Listen to my twelve-minute interview with Andrew Harvey here:
Andrew Harvey
Andrew, why do you consider betrayal to be one of the most difficult forms of adversity to overcome? Betrayal is quite simply the most devastating experience that anyone can live through, especially if it’s betrayal as I went through it — betrayal from a teacher whom I loved with all my soul and heart and who had been an immense source of strength and revelation for me.
Betrayal dissolves every kind of concept that you have of reality and plunges you into a groundless abyss. This, of course, is an appalling experience, but it’s also… if you can stay in love with love in the dark, this experience can lead to a massive revelation of the presence of the Divine in and through everything, which permanently transforms you.
I wouldn’t wish the experience of betrayal that I’ve had on anyone, but looking back I realize it was absolutely essential for my evolution. The betrayal I had at the hand of my teacher, which I wrote about in Sun at Midnight, was a betrayal that ended one life. I died when I realized that I’d been hopelessly sold down the river in a very dangerous way. But that death wasn’t into chaos. It was into a much larger, more spacious realization. Also, I believe that betrayal isn’t just the most difficult experience that a human being can go through. It’s also an (more…)
Today, the third day of a three-day seminar entitled “The Language of Impact,” in Los Angeles, I saw two of the one hundred twenty attendees talking to each other during a break. I walked up to Jin Robertson and Jorg Winterlach and said, “Excuse me, I just want to say that you both are amazing. You inspire me.” As the three of us talked for the next few minutes, I was thinking how incredible it was that our lives—Jin lives in South Korea, Jorg lives in Germany, and I live in California—had intersected at that moment in time.
Dr. Jin Kyu Robertson
Jin had come to America at age twenty-two in response to a South Korean newspaper ad looking for a housemaid. She had a one-way ticket, a hundred dollars, and very little English. Six years later, to escape her husband’s abuse, she entered the U.S. Army, where she rose to a rank of Major. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in International Relations History from Harvard. Her daughter followed in her footsteps, earning a Harvard degree and then entering the U.S. Army; she is now a Major serving in Pakistan. Jin is now Korea’s most popular motivational speaker, and her book, Major Dream: From Immigrant Housemaid to Harvard Ph.D., has sold more than half a million copies and prevented numerous suicides in Korea.
Jorg Winterlach
Jorg grew up in East Berlin under communism, forced to (more…)
Hope and faith will always triumph over adversity just as good will always triumph over evil, for implicit in the duality of material existence is the promise that this, too, shall pass.
Good and evil must ever be complements on this earth. Everything created must bear some guise of imperfection. How else could God, the Sole Perfection, fragment His one consciousness into forms of creation distinguishable from Himself? There can be no images of light without contrasting shadows. Unless evil had been created, man would not know the opposite, good. Night brings out the bright contrast of day; sorrow teaches us the desirability of joy. Paramahansa Yogananda
If you believe that you are one with God, that you co-create whatever comes into your life, and that everything happens for a reason, then it follows that hardships are nothing more than course corrections on your spiritual path.
There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts. Richard Bach
If you could but look through God’s eyes, you would see God’s (more…)
When you feel attuned to God and bathed in the healing, protective glow of God’s love, you recognize fear for the illusion that it is.
Clouds don’t worry about falling into the sea because they can’t (a) fall or (b) drown. But they are free to believe they can, and they may fear if they wish. Richard Bach
You realize it is not the adversity that needs to be changed, it is (more…)
The most capable and courageous among us have likely lived through punishing experiences, the simple telling of which would make the rest of us faint dead away.
Our greatest lessons are often embedded in our greatest pain. We cry to the heavens, unaware that we are growing stronger and wiser even as we plead for mercy.
We rarely gain a high or larger view except as it is forced upon us through struggles which we would have avoided if we could. Charles Horton Cooley
You would not be the person you are today if you had never been brought to your knees by the vicissitudes of life.
If life teaches us anything, it may be that it’s necessary to suffer some defeats. Look at (more…)
Celebrate the difficult moments, for they are where the missing pieces of your greatness can be found.
Things don’t go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up. They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be. Charles (Tremendous) Jones
Greeting every challenge as a character-building exercise (more…)
The road to salvation is by no means a linear path; adversity and triumph melt into one another until they are all but indistinguishable.
Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed. Kahlil Gibran
Thus, while you do not necessarily rejoice whenever life steers you into a ditch, you (more…)
By definition, the circle of life demands that we experience the full range of what this life has to offer. Adversity is an integral part of the natural order of things. No one escapes its bittersweet embrace.
To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the “thorn in the flesh” is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent. Carl Jung
While you cannot prevent adversity from knocking on your door, you can prepare for its arrival by (more…)
Hope and faith will always triumph over adversity just as good will always triumph over evil, for implicit in the duality of material existence is the promise that this, too, shall pass.
Triumph of the Spirit 