Image by Giustiliano Calgaro
When we use our divine lens to see what lies beneath the surface, we realize that everyone experiences pain throughout life, especially during childhood. Whether we felt unloved, inadequate, rejected, unlovable, impoverished, or were abused, we all grow up hungry in one way or another. This hunger creates our desire to evolve.
When you view your childhood from the ego lens, you may see a tragic story of injustice in which you’re a victim. The ego mind will tell you that because of your suffering you have a right to be angry, desperate, afraid, or cruel. You may spend much of your life with this paralyzing viewpoint until you hit a crisis. And when your pain is great enough, you might finally choose to shift into your divine perspective. You’ll realize how perfectly you chose your childhood, so that you could find your divinity, look beyond the surface, and embrace the wisdom of your soul.
This is your soul story, and it’s the only perspective that matters. Your ego tells you otherwise. But your soul story is the true story, and it empowers you. It’s the viewpoint you’ll realize at the moment of your final breath.
FACING YOUR PAIN
Peter was a forty-year-old computer programmer who hated his job and had a passion for race-car driving. He spent so much time at the racetrack that his marriage was in trouble. His doctor prescribed antidepressants and sent him to me for career counseling. Peter’s story was unforgettable.
One night when Peter was thirteen, his sixteen-year-old sister woke him up. “Mom and dad have gone out. Get in the backseat of the car and shut up,” she whispered. “We’re going for a ride.”
Peter followed her into the family car and fell asleep in the back-seat. He woke up hours later in the darkness, in a ditch, unable to find his sister. She was pinned under the car and had died instantly. That moment changed his life forever. His parents divorced, and his father became an alcoholic. “No one ever spoke about the accident,” he told me. Peter learned to bottle up his feelings. “Have a stiff upper lip and carry on,” was his father’s only advice.
As my client, Peter explored this memory and realized that each time he raced a car at ninety miles an hour around a race track, he was healing a childhood wound. He was reliving and reprogramming the event that had destroyed his childhood. He was taking control of his greatest pain—the loss of his sister and family.
By facing his pain, Peter gave himself permission to leave his job as a computer programmer to pursue a career as a race-car driving instructor and a race-car service shop owner. He recognized that teaching others how to navigate a speeding car was a profoundly healing experience for him. And by honestly sharing his insights with his wife and daughter, he rallied their support for his new direction. He found renewed intimacy in his marriage and gave himself permission to pursue work that he loved.
This brings me to the most powerful truth I know about meaningful work: your pain is your greatest ally for finding the work you love. Consider that you chose (consciously or unconsciously) every job you’ve ever had because it was healing you. Hundreds of my clients have proven this to be true. From observing their experiences and studying the biographies of successful people, I am 100 percent sure that our pain guides us to our true work, and that our true work heals our greatest pain.
How? Our work can heal us by letting us offer to the world exactly what we need to heal ourselves. By facing our pain, we can turn it into energy. It becomes our ally and moves us forward.
Ask yourself what pain needs healing now. Let the answer guide you to the work you love. Here’s the secret: The more pain you feel, the more energy you have at your disposal to launch your new career. See your pain as fuel, not as something that stops you from moving forward. We have to shift into our Divine Lens to realize this.
When you’re unhappy in your career, it’s time to face your greatest ally—your pain. The pain you’re feeling deep inside of you is a beacon calling for your attention. It’s telling you what you need to know so your life can move forward. Your pain needs to be recognized, listened to, and turned into fuel to move your life forward. Shifting into your Divine Lens reveals the blessing in your pain story.
How do you turn your pain into fuel? First by recognizing what your greatest pain is, and then by recognizing how to heal that pain through your work. Your work will then become a powerful impetus for healing yourself and others. Remember, the more pain you have, the more fuel you have. Consider your pain to be your greatest blessing, and move forward.
THE PLAY’S THE THING
We have to love the play of life for what it is—a school in which to master our spiritual evolution. We all must sip from this potent brew, or there’s no need to be here. It’s the play, and the play’s the thing.
And when you take your final bow, it matters how honestly you spoke your lines, how bravely you faced the audience, and if you played your role with every ounce of heart you could muster. It matters how true your words rang out into the night, filling the audience with hope, sorrow, and understanding, your poetry drifting into a moonlit sky.
Only at the final curtain call can we say it was terrible and wonderful, and that we’re glad we came, that the story was worth it. And the script was brilliant.
Be the player on the stage we can’t forget. Pull the naked truth from your heart and lay it on the stage for all to see. Speak your untarnished wisdom that wakes us up for a brief instant of shared illumination. Because you are divine, and nothing can stop you.
When everything is stripped away, who’s left inside? Your divine self. Your soul. When you’ve lost everything, what have you found? Your divinity.
Take the opening. Take the chance. You’ve got nothing else to lose. All obstacles, belongings, and attachments have been removed for your highest good—to open your heart, break your patterns, erase fear, and quiet the ego mind that’s been obsessed with winning.
Pain quiets the personality that hides our true self
from the world. When it all slips away, take a breath.
Just one breath connects you to your divinity,
to your divine perspective.
THE LESSON OF MY PAIN
Say this sentence out loud: “Show me my divine perspective, the lesson of my pain, the gift in this moment, and my next step.” One breath, one sentence spoken out loud, and everything is revealed. Now you’re ready for your next level of evolution, the next phase of your journey.
Today you’re being asked to release the old, step away from drudgery, throw open the windows, and kiss the unknown dawn that awaits. You’re being asked to grow, to love what you fear, to embrace pain as your greatest gift.
Will you consider this? Can you pray, “Help me see this differently. Pull me out of ego. Wrap me in love and understanding.”
You’re not weak or overly sensitive. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re a divine being who came here with a plan. You may have lost your way, but that’s what happens in this dense realm.
None of your past matters. What you have is today. And today is your choice point. All that matters is finding your way through the fog, reaching for divinity, seeking inspired purpose, and refusing to live by the rules that others have determined for your life.
Your soul is in charge, always. Your personality is only the costume you wear. Your soul opens every door, pours love on every wound, sees beauty in every misstep. Your soul realizes this is simply the journey you chose to take on your way to higher consciousness.
Everything you touch in this physical world is infused with love— your desk, your jeans, and your drinking glass all contain energy, a vibration of consciousness capable of assisting you in your awakening. Have respect for the unseen consciousness that exists everywhere within and all around you.
THE SOUL'S TRUE WORK
Every task you perform here, every job you undertake, is calling you to your soul’s true work. Nothing is meant to be drudgery, torture, or work for work’s sake, even though many choose to see it this way. Our lives are meant to elevate, inspire, heal, and awaken.
Where were you when your last lesson broke you open? Do you remember? Did you pout and blame? Did you attack those who asked you to grow? If so, this was your ego acting out, your empty personality disconnected from soul, the hungry ghost inside of you.
Or did you swing the doors of your heart wide open and call out for guidance?
It’s time to make amends. You get to choose again. You can open your arms with gratitude, laugh instead of cower in fear, and move through the fog into the light—the light that was always there.
All you can hope for is to take the first step and reach for a sweeter answer. Everything changes in the instant of making a new choice because everything you feared is then revealed as nothing but illusion. All that matters is your courageous heart. That’s where the light lives. That’s your essence, and now you can see it.
Consider the possibility that all of your pain—every wound you’ve ever experienced, every loss, every illness, and every disappointment—was exactly what you needed and chose in order to arrive at this point in your life, which is exactly where you’re supposed to be. Your soul chose to experience loss in order to open your heart and strengthen your connection to the Divine, to push you onto your true path and inspire you to accomplish your soul’s greatest mission.
Your greatest work offers to the world what you wish had been offered to you in your moment of greatest pain. Grief brings a clarity and focus to your life’s purpose, which gives you a powerful advantage in everything you do. Pain of any kind will drive you to see beyond the surface and embrace a divine lens perspective in every area of your life.
Copyright ©2023. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted with permission of the publisher,
Park Street Press, an imprint of Inner Traditions Intl..
Article Source: Through a Divine Lens
Through a Divine Lens: Practices to Quiet Your Ego and Align with Your Soul
by Sue Frederick
In this guide to aligning with your soul and seeing life through a divine lens, Sue Frederick presents mindful practices and spiritual tools to shift your perspective and step into your power. She explains how each of us arrived in this life with a soul intention to live up to our greatest potential and do great work that helps others—but often we hit bumps in the road that disconnect us from our soul’s wisdom and allow the ego lens to take over and destroy our confidence. Yet, as she reveals in detail, each crisis is an awakening, an opportunity to shift from feeling like a victim to feeling that your soul came here to experience these exact challenges in order to evolve in just the way it needs.
Click here for more info and/or to order this paperback book. Also available as an Audiobook and a Kindle edition.
1644117320
About the Author
Sue Frederick is a lifelong intuitive, an ordained Unity minister, a certified past-life and between-lives soul regression therapist, a certified creative arts therapist, a career intuitive coach, grief intuitive coach, and master numerologist.
She’s the author of Bridges to Heaven: True Stories of Loved Ones on the Other Side; I See Your Soul Mate: An Intuitive’s Guide to Finding and Keeping Love, and I See Your Dream Job: A Career Intuitive Shows You How to Discover What You Were Put on Earth to Do, and the memoir Water Oak: The Happiness of Longing.
Visit her website at CareerIntuitive.org/
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