RULE FOUR: A LESSON IS REPEATED UNTIL LEARNED

Lessons will be repeated to you in various forms until you have learned them. When you have learned them, you can then go on to the next lesson.

Have you ever noticed that lessons tend to repeat themselves? Does it seem as if you married or dated the same person several times in different bodies with different names? Have you run into the same type of boss over and over again? Do you find yourself having the same problem with many different coworkers?

Lessons will be repeated until learned. When I taught high school, I always told my students, "If you don't deal well with authority figures at home, then you will have an opportunity to deal with them out in the world. You will continually draw into your life people who need to enforce authority, and you will struggle with them until you learn the lesson of obedience." Teenagers often perceive their parents as overly strict. At the age of fourteen, one of my former students went away to boarding school. Much to her surprise, she found teachers and staff with the same rules that her mother had laid down at home and that I had at school. She finally understood.

In couples' counseling, it is often noted that people who divorce and remarry nearly always marry the same type of person they just left. Similarly, a friend of mine named Cassidy who was a compulsive perfectionist had a knack for attracting inappropriate men. It was no coincidence that Cassidy, to whom mismatched socks were a horror and a torn shirt a federal offense, repeatedly drew men into her life who dressed like slobs. She was a stickler for manners, yet her most recent boyfriend held his spoon like Fred Flintsones wields a drumstick. Only recently did Cassidy begin to acknowledge that perhaps these men were appearing in her life as teachers and opportunities to work out her perfectionist issue.

You will continually attract the same lesson into your life. You will also draw to you teachers to teach you that lesson until you get it right. The only way you can free yourself of difficult patterns and issues you tend to repeat is by shifting your perspective so that you can recognize the patterns and learn the lessons that they offer. you may try to avoid the situations, but they will eventually catch up with you.

To face these challenges means you need to accept the fact that something within you keeps drawing you to the same kind of person or issue, painful though that situation or relationship may be. In the words of Carl Jung, "There is no coming to consciousness without pain." And come to consciousness you must if you are ever to stop repeating the same lessons and be able to move on to new ones.

The challenge is to identify and release the patterns that you are repeating. As any good facilitator or therapist will tell you, this is no easy task, since it means you have to change, and change is not always easy. staying just as you are may not help you advance spiritually, but it certainly is comfortable in its familiarity. You grooved your patterns a long time ago as a a way of protecting yourself. Moving into unfamiliar new behavior can be uncomfortable not to mention at times frightening.

Rising to the challenge of identifying and releasing your patterns forces you to admit that the way you have been doing things isn't working. The good news is that by identifying and releasing the pattern, you actually learn how to change.

There are six basic steps to execute any change in your life. They are:

1. AWARENESS -  becoming conscious of the pattern or issue
2. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT - admitting that you need to release the pattern
3. CHOICE - actively selecting to release the pattern
4. STRATEGY - creating a realistic plan
5. COMMITMENT - taking action, aided by external accountability
6. CELEBRATION - rewarding yourself for succeeding

No lasting change can be made, nor any pattern released permanently, without going through each one of these steps. In order to facilitate your process of change, you will need to learn the lessons of awareness, willingness, causality, and patience. Once you master these, you will most likely find the challenge of identifying and releasing your patterns far less intimidating.