Fortune Favors the Broken - Here’s Why:

All of us know what it's like to die an emotional death while the body lives on. This is what determines whether we transform, or repeat the cycle.

One day when my life fell apart, and the pain was so extreme I felt I was dying inside, a woman pointed at me and said: 

“I want everyone here to look at Tess right now, because she is the luckiest person in the room.” 

WHAT? 

How I looked in that moment was curled in a ball on a couch, face swollen from crying for days, dimly lit eyes from lack of food and too many cigarettes.

I thought she was out of her mind. I would have given ANYTHING to trade lives with anyone in that room. I could not understand why she’d say that. 

But I do now, and that’s what I’m here to share with you.

All of us know what it is to die an emotional death while the body lives on - this is the alchemical fire of transformation. It is one of the most painful yet necessary and sacred things we humans go through in this life. No one is exempt. 

The determining factor of whether we rise from the ashes and transform, or continue the cycle of destruction, is our ability to recognize the opportunity in the pain. 

When we break down, our ego breaks with it. Our beliefs, habits, looping thought patterns, relationships, perception, even our identity: all of them come under the microscope and into the light for examination. 

This is, understandably, very terrifying. You are experiencing a glitch (or total system failure) in your own matrix. It can feel like a bad acid trip in extreme cases. 

Here’s where the blessing and opportunity is: 

When we break down and break open, we feel empty. We have been emptied out. Which is the perfect and only condition to be able to receive whatever you’ve been searching for (and failing to find). 

Societal programming, trauma, repressed or dysregulated emotions can warp our perception so far from our true nature, that we forget we’ve gone astray in the first place. We are reminded in the experience of the breakdown, the ego death, the surrender. 

It is in this state, when our defenses are down, that guidance from a Source higher than our thinking mind can reach us to our core. 

If we allow ourselves to remain broken open, without going into an immediate frenzy of trying to medicate our misery, the guidance always comes. 

That woman was right. I was very blessed with agony. That experience led me to bare full witness to a cycle of self-sabotage and destructive, often abusive behaviors toward others that I’d been acting out for most of my life. I genuinely could not see it until that point.

I always had an excuse, or a person or past trauma to justify my behavior, which included addiction, violence, self harm, suicide attempts, dropping out of society and pushing everyone away, drowning in self-pity and shame, rinse and repeat. 

Seeing fully into the nature of my behavior and accepting full responsibility was brutal. How could I have done this?! Well the more important question is - I have done this, I don’t want to anymore, how do I never repeat this again?

There was tremendous power in finding out how I was the cause of my suffering, and a great contributor to the suffering of others. 

A brutal pill to swallow, but I had to touch that level of pain and remain open to receive the truth of why I was in that pain to begin with.

I finally changed because I fully faced the pain and its root causes.

This particular situation was many years ago. I have never been the same since. Yes, I’ve had lapses into old behavior, but I’ve been able to recognize it, stop it and correct it very quickly, whereas before this incident, I had zero self-awareness and was a perpetual victim of circumstance. 

In every persons dark, quiet hour, when we have no idea what to do with ourselves and often want to give up on living — it is in this sacred space, something speaks to us. 

I can’t tell anybody what it is for them. All I can say is in order for us to find ourselves, we have to contend with the fact that we are lost.

You cannot be found if you are not lost. You cannot be healed if you are not broken, and you cannot be saved if you are not in crisis.

So what I say to anybody experiencing this, as many are today on the planet: allow it. 

As corny as it sounds, trust your process. 

We have many names for this force on earth. There is a much higher intelligence, wisdom and magic that we cannot see, and it is in these moments that we are closest to it — even though ironically, we feel furthest from it; often times outright abandoned by it. 

if you are in this place, allow yourself to feel the silence and the emptiness. Allow the answers to come to you. We are conditioned to strive and fight, to find anything that might numb the pain, until we get to a breaking point where it goes from background noise to the main character. 

Allow the breakdown. Allow for a time of silence and contemplation, meditation and prayer. Even more brave, reach out to another person and be honest about where you’re at. This sets you free and releases shame, the engine of suffering.

It has always been these experiences that have catapulted me into a higher level of thinking, living, experiencing and being. They are the precursor to any awakening or transformation.

Breathe. Slow down. Resist the urge to try and medicate or change the way you feel and see what happens. If you decide you don’t like it, you can always put on your armor and go back to what you were doing before. That option is always there for us. But sometimes we have to let the smoke clear from the chaos of whatever situation we just came from, in order to see that there are other doors open for us that we did not, or would not see before. 

I hope this was helpful to somebody else. Please feel free to share your experiences in the comments, I always love to hear from you.

And if this was helpful to you, please share the article with your loved ones.

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