Eckart Tolle said in A New Earth, “life will give you the experience you need to emotionally grow.” What I tend to see in my patients is the mindset of why is this happening to me. This is common. We have all thought this. However, what Mr. Tolle is saying here is that life is giving us the experience to learn what is needed at this time. For example, some of us did not realize how desperate the racial issues were and life gave us Ahmad Aubrey. Others of us did not realize that there are some of us who really do not have the luxury of having saved several months rent to secure a roof over our head and so life gave us an economic down turn.
Lastly, some of us have taken the distractions in our life to avoid emotional pain and so life gave us time to sit with our emotional struggles so we would see how critical their resolution is to our success. Clearly, there have been so many opportunities to learn and emotionally grow, but the first step is not asking why me? Instead try, what am I supposed to be learning from this experience?