I made a deal with the devil and I did not even know it, not until my husband got cancer.

(I know I told you all Id write about currency.  That is coming but now I’ve been thrown a curve ball by life and want to share the insights from it.)

So here is the deal I made:  If I do all sorts of transformation work, if I evolve myself, if I go to workshops, use the law of attraction, clear my chakras, pray well, “do my work,” then somehow some way the things that happen in other people’s lives, wont happen in mine.  Somehow all of this work would make me exempt to…well…. anything “bad.”   I realized the moment that I found out John had bladder cancer that I believed that it should not happen to me.  I believed that the economic downturn would not hit me.  I believed that somehow all of the skills I had bought me a free pass past all of the nasty gritty stuff of everyone else’s lives.

Ok I feel like a complete fool even saying this but somehow I think it’s quite important so I am sharing it.

I think part of the American disease is that we are entitled to somehow being above or separate from the events that impact all beings. And we do all manner of things to exempt ourselves from the capriciousness of the gods.  Deep in my bones I have been under the impression all of this time that I am entitled to a certain kind of life.  Almost all of my waking hours, almost all of my professional life has been dedicated to pursuing that life.

The whole time I have been hearing its not the circumstances that make you happy but really I’ve given every ounce of my life force to re-arranging the circumstances: my house, my location, my work schedule, my bank account balance, my retirements accounts, to realize my dream to make manifest this life to which I am entitled and which will serve as proof of my power to defy even the fiercest of forces.

Well, as you might have already guessed, the jig is, as they say, up.

I am not entitled to anything in particular: a certain house, a healthy child, a good career, a vacation home, happiness, or anything else for that matter.

And in giving up being entitled to any of it I can be deeply grateful for that which I do have.  Entitlement and gratitude cannot inhabit the same space.  The former occludes the latter, casts a shadow over its steady luminous glow.  Entitlement lives in a context of separation.  Gratitude comes straight from the well of sufficiency.