Life provides us with countless opportunities to grow; many of these take the form of hardships. It is much like the butterfly that must struggle to break out of the cocoon. If the cocoon is prematurely opened, the butterfly doesn't mature properly and cannot fly. Hardships help us become “hardy,” ready for the world. They help us develop our capacities. We all recognize how this is so. Various challenges help us develop our compassion, our strength, our patience, our will, our surrender, and countless other qualities.

Yet not every hardship serves us this way. Just as there are “good hurts” and “bad hurts,” there are good hardships and bad hardships. The good hardships help wake us up; they help strengthen us so that we can break out of that cocoon. In bad hardships we don't seem to benefit; we just slop around in our own stuff. Let's take as an example the woman who feels unlovable and, out of that, puts up with situations where she is not treated well. In this case, the hardship doesn't help her. It just keeps the old story running. The only way this hardship will lead to liberation is to examine who it is that feels this way and to see through that identity. The place of suffering is exactly the place that needs to be healed. Knowing this, the woman who is being treated badly can ask, “How am I inviting this, and what do I need to do to change it?” If she is objective, she might see that feeling unlovable is a natural result of her history and that it is just a feeling. It's not the truth. If she can get to the deeper truth of that child who needed and deserved love, she can hold herself in a loving way and put herself into situations that will be healing.

I think one of the factors often overlooked in psychological healing work is the necessity of seeing the whole truth. The truth goes beyond simple awareness of what is to understand why it is and what is holding it in place. As a psychotherapist, I know too well that it is far easier for people to identify their patterns than to change them.

People ask, “If awareness is so powerful, why don't the patterns change simply by my becoming aware of them?” My answer is that the patterns have the best chance of changing when we release the feelings and self-images braided into them. There are many things we need to see here: where a pattern originated, what identity keeps it going, what false beliefs we are holding to. We need to see not just the repetition, but also our part in it. This needs to go beyond an intellectual understanding and involve us in the real work of change. The truth can help us make this change. Not the basic truth that the pattern exists, but the deeper truth of who we are. When we recognize that our conditioned self is not our real self, it is easier to let go of the patterns etched into its surface. We're freer to let go of our identification with the identities and the feelings that keep those patterns in place. This makes it easier to identify with our deeper nature, and identifying with our deeper nature makes it easier for the patterns to dissolve even more. So there is a reciprocal influence here, and truth is part of this process. The truth really does set us free.

Now the situation is complicated by the fact that for a variety of reasons we may ignore the truth and go back to the familiar. Often we'll return to an earlier identity because we don't want to give it up before we've gotten what we missed. The problem is that won't really work. We can't go back and change the past, and we're no longer that child anymore. We can get some of what we wanted, but usually the desires that come from that child space are too big for others to meet. We also return to old identities because we find it terribly disconcerting to be without any identity at all. Even a painful and shabby identity seems preferable to feeling insubstantial or not knowing who we are.

The challenges that help us dissolve these identities are as diverse as the identities themselves. A person who is arrogant and self-important may be served by situations that are humbling, while one who feels inadequate and weak may be served by hardships that require strength and ability. It's not that hardships are the only way we grow; there is also great opportunity when positive things are opening up in our lives, and, if we are on our toes, we can also grow when things are going along in that seemingly humdrum way. It's more difficult when we're not being challenged, but growth is always possible when there is awareness.

It is easiest to see the value of a hardship when we see how it provides a corrective, as in the previous examples. We might even see that our own imbalances create the situation where a corrective becomes necessary. Overconfidence, for example, will always lead to a fall. Because it is not based in accurate perception, there will sooner or later be an error in judgment. The problem will, in some way, bring us back to the truth.

But what about those hardships that have nothing to do with an individual corrective? How can a situation of mass calamity be individually tailored? I don't want to get into the issue of the suffering of innocents or the thorny question of whether anything happens without our soul's consent. I just want to talk about it in an everyday kind of way. Shit happens. People are mutilated in accidents, mowed down in random acts of violence. We can look at people who've gone through these things and see that some are beaten down and demoralized, collapsing into their worst self, while others grow stronger, more compassionate, and more transparent. They take the suffering and make something good come out of it.

This takes me back to the image of the butterfly struggling to emerge from the cocoon. For the butterfly, the struggle is part of the design. It is part of a butterfly becoming ready to fly and, some would say, part of God's way of preparing that butterfly. Maybe God is also preparing us for something and the most efficient way to do this is by making us struggle. Some people take this as a matter of faith; others find support in retrospection. Often we can look back at something that we protested at the time and see why it was necessary. This is one reason I try not to protest my hardships too much. I realize that I don't have the perspective to see where they are leading. The most productive thing I can focus on is how I am using the situation. Am I slopping around in old storylines or learning something new? Am I letting the friction wear me down (and to what end) or am I using the friction to become stronger and more resilient? The question is: “How can I use this friction to grow?”

Bio: Jasmin Lee Cori is a licensed psychotherapist who uses a transpersonal approach to help people live from a deeper place. She is the author of several books about spiritual life including The Tao of Contemplation and The Tarot of Transformation. You can find out more about her books as well as her writing and editing services, online journaling course, and counseling, at www.jasmincori.com/