In all the work that I do with life path journeys, the one thing that I consistently need to explain to people is that our life paths are not a straight line. They are not even a curved line, going over hills and down valleys, though that certainly is what we experience. Your life path is not actually linear at all, though of course we all age and it’s only headed in one direction. Actually though, your life path is a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and were done with, only to re-experience these same issues again at a different level so that you can learn new and deeper truths.
Throughout our lives, we will constantly experience the same themes and challenges which will echo back from our past. The reason for this doubling and tripling back is the same reason for our existence – which is that we are here to learn more about ourselves. These echoes are opportunities for us to either make better decisions and grow into more mature versions of ourselves (shifting the spiral “up”) or to make worse decisions and regress (shifting the spiral “down.”) See A More Hopeful Way to Look at Time by Yancey Strickler
We all have many different yearly life cycles running simultaneously. When calculating a client’s Metasymbology I will always include where they are in their seven, nine and thirteen year life cycles. We all experience every year of our lives from these three different points of view combined:
– the 7 years cycle is the small picture, the here and now, how events affect you on a daily and weekly level
– the 9 years cycle is the medium picture, where you’re going and heading, how events affect you over many months up to a few years ahead
– the 13 years cycle is the big picture, looking at the meaning or purpose of your life at this point in time, how events affect you over the next 5 years and beyond.
It all starts out easy. From the ages of 0-7 life is all about learning how to live. You experience life as a wide eyed innocent child, absorbing and processing the world around you. You are learning to be human and what it is like to be you, in your family, in your community, and in your country. When you start out in life, the first 7 years are all about learning about living.
As we age though, things start to become very different – more complex and complicated, but also more opportunities and choices. Throughout life you continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths, revisiting aspects many times over, but each time from a different level of understanding. Firstly we’re older and time has moved on, so each different age provides a different perspective. But also other things can change, such as our position in life, the people we are surrounded by, our mental or physical health, our location on the planet, and so on.
These cycles coincide with the ways that we think, feel and operate in our lives. Everything that you are, all the ingredients that make you you, for good or for bad, are reflected somewhere in the life path that comes from the day you were born.
These cycles form part of the system of how we think, feel and operate. These ingredients form part of our personality DNA, and make up our life experience blueprint. How you feel about your life is up to you, but what you experience largely comes with combination of traits on your life path.
That’s why each time we experience that old thing in a new way we gain new perspective and new understanding. The goal is to learn its lesson, master it, and then move on. But if we don’t learn the lesson then that experience will keep coming back in more severe ways until we finally either learn to master the problem, or we give up trying and it becomes an entrenched behavioural limitation.
This is one reason we can so often have dreams that take us back to locations of the past to re-enact old experiences in new ways – ways that might include aspects of the present. Perhaps you dream of being back in your first job, which reflects some current work issue that you’re facing, which you also faced all those years ago when you were first starting out. Or perhaps you’re very happy in your current relationship but keep dreaming of your first crush. Here your subconscious mind is comparing the past to the present to see if you have learned the lessons from long ago or if you are still acting out fantasies.