Adversity is a cruel beast that can seriously hurt and even kill. Although a hardship can take many shapes, the mechanism of a misfortune is always the same. It starts with the choice to either thrive or survive. Surviving means to live in the shadow of a painful experience by doing the bare minimum to stay afloat as not to disturb your beast and make things even more challenging for yourself. Even if surviving is the only viable option during some circumstances, there will come a time – during or after a catastrophe has struck – to either stay in survival mode, or to move out to thrive. Here again you have two choices; to either thrive with adversity or against it. Thriving against adversity means that you perceive a turmoil as a threat that you have to get rid of at any cost. This is the way of the Warrior, pulling out the sword and coming head to head with a hardship with only one possible outcome; you or the beast will be the victor.
And then there is thriving with adversity; the way of the Perceptual Alchemist. While a Survivor remains and a Warrior confronts, a Perceptual Alchemist unites by becoming one with the beast to harness its chaotic power and move on to new horizons. Just like a Survivor and a Warrior, a Perceptual Alchemist is a role that you take when the going gets tough, with the goal of transmuting the unfortunate events of life into fortunate ones. Like everything else that exists in the universe, an adverse situation is a form of energy. Since energy cannot be created neither destroyed, what is clearly left for us is the opportunity to alchemize the uneasiness of life into opportunities. No problems will ever vanish. It’s an illusion for which we, as a species, have already paid a hefty price.
Overall, it doesn’t matter what kind of issue you’re dealing with. It’s universal. The uneasiness of life always involved what I called the seven faces of adversity; self-image, pseudo-reality, fear, emotions, stress, faith and raison d’être. There is also what I call the heart of a misfortune. This is the part of an uneasiness that offers the opportunity to enrich your life in a complete and lasting way. For a Perceptual Alchemist, the seven faces of adversity and the heart of a misfortune are symbolized by a seven-headed beast which serves to incarnate the pain and the suffering that a hardship inflicts upon our lives. The term Perceptual Alchemist is a reminder that the capacity to alchemize the fierce energy of a hardship from lead to gold depends entirely on your ability to see things differently, otherwise the difficulties of life will always be something to retreat from or slay blindly.
To see things differently is a question of perception, the most important faculty that you possess.
There are two ways to perceive; from the heart and from the head.
To learn more about the heart and the head, I invite you to read the following page;
About/Heart-Head
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