My Life Is So Hard!

Greetings fellow warriors. Anaam here.

There is something really interesting I would like to talk about today.

You know what happened this morning? One of my housemates was in the kitchen doing something. I walked in, and with her back turned to me, she let out this huge sigh – like a “huuuuh” that carried the weight of something heavy. I could not help but comment, “Wow, that sounded like a massive sigh. You know, like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders.” And she just turned to me and said one word: “Life!”

I said, “That is not life. That is your mind.”

Now, let me break that down for you because this is important. Whenever we catch ourselves saying things like, “Oh, life is so hard,” or “This life, oh,” or any of those variations, we are actually falling for a very strange and subtle trick. And it all comes down to something I call ‘self-importance’.

First, let us back up a little. The ego – or the “I,” that sense of me – has a very specific job. Its function is to create boundaries and compartments in our consciousness. Without that function, we would be a walking dysfunctional blob, unable to exist in any meaningful way. The ego helps us know where we end and the world begins. It lets us distinguish between me and you, this glass and that screen. Everything is really just a soup of energy, but that energy gets processed through what Toltecs call the assemblage point into coherent, understandable moments.

So the ego is necessary. But when it runs rampant – when it becomes cancerous and dysfunctional and goes to the extreme – that is what I mean by self-importance. And one of the cleverest things self-importance does is make you believe that this heavy, burdensome feeling is coming from life itself. It creates the illusion that life is out there doing something to you, and that you are just a victim of it.

That is a very clever device. It tricks your consciousness.

The difference between the average person and the warrior is simple. The Toltec Warrior sees through that trick. The warrior is not taken in by it. The warrior knows that it is not “my life.” It is just life. That’s it. We are a part of the bigger process.

We are life.

We are life.

We are life.

If you were not life, you would not exist. So when someone sighs and blames life, what they are really doing is - thinking. It is their thoughts producing that burdensome feeling. It has nothing to do with life itself. Life is just this grand process unfolding. Why blame poor life? Life has nothing to do with it. (which emotionally feels really tragic doesn’t it!)

For the average person, this confusion is understandable. We have all been subjected to miseducation and indoctrination – what could be called the foreign installation.

The key point is this: the warrior takes self-responsibility. The warrior does not use life as a scapegoat. That is just self-importance avoiding change.

To the warrior, that feeling of being weighed down is evidence. Tangible, energetic evidence that change is required. Not that someone else should change. Not that the world should change. Not that life should treat you better. That is the victim mentality, and it is compelling but inaccurate. Leave that for the average person, because the average person is an expert at blaming everything except themselves. The warrior does the opposite. The warrior looks at that feeling objectively, rationally, and says, “Aha! here is evidence that my energy is being drained by my own self-importance, which is stuck in some issue that I am resisting.”

So do not let that trick throw you. Catch it immediately in your consciousness. Be faster than your mind. Your awareness has to be quicker and more rooted than your self-importance (which is born out of our thoughts and emotions). Whenever you find yourself in a scenario like the one I described, take it as a sign. It is evidence that some inner change is trying to happen, but your self-importance is resisting it and turning it into a blind spot.

Develop that ability to see it. Because here is another way to look at it – that feeling is actually life talking to you through your body. Life does not speak in words. Words are the cheapest and most misleading way to communicate. That is why animals do not use them. Animals have far more superior ways of connecting and sharing information. But because we are trapped in the world of words, we assume that is the only way anything can communicate. We think, “How else could anything understand anything else?” But that is just the prison of the mind, the prison of perception. There is so much more going on beyond that. That is the average person’s world – trapped in words.

I will dive deeper into that in another blog, but for now, just know this: do not let this throw you. Tackle it head on. It comes down to self-responsibility. Take responsibility for yourself (take your time - no rush) and ask, “What change do I need to make? Why? What am I resisting? Why is my self-importance playing the victim again?”

Use that questioning to grow. Use it to become stronger, freer, and less resistive. Learn to flow with what I call relaxed power. And do not misunderstand me – that is not weakness. Real weakness is being rigid and tense. Power is something else entirely. Power is when you are relaxed and you can flow energy effortlessly. It is when you are completely present and your whole body moves as one. That is real power.

So cultivate that awareness and walk in freedom. Talk soon.

Anaam