In our life, we have made everything a battle, a battle we force ourselves to fight every moment. We struggle and fight to conquer life. The more we feel that we are losing the battle, the harder we fight. The harder we fight, the more frustrated we become, ending up feeling crushed and defeated by life. We may feel that life is against us and that frustration and failure are inevitable.
Life, however, destroys nobody. It is the life that has brought us here, we were born out of it. If we fight with our own source of energy, we will be destroyed not by life but by our own violence.
Seeking External Validation and Admiration
This inner violence, this misery, is created by us, by our wrong approach to life. All skills that we have accumulated are misguided and unfit to solve our fundamental problem. We all carry a deep-rooted wound of rejection. We don’t have self-respect but only self-denial, self-condemnation. To compensate for it, we crave for validation and admiration which we have been trained to look for outside of us. We have learned this psychological strategy from our parents, society and our education system to get our rightful admiration and validation for everything that we face in our life.
Fully depending on external validation, we’ve become so afraid and so out of touch with our own self that we are constantly on guard and triggered every moment to wage a war. This trembling inside is due to the deep-rooted fear of ‘I am not enough’. We cannot depend on ourselves and we have to depend upon others. To depend upon others means that we need to rely on something outside of us which is not under our control. If that which we want to hold on to is not attainable or that which we hold on to is not available all the time we struggle and fight and deplete our energy in the process.
Facing Life As It Is
Life is not against us. We are a part of it and not separate from it. We are intrinsic and organic to it. It’s impossible to conquer life – the part cannot conquer the whole. Life is very spontaneous and flows and emerges by itself. Life is a dynamic dance of energies in the outer world as well as in one’s subjective inner world. So to face life with its multidimensional ever emerging layers, we first need to attend to this unfinished business – the fight within ourselves.
Whether we like it or not, we need to face this inner fight. We cannot escape. No matter where we go, the same life is waiting for us. We need to face it now. There is no way of escaping. We may think we can avoid conflict and difficulty. In the end, however, the flow of life itself is hampered by our continued effort to prevent discomfort and conflict. The Sanskrit word avidya best describes this state. Avoidance and prevention, therefore, have no meaning. We cannot fight with life itself.
Read more to know how to master the art of living & fight like a Warrior: https://yogavana.in/blog/yoga-warrior-spirit-part1