I quote, therefore I think: It’s fate. What did you expect?

And I think:

How incredible is it that in all my years of education, inner work, if I may use an all-encompassing term, was rarely mentioned. And even more incredible is how essential it is to our fundamentally being a human.

The above quote has a few more lines to it:

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.  That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.

In short, it helps to know your self; your patterns, the stories you tell yourself, what you want in life, as well as your quirks, your triggers, your flaws. You have to know both your light and your shadow side.

When you don’t know how you work, you are unconscious, and it is more difficult to make it through when life is less than ideal. And if it seems you’re fighting the same challenges over and over again, it means there’s a lesson or insight you’ve yet to open up to and learn. Hence it appears as “fate”.

The unconscious mind asks, Why me?

The conscious mind asks, What do I need to take from this?

The more you learn about yourself, the more you tell yourself the truth about who you are,
the more you believe that your value doesn’t come from what others assign to you or what you do or
how capable or perfect or fill-in-the-blank you are, the more grounded and whole you feel in your
circumstances.

Now when life gets busier or more stressful, you can be calmer and less reactive. Because you’re learning how to be, not so much what to do.

Being more of who you are—now that’s a fate worth living for.