Reflection: What have you labeled as a problem?

The biggest obstacle in your life isn't the experience itself, but the meaning you've given it.

In this reflection, I explore how the same event can be experienced in completely different ways depending on the relationship we have to it. I also share a recent insight from one of my interviews, where a recurring life pattern became visible through a single conversation.

Transcript

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Welcome to the Negna Stadius Podcast. Here we will explore fear, patterns, and what is meant to lead yourself through life. The biggest problem in your life isn't actually the event itself that happened in front of you, but the fact that you labeled it as a problem. Of course we have wars, illnesses and tragedies happening, but this is about what's happening in your everyday life. Because two people can experience an event completely different. If these two people work on the same work spot and they lose their jobs, one of them can say, My life is completely over. What am I supposed to do now? How am I gonna support myself? They label it as a scarcity, as a fear that this is never gonna solve. The other one may say, Maybe this is leading me somewhere else. Maybe I get a chance to come closer to what I actually want to do. It opens up more opportunities. They label it as a possibility for something different. Because the event stayed the same, but their relationship to it changed. And you can put that invisible Harry Potter cloak on you and say it's so sad that this happened to me. I'm so miserable and you're complaining to everyone around you. You can choose that. But you are not suffering because what you experienced. You're suffering because it didn't match what you wanted. You wanted to continue working so everything will be predictable to you. So you would know that every month twenty fifth you will receive that money. And suffering is everywhere. You can break your leg, you can miss a spot when you trim the grass. But your job is not to call someone and say I feel so miserable that this happened to me, can you please hold it for me a little bit? Because that's what you unconsciously are doing. But for you to say can I experience this without immediately turning it into a problem? Because every experience shows you something. It gives you information to look at yourself. Because instead of telling yourself in your head why is this happening to me? Ask yourself what pattern is this revealing? Like why would I need the certainty of this payment? Is it because I believe I can't succeed or finding my own path without those money every month? Is it because I have a control problem? That maybe wasn't even mine from the beginning? Maybe it was the parent I grew up with and they did exactly the same as I do today, and I just took it with me in my backpack. That pattern may not even be your own truth. You can even end up in the same situations over and over again, and you start recognizing that it goes in the same loop. Everything happens in the same sequence. Then why does it do that? Is it because you just happen to be unlucky finding those situations? Or is it that you haven't worked out something with yourself? Because the energy that you put out in the world attracts just that energy still, even after years. A few days ago I had an interview with a man who was participating in the project that I'm building. During our conversation he shared his story about that he spent most of his childhood and around thirty five years of his life on different sailboats. Throughout the interview, one theme kept appearing over and over again. He spoke about searching, searching for a home, for belonging, for connections in relationships, for new challenges. It was a thread running through his entire story. What sounded like the problem that he was facing today were in reality pointing toward a much deeper pattern within him, because the same goes for him. What he experienced in his everyday life today, together with what is still living within him from his childhood, is trying to reveal something. During our conversation he also described how his father learned him incredible survival skills. He learned how to build, adapt, solve problems, talk to complete strangers, and to survive in demanding environments. But emotionally, survival looked differently. He had learned to keep moving, push difficult emotions aside, stuff them under the rug, and continue forward rather than to learn how to meet what was happening within him. At the end of the interview I left him with two reflective questions. If you no longer had to survive, how would you choose to live? And what are you still searching for that you hope will finally make you feel at home? And that's why I really enjoy these interviews. Because these conversations and interviews are not to give advice. They're about creating enough space for people to hear themselves clearly. Because you can have two different mindsets about if your life is a big problem or not. You can think why me? This shouldn't happen and I'm stuck or everything is against me that takes an enormous amount of energy from you that you could put on a different mindset. You isolate yourself to what life is actually showing you Because if you put on an experience mindset, you can think interesting what can I learn from this? What is this showing me? And what is the next step for me? Because what in your life has you labelled as a problem while in fact it's actually just an experience? Because many of the obstacles that you experience in your everyday life begins as an experience. It's your relationship to those experiences that turns into an obstacle.