You feel like you’re not able to get ahead in life because you’re trying to get ahead in life. Life is not something that you can get ahead of. If you try to head off life, that’s called being dead. So, trying to rush forward is not an option. That happens when someone is feeling an extreme amount of pain in their present life. So the question is: “What are you running away from?”
Once you’re able to answer the question of what you’re running away from, then you need to dive straight into it. This is where shadow work comes in – you can do “The Completion Process” by Teal Swan if you need a method to do that either by yourself or with a practitioner – but, the energy of “escape” is something that cannot be resisted.
When you try to escape something you create it by virtue of everything in one direction creates its opposite direction, by virtue of both needing to exist in order for one to exist. You’re not not able to get ahead in life. It’s that your perception of progress is skewed towards accumulation of things that don’t genuinely mean anything to you as a person. They may mean something, or you have been told that they mean something, from a greater societal perspective, but they don’t actually mean anything to you. As you continue to pursue the accumulation of these things, it’s kind of like “the hungry ghost” where you can eat as much as you want, but it doesn’t actually nourish you.
In order for you to feel like you are not on some sort of treadmill in life, you need to get off the treadmill. How do you get off the treadmill? You find meaningful work. How do you find meaningful work? You follow what lights you up when you do it. If you find yourself not lighting up when you do anything in particular, what we would say is to follow your interests and what lights you up to even think about – they may come in brief flashes or moments, but follow those things.
You may find it a bit difficult to stay positive when adversity comes up in the pursuit of these things. It’s not that these things should be pursued at all costs to the detriment of everything else in your life, but this is just merely some information to get you moving in a direction, so you’re able to start making choices that allow you to flow downhill in the direction of the things that you are wanting. You don’t want the things that you think you want. There’s a lot of societal noise in your body with regards to what you think you want – but you don’t actually want those things.
Your desire to get ahead in life is not a desire to get ahead in life. It’s a desire to prove to society or show society that you have the things that it says that you need in order to be successful in order to get it to shut up and leave you alone. But in reality, that’s an endless chase, because it will never approve of you. Society will never approve of the things that you want yourself – genuinely, authentically.
You want to be happy. You want to feel loved. You want to feel content. You want to feel fulfilled. You want meaning and purpose and a plain, simple life that feels good, and society will never approve of that, and that’s what you need to accept. What you want, your version of “success”, the society around you will never give that the thumbs up of what “actual” success is.
And so, in “society’s” eyes, you will always be “unsuccessful” – and that’s what you need to release.