Rule One
You will receive a body. You may love it or hate it, but it will be yours for the duration of your life on Earth.
Rule Two
You will be presented with lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called ‘life.' Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or hate them, but you have designed them as part of your curriculum.
Rule Three
There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of experimentation, a series of trials, errors, and occasional victories. The failed experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that work.
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.
Rule Five
Learning does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
Rule Six
‘There’ is no better than ‘here’. When your ‘there’ has become a ‘here,' you will simply obtain a ‘there’ that will look better to you than your present ‘here’.
Rule Seven
Others are only mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.
Rule Eight
What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you.
Rule Nine
Your answers lie inside of you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
Rule Ten
You will forget all of this at birth. You can remember it if you want by unravelling the double helix of inner knowing.
Summary
Your time here on Earth is brief. Time passes and things change. You have options and choices in which to make your wishes, dreams, and goals become reality.
When you ask yourself, ‘Why am I here?’ or ‘Why is this happening to me?’ or ‘What's it all about?’ turn to your spiritual primer. Ask yourself, ‘What is the lesson?’ If you hear a defensive reaction using the words ‘never’ or ‘always’ in your response, you haven’t yet learned the lesson. Next, go a little deeper and ask, ‘What is there for me to learn from this experience?’
Each time you view your circumstances as possessing value, regardless of the apparent confusion or hardship, you grow. Your personal evolution will depend on how readily you embrace your lessons and integrate them into your life. Remember, the only consequence for resisting lessons, is that they will keep repeating themselves until you learn them. When you have learned a lesson, you will always be tested. When the lesson is learned, the test will be easily passed, and you then move on to more complex and challenging ones.
You can look back on the incidents in your past and see clearly the lessons you have learned, resisted, and are still repeating. ‘Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift, that is why we call it the present.’
It is more challenging to look at your present situation and see exactly what your lessons are. Looking into the future is the most difficult. Wishing that you had already graduated from the school of life does not accelerate your progress or make the lessons any easier. Examining the situation for the real lesson is the scavenger hunt.
Remind yourself that you are here to learn lessons. Be present with your process. Pay attention to what you are experiencing. Be diligent with actions which enable you to ‘get' the lessons presented to you. Ask for answers and you shall receive them. Listen with an open heart. Explore all options. See your judgment as a mirror. View each crisis as an opportunity. Trust yourself. Believe in yourself. Look within yourself, to your higher self, for guidance on all your choices. Extend compassion to yourself.
Remember, there are no mistakes, only lessons (Rule Three). Love yourself, trust your choices, and everything is possible!
From If Life is a Game, These are the Rules, © 1998 by Cherie Carter-Scott, published in the
Helen Keller, blind and deaf from childhood, had no way to communicate with the outside world. In fact, she didn’t realize the world communicated at all.
Her teacher, Ann Sullivan, was determined to show Helen the world around her, and introduce her to it.
After more than a year, Ann made Helen realize that the world was filled with people and wonderful things. From that moment she had a sense of purpose.
It is hard to say which had the greatest determination - Ann Sullivan before this point, or Helen Keller after.
Helen learned to read and write and speak. She graduated from Radcliffe College, and even became a famous writer and lecturer.
The search for purpose should last a lifetime, especially if the final goal is happiness. Helen Keller, remembering her struggles, said, “Happiness is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” Anne Sullivan would no doubt have agreed.
Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose - not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember.
~ Anne Sullivan quote
I am only one, but still I am one.
I cannot do everything, but still I can do something;
and because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do something that I can do.
~ Helen Keller
