In this episode Dr. Cari Wise discusses the concept of struggle and its impact on our lives. She emphasizes that struggles are a universal experience and can affect various aspects of our lives such as internal, external, physical, emotional, and spiritual.
Dr. Wise argues that struggles are a natural part of being human and that there is value in every struggle we face. She encourages listeners to reflect on their past struggles and acknowledge how these experiences have shaped and transformed them.
Rather than viewing struggles as something that harms us, Dr. Wise suggests that they serve as catalysts for self-discovery and personal growth. She believes that everything happens for our good, even in the face of intense struggles, and advises listeners to trust that there is a purpose behind their challenges.
Dr. Wise also acknowledges that patterns of struggle can emerge in our lives and urges listeners to approach these patterns with curiosity and openness. Reflecting on past struggles can help us understand why they occurred and how they have shaped us.
Some key takeaways from the context are:
– Struggles are a universal experience that affect various aspects of our lives.
– Struggles are a natural part of being human and have value.
– Struggles can serve as catalysts for self-discovery and personal growth.
– There is a purpose behind every challenge.
– Patterns of struggle indicate there is a lesson to be learned.
– Embrace your true self and approach your own path with courage and confidence.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain typos.
Hi there. I’m Dr. Cari Wise, veterinarian, certified life coach, and certified quantum human design specialist. If you are a veterinary professional looking to uplevel your life and your career, or maybe looking to go in an entirely new direction, then what I talk about here on the Joyful DVM podcast is absolutely for you. Let’s get started. Hello my friends.
Welcome back to another reflection Friday. Today is Friday, April 12th, 2024. Today we’re gonna spend a little bit of time talking about struggle because over the last week I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people in a lot of different areas, both at work and personally, and their struggles have come up. And as we’ve gone through these conversations about their struggles,
it’s given me an opportunity to share with them what I believe about the struggles that we encounter in our lives, both personally and professionally. And I wanted to take some time today to share that with you. All of us have things that we struggle with. They can be internal things, they can be external things, they can be physical, they can be emotional,
they can be spiritual, they can have to do with other people. So there’s all kinds of different areas in our lives where struggle pops up, and it’s very common for us to look at our struggles and to believe there’s something we need to fix, or that there’s something that we have done to cause it. So we look at these struggles and we really personalize them,
oftentimes creating a lot of judgment toward ourselves or judgment toward other people. Why is this important for us to realize? Well, it’s important to realize because if we’re constantly judging the struggle, then we are believing on some level that the struggle shouldn’t be happening. That if we had been better or done something different, or if somebody else had been better or done something different,
that the struggle wouldn’t have shown up in our lives. And so we start to set up this pattern of trying to perform better, try to be better in order to avoid struggle. And my friends, this human experience just has struggle built in. But here’s the beautiful thing about struggle. There is no wasted struggle. Every struggle that we go through, every challenge that we’re faced with has an intentional purpose behind it.
And I know in the moment how hard it is to see that there might be intention and purpose behind the really hard thing that you’re going through. But I want you just to consider playing around with the idea of trusting me on this. After decades and decades and decades of living, you know, I just turned 50 this year. I’ve had a lot of opportunity to reflect on my own struggles that I’ve encountered throughout my lifetime.
And when I look back on some of the greatest struggles that I went through, the things that in the moment I didn’t know how I was going to survive, sometimes I didn’t know how I was going to physically and emotionally survive the things that were happening. When I look back at those things, there are a few things that I know for sure. Number one,
I made it through. I’m still here. So that is what I wanna offer to you, that whatever the struggle is that you’re encountering, you have what it takes to make it through to the other side. And if you will, just hang on, you will get there. I promise you that You also already have evidence of surviving every challenge that you’ve ever been up against up until this point in your life.
So whatever struggles you’ve had in the past, you already have evidence of surviving those challenges and struggles. So let’s not forget that either. But as you get further and further and further away from the struggles that you’re in May right now, you’ll be able to look back at those struggles and see how they changed you. And they didn’t have to change you in a bad or negative way.
Now it’s possible, we will look at those struggles and we will identify ways that we were broken to, for lack of a better word, ways that we were hurt or we believe that we were damaged. But here’s what I want you to consider. I want you to consider that anything that changed within you as a result of what you struggled with was actually still part of your intentional journey.
It’s requiring you to dig down into a deeper aspect of your true nature, to really find your own center, your own core, your own place of grounding. And I promise you that it is within you. These struggles that we encounter, my friends, they’re not meant to hurt us. They really aren’t. And even when we can tag those struggles to a specific person who did something was very intentionally and specifically hurtful to us,
I want you to just consider that maybe even that still had purpose in your life purpose that was useful for you. There are no wasted struggles. And another way that we can look at this is that everything happens for our good. I know in the moment when we see horrific things happening in the world to ourselves, to the people that we care about and to people that we don’t even know,
I know how hurtful and painful that is to watch a hundred percent. I’m not condoning any of that at all. But what I want us to realize is that when we are involved in those situations where there is such intense and dire type struggle, that there is still a bit of a silver lining. We will never see that silver lining in the moment.
So let’s just be honest in the moment we’re just hanging on, we’re just trying to get through. But if we can start to consider as we’re now in it again or in a new struggle in the future that this is also part of what’s working for our good, then it can give us a little bit of ease in the process. We can stop trying so hard to change or stop what is happening both externally and internally,
and we can just kind of be there for the ride as we allow the experiences of the world to happen without trying to control them all. Because let’s face it, friends, we control very little in this lifetime. And when we are able to just let those things happen, and then we can be the watcher of ourselves in those experiences, and we can take control of ourselves,
so we can decide intentionally for us individually, how we’re gonna show up, how we’re gonna behave, what we’re gonna create when we do that, then we stop living our lives at the effect of the things that happen around us. Our wellbeing then is no longer conditional upon how other people behave or what is happening outside in the world. This is a wonderful and a very safe place to be because those struggles that we encounter,
which are part of the human experience, they are not meant to break you. They’re not meant to ruin your life. They’re meant to prompt you, to nudge you, to start to understand what’s actually real, what’s actually safe, and to recognize how resilient you already are. Every struggle that I’ve been through in my lifetime, when I look back at those moments when I thought I was never gonna make it through,
or I believed that life had changed so much that maybe my future was ruined or compromised, I can see now how it was exactly what I needed at that point in my life to take the next step in my journey. It forced me to dig down into aspects of myself that I didn’t even know were there. It caused me to find strength and to rely on myself.
And I’m not saying we don’t need other people, we don’t need connection. That’s not what I’m saying. But for me, in some of those moments, I needed to be able to show myself that I could survive even when the people who were supposed to care about me or take care of me were no longer showing up in the way that I believed that they should have been.
As I went through other struggles in my lifetime, as I got into my adulthood, some of the same themes kept, kept coming up over and over and over again. And as I started to recognize the patterns, I started to become aware. So that is something that you can do today. I hope that you will consider for yourself is what patterns of struggle are you carrying around?
Because if you can look back and reflect and start to notice a pattern of struggle, my friends, there is no bigger indicator that there is a lesson there for you showing you and proving to you that there is no wasted struggle. There is something here for you to learn. And as you learn what it is you’re supposed to learn, you expand what happens next.
You won’t have to keep going back through the same patterns of struggle. Once you start to realize, oh, wait a minute, this isn’t the world coming down on me. This isn’t me being a terrible person and doing it all wrong. I’m not bringing this on myself. This is me in this process of living, this process of growing and evolving,
and there’s just something I’m missing here. There’s something that the universe is trying to show me that is going to help me, and it’s trying to get my attention. That’s where these patterns, especially patterns of struggle, really come into play. It’s not to hurt you. It is to wake you up so that you can start to understand what is actually real.
So you can stop trying so hard to control everything around you. And instead, take that time and that energy and put it onto understanding yourself, learning who you are at your core, accepting the essence of you, and stop hiding from the world and the process. We don’t need you to be different than you are at all. We need you to be who you are.
You’ve probably heard me say that already a hundred times. The struggle is just another layer of that. So if you are struggling, what I want you to consider is that there’s a lesson there for you, and I want you to consider that even the struggle is always for your good. You haven’t done anything wrong. You haven’t brought this on yourself. You don’t need anybody else to be different,
my friends. This is your life, your journey, your path, and the universe will continue to throw patterns at you. Some people call these things coincidence, my friends. I don’t believe there’s any coincidence out there at all. I believe absolutely every single thing happens for a reason. And our struggles are examples of those things that happen for a reason.
There is something we are missing. There is something we aren’t learning. There is some something we’re not catching. And so when we start to see that pattern of struggle repeating over and over and over again, rather than concluding that we are just doomed and that our life is just cursed, which is absolutely not the case, instead of drawing a negative conclusion and stepping out of who you are and out of your life,
what I want you to do instead is to be curious. Lean into it. Ask yourself, what is it that I’m missing here? Because when you start to ask those questions, you will start to get the answers to those questions. There is always an answer to any question that you have. And my friends, you have to first just ask. You have to be first open to exploring the possibility that there is way more to your life experience than what you are aware of right now.
There is way more to your purpose than what you understand in this moment, and that there is way more resilience within you than you even know you have not even skimmed the surface. And as you start to get to know who you are, and as you start to view your life through a lens of curiosity instead of judgment, my friends, everything starts to shift.
And you’ll start to see for yourself too, just as I have over the last few weeks of how every struggle has a purpose, both for you and the struggles of our loved ones and our friends and our family. Every struggle has a purpose. There is no wasted struggle. And that does not mean that we condone the things that happen in the world that we would identify as bad things,
evil things. We don’t condone that at all. We don’t purposely want those things to happen. But the truth is, we likely have very little power to stop any of it. So what are we gonna do with it? Are we gonna look at those struggles and hide and cower and go into ourselves and try to protect? Or are we gonna look at those struggles and recognize,
Hey, wait a minute, there’s something to be learned here. There’s something that I can apply to the next phase of my life. There’s a piece of me that is dying to come out to be utilized as part of my resilience, my friends. That’s what this life is all about. It’s all about you being who you are. You not trying to fit into a box and be somebody else,
you stepping onto your own path and going forward in that own path courageously and confidently. And I know that the world does not teach you to do that. I know that the world teaches you to try to be like everybody else. The world teaches you what the responsible and safe is, what productive and successful are. And my friends, you can decide to believe all of that,
or you can decide not to. It’s completely optional. What I want you to consider today is that you haven’t done anything wrong, that you haven’t screwed up your life, that you haven’t messed up your future, and that every single struggle that you have had in your lifetime and will continue to have in the futures. Because my friends, the struggles never go away.
They’re gonna continue to pop up just as they have for me over the last few weeks. And as those struggles continue to pop up, and as you look back at the ones you’ve already had, I want you to just consider and ask the question, what am I meant to learn from this experience? Because whether or not you are aware of your lessons,
those struggles have already impacted you and impacted your path forward. And they will continue to do so. And as you start to reflect on your struggles, and you can see the why that happened in relationship to your own journey, what happens is the struggles that you have in the current moment, they are not so pressurized. You can recognize them as, yes,
these are struggles. This is a moment in time where I feel very uncomfortable or I feel very afraid, or I feel very stressed out. But this moment in time is not the prediction of what my future is going to be like. This moment in time is teaching me something, and I get to decide how I step forward from here. And I know that even if I don’t understand the struggle today,
that down the road I will be able to look back on it and I will start to understand why that struggle occurred. It wasn’t because I did something wrong. It wasn’t because I was bad. It was because I needed to learn something that I hadn’t yet learned so I could step forward in a way that I had not stepped forward into a future that I didn’t even realize was possible.
All right, my friends, that’s gonna wrap it up for this week. I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.