My love, Jamie Ananda, recently shared during one of our Kirtan sessions that Ganesh is not only the “remover of obstacles,” as he is so often known, but also the one who places the obstacles there to begin with.
This struck something deep within me and has shifted the way I relate to challenges, the way I see them, experience them, and ultimately respond to them.
It made me reflect deeply on the spiritual meaning of obstacles and the possibility that perhaps some of our most difficult moments are invitations into deeper growth, healing, and transformation. And perhaps, as Jamie says, a calling from Spirit to come closer.
When Life Feels Heavy
I recognize a tendency in myself, and in many of my clients, to view our difficulties, hardships, and struggles as:
This past week has been heavy for me. Unexpected challenges popping up here and there. Things not unfolding the way I had planned or hoped. People behaving in ways that trigger old wounds. Feeling discouraged, tender, depleted.
The other day I woke up feeling so heavy and exhausted I could barely carry myself through the morning.
Lurking in the background were the familiar thoughts:
You’re doing something wrong.
You’re not enough.
You should be handling this better.
You shouldn’t feel this way.
Just shake it off and move on.
My pattern was showing up again, fixating on everything that felt wrong and all the ways I believed I wasn’t getting it right. Black-and-white thinking. The Inner Critic running the show while the Inner Child felt hopeless and defeated.
Sound familiar?
I know it does for some of you, because I’ve been hearing echoes of this same struggle from friends and clients lately.
Thank Goddess I’ve been walking this path long enough now to know that the undertow doesn’t pull me as far or keep me under as long as it once did.
I know the path itself includes getting lost and finding our way back again and again.
I know the stories in my mind are not necessarily true.
I know my old coping mechanisms only lead me to the same exhausted dead ends, and that I am tired of revisiting them.
And I know how to hold space for what is coming up within me, rather than focusing only on the external.
Stop, Drop, and Flow
So I stopped.
I dropped into myself. Into my heart. Into my body. Into my Soul.
I let go of the pressure, the judgment, the grasping for control, and allowed myself to stop resisting what was here. (I call this practice Stop, Drop, and Flow.)
I surrendered to “the love that heals me,” as the song says.
I release control and surrender to the flow of love that will heal me.
– Alexa Sunshine Rose
The Love That Heals
The love that heals me is the kind of love that stays present with whatever is arising within me, with compassion, tenderness, and deep understanding for the patterns that create suffering and the survival adaptations that formed when I was too young to understand what was happening.
The love that heals me does not judge me. Nor does it become entangled in the identity created by my Inner Critic’s limiting beliefs.
The love that heals me can hold shame, fear, sadness, and confusion without becoming consumed by them. Instead, it brings such pure and unconditional presence that these feelings begin to soften and melt back into the very love holding them.
The love that heals me patiently reminds my Inner Child, again and again, that she is safe. That she is enough. That she can trust.
In truth, it goes beyond reminding her. It embraces her with unwavering presence and care until she is able to feel it and release the struggle. Because our Inner Child does not heal through words alone, but through the felt experience of safety, love, and presence.
The love that heals me remembers that I am not being punished by the challenges arising in my life. Nor are they proof of failure. They are opportunities to deepen, expand, release, and rise. Perhaps a new chance to heal an old wound.
Ganesh and the Spiritual Meaning of Obstacles
The love that heals me reminds me that Ganesh… Great Spirit, God, Goddess, the Divine, the Great Mystery, whatever name resonates for you, has my back.
These apparent obstacles are invitations to release the past, allow the new to emerge, and rise into the truest expression of who we are.
What if the very challenges we face were actually indications that we were ready to evolve, ready to expand, ready to heal?
Each time we face adversity, each time we are triggered, each time something happens that shakes us up… what if our Soul recognized the opportunity and seized it?
This, to me, is the true spiritual meaning of obstacles.
To surrender to the Greater Wisdom. To align with our Essential Nature. To lead our inner world with wisdom and love. To leave no part of ourselves behind, but instead to integrate all of it, knowing that this is where Wholeness lives.
And from that wholeness, we remember once more the beauty of it all.
The warm sunny days, yes, but also the storms. The winds. The rain. The clouds.
They are all sacred parts of the journey, just as meaningful as the effortless days when everything flows with ease.
We are the bridges between Earth and Sky. Heaven and Hell. War and Peace.
Like rainbows born from storms, we are capable of transforming our darkest moments into something beautiful, powerful, and eternal.
This is the magic available to us when we allow ourselves to truly experience it.
Thank you, Ganesh, my love, for all of it.
And so be it. And so it is.