The ugly, splintered, deformed, problematic and violent things in life can be flipped on its head to become our teacher.

The essence of life is challenging.

We will be confronted with volatile and heartbreaking emotions. We will want to lash out and proclaim that life is cruelly unfair.

But here’s the caveat: life never promised us that it will be fair or that it ought to be.

Life is a series of experiences and emotions. It is an unfolding of the tremendous story of our lives.

Some days, you will wake up and feel 100%. Other days, you will wake up and feel as if you’ve just been thrown into a giant blender and all that’s left of you is the mushy pulp of your former self.

All this is in passing.

We cannot find enlightenment in the ways we find a shiny penny on the ground. We must be enlightened, an intangible and irreplaceable spirit that resides within you.

Pema Chödrön writes in When Things Fall Apart, “To live is to be willing to die over and over again.”

Thus, every day becomes new. Every transgression becomes our teacher. Every person becomes someone who can teach us how to love again when we feel we can love no more. Every heartbreak becomes an opportunity to rise again, to mend and repair once more.

When all that’s left are our tears and battered soul, that is when we can sit in the middle of it all.

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The phoenix, a mythical sacred firebird, builds itself a nest of twigs which then ignites, burning fiercely both the bird and nest. Then, when we think the world is over, a new phoenix rises from the ashes itself, renewed and born to live yet again.

Like the phoenix who burns away, we can choose to stand and rise from our ashes in order to live. And just when you think life is impossible, face your willingness to die.

When you feel you can go no more, when everything you’ve ever known to be true has been ripped out of its very core, you are given the opportunity to start anew, to hit reset on your life and to begin a new course. You can face your willingness to die.

Death wants you to hold on so that you think you’re fearing death, when in reality, you are actually fearing life.

Difficult times are not meant to have us cling onto the good times, to have those good times confirm who we are as a person.

Difficult times are meant to have us learn to let go. In the letting go, we can then be truly free.