Life Lessons

Bernadette was slowly relaxing. Her breathing was becoming deeper. It was easy to see that she was leaving her busy life behind, entering into this wonderfully calming space within herself. Very alert, very aware, very focused.

She did not know what to expect. Neither did I. She came looking for answers, for the sense of purpose that she once had; I suppose she came looking for … herself.

She was not desperate but determined, not resisting but deeply willing to experience, see or hear that, which would lead her to the answers she searched for. It made my job of guiding her much easier.

Shortly after, she became aware of a deep, wise and loving voice speaking to her gently as if from a place in her mind. The feeling of love and total peace that she felt was so overwhelming that it took her a while to adjust to this wonderful new experience. By the time she realised that she should listen to what is being said, the Voice stopped and in the inner screen of her mind scenes of her life begun flashing one after another. With them came the familiar feeling of being lost in the labyrinth of her life.

Then the Voice began speaking again.

‘If we were to tell you that, just like majority of your fellow human beings, you devote  most of your time to activities that have no real meaning and value in the greater scale of life and spend too little or no time at all doing the things that matter, if we were then to give you the tools that would help you to change that, would you listen?’

Bernadette nodded her head.

‘Let us begin then’, the voice said.

Every person, having crossed over into the spiritual world, goes through a Revision of the life that has just ended with their Highest Guides. This Revision is nothing like the judgement day that you all fear so much. It is a meeting of great teachers and their student-soul. There is compassion, understanding, and total acceptance of the student-soul. But in order to grow and learn, the new arrival, having left their physical body behind, needs to evaluate and understand what crucial lessons have been learned in that life and what still remains unlearned. It is therefore an evaluation with the purpose of gaining understanding, not an exercise in judgment.

For the past many thousands of years people have been learning about their lessons only once they have crossed over. It was all way too late, as at that point, they could no longer change the past, they could only choose to come back and try to learn the same lessons again. The progress of the humanity was very slow.

We want to help you to speed it up now. Please listen carefully.

The voice told Bernadette to imagine that during the Revision one of the Guides holds a page containing all the lessons she came to learn in that life. Each lesson is listed as a separate line. Next to each line is a small box. That box gets a ‘tick’ for each learned lesson and a ‘cross’ for each of those that she did not manage or resisted learning. Bernadette was shown examples of life lessons. She was surprised to see how simple yet profound those lessons were.

“Overcome the fear of loving another,

learn to stand up for yourself,

step into your own power,

realise that in the absence of love fear is created.”

No person seemed to have more than just one page. She always imagined that the lessons would be long and elaborated, but there were just a few lines on each page, short, concise, to the point. The voice said that in essence, there are a limited number of lessons.

‘From now on we would like you to approach every situation, especially the difficult and challenging ones, by thinking of what the lesson in it is for you and what kind of approach and response to the situation is going to get you a ‘tick’ in the box next to it.’

‘Naturally, in the spiritual reality, there are no paper pages storing our lessons, it is just a metaphor, which makes the process easier to understand for you’, said the Voice.

Before you decide to come back into the human form in order to have a new experience on Earth, you enter a room that is your own library of past lives. In there, you look around different sections and shelves, all representing the unlearned lessons. Despite what you might think there are not that many of them. You then select some of the remaining lessons and when satisfied with your selection, you log on to the spiritual internet and post your ad, looking for souls interested in teaching you those specific lessons. (The souls that you know as your parents, siblings, your spouse, children, family, friends and all the other key characters in your life, they all have responded to your ad. They all have expressed how delighted they would be to help you to learn those lessons. And so you studied in detail each other’s lessons so that you could serve as teachers to one another.)

After having gone through some more preparation steps, you are ready to enter into the physical world. The moment comes when you are born. Some of you retain full awareness of your lessons while in the mother’s womb, some bring them as far as infancy or early childhood, but a majority enters this world already unaware of them.

Even if you do remember though, as time passes, your awareness of your lessons diminishes, until you almost forget you have them at all.

You are meant to go through your life asking yourself the question: “what am I to learn from this experience?, what is my lesson in it?”. But there is nobody there to teach you that. Your unresolved childhood experiences carry the lessons into your adulthood. By then you have developed the pattern of seeing the problem, but never the solution, of re-acting to what the world seems to throw at you. You see obstacles, not opportunities.

You get stuck in the unfairness of life, in problems that seem bigger than you. You do not look for the learning, and so you do not find it.

Losing a job, going through a divorce, being bullied at work or at home – they each are nothing else but an opportunity to learn something profound. Nothing that is being said or done to you is ever personal. You make the choice to see it that way, and in doing so you give your own power away. Each of the challenges you face is meant to help you to step into your own source of love and inner power, help you to create a better, new life for yourself. Remember, you have made those choices of your life experiences and lessons for yourself. And you have made those choices out of unconditional love for yourself. Each of them must contain a key to a better life, better future.

When you focus on what the lesson is you naturally look ahead, focus on the positive sides. Otherwise you end up looking back, stuck in the past. Recognise what the lesson is and you will set yourself free, the situation will resolve itself and cease to exist or stop affecting you – there will no longer be a need for it to be there. Each time you learn a lesson, your life becomes easier, more effortless. You were never meant to climb the ladder of life carrying all that heavy load with you. You were meant to let go of it, bringing with you nothing else but the experiences that those lessons have produced. 

If only when growing up, those around you knew the essence of life and the importance of looking and learning one’s life lessons, you would be used to finding them everywhere and dealing with them as they come. Your life would unfold as a whole series of effortless events and situations. You would get the taste joy, happiness, passion and fulfilment on daily basis. You would experience and co-create Heaven on Earth.

But those close to you knew nothing about lessons. They waited for you to become their teacher. This is why you are here.’

The Voice went on. ‘Most of the people know nothing about the reasons why they came into their incarnation on Earth. Thus they end up living their entire lives oblivious of the learning process that is supposed to take place in that lifetime. When the time comes to meet the Guides during revision, the realisation hits them – they have spent most of the time devoted to doing things that in reality mean very little. By then it is too late to do something about it though.’

Bernadette was not sure she understood it right. She asked for an explanation.

‘Let us talk about that, which consumes most of your time – your job. You do not like it, nor do you enjoy doing it, but it gets the bills paid and helps to put the food on the table. At least eight hours a day are spent on that, which you dislike.

What you do not know is that when the time comes to sit down with us and review your life, you will get no ‘ticked boxes’ for the amount of money that you have made in a year, the position that you held in a company or the financial legacy that you left behind for your children. None of those things will matter.

When you realise that nearly ninety percent of the world’s population consists of people who are in the wrong jobs for all the wrong reasons you will understand that those people spend long hours every day doing that, which on the grand scale of things, does not matter at all.

Still not many recognise the fact that each and every one of you has a talent or an expression of it that makes you unique. When you find what that talent is you find your life’s passion. You are meant to follow that passion and turn it into your job. Then you will find that you do not work at all, as you love what you do so much that it is all done effortlessly. You will also not need to work for money. Follow your passion and the money will come with it.

It will be irrelevant to us how much money you have made, was the end result a success or a failure. You will get a ‘ticked box’ just for having tried. Because having tried has given you a new experience, it already made you richer.

But when most of you think of those talents, you still get stuck in the rigid descriptions of the jobs available to you. That is a mistake. A teacher, a driver, a nurse. They all are very defined professions with specific job descriptions and little room for individuality. But each of you has such a mixture of skills and abilities that you could and should add a completely new meaning to each of those jobs. You are meant to make them unique. As unique as you.

In order for you to know what you strengths and weaknesses are, what talents and abilities you have, what is it that you are good at, what you enjoy doing the most – you need to experience yourself in a variety of fields and situations.

Think about the way children experience this world and identify what it is that they enjoy doing the most. They try many different activities, often switch from one to another until they find those that please them the most. They focus on them for a while, and then, following the process of changes happening within them, they are ready to look for different fields that please the new person they have now become. And so as parents you end up bringing them to soccer one week, swimming the other and guitar lessons the following week, only to find out that when you thought they have just managed to settle into one activity, they interests have changed and now they are ready for … art work. Children understand how important experiencing oneself is, you will never find a child who spends a long time thinking of an activity. They simply go and try it out. This way they discover their own skills and talents, their likes and dislikes. This way, they discover themselves.

You see, children still have that natural, undistorted ability to follow their inner process of change. They do not question the change, they just adjust to it, understanding that it is a simple and natural process of life. It is only later in life that due to their fears they develop resistance to change. By then, the most awful thing has happened to them – they grew up and became adults.

As adults they feel under pressure to assume responsibilities expected of them by others. Their world is full of ‘musts’ and ‘have-to-s’. Just like you, they make life choices such as relationships and careers, based on the level of security they provide. As a result they learn to relay so heavily on what is outside of them for their peace of mind and security that when the relationship or the job is gone their world collapses.

Your sense of security must come from you, never from anything or anyone outside of you - that in itself is one of the most powerful lessons that a lot of you are learning.

Now let us go back to the way adults differ in experiencing themselves from children. Adults, having assumed so many, in their eyes important, responsibilities have no time left for experiencing life. They allow their lives to run on an auto-pilot. They loose touch with who it is they are, what brings them joy and happiness. They seek contentment, not passion and fulfilment.

As they stop experiencing themselves, they find it difficult to find or create jobs that reflect their inner talents.

They therefore end up spending most of their waking hours doing that, which not only does not bring them joy, but often goes against their own higher good. The financial gain that they sometimes achieve is in no way able to compensate for the fact that they have lost themselves in that process.

It saddens us to see how many of you are following that trend, how many of you are getting it wrong. We know that if we could teach you to think of what really matters now, you would have plenty of time and opportunities to go through life learning your lessons, making every moment of your future easier and brighter.

It is fear that stops you in your tracks and does not allow you to follow your heart. Many of you are facing many wonderful opportunities to transform your lives. Just look at the amount of people loosing their jobs at the moment. Please tell them all not to despair. Every problem comes with its own solution. Every change is a change for better. But if you refuse to look for the opportunities that those circumstances are creating in your life, you are stuck in despair. Focus on what you really want, for once dare to follow you heart.

We want to tell you about a beautiful island on the Pacific ocean. You often refer to its inhabitants as ‘primitive people’. They have no houses, cars, economy, in fact, they do not even have money. Their natural environment provides them with everything they need and they have learned long time ago how to live in perfect harmony with it. When one of you from the ‘civilised world’ lands there, you cannot help to notice the amazing, almost spiritual sense of peace. You become enveloped in that good feeling atmosphere soon realising that it is those people that have achieved the understanding of what the essence of life is. It strikes you how dramatically different your life is, how much faster, yet lacking that essence that those people managed to grasp. You then understand that it is almost impossible to be exhausted with over-activity and the burden of too many responsibilities and feel happy and fulfilled at the same time. Those people understood that a long time ago 

You all live faster and faster, chasing the shadows of illusion. In that race, you have lost your awareness of why you came here in the first place, the awareness of what you life’s lessons are.

Let us take the example of your brother Cian. He was in six different relationships over the last three years. Each girlfriend was different, yet each relationship ended in exactly the same manner, due to the same reasons. Coincidence?  or lack of recognition that somewhere along the lines Cian is missing the lesson that he is to learn?

Each time you resist a lesson, it comes back to you with more intensity. Eventually, sometimes within the same life, sometimes over a few different ones, the lesson presents itself in such a way, that you must face it. You then often feel pushed against the wall, almost placed in a position when you have no choice but to learn it. But of course the choice is always there, and some, even at this point, are still resisting to learn it.

We want to give you simple tools that will help you to identify what your lessons are, both those that you have already learned and those that you are still learning.

One of the simple ways to identify your life lessons is to look at your childhood, especially all the difficult or challenging aspects of it. In most cases the seeds of your life’s lessons are planted right there.

As most of you are unaware of your lessons, they remain active and you bring them with you all the way into adulthood.

You often comment on how some of you marry the images of your fathers or mothers. Why do you think that is? Your mother and father are the first and greatest teachers that most of you often choose. If you have not learned the lesson that you father was mirroring back to you in your childhood, the chances are that later on in life you are going to attract a partner who will be reflecting the very same issues back to you again. You will therefore be given another chance to recognise your lessons, learn them and by doing so, release them from your life. At that point the relationship with your partner will be transformed, as there will no longer be the need for your partner to reflect that particular issue back to you. That is exactly as simple as it is.

Go back into your childhood, think of the controlling mother, the lack of love and recognition that you got as a child. Think of the bullying at school. Each of them holds a key to a lesson you were meant to learn.

The mother took on the controlling aspect in order to teach you that you need to step into your own power. You and her shared the same lesson, the essence of it was self – control, but you both manifested two opposite aspects of it. One of you was controlling, the other one was controlled. You needed to learn that your own strength comes from within you and no external authority outside of you can affect you; you were meant to learn to be in control. Your mother had a very similar lesson. She used the control she had over everyone and everything around her to mask the lack of control over her life and herself that she felt deep inside. She was meant to learn that once you connect with your loving self, you feel no need to control others.

When you consider the lack of love that you have received, you were meant to learn to love, respect, acknowledge yourself, regardless of the situation. Always offer unconditional love to yourself and the world will immediately love and acknowledge you. Your father, who could not express his love for you, shared the same lesson. He had forgotten how to love himself and therefore found it impossible to show love to another. Self-love was at the core of this lesson. For as long as you were waiting for another to give you that which you lacked or desired (love), you were not learning the lesson.

That girl who bullied you at school had something in common with you too. She has done it all to you not out of hatred for you, but for herself. On a deeper level she sensed that you were as vulnerable and insecure as her. Her own pain was hurting her to the core of her being, she tried to numb it by hurting you.

Do you see that it was never personal, even though you saw it that way? It never was about you, it always was about her. She was teaching you self-worth and self-love. You were reflecting the same back to her by being the victim of her attacks.

At each point in your life you were fully in control of the situation, even though it never felt this way. At each point you could have looked for the lesson and by having learned it, and releasing it, you could have set yourself free. You were never the victim, even though you have allowed yourself to think that way.

We could list all your lessons to you now, but there would not be any great benefit in doing so. You need to learn to recognise them yourself. That in itself is a great lesson. We suggest therefore that you make a list of all the difficulties and challenges that you have experienced in your childhood and analyse them the way we have done it above. You then need to understand which ones you have already learned and which ones are still active and present in your life.

The next step then is to look at your current situation and the difficulties that you are facing at present. Some of them will be directly linked to your childhood’s unlearned lessons, some will be new ones. Just thinking about them will not have the same powerful effect as writing them down on paper.

Once you recognise what your remaining lessons, learn them and release them, your life takes on a new dimension. You begin creating that, which comes your way. you live in harmony with your life’s purpose. And when the day comes to meet us on the other side, you get all your boxes ‘ticked’.’

Bernadette felt that her life would never be the same again. She really understood the importance of getting her boxes ticked. From now on she would look at every situation and ask herself what the lesson is in it for her.

She had one more question though. It concerned her life’s greatest dreams.

She asked about this big dream of hers to set up her own company and write book of poems.

‘Well, they are both wonderful and worthy goals’, the Guides said.

She then asked if she never got the time to accomplish them, would that earn her a ‘cross’ or a ‘tick’ on her list.

‘Tell us first why do you need to have that company and write that book?’, the Voice asked.

‘Well, once my dreams come true I will feel that I am a fulfilled, worthy and accomplished person’, said Bernadette.

‘Exactly’, the Voice said. ‘This is what you still do not understand. It has never been about that company or the book at all. None of them will get you your box ticked. It has always been about you already feeling that you a great, accomplished person and author. That is what is going to really matter then. If you start a business and it does not work out, you do not get a ‘cross’ for not making profit, you get a ticked box for trying. In that process you have gained yet another experience, from which you have learned. The physical (= financial) end result is completely irrelevant. The whole point again is in you already feeling that you are accomplished. Each goal that you set is nothing else but a tool to help you feel something, it should never be used as a proof or condition of anything.

You often say ‘when I get or achieve this, I will feel better about myself and my life.’ Wrong again. Feel better about your life now, that will get you all the boxes on your list ticked. Get to the feeling side of things now, you will then see how the book writes itself and the company simply comes your way without any effort on your part.

If you feel a lot of strain in an area of your life, you are trying to make something happen so hard but it doesn't,  it only shows you that the way in which you approach it needs to be corrected. Most of the time it is not the situation or the people involved, but your attitude towards it.

Use every opportunity to learn more about yourself. Focus on acquiring new experiences in life, in other words focus on the ‘being’ rather than the ‘having’ or ‘achieving’..

We know how badly you want that company and that book, that should motivate you even more to feel that you already are that person that you desire to be once the book and company become reality.

We hope that as a result of our conversation with you, you will be better able to make choices that are aligned with your higher purpose here.

Too many wasted so much precious time and so many lives repeating over and over the same patterns, working on the same issues, while all the time the solution was right there in front of them.

What are you to learn from this experience Bernadette?’, the Voice asked.

 nd Bernadette knew that her life would never be the same. That the only person responsible for her it was her. And she had a very ambitious plan of getting all of her boxes ticked.

At least she would try!