Even Eve Fell

Sometimes personal experiences seem random. Indeed, I think life in general can appear to be a series of haphazard events. But I try, as often as I can, to remind myself that there's a reason and purpose to everything we do. But we're all really learning how to dance with our blindfolds on. We can't really see where we're going, but hopefully we can move to the music, and trust in ourselves, our partners and our teachers that they won't lead us astray.

One seemingly random event that has made a huge impact on my life was the passing of a dear friend - a friend as close to being family as anyone could.

Before his death I thought deeply about a lot of things like the nature of life and death, our purpose on the planet, the meaning of life and all that mumbo jumbo one thinks about with too much time and too much wine. I 'believed' in a lot of interesting things - a lot of interesting theories about the universe and its workings.

But when my friend died, it went away. All of it. It was as if, in the blink of a second, someone had erased my hard drive. I was a void of belief. I believed in nothing. NOTHING. Nothing had meaning, everything was random, chaos reigned supreme and none of us mattered.

I then had a dream, a beautiful dream that I won't describe now, that changed that.

When I awoke, it was all back. All my beliefs, my theories, my almost blind faith in the universe's energy and power - only something was different. They weren't beliefs anymore. I KNEW things. The same way that I know my name and where I live and what my telephone number is, I knew that there was life on the other side and that we all come here for a reason, for learning, for experimenting, for pushing boundaries and exploring and testing ourselves. We were spiritual beings having a human experience, not human beings having a spiritual experience. These things I suddenly KNEW.

I came across this, and I love how beautifully my friend Wayne Dyer's words capture my personal experience - this one in particular explains a lot:

Now I know this will sound strange. When you understand that you have an energy body and when the Kabala talks about being able to move from one level to the next, it says, now this is a very important part. That in order to move from one level to a higher level and to generate the energy for this you have to take a fall.

The thing that proceeds every step of growth in your life is a fall. It is as if you are a high jumper. I was in high school. You don't just run-up to the bar and go over it, you have to go down real low and the process of going down low you're able to generate the energy to propel yourself over the bar. The same thing works metaphysically.

Now the falls of our life are really generated by your higher self. They are not generated by your ego. The ego is terrified of you having a fall because generally when you have a fall you find God. You become more spiritual, more caring, more gentle. A fall can be many things such as a breakup in a relationship, a bout with drugs, an accident, a heart attack, a bankruptcy, a trauma of some kind. Whatever it may be.

What you need to know, not believe, but know is that right when you take a fall you're generating energy to a higher level. Instead of putting mental energy into negative emotions, be grateful for the opportunity to be a better person and to go to the next level. When you know this every time you experience a fall you can become thrilled.

Taken from an interview with Wayne Dyer

I particularly love his emphasis on 'knowing' rather than 'believing' - although the irony of this is that in order to get to that point of knowing (if my personal experience is at all the norm) then one must fall first. Then you'll just know.