Have you experienced times of feeling lost and alone? Yearning for something you can't identify? Grappling with the urge to make drastic changes in your life? Knowing that there has to be something more?
You might be going through a mid-life crisis.
From a psychological perspective, this is often thought of as a time when we realize our mortality and make desperate attempts to look and feel younger. It is a time when we are transitioning into a new phase of life, which can feel very uncomfortable.
From a soul perspective, it is quite different. There comes a time (or times) when we wake up and realize "there is something wrong with this picture." We have the sense that there is more to life, but we don't know what that is or where to find it. Sometimes the crisis is low-key and navigable, sometimes it is a heightened emergency.
We are defined by our choices. And we make a lot of them over the years. Good choices bring about growth, but incorrect choices eventually result in crises. From a spiritual perspective, a midlife crisis is the result of incorrect choices finally making themselves known.
Many of our choices were made a long time ago, when their effect was not noticeable. As life continues, the impact becomes stronger and more intense. We have opportunities along the way to course-correct, but all too often we ignore the signals to do that, and by the time we notice it the intensity of an "off" choice is so strong it becomes an emergency. By the time it builds up, it becomes an explosion.
What makes for a wrong choice? Two aspects: 1) Those made from distortions, such as selecting a marriage partner based on the need to be validated or rescued. And 2), more importantly, those made from the personality (ego) that go against our soul pattern.
That's what a midlife crisis is - the impact of the choices we made that went against our soul pattern. Ultimately we cannot allow them to continue because our soul pattern is sacred; it is something we must follow because it is uniquely ours, divinely ordained. That is why, when we veer off that pattern to a great degree, problems arise.
These impacts do not happen suddenly; there is a ramp-up. We don't notice when it first starts because we are totally focused on the moment, but it builds and builds because our soul pattern was meant to proceed in one direction when our personality chose another. Then as we go on in life, the gap widens and the pressure gets more extreme.
And remember, this is all happening on an inner level. One of the challenges of modern living is that we are encouraged to avoid dealing with inner turmoil. Thus, we look outside for our answers: new jobs, new lovers, new bodies, new hobbies, new medications. But that just keeps us in crisis. They may help for a while, but in the end they just mask the problem.
Remember Pain is Medicine? (click here) Whatever crisis you are experiencing or have experienced in your life, it is a message. Go on an inner journey, seek your power, your soul pattern. There is a pot of gold (called joy) at the end of that rainbow.