In whatever form it shows up, crisis is always attempting to break down old structures that are based on negativity and wrong thinking. It shakes loose ingrained habits and breaks up frozen energy patterns so new growth can happen. Indeed, the tearing down process is painful, but without it, transformation is unthinkable…
Change is an inevitable fact of life; where there’s life, there’s never-ending change. Full stop. But when we live in fear and negativity, we resist change…So then crisis comes along as a means for breaking up stagnant negativity—so we can let go of it. But the more painful the crisis is, the more our ego—that will-directed part of our consciousness—attempts to block the change…In the areas then where we don’t resist change, our lives will be relatively crisis-free. Wherever we resist change, crisis is sure to follow…
Our stagnant negativity creates a structure built on faults and errors and wrong conclusions about life; we’re living in contradiction to the laws of truth and love and beauty. This structure has got to come down and crisis is the wrecking ball that will shake up the stuck, frozen areas in us that are always negative. This is the spiritual meaning of crisis.
Our fears are always based on illusion, and we could easily overcome them if we were to challenge them and expose the fundamentally flawed premise on which they stand. Instead our fear makes us afraid of facing ourselves so we can transcend our errors. We become afraid of our fear, and then we hide our fear behind rage, or disguise it with depression. The fear compounds…
Round one of a feeling—whether it’s fear or depression or another difficult emotion—is the first crisis we didn’t heed…This launches us into all the subsequent rounds of being afraid of our fear or depressed about our depression…Finally we reach a breaking point. That’s when the perpetual motion machine we’ve created has a breakdown…
Divine qualities like truth and love and beauty go on infinitely, but distortions and negativity never do. They cease abruptly when the pressure bursts. Enter, crisis…The eruption of a crisis more clearly defines our options: figure out the meaning or continue to escape. We are given a means for exiting the ride, or we can keep going and be flung from it more painfully later. In the end, resistance really is futile…
Just as a thunderstorm serves to clear the air when certain conditions in the atmosphere collide, crises are natural, balance-restoring events. But it is possible to grow without creating “dark nights” for ourselves. The price we need pay for this is self-honesty…
This applies to every single person in the world. For whom among us hasn’t had to put up with more than a few “dark nights”? But if we learn to explore even the smallest shadow for its deeper meaning, no painful eruption of crises will be needed. There will be no rotten structures that need to be destroyed…Then the sun will rise and our dark night will prove to be the educator—the therapist—that life can be, once we try to understand it.
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Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #183 The Spiritual Meaning of Crisis
