Do you Keep Inviting the Tiger in the Circle of your Life?
By Z Zoccolante
They say that things repeat until we learn the lesson. It’s like a circle that we walk around with a Tiger in the center. Even if we jump off the circle, the next circle we walk is going to have a tiger too because we haven’t yet learned the lesson of the tiger. We haven’t walked around the circle and closed the energetic loop.
For some of us this loop might be relationships. We might find ourselves thinking, “Thank God that man or woman is gone from my life.” But then when we date again guess who shows up, another version of the tiger man or woman. And they keep showing up in different people until we learn that damn lesion.
This seems like insanity to me so I like, and try my very best, to learn my lesson once and move the f on.
One of my best friends once told me what I considered a great compliment. She said, “Sure you may be in a situation but I’ve noticed that once you connect things, you learn, and then you change immediately.”
The important part about what she said was that once the dots connect we change. It’s like being attacked by the tiger in circle 1 and jumping to circle 2 and saying, “Well this tiger has 1 tooth missing so this is totally going to be different.”
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
Still a tiger, with huge claws and lots of other teeth.
The point is to learn the lesson so that you don’t have to have the tiger in your circle anymore.
This week I had dinner with a lovely therapy colleague who finally was able to exit her abusive relationship. Over dim sum, she shared her story with me. One of the questions I asked her was when in all the years that the abuse was occurring did she finally think that she was a victim of domestic abuse. She told me that it was only the last few months when she began to see a therapist over job anxiety. The therapist was quickly able to connect that she was being emotionally and financially controlled and abused. (Domestic Abuse isn’t just being hit – see last week’s article for more info on this).
One of the most important take aways I got from her story is that things happen slowly. It’s like the known metaphor of boiling a frog. If you turn the water up slowly the frog won’t even jump out and he’ll die there, boiled alive.
Humans get connected emotionally to our tigers. We are emotional creatures. But it’s that point that we finally have clarity and can see the tiger for what it is. Something that we need to move beyond.
Once we see, we learn and then we can change.
This tiger we talked about today might be a relationship. It doesn’t have to be. It could be a job, a place you live, a friendship. It could be a family member. It could be having to retake a class or losing something important to you. For people on the Big Island, volcanoes have consumed their homes and they have nothing.
For everything that happens, we can see it two ways.
1) Why me? Why this tiger? F this tiger? Why is happening to me? (as if we are somehow exempt from pain or suffering).
2) What is there for me to learn here?
If you have a tiger right now, and we all do, what is the lesson for you to learn? How can you close this circle? How can you learn in a way that all the tigers everywhere know that your circle is now closed to them.
Just food for thought (get it, wink). Have a great week peeps. Know that you are awesome and doing great things, and that you have deep strength within.
With Love,
Z :)
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