to solve its dilemmas of struggling, suffering, and isolation. The ego is incapable of seeing outside itself to find healing, love, and the soul. It does everything it can to find solutions inside its own self-created realm to cope with all that life brings, but it can never find the answers there.
Feelings of deep isolation, separation, and abandonment, are the ego frantically trying to find answers inside of itself. Sadly, it will never succeed because the answers do not exist there. The pain you feel is the ego turned on itself, feeling frustration, isolation, and helplessness at not being able to resolve its own problems.
The part of your shadow or ego identity that gets triggered and reacts is actually a defense mechanism trying to keep you safe. It is a fear-based program that is as close to an instinct as a person has. What is rarely recognized is that it can be modified or even deleted like a program in a computer, but the trick is knowing how to do that. In fact, most people aren’t even aware that is possible. I assure you it is!
What Doesn’t Work
1. The ego is not diminished, and certainly not eliminated, by talking about it, reading about it, or thinking about it. Here’s why: since the ego lives in your deep unconscious you must be in a meditative state to even access it in the way that is necessary to heal it or clear it. Once you access its deep beliefs and needs you can systematically start dismantling it. But first, you have to identify the unique components of your ego. You will only clear what you identify. Otherwise, the ego programs will continually recycle.
2. The ego will not go away through any analytical or intellectual process. You must address it on a feeling level experientially. If you can feel it you can heal it, but you must discover first-hand what drives the ego and then merge it with your True Self or soul.
People will cling to their painful reality like a drowning person clings to a board floating in the ocean. They cling to it for dear life and are afraid to let go and reach for the lifeguard on the boat who can save them. The lifeguard can’t pull the person and the board into the boat. The board must be released first. When people are willing to admit they are living clinging to a board of fear and are willing to surrender and let go, only then can they be helped.
As you neutralize the effects of the ego by merging with the higher aspects of your soul, you will awaken to a new way of viewing yourself and all life. You will feel as though you have awakened from the dreams of a deep sleep. Until you have this experience you think you are awake and directing your life through conscious decisions.
Of course, it takes some time to transition from an ego-based life to a soul-integrated one. Look at the choices you made and the reasoning process that pulled you to make your choices. What emotions and reactions sabotage manifesting the relationships and life you want? Surrender all aspects that want to attach through all wants and desires. Become aware of the energy of the unlived and inexperienced life and the part of you that wants it. Be in touch with the part of you that says, “Just one more conquest. Just a little more power and control. Just a little more money.” In fact, recognize that you could reduce the ego’s nature down to wanting one thing: more! Herein is the essence of what it has come to mean to be human. This is what the entire physical dimension is about.
As you merge deeply with your soul, you will realize how absorbed in an illusion you were. You will feel reborn as you awaken into a fresh new view of everything. I can’t help you fix this situation with articles but I can with audio programs I’ve created. Click on any of these links for more information.
As the ego’s fears and needs merge with the light of truth in the soul presence, what was feared vanishes. I explore this much further and how to accomplish it in my book Handbook for Enlightenment & Ascension in the chapters on surrender and grace.
You must reach beyond your ego-dominated mind programs, because if you fail to do that, you will create more struggle and suffering. Your time has arrived to fully wake up to the forces shaping your life, and utilizing tools to clear away your ego obstacles and integrate the highest spiritual awareness possible.
