Back to School... Don't resist the lesson

The beginning of the school year has always symbolized fresh starts for me more powerfully than New Year's Day. Perhaps because my brain has been trained to shift gears in September from all of those years I was in school followed by the years my children have been there. We are currently moving from summer's low gear and waking up our brains.

This is the time of year that I feel most ready to learn new things. I love taking on a new challenge and setting goals, I get the impulse to buy my very own school supplies and organize my desk. Never-the-less the lessons have changed with each passing year. Now they don't always appear in such obvious ways, written out on a blackboard. There is no teacher making me accountable and asking to see my homework and most of the time there is no warning that a test is coming next Tuesday. 

I miss those days when life's lessons were spelled out and scored. There was little question as to whether or not I was properly grasping the knowledge. Adulthood is different in that way. The lessons can slip in subtly and sometimes you have no idea there is even a lesson on tap. Sometimes the lesson needs to show up multiple times until repetition, complication, and failure finally wakes us up. 

Our lessons in adulthood are easy to resist as well, most likely because the focus pulls inward and we are called to learn more about our inner selves rather than the world outside us. Years of training have created a keen ability to look outside of ourselves. As adults we are called to "Know thyself." We begin to see that the world outside cannot change without changing our reaction to it and that there is no lesson more important than that of inner peace. 

There is no perfect manual for the lesson of inner peace. We all have to create our own handbook because what works for me may not work for you. We become the observers of chaos in order to identify what feels bad and dig deep into our hearts and souls to inquire what feels better. We wrestle with our monkey mind, we act from fear, we resist the "ugly", until we reach a crisis. It's often at this point, "The Test," that we realize the lesson has changed from one of force, pushing out into the world and conquering, to one of surrendering the struggle and allowing the flow of life to bring what we need and desire to us. 

So while my brain is waking up from its summer haze, I see that the new lessons being presented are not about effort and meeting well-defined goals. The lesson is about non-resistance and allowing. Seems easy enough, but we humans are always looking for a fight or expecting things to come through a lot of hard work rather than ease. Does it have to be that way? Maybe not.