Stage-7: Spirituality — Embrace Destiny
Rationale
Coping is not simply about subjugating personal desires to social requirements(): there needs to be a distancing from these and an awareness of your participation in a far bigger scheme of things. The provides the necessary guidance by encouraging you to identify with the universe and recognize that you have a necessary unique and destined part to play.
Refusal to Embrace Destiny is a Failure to Cope
Life dealt you a particular hand. Complaining and blaming rather than drawing on your unique strengths will take you on a downward path. At key moments, your egotism must be put to one side or it will blind you and disconnect you from capacities for healing that lie within.
Values & Assumptions
Promoting Survival
Essence: Embrace your destiny
There are many things in life that cannot be controlled. Events just happen to us. Railing against fortune or fighting hopeless battles against fate generates stress. Even passive acceptance is not enough. It is far more useful to see a pattern so as embrace it as your destiny.
Benefit: Live without regrets
There is no way to foresee the future or plan your life trajectory in detail. Things will go wrong, and mistakes will be made. You can only do your best at each particular moment. If things do not turn out as you hoped, then there may be a something to learn, but indulging in regrets and self-blame makes no sense.
Means: Recognize a higher power
By appreciating that there is a higher power that shapes events and our choices, you can become more confident in accepting your destiny.
Handling the Socio-physical Environment
Participation: Go with the flow
Man proposes, God disposes. Man plans and God laughs. In other words, there is a severe limitation on what can be planned in life. Illusions of control need to be given up and fighting against the flow of events is almost always a mistake.
Interaction: Use spiritual healing
Pain is the greatest stressor and is unavoidable in life. As explained in the Producing Goodness framework, there are a some simple techniques of healing, especially:
- Be grateful
- Be forgiving
These must be activated because there is no limit to your ability to make mistakes. Having learned from them, you must just let these go and forgive yourself and be grateful for your successes. Instead of nursing grudges and grievances, it is better to be grateful and forgive others to dissolve pain and stress.
Individualization: Respect your uniqueness
Everyone is different. No two people have the same trajectory in life. Comparisons with others are odious. If you focus on your own uniqueness you can recognize that you are a cosmic miracle (and so is everyone else).
Channeling Your Functioning
Endurance: based on Surrendering
While to this point, it can often feel that coping is a battle—with chance, with others, with events—you must be ready to surrender to the larger cosmic forces at play. You are who you are, and the world is what it is.
Completing the Spiral
Having completed Cycle-2, we can re-enter the , again simply by surrendering to the flow.
With incorporation of values, work is perceived differently. We can say «», rather than «» or «».
Creativity is spontaneous because work has been well-managed in Cycle-1 and it has become part of your life in Cycle-2. Rather than generating stress, work becomes an expectation and a necessity: not to work is now stressful. Work is an aspect of a well-rounded life, because everything needs to be worked at. In spontaneously striving and thriving, a person finds their place in society, and even in history.
Having completed the Spiral...
- Review the findings.
Originally posted: 9-Dec-2022. Last updated: 28-Mar-2023.