At some point in time, we all wonder, “Why is this thing happening to me; what did I do to deserve this?” There is no doubt that unpleasant and even tragic things happen to good people, and the bottom line, according to my Guide Group, is that we plan the majority of these things. Why would we do that to ourselves? We do it because there’s a lesson that we want to learn, and our soul has chosen to have a specific experience serve as a window of opportunity to learn that lesson.
In past columns, to expedite our spiritual growth, we’ve talked about windows of opportunity, relationship villains, and the fact that accidents are not accidents; we plan them. Today, we’re going to take a look at another type of experience that we plan for ourselves: The Bully Window.
I had a lot of experience with bullies in elementary and junior high school. I know the pain of being bullied, and I’ve allowed bullies to make me behave in ways I wish I hadn’t.
There were times I caved to peer pressure, and there were times I resisted it. In fact, if you were looking at a graph showing my popularity during my school years, you would clearly see where I resisted and where I gave in. The Bully window was opened for me so many times that there is no doubt in my mind that this was an important must-learn item on my spiritual “Do” list for this lifetime.
As an adult, after spending a great deal of time reviewing my life, looking for life scripts, patterns, and windows of opportunity*, I realized that I learned a great deal from my bully windows. By working with my Guides and becoming aware of the nature of bullies, I’ve learned to recognize bully windows much more quickly than when I was a kid, and I can now take immediate action to put an end to them.
My Guide Group has been very clear in the information they’ve provided on this subject, and I think that one of the hardest things to come to terms with about a bully window is that we plan for the bullies in our lives. They are a type of relationship villain**, and the learning from this type of interaction is as important to the spiritual growth of the person being bullied as it is to the bully themselves.
Here’s some interesting information about bullies from my Guide Group (the “GG”) to help us gain a better perspective and understanding of this distinct type of relationship villain:
“Bullies are an ugly thing, but they are very much a planned occurrence for any given lifetime. When someone bullies you, you feel bad about yourself. Bullies stab at one’s self-esteem and make one feel that they are not good enough or smart enough to fit in with the ‘in the crowd.’ When a soul decides to be bullied in a particular incarnation, it is usually because it wants to work on building confidence and self-esteem. We can tell you, too, that the ‘idea’ of being bullied when you are at the planning table is very different from the actual feeling of the experience during an incarnation. Many things that seem like they will be a breeze to go through when you’re on the planning side of the veil don’t turn out to be easy once you are back in your body.
Being the bully is not a job that souls cherish, and if you look at them, really look at them, you’ll see that they have issues they need to overcome, and the role of the bully gives them the opportunity to do so. The soul who bullies you is most likely a close universal friend because only someone who truly loves you would want to take on such a nasty role. Those that love us want to help us achieve our goals and our growth in the shortest amount of time possible.”
Looking back, there is no doubt that each of my bully experiences was a window of opportunity for learning—they were all pretty much the same and were based on ostracizing someone (think life script here), and they all pretty much went like this: the “in group” decided like didn’t like someone, and if you were friends with that person or continued to stay friends with that person, then you found yourself on the receiving end too. The first time I experienced this, I was in elementary school, and I’m sorry to say that I gave in. The next time I experienced it was in junior high school, and I didn’t give in. I had always felt extremely guilty for what I had done in elementary school, and I wanted to make up for it. For two years after not giving in, I was on the receiving end of a group of bullies, and I lost most of my friends. But I didn’t back down that time—I stuck with my friend, who was the original target of this little band of bullies, learned the lesson, and I never had to go through this particular scenario again. In fact, when I was in high school, I didn’t belong to any clique; instead, I had lots of friends from many different groups.
So, how did I deal with the pain during two years of constant bullying? During those difficult times, I tried my best to ignore them and continue on with my life—I never let them see that what they were saying had any impact on me whatsoever. After a while, I just wasn’t fun for them anymore because they got no reaction from me. I didn’t lose all my friends; I still had a few, and they were a great support group for me, although I had no idea what a support group was at the time.
I noticed that my particular bullies liked to strike when I was alone, so having other people around definitely helped. I continued with my life and pursued the things that I liked best—I joined clubs, I took the classes that I was interested in, and I excelled at those classes. I developed a great deal of confidence and self-reliance during that time, and I met a lot of people from diverse groups with whom I eventually became friends. But to put a stop to the “bully window of opportunity” repeating for me, I had to take a stand for what I believed in. I had to learn not to cave into peer pressure—that was my big lesson to learn. The bully experience was the tool I used to learn about it.
Because I learned this lesson early in life, I knew how to deal with bullies at work and in my romantic and personal life.
And because I dealt with it early on, it’s a rare thing for a bully to try to push me around now. That’s the great thing about learning a lesson:
We’re done with it, and we get to move on to other lessons and experiences.
We all have different lessons that we want to learn, things that we plan to learn during this incarnation. The best way to figure out how to stop attracting the same unpleasant circumstance, be it a bullying situation or something else, is to do a mini-life review and look for life scripts and patterns. Once you spot them, examine how you acted or re-acted in each situation and make adjustments to your attitude/behavior. Changing the way we deal with a situation that keeps repeating itself is the best way to complete a lesson and go through a window of opportunity. And remember, we planned the bullies in our lives. Hard to accept, I know, but becoming aware of our part in planning unpleasant experiences will help us wake up faster, spot our windows, learn our lessons, and expedite our spiritual growth.
Namaste.
*Windows of Opportunity: Windows are opportunities for growth and learning that we personally designed and created for ourselves while we were on the other side of the veil, planning our present incarnation. Think of your life as a book with chapters, and in each chapter, we insert scenarios or situations constructed to help us learn a particular lesson or have a growth experience. Why look for Windows of Opportunity? Each time we learn a lesson or complete an experience on our “to-do” list for this lifetime, we have more time to work on other items on our learning list. The more we accomplish, the more rapidly we mature spiritually. To ensure that we learn a particular lesson that we are intent on learning, we incorporate many possible windows of opportunity into our lives so that if we miss one, we will have another chance to acquire the learning or experience we need and want for our spiritual growth. As we miss one window and go on to another, the windows become increasingly more dramatic—that is to help us wake up and learn our lesson. Spotting windows “on the ground floor instead of in the penthouse” means that we can learn our lessons with less drama and pain as we start to recognize windows earlier, which, in turn, will help us accelerate our growth so we can more quickly move on to other lessons and experiences.
**Relationship Villains: Relationship Villains are souls who are our closest universal friends when we are on the other side of the veil, but for this incarnation, they have volunteered to play the part of “the bad guy” to help us cross something important off of our spiritual “must learn” list for this incarnation. They might be people who simply annoy us or even those we consider to be our so-called enemies. They are catalysts for learning: They create (or co-create) unpleasant situations that open windows of opportunity for us to learn and grow, or they may take action that forces us to stay on our chosen path–either way, their purpose is to help us accomplish our learning/growth faster; and in what may ultimately be a less dramatic or painful way. Relationship Villains can be anyone, and you will find them everywhere. Look for them, especially in romantic relationships, family relationships, and work relationships. Still, they will also turn up at school, at the grocery store, at the airport, the DMV, and anywhere you happen to be! They can be someone you have an ongoing relationship with or someone you interact with just once or twice. When you learn the lesson, your relationship with your “relationship villain” will become much more palatable (this is usually the case when the “villain” is a family member), or your relationship will end because your mission together is over (as often happens with friends).
