Struggle is the result of conflict between ideas, emotions and your ability to choose what you want to create. You always have multiple options of what you want to do, experience or create and how you want it to work out. The problem is what you want doesn’t always show up the way you want.
Why does struggle exist if you are in charge of your ideas, emotions and choosing what to create in your life? Struggle exists because of a pattern of ideas and emotions. That pattern is either something you keep creating and don’t recognize or something that someone in your life keeps creating that you don’t recognize.
A pattern that you create causing conflict or struggle in your life is a culmination of ideas and emotions that keep repeating similar experiences. When you get caught up in the repetition of these experiences but want something different you will notice the feeling of conflict or struggle. This simply means that you have gotten stuck in a pattern and forgotten that you are completely in charge of redirecting and changing the outcome. It may seem like a bit of work to change the pattern at first or it might happen quickly and easily. That depends on you and how much you believe that you are in charge of your life. This might be something like trying a different clothing style, not stopping to get a cup of coffee every morning or adding a nightly walk to your daily routine. Once you change the experience, the emotions change too.
Patterns that come from other people in your life can be a bit more challenging, especially if it’s something that you have grown up with and has been “normal” most or all of your life. Take the example of a parent that never got to have the career he/she wanted because of fear of failure. This parent settled for jobs that paid the bills and took care of the family. You, as a child, grow up with this being normal. You, as an adult, get a career with varying degrees of success and happiness. However, when you get inspired to change careers into something you really want and love, it’s like hitting a brick wall. You experience slow progress, frustration, anxiety, tension and things don’t seem to go your way. The conflict is that you know you are happy, excited, and doing things right. You also know that you really do not feel frustration, anxiety and tension even though you appear to have the physical symptoms of them. If you try different techniques to get rid of these feelings of frustration, anxiety, tension, etc, they only work temporarily and it comes back. The pattern and symptoms are not yours even though they appear real and you seem to be physically experiencing them. You are living out your parent’s pattern of not being able to have the career he/she wanted and all of the emotions that the parent associated with it. You didn’t see the pattern because you grew up with the feeling of “normal” being not having what you truly want. When you tried to change what was “normal” the emotions in the pattern got out of hand. In this case, once you recognize the feelings and patterns as part of your parent’s story, you can step out of the patterns and create your own new one without all of the frustration, anxiety, tension, etc., that you had been experiencing.
Whether you are having a simple conflict or one that seems very complex, step out of the pattern of ideas and emotions, recognize the story, write a new one, stop your struggle.