Lessons Don't Always Show Up In The Way We Expect

When I created a vision board early this year I put on it a quality I wanted to learn how to live: fearlessness. I wanted to really live a life in love and not fear. Last night I had a bit of an epiphany in that I realized that the best way to learn how to to be fearless is to be confronted with scary situations and deal with them without fear. Because if everything is sweetness and light you wouldn't really be practicing or experience fearlessness.

Deep sigh.

I asked for the lesson but I don't get to control how it shows up. And I realized that the lesson I asked to learn has been showing up for a year or more. I'll spare you the gory details but there's been a lot of hard, difficult and frightening stuff and situations I've experienced. But what I also realized that I've dealt with them not completely without fear but with a lot more love and faith than I might have in the past. Older and wiser indeed has its benefits.

Twyla Tharp in her book The Creative Habit reminds us of the story of Daniel and Mr. Miyagi in the movie The Karate Kid. Daniel asks Mr. Miyagi to teach him karate and instead the teacher has the student wax on, wax off and undertake other mundane chores. Although Daniel didn't understand at first, he later learned that through these chores he was in fact learning the fundamental moves of karate even if the lesson didn't show up the way he expected.

Often when we are in the thick of things we don't realize that we are in practice and learning the lesson we asked to learn. Johnny Truant posting at Naomi Dunford's blog Itty Biz also recounts an aspiring martial arts student story as well as his own and how it illustrates really learning the lesson of motivation. His take is that he truly learned motivation when he needed to, when he had to. And that lesson showed up through painful and difficult life circumstances. He challenges readers to question if they are really motivated and if not how they might look at their lives and learn the lesson.

Lessons don't have to be painful but they can be difficult to recognize. Like Daniel, we often have ideas of how we are going to learn something, who the teach will be, what the lesson plan will look like and then when the exact fantasy we have in our head doesn't play out we potentially lose some of the ability to learn the lesson. By looking at the circumstances in our lives, the tasks we are asked to perform, the actions we undertake and the people who show up in our lives as opening the door to learning and being present to teach us, we can learn the lessons we are meant to a little easier and faster and possibly not be forced to repeat them.

Have you learned a lesson in an unexpected way? What did it teach you and have you learned how to better recognize educational opportunities in your life?

Related Reading:

Gina Spadafori at Pet Connection: Learning to live: Lessons from the dying

My dying father taught me about facing death with courage and peace. My dying dog is teaching me to face life with all the joy we can find because our time is always short, no matter how much of it we have.

More than anything, I am realizing that when you stop learning, you stop living. Fortunately, we are all surrounded by the finest of teachers, two- and four-legged both.

Cherrie Carter-Scott at Jef Menguin.com: Ten Rules for Being a Human

4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There’s no part of life that doesn’t contain its lessons. If you’re alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.

Liz at Inventing My Life: The Fearless Factor

My Inner French Girl: Today I will be fearless

Free and Flawed: If I Were Fearless...

Tina at Think Simple Now: Surrender to Pain

It’s true, hindsight really is 20-20. We can’t change the past, but we can choose to extract the lessons learned and move on with dignity and hope for the future.

Here are some things I’ve realized and learned:

• All challenges are there to teach us a lesson. But we are conditioned to treat challenge as a bad thing. Challenge is our friend, embrace it!

BlogHer CE Maria Niles enjoys learning life lessons at PopConsumer