by Connie Brisson

I’ve always felt that life was a struggle.

Like Donna Summers, I’ve worked hard for my money, honey.

Was it because of my heritage or past? I’d never really thought about it until one day something a neighbor said stuck out in my mind. While living in Saudi Arabia (after Marcel and I were first married) I felt compelled to wash all the walls of our very large apartment. My Australian neighbor told her husband what I did and then said: “She Ukrainian. They like to work hard.”

Is that what was going on here? Were Ukrainians unconsciously compelled to work hard? Is that why my life had been such a struggle all these years? That was the first time I’d ever really considered that my struggles could be due to cultural or other programming from my past.

Certainly, I was a little fighter. There is no doubt about that. If I wasn’t getting what I wanted then it meant that I wasn’t trying hard enough or that I had to change my strategy. I would try and try and try again. It NEVER occurred to me that the reason I was not getting something I really wanted was because it was not for my highest good or that it would keep me from my purpose or that it WAS part of my path, purpose and learning.

When I first came to Skye MacLachlan it was because of the difficult relationship Marcel and I were having with his children. I knew how I thought it should be (all of us getting along) and yet the harder I tried, the worse it got. I wouldn’t have considered looking at tarot for answers if anything else would have worked.

I quickly learned that there are no victims in Skye’s world. She told me there was a reason why I was attracting this situation into my life and that when issues were big like this it was a major learning lesson for everyone involved.

But I really wasn’t looking for self introspection. I wanted a quirky, supernatural, tarot fix. You know, like hanging a plucked chicken with a ring of garlic around its neck on my back fence during a full moon or something equally as bizarre, because honestly, I felt that I had tried everything else. (Turns out the chicken thing has nothing to do with tarot, so you’ve got to do the inner work to change things. J)

Years went by, and although I continued to do a LOT of inner work, the theme of struggle continued in my life. Then one day in another session with Skye, after discussing another huge struggle of mine, she AGAIN said: “Connie, you’ve got to get to the root of why everything is such a struggle for you. Until you get to the root and acknowledge it, you will always experience struggle in your life.”

Well, for me, that was like saying: “You’ve got to get to the root of why water is wet.” IT JUST IS. So I said to her: “Skye, life is a struggle for everyone.”

Then she said something totally unbelievable to me. She said that many people experienced days filled with joy and although there was a small amount of struggle, it was minimal, maybe 5% of the day. I started laughing and I said: “Who’s that? The very dead Gandhi?”

When she said: “Me,” I was honestly stunned. For a brief moment everything stopped. Was this possible? Could she be right? Was there something in my past, some preconditioning that was controlling my life right now? Then for the first time in all the years we had worked together on this particular issue, I consciously allowed a small space to open inside of me to make room for the answer to come. I asked myself: “Where did this struggle within me come from?’

By the next night, believe it or not, I remembered a situation as a baby where I had to struggle for my life in a literal life or death kind of way. Honestly, as difficult as it was to remember, it was so liberating. All of the sudden I could see why this energetic pattern would have such a hold over me my whole life. From the very beginning of my life, I had learned to struggle to survive.

And it wasn’t until this happened to me, this memory and liberation, that I actually started to experience times free of struggle. Suddenly there were moments when I was vacuuming, doing my GST or helping Gabi learn words for her spelling test when I felt nothing but JOY and BLISS. And writing that brings tears to my eyes because those are the same moments that could have made me feel so trapped or burdened before.

When we’re open to where our patterns come from, the answers arrive like gifts. And when we unwrap them, they always have a little bit of bliss tucked inside.