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Hi -,
There’s a beautiful spiritual concept that claims you came here to learn certain lessons. Your soul is seeking lessons related to pain, love, loss, relationships, abundance, scarcity – and your life’s experiences are then shaped to allow you to learn the particular lessons most relevant to you.
Psychology offers a similar insight: have you ever wondered why certain challenges seem to stick to you, as if you were a scented flower and they were a bee? Different partner, different city, different career – and yet the same challenge or frustration keeps on appearing again and again. Different props, same play.
Life is not necessarily repeating events. It is often repeating lessons.
There are 2 psychological concepts I really like, that allow for in-depth reflection on your life’s repeating lessons:
Attachment Patterns: The child in you, growing up under certain circumstances, learned to attach and connect with others in a certain way. You will then seek, consciously or unconsciously, to replicate those known attachment patterns (whether they are healthy for you or not) simply because that’s what you learned. It requires laser-focused observation over your own behaviors and psyche to crack those patterns and create a shift.
Emotional Avoidance: I write a lot about it – because it’s a big piece in solidifying some of our patterns. When you experience a challenge (especially a trauma) and avoid the processing of its emotional backlash, these emotions are stored within you instead of being released. They will then navigate your choices and behaviors from the unconscious, leading to recurring lessons.
If you recognize your own repeating patterns, it is important to see them as a friend instead of a harmful enemy. The recurring challenge is not evidence that you are failing – it is evidence that you are still invited into growth in this area.
And frequently, the repetition evolves with time. You might be struggling with rejection at 25, dancing with the pain of rejection at 35, and at 45, rejection might still hurt. But like a spiral staircase, taking you higher with every step, you grow through this journey of rejection.
You learn more and more about yourself, you get to know your triggers better, you recover faster, and you learn to build less and less of your identity around it.
The lesson returns, but so does a wiser version of yourself.
Keep on doing the work, don’t give up, believe in your ability to create a shift – reading this newsletter, observing your own patterns, it’s all part of your journey of growth.
I believe in you,
Itai
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