Central Theme of Your Life

by Patrick Quanten MD

Being aware of the central theme of your life, the main issue around which your life evolves, allows you to put your life into a real perspective and gives you a clearer picture of what it is about. We all have a recurrent main issue in life. It will appear as if, no matter what you do, you cannot escape it. No matter how much you have worked at it or have gained insight into your life, your main issue will continue to haunt you. You will have to keep on working at it to develop it to more sophisticated heights each time. You cannot ignore it. You cannot run away from it. You can never totally resolve it.

In that case, what’s the good knowing about it?

Realising what your life is mainly about can make it a lot easier to see the main road your life travels on and then to bare the weight of it. ‘Fair or unfair’ doesn’t play a part in it; life just is. And yours is the way it is. Knowing how it is, and how experiences will look for you in particular, makes acceptance a lot more tolerable. But what is it exactly that we mean by ‘The Central Theme of Your Life’?

Well, the central theme will be a recurrent theme that keeps colouring all your experiences. One person may lose all that is dear to him/her. Another will continually be stimulated to grow and open up, the one thing that person is petrified off. And still another will have to give up everything they strive for or manage to achieve. These are just a few examples of well-known themes we will explore in a little more detail.

When life is all about ‘loss’, experiences may tell you that everyone you love will be taken away from you. Your loved ones die or leave you behind. If that is what you have been shown through past experiences, then you may be filled with fear to love anything or anybody ever again. And although you may logically acknowledge that everything is perishable, you still cannot ignore the sense that it is somehow your fault. It may be seen as a sort of punishment towards you that you are not allowed to ‘keep’ love. With this central theme it is your task to learn that you need to love people without fear of losing them and that there is no punishment. You can learn that you cannot be happy when you keep sabotaging the love you have for people. That way you may believe that if you send them away or scare them away, they can’t hurt you anymore by leaving, thus reducing the pain you might feel. Not allowing people to love you too much, to get too close to the real you, seems like a good strategy to banish the hurt of losing them from your life. However, that means that you will not, can not, allow any close love into your life for fear of losing it. What you really need to learn is that it is okay to love, to be close and that it is okay for people to go. You learn that it doesn’t necessarily means one has been punished or that it was meant to hurt you. Everything moves on; nothing stays the same. And that goes for love too. ‘Losing’ is a natural part of life and having that as a personal experience enhances the enjoyment of love, as there is a deep sense of the impermanence of life.

Another theme is about emerging as a beautiful person, becoming your own wonderful Self, having a love for the Self and be standing on your own two feet, rather than always leaning up against somebody and making yourself totally dependent upon the other. You may have a tendency to always see yourself through the appreciation others show you. You may lack the esteem to value the Self as a beautiful, strong and independent person. To have a life in which you have to be fully focussed on the needs of the other and wipe your own wishes and needs cleanly off the table, never has the capability to feed the Self. It is the approval of the other that you require as a source for life. Without it, you don’t exist, you don’t have any reason to breathe. Finding strength and confidence to stand on your own two feet is one thing. Not needing anyone’s permission or approval to do so, is another. This is mainly about never needing the world to say, “Well done”. Our society has made us even more in search for general appreciation then ever before. Hence, the television programmes were ordinary people are selected and praised for their outstanding talents. Fame, fortune, and, so it seems, life itself, all depend on the love of the public, which, of course, in turn is being steered by other powers such as the media; life depends on the acceptance and nurturing from others. The truth is that you can never own your own life until you only validate it according to your inner self, and not according to anything or anybody in the outside world. So, this main issue will keep coming back to you until you learn to culture your independence. Fear and the pain of having to start living without the road signs someone else wants you to follow, becomes a recurrent feature of your everyday life. You will be desperately hanging on to anyone who likes you to be dependent upon him/her for your decisions and your direction in life. It will give you ‘security’, or rather the false sense of. But once you have learned to stand on your own two feet, to express your own opinion, to be a person in your own right, you will blossom as a person and you will also become an example, a light, to others.

What about the theme of “letting go”? So many times things have been taken away from you you have lost count. And no matter how hard you try to hold on to it, it keeps slipping away from you. Not only do you have to learn not to be attached to the environment you live in, to things and people you love, but you also have to learn to keep on giving everything that is required. You are not allowed to keep anything, apparently, but you experience at the same time, that you are required, forced, to give everything you’ve got away, so others can attached themselves, get what they need and have a sense of security. You might lose every personal relationship you have worked hard for and really wanted. It appears as if you need to let go of every person who holds the promise to complement and complete your life. And each time it gets harder as you feel you are improving and refining the selection just because you know it has to be ‘perfect’, otherwise it won’t be any good. So close to a ‘perfect’ fitting relationship, and yet you are about to ‘let go off’ once again. Similar scenarios develop in different areas of your life. Perfect jobs are lost, slipping through your fingers like fine sand. No matter how hard you try, you are incapable of holding on to material things, to emotional stuff, to thoughts, well thought out plans, friendships, love, professional status, career. Either you go and look for a confrontation to blow an established routine right out of the water, or it is all taken away from you out of your control. Both systems are being used: you sabotage your own success, or in spite of your own laudable efforts events turn against you. When you begin to realise the self-sabotage bit, you may well acknowledge it and drastically reduce the occurrence of it in your life, but that won’t guarantee you an improvement. You would think that you would then be able to establish a firmer ground on which to proceed, only to find that each time things collapse again through the intervention of outside forces. This scenario might leave you uneasy and lacking the willpower to try again. Not only do you have to let go of any personal dreams you might harbour, because you know that the chances of you being able to manifest them are remote, but you will still need to find the strength from somewhere to continue. Life continues and in spite of all odds stacked against you, you need to try again. You need to learn to become detached from the result of your efforts. Life still requires effort, and that is what you need to learn to focus your attention on. Whatever the result of your hard work might be, becomes irrelevant. You do things because you like doing them, not because they are going to result in something specific. You learn to detach from the destination and solely enjoy the journey.

There are, of course, other themes to be found, and we all encounter more than one particular issue in our lives, but there very often is one that keeps hitting us. Becoming alert to recurrent issues and finding the main direction behind the fear, doubt or self-loading the experiences are leaving us with, is essential in the process of empowering the Self.

Whatever we think is happening in our life, be it sadness, hardship, pain, happiness, peace, the central theme will be hidden in it. It is finding that common thread that runs through most of our experiences that will give us an insight into what our life is about. Once you recognise that thread, you may find that whatever you do to avoid it continuing to play a significant role in your life appears totally impossible. It haunts you, no matter what. You think you have learned so much, you have worked so hard on not repeating disastrous patterns, and yet your central theme will reappear time and time again. Not only that, but the intensity of it increases each time. The more you learn the more intense and powerful the confrontation with your theme. It is as if the stronger you are getting the more the Universe decides you can cope with. Don’t let this be a deterrent to you; you still benefit greatly from recognising your central theme, which will allow you to accept the experiences a lot easier.

Wherever our main pain, our main hardship and ‘unfairness’ lies in life, it is there that our main potential for growth emerges too. Because pain and problems tend to focus the mind on the issue, that why we are frequently confronted with it and its effects. Knowing what it means we can work at it; we have the potential to do something with it. Growing as a person actually means ‘to become more the person that you already are inside’. It is just because of who you are that the way your life develops pushes your personal boundaries. It is this confrontation with the restrictions we experience that allows us to grow. Just as it is the confrontation of warmth and cold and of water and dry that creates the growth potential for plants. That is how we can learn who we are and what we require in order to become ourselves.

Never moan about the pain or the unfairness.
Never doubt the reasons why you are the one having this particular experience.
Never forget that you will grow, as a person.

Be grateful for the journey whilst you blank out any possible destinations.

January 2009