For most of my early life, learning meant acquiring something I didn’t already know. I picked up skills, gathered knowledge and worked out how to do things better. Learning was what helped me in my career, or made life run more successfully. That life itself might be teaching me something about me was not an idea I had ever entertained.
When Life Stopped Making Sense
What changed that was a serious back problem, which left me unable to work and eventually contributed to my losing the house. I could not understand how the successful, happy life I thought I was building had brought me there. For about six months I cried, raged at what had happened and wondered why life had dealt me such a hand. When I had exhausted most of that, I began to listen.
Reading The Road Less Travelled had given me what I can only describe as a Eureka moment, and I described that in the article on the Higher Self. The trouble was that I had the insight and then carried on much as before. I had invited my Higher Self into my life while continuing to think, choose and react through the same old beliefs.
Six months after losing the house, something shifted. I saw that life was not something to conquer on the way to the life I wanted. I had it back to front. My own thinking and choices had consequences, and those consequences had been showing me things I hadn’t known how to see. I had simply carried on down the same road until the results became impossible to ignore.
That was when I began to understand life as a school.
Finding Another Way
A Course in Miracles describes the world as a construct of the ego thought system, and it also teaches that we can use what we experience here to learn another way. The first of those is a considerable metaphysical claim, and nothing in this series asks you to accept it. It is a road you may want to explore, and it is one I am still walking myself. What I am describing here is what happened when I applied some of those ideas, alongside a good deal else I have learned over the years.
What I took from it was simple and entirely practical: whatever the world is, we can use what happens in it to learn about ourselves.
I had already asked for another way. What I hadn’t understood was that part of the answer would be to pay attention to what my life was already showing me.
There Is No Right Way
Seeing life as Earth School is a choice, and I said earlier that it is yours to make. It has helped me enormously. That does not make it the right way, or the only way.
We are each finding out who we are, and nobody else can tell us what that ought to look like. What helps me may not help you. Something it took me years to understand may be obvious to you, or you may see it entirely differently. All I can do is set out what I have experienced and what I made of it.
There is no cosmic teacher deciding that because we ignored hint number three, it is time to send something worse. Nor do we have to learn a particular lesson before life will let us move on.
What I have noticed is far more ordinary. If I keep overriding what I know about a relationship, I stay in the relationship. If I keep explaining away what my reactions are telling me, I go on making choices from the same thinking. If I don’t recognise a pattern in myself, I carry it into whatever comes next.
The lesson has not become harsher. The consequences of not learning it have become louder.
There is no punishment in that, and no right or wrong. There are choices, experiences and consequences, and the opportunity to become curious about what they show us.
The change for me came when I realised I didn’t have to wait until something hurt before I paid attention. Which raises a better question. What might we notice if we started listening while life was still speaking quietly?
Where Are the Learning Opportunities?
If life is Earth School, there is no syllabus and no manual telling us what comes next. The learning opportunities are simply in what happens as we go about our lives, and these are the places I have found them.
Our Choices and What Follows Them
Some of the clearest information comes from the choices we make and what happens as a result. That is not about a right choice and a wrong one. Often we simply discover that a decision didn’t take us where we hoped, or that something we were certain would make us happy didn’t.
The same holds when something plainly doesn’t work. We approach a conversation in a particular way and make things worse. We pursue something we were convinced we wanted and find it empty once we have it. We don’t have to turn every disappointment into a great spiritual lesson. We can acknowledge that it didn’t work and choose differently next time. That is learning too, and it counts.
We learn just as much from the choices that go well. What did I do differently? What felt right about it? Why did that situation bring out the best in me? Looking back at our choices without judging ourselves tells us a great deal about who we are and what actually matters to us.
The Patterns That Keep Repeating
Patterns are the richest source of all. If I keep finding myself in similar relationships, having the same argument, feeling overlooked, growing resentful or ending up somewhere I don’t want to be, it is worth asking what the repetition is showing me.
A pattern doesn’t mean I have done something wrong. It gives me something to be curious about, and one question to put to it: what am I thinking, believing or choosing that is contributing to this?
Our Reactions, and What Stays With Us
Sometimes the information is in our reaction rather than in the event. When something relatively small makes me disproportionately angry, defensive, frightened or upset, the size of the reaction is itself the signal. The situation has usually touched something that was already there, and the event in front of me is not the whole of what I am responding to.
The same is true of whatever stays with us: the dream we still remember the next morning, the remark we cannot put down, the thought we keep pushing away because it doesn’t fit with what we have already decided. None of it has to be interpreted. It is enough to stop dismissing it.
What We Avoid
We learn from what we don’t want to look at: the conversation we keep putting off, the decision we won’t make, the thing we know isn’t working, the uncomfortable truth we keep explaining away.
Avoidance doesn’t automatically mean we should do the thing we are avoiding, and there are often good reasons to wait. But when something keeps returning to our awareness, the question worth asking is why we would rather not look at it.
What Our Body Is Telling Us
Our bodies can give us useful information too. I don’t mean that illness is a lesson or that we should interpret physical symptoms as messages. I mean the familiar responses we all recognise: the clenched jaw, the shoulders around our ears or the feeling in our stomach before a particular conversation.
Our mind can insist everything is fine while our body appears not to have received the memo. I’ve learned that if I repeatedly have the same physical response around a particular person, situation or thought, it’s worth becoming curious about why. It doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong, but it is another piece of information I don’t want to automatically dismiss.
What Other People Reflect Back to Us
Other people can be some of our best teachers, although I don’t always appreciate it at the time. One person disagreeing with me is simply their opinion. But when several people who know me well and genuinely want the best for me are independently saying the same thing, I’ve learned that it’s worth stopping and listening. That doesn’t mean I have to change my mind, but I might want to question why they are seeing something I can’t.
Sometimes it’s simply because they are standing outside the situation. We may have spent months thinking something through, explaining our reasoning to ourselves and becoming increasingly convinced that we’re right. Someone who isn’t caught up in it may be able to see something we’ve stopped being able to see.
My instinct can still be to explain exactly why they’re wrong. What I’ve learned to notice is how hard I’m working to convince them. If I’m desperately trying to get everybody else to agree with me, sometimes the person I’m really trying to convince is myself.
Of course, other people don’t get to make our decisions. They have their own beliefs and fears, and they only ever see part of our lives. Their perspective is information, not instruction. We still get to choose, but sometimes we are choosing with something else to consider.
What Draws Us Towards Something
Not everything worth noticing comes through difficulty. Sometimes there is no warning at all. Instead, we keep feeling drawn towards something. It might be a subject we can’t stop reading about, an idea that keeps returning, someone we feel moved to contact or something that makes us feel unexpectedly alive.
My writing has been like that. The idea behind the work I’m doing now stayed with me through raising children, a career, a business and everything else that quite reasonably came first. Whole years went by when I did very little with it, but it never disappeared.
Looking back, I don’t think that meant I should have dropped everything and written a series years ago. For much of that time, I couldn’t have done that anyway. I simply knew the idea mattered to me and that I shouldn’t lose it.
That’s how I think about these quieter promptings now. They don’t necessarily mean do this. Sometimes they simply mean look here.
The same is true of the things that bring us peace, joy or make us feel completely ourselves. When we think about personal growth, it’s easy to concentrate on problems and what needs to change and overlook what is already working. But that can teach us something too.
Why do I flourish in one environment and struggle in another? Why do I feel completely at ease with certain people? What gives me energy rather than draining it? What do I become so absorbed in that I lose track of time?
Earth School isn’t only about learning from what hurts. We can learn just as much by paying attention to what brings out the best in us, what gives us joy and what feels right for us.
Telling a Signal from Noise
Not everything we feel is a signal. Fear produces convincing warnings, and enthusiasm makes something feel right because we want it to be.
I go into this more fully in the article on the Higher Self, where I write about recognising intuition. The distinction I find most useful is this: fear is urgent and demanding, while intuition is quieter and can wait. If something still feels true once the emotion has settled, I am far more inclined to listen. Even then it is information, not instruction.
Learning Earlier
None of this comes with a label saying LEARNING OPPORTUNITY, and none of it necessarily means anything at all. Seeing life as Earth School is not about analysing every dream, emotion and coincidence for hidden messages. It is about becoming more interested in our own experience.
We start to notice what repeats, what triggers us, what we avoid, what works, what other people reflect back, what brings us joy and what keeps drawing our attention. Then we ask one question: is there anything here that helps me understand myself better?
Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes we find we already knew and were not quite ready to admit it. And occasionally something we had dismissed turns out to be the useful thing.
What changed for me was not my circumstances. Once I became willing to see, I noticed what had been there all along. There is nothing mysterious in that. We notice what we are looking for, and I had not been looking until something became impossible to ignore.
The learning opportunities are simply in what happens as we go about our lives
Try This: Notice Before You Interpret
For the next week, don’t try to work out what life is teaching you. Just notice what repeats.
Write down the thought that keeps returning, the dream you still remember the next morning, the reaction that was bigger than the event, the conversation you keep avoiding, the advice you have now heard from more than one person, and the idea that gives you a small lift every time it crosses your mind.
Collect them without deciding what any of them mean.
At the end of the week, look at what you have gathered and ask one question:
Is there anything here I already know, but have not quite been willing to know yet?
Then ask the other one, which is the one we forget:
Is there anything here quietly inviting me towards something?
You may find there is nothing at all, and that is a perfectly good result. You may also discover that life has been speaking rather more often than you realised.
Deciding to look at your life from the perspective of learning something can be hugely rewarding, but you also have to understand that not everything happens for a reason, and that is where we go next.
Articles in The Earth School
Earth School: Why Life Is Your Greatest Teacher
What Is Life Trying to Tell Me?
Not Everything Happens for a Reason
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