

Not long after that, however, something began to happen, and everything began to unravel. Everything looked like it was really good in Charles’ life. And in this belief, he left his family, he left his home, he left his friends, and he was able to get a transfer in the same career to the city where this woman lived. He spent long travel hours with them, they had meals together, and they talked about the events unfolding in the world around them.Īnd it wasn’t long before the inevitable happened, and he believed that he was in love with a female co-worker who was traveling the circuit and attending the conferences with him. And what he began to find was that he actually knew the people that he worked with and the people that he traveled with better than he knew his own family. He saw his family very little during this time.

He found himself at tradeshows and conferences all over the world. He moved through the ranks within the corporation, and soon he found himself on the road showing others what it is that he had learned and developed.
Gregg braden timecode calculator software#
He was an engineer, a software developer. And Charles described his experience of working very long hours in a corporate environment, and he became very, very good at what he was doing.

We’ll call him Charles, although that’s not his real name. I had a client, as well as a friend, who is an engineer whom I worked with. So what is this mysterious power? How does it show up in our lives? Well, through the story that follows we’ll answer those questions, and in doing so, we’ll lay the foundation this mirror of the dark night of our soul. And to stifle this power and deny its expression can be life-denying. To allow this force to be expressed is a life-affirming experience. This parable suggests that we each harbor within us a power, a force, if you will, that seeks to be shared and expressed. And if we choose to retreat from that and we shy away from finding those portions of ourselves, many people have found in very direct ways that it destroys us, it destroys our trust and our ability to move forward in the process of life. If we reach into the deepest access of who we are and what we have available to us as people, it will carry us through what we see as the darkest experiences of our lives. If, however, you do not bring forth that which you have within you, it can destroy you." And this is a reference to the power that lives within us, the power that must be expressed in some way in our lives. Referencing from the lost gospel of Thomas, we’re reminded, "That all are born and must walk in the two spirits that the one has created in humankind, spirit of light and spirit of darkness." A second part of this quote goes on to say that "if you bring forth that which you have within you, it will save you. When we find ourselves in such a fear, the ancients called our experience "the dark night of the soul." And this mirror is a mirror that helps us to understand the mystery of the dark night of the soul and how it plays out in our lives. There’s a mirror that shows us our greatest levels of personal mastery by presenting us with our deepest experience of personal fear. So an opportunity from this perspective can feel very different from a test that we can pass or fail.

To meet our challenge while honoring our personal principles of integrity and trust and in those around us. In an opportunity, all that we can do is to meet our challenge and become the best people that we can be in the presence of that challenge. What if the challenges of life are not tests at all? What if our greatest challenges are simply opportunities to demonstrate our mastery of a particular skill or relationship? In an opportunity, it is impossible to fail, or to succeed, for that matter. The belief that life tests us falls right in line with that either/or kind of thinking and allows us to succeed and fail many, many times in our lives. And in those measurements we’re either successful or we’ve failed. We live in a world where we’ve been conditioned to believe that our achievements in life may be measured. While that certainly may be possible, I’d like to offer another perspective. Many people describe this as a feeling of being tested, as though life is testing something within them. Sometimes we may even feel as though life has pushed us right over the edge. Sometimes the events of life seem to push us to the very edge of who we believe we are.
