NEW LEVELS OF CHALLENGE
Cullen Baird Smith
Laarkmaa has told us that we are living through the most challenging time humanity has ever experienced and that we have more opportunities for leaps in evolutionary progress than ever before. Perhaps that is why so many of us are being challenged with hardships that seem beyond the pale. Perhaps that is why just when we think we have finished with something, it appears again in another form. I know that I am constantly telling the cosmos that it doesn’t have to be this hard! The reason I know it doesn’t have to be this hard is because I remember a reality of freedom without these constant struggles. Like you, I want to return to that—NOW.
New Levels of Integration
Yet I am finding that I am not alone in my experience of repeated challenges. Others are communicating to me the very same experiences. Every time we grow, every time we reach a new plateau or a new level of understanding, the challenges that surface change in magnitude and variation, just when we thought that we have reached equilibrium.
The challenges, whatever they are for us individually, metamorphose each time we think we have reached a deeper level of shadow work, taking us to a new level of integration. These challenges continually morph in a direction that causes us to have to constantly stretch to change our perspectives and redevelop the way we view and work with our shadow. It is as though we are living in an ever-changing puzzle or conundrum that we have to face differently in each and every experience.
Opportunities Disguised as Challenges
Apparently all of these seemingly new challenges are alive and have their own survival mechanism. The challenges themselves will adapt to our reactions until they have served their purpose. As we change, the challenges change. They evolve as we evolve, reacting to our evolutionary abilities to grow and move forward with newfound understanding in a way that resembles how bacteria and viruses now react to drugs that are designed to defeat them. As we change and apply attitudes and perspectives that are more competent to deal with each challenge, the new challenges mimic the drug resistant behavior of viruses and bacteria. In other words, when we think we have reached a stage of surrender and cooperation and acceptance with the ever-changing energies, we are slammed with a new strain of the existing challenge. We have to once again change our behaviors and perspectives to accommodate these new opportunities disguised as challenges.
This is a key point: we must remember to search for and find the opportunity disguised as a challenge. Ultimately, we are being challenged to move beyond our beliefs about progress and reality. The opportunity is to see and understand a different perspective in order to evolve. Practicing gratitude in the face of extreme pain and disillusionment shifts the energy and allows new understanding to arrive. We begin to integrate the challenge into ourselves with acceptance, and then we live peacefully with it until it is no longer our adversary.
Parallel Dimensions
Laarkmaa has told us that we are great beings who are living many lives simultaneously. What many have called “past lives” are simply ourselves in parallel dimensions, experiencing lessons and challenges to help us grow fully into who we are. Deja vu is not remembering the same experience; it is simultaneously having the same experience—a merging of our parallel selves. We do this when we are ready to recognize and integrate other aspects of ourselves into our consciousness. Our consciousness is evolving, and it is our consciousness that has the power to change our perspective from challenge to opportunity. Each time we do this, we raise our vibratory level and invite in more awareness. As our consciousness evolves, our physical world changes too. We are just not in a position to see it yet.
Sharing Experiences
Communicating and sharing our experiences with others brings us the opportunities to increase our awareness and to see how together we are able to "speak things into reality." When we share how we discover opportunity within a challenge, others experience the upliftment, the possibility, and the promise that “it doesn’t have to be this hard.” We are the ones who define just how hard each challenge is and how quickly we can turn it into a gift. Laarkmaa has been speaking about “proper energetic exchange” for years. This concept is not only about giving money for what we receive in service. It applies to everything. The proper energetic exchange of each challenge is the gift of new understanding that speeds our evolution. Sharing our experience with one another strengthens our ability to recognize and live in the new reality we are co-creating through our changing viewpoints and responses to life.
Pia and I will be joining with other Light Movers and Laarkmaa in April to share our own experiences and ways of communicating as our starbeing friends do—heart to heart. We invite you to be with us, in any way that you can.
With love and light,
Cullen