Beth Peterson | Author

I am asking each of you not to allow the experience of a tragedy to become your final destination. Please don’t allow something that has happened to you define you in a negative way. Change your way of thinking. Try to embrace it. Find a way to make it a part of your life destiny and learn to truly live through it. Too often we take the outcome of an experience and let the emotion of it encompass our entire existence. We revel in the what and forget about the why. I want to share with you, the why. We are here to experience lessons in our life. We all learn from those lessons and implement what we learned into our path of living. We must find a way to step out of our emotional connection to these tragic experiences, teach ourselves to view it from a different perspective and see the clearer picture. We then can take from it the knowledge we have gathered and leave the emotional baggage behind.

We are spiritual beings, born here as humans to walk a path, to live a journey and gather the knowledge from our lessons. Mistakes are not wrong. We must all make them and learn from them in order to avoid making them again. It is the recognition of our past mistakes that will enlighten our awareness to the next path we should choose.

Changing our way of thinking, by viewing the experience as a lesson we must only live once, may take some of the overwhelming pressure off of us, from thinking bad things only happen to me, as an individual. We all have so many of the same lessons. The greatness in each of us becomes the fact that we can all choose a different outcome to the same lesson. When we look at our lessons after the fact, we can see where we could have made a different choice. Changing your thoughts on dealing with the lesson allows you to spend as much time on the lesson as you, individually need. Some need more time than others, however the time spent defining yourself by what happened to you, keeps you from redefining yourself by what you have successfully survived.