I have always been a fairly independent person, but somewhere deep inside, when I became exhausted from the struggle of making it through the day, my mind would begin to fill with not so independent thoughts.

Thoughts like: "Please just let someone else get up and make that supper for me" or "please, just send me enough money, that I will never have to work again" or my favorite saying, "This time God, all I want for Christmas, is time off for good behavior".

It was just recently that I realized that I was no longer hearing these thoughts; and observed, as well, that I was no longer waiting for someone else to solve my problems or someone else to rescue me. I was no longer waiting for a relationship or wealth in order to be happy. I was just happy - not rich, not poor, just peaceful, calm and joyful…a wonderful discovery and not always common for WaveRiders*. 

In the past, I watched friends and strangers and thought, how wonderful it was that they had help from partners or family.  What I did not know at that time was that I was only viewing one half of the exchange. The second less obvious half that I did not see was the substitute challenge that appears after the initial challenge has been taken care of by others. I observed the gift of assistance but did not observe the payment for the gift, nor the set of replacement circumstances that would arise because of the assistance.  

It seems to me that people and circumstances, do not take problems away from other people. Instead we appear to swap one set of difficulties for another. These new irritations may be perfectly acceptable or they can be worse than the original set of perceived problems.

Maybe we feel that we can not sleep well because we do not have someone to warm up to in the night.  We may believe that our happiness rests outside ourselves and that only someone else can solve our current insomnia.  When we have someone to snuggle up to, we may find that the person snores and we end up sleeping on the couch so that we can catch a few minutes of rest before trudging off to work.  Once again without someone to warm up to in the night and perhaps even looking back in awe of those wonderful days alone in a comfy bed. 

Perhaps, we think we would like a friend that we can take to all our business social events because we are really tired of going alone, then we find this person, and now this friend, insists that we escort her/him to all of their functions to which we have absolutely no time and definitely no interest - a fair exchange, yes - but not what we were really looking for. We long for the days of solitude and time to complete our tasks.

How about all the times we ran after the quick fix to our financial problems, that makes us work all hours of the night and exhausts us only to send us swirling into depression with lightning speed, so fast in fact that we cannot see that we have entered the pits again. We may have earned the large amount of money that we needed to pay the bills only to substitute the first problem with a second one - we removed the unpaid bill and substituted it with our depression. Now we beat ourselves up and whittle away our self-esteem. It may take weeks for us to get back to mid-wave** losing precious productive time and creating future problems.

Occasionally we are so thankful to have assistance, and not have to face our problems, that we may even allow bad help into our lives. Lets say that we need help with our computer but we don't have a lot of money so we welcome into our lives the computer help that a new found friend offers. Perhaps we are constantly being pushed toward learning how to repair our computer but we continual avoid the situation believing it is beyond our capability.  Instead of believing in ourselves and taking a leap of faith we, instead, are so willing to give up our challenge that, without checking the persons credentials, we invite into our life an unscrupulous technician that has now removed the good parts in our computer and replaced them with old ones. We have fixed the initial problem but now we have another less acceptable problem.

Many times we allow, into our lives, false angels and false opportunities that appear as helpers to rid us of our toils and troubles. They arrive because somewhere we have felt doubt that we can solve this problem on our own and someone else must do it for us.  We might have fallen from faith into the fear and thought this opportunity was the only way out. If our challenge is part of our preeminent lesson in life then it will not go away so easily.

We prayed and we prayed for someone to remove our pain, and this person or this thing that came along seems like the answer to our prayers, only the person or the opportunity turns out to be the creators of a new nightmares.  False angels appear when we doubt and we motivate our prayers from fear.  Faith brings to us assistance that is absolutely what we need, when we need it - it appears from the sidelines as you focus on doing the best that you can do each day with the resources you have at hand and disappears the minute we attempt to force our will on the situation.  We may indeed see the end of our struggle at hand and try to speed up the process. Our challenges and discomfort pull us out of our comfort zone and make us stretch our imaginations to discover new solutions and open for us doors that we never dreamed were available.  Our challenges educate us and prepare us for the next step in our journey.  To turn away our challenges means to remain unchanged. 

In The Wave Riders book and the newsletters we have discussed keeping our intentions clear***  so that we can focus our energies into the right direction in our lives and allow universal energy to stay aligned with our chosen direction - so that this universal energy can assist us along the road. We know that this works, but we are human and sometimes we get tired or we get scared. The bills are not paid, and the chores never end and we change our focus from our journey and we instead focus on the problem and we react from the fisted ball of fear in our belly and our our clear intentions are no longer clear. 

When we think the thoughts, " I wish someone would come along or God would send an angel to make this all better for me" we are really asking God to take away what we may need in this directional pathway. When we ask God to end our pain and the gift in the lesson from the pain we see only our view of the situation, but God's view is much different.  Like a parent watching a child falling while learning to ice skate, God knows it is all a natural part of the learning process. He cannot make you skip the step no more than you can give the gift of skating to a child without the child receiving a few bumps and bruises. 

Perhaps in our prayers what we need to ask for is strength.  Strength to endure what we must endure to become all that we will become. Our current pathway is where we are headed in order to be all that we can be in this existence.  Our current pathway has challenges… all pathways do.  

A truly peaceful existence is the gift received when we can accept our challenges as normal and equal, beneficial partners in our existence and not as personal failures, personal attacks or karmic lessons for past errors. 

There is a difference between delegating work to increase efficiency and delegating your challenge off to someone else because you want to avoid the situation. When you delegate for the purpose of sharing of tasks, for example: to increase production - this creates a calming effect and feels like a common sense decision. You are thankful and happy and things are improved.

But when you "delegate" because you do not want to face the situation you will feel an amazingly sense of relief, because you have avoided what it is you had feared or you may feel an overwhelming panic type rush to jump in to the situation and grab the opportunity. Things are improved only temporarily.

When we remove our current challenges because we doubt our ability and we fear the possible failure, we do not expand, we do not learn to face the intended lesson.  When we face the difficult situation we learn the lesson and we allow ourselves to move on knowing  that the past problem is no longer an issue. 

Whatever we do or think always has consequences in the form of benefits and challenges. These are the absolutes and a natural part of life. Everything that we do will have a lesson and a reward and these rewards may be as simple as a new understanding or view that we did not have before, but still it is a reward. Why must there always be challenge with benefit? Because without challenge there is no growth and that in itself is the greatest benefit. Even a young tree needs the challenge of standing in the wind to grow truly strong.

When you view your life not by the benefits that occur, but by a singular moment of experience and simple existence then you can create the perfect environment for inner peace. Inner peace can flourish and grow when it is  nurtured by the internal triggers of joy and not the evidence that life is good by our external observations.

Indigo Irwin Kennedy

*Wave Rider: an intelligent and/or creative person 

**Mid wave, as discussed in The Wave Riders book is the mid cycle of our psyche. We are neither loaded with energy and happy thoughts nor are we down with low energy and negative thoughts.

***Clear Intentions: February 2003 newsletter http://www.thewaveriders.com/newsletters/feb03.html