Adapting to Life’s Challenges
The difficult circumstances, challenges and even tragedies that befall us are often the very things that make us stronger. The more resilient and adaptable you become in the face of life’s fluctuating circumstances, the more empowered you are.
In this video, Dadhichi briefly talks about his early struggles being sent to an orphanage and fostered out, and how those experiences helped him adapt and become stronger as a person. In fact, he says it is one of the foundational reasons for his success and satisfaction in life.
The question then becomes: how do you adapt to difficult circumstances and still become successful?
Eliminating the Unnecessary
The whole concept of achieving happiness and truly falling in love with your life depends less on acquiring more and more, and more on its opposite — eliminating the unnecessary.
At some point you must perform a kind of spring cleaning in the messy attic of your psyche.
As a practising astrologer, many clients ask about their career prospects or life purpose. Career manuals are often huge books filled with thousands of possible professions. Even once you begin to understand your interests, the number of options can still make the decision confusing.
“Dadhichi, how do I make that choice?” is a common question.
The answer is simple: eliminate what does not belong.
Start tearing out the pages of professions that clearly have nothing to do with your interests. By gradually eliminating the irrelevant options, clarity begins to emerge. The same principle applies to life itself.
Begin with the End
There is a powerful principle of success: begin with the end.
Even in everyday situations we naturally follow this rule. If you hail a taxi in a city you’ve never visited before, the first thing you determine is the destination.
The destination represents the what. The taxi represents the how.
Once the destination is known, the journey unfolds naturally.
Yet many people become lost in the “how” while never clearly defining the “what”.
When the destination becomes clear, the path has a tendency to reveal itself.
Trusting the Process
Once the “what” is firmly established in your awareness, the “how” begins to take care of itself.
This requires trust — one of the most powerful tools for self-actualisation and happiness.
Trust allows you to eliminate unnecessary mental clutter and focus only on what truly matters.
The same elimination process must also be applied to emotional baggage.
Spiritual Fertiliser
Most people refer to painful memories as emotional baggage. But that baggage can also become fertiliser.
Just as eco-gardeners recycle organic waste to nourish their gardens, the pain and struggles of the past can be transformed into personal growth.
Learning to recycle emotional experiences — pain, jealousy, resentment or fear — is the art of psycho-spiritual fertilisation.
When used intelligently, these experiences cultivate inner strength, confidence and independence.
Awareness of Awareness
This process ultimately leads to self-realisation.
Realisation arises when awareness becomes aware of itself.
Practising this awareness creates a loving mindfulness of life that is free from constant judgement.
Time itself often becomes the silent enemy of happiness, because most people live their lives horizontally — moving from past memories to future expectations.
The Vertical Dimension of Time
Imagine time as an X-Y axis.
Most people live along the horizontal line — moving between past experiences and future expectations.
But there is also a vertical experience of time, which occurs when you are completely absorbed in the present moment.
This vertical experience is where creativity, art, music, poetry and spiritual insight arise.
Great achievements in science, culture and philosophy often emerge from this deeply focused state of awareness.
Attention: The Fuel of Happiness
When you are fully present in an activity — whether creating art, solving a problem, or engaging deeply with life — the past and future temporarily disappear.
This state of rapt attention reveals glimpses of the happiness that already exists within the present moment.
Attention itself becomes the fuel of happiness.
Trust, Fearlessness and Passion
Falling in love with your life requires several essential qualities:
- Trust
- Fearlessness
- Earnestness
- Passion
If fear dominates your nature, you may never take the necessary risks that lead to success.
Developing these qualities requires self-observation and honest reflection about the balance within your own nature.
Free Will or Destiny?
For many years I believed strongly in free will. That belief began to change after travelling to India in 1999.
There I encountered the ancient Nadi palm-leaf manuscripts — records said to contain the destinies of individuals written thousands of years ago.
Unlike normal astrology, the reader begins with your thumbprint. From this, a bundle of ancient palm leaves is searched until the correct one is found.
What followed was astonishing.
The reader revealed precise details of my past, present and future — including family names, personal events and life changes.
Over the next twenty years, many of those predictions unfolded exactly as described.
Life Written on a Leaf
The palm leaves described events such as leaving my country of birth, moving to another land, meeting my future wife and eventually having a daughter.
Years later, those events unfolded precisely as predicted.
Experiences like this challenge our conventional understanding of free will and destiny.
As the sage Ramana Maharshi once said:
“Try as hard as you will to make something happen in life — if it is not destined, it will not happen. And try as hard as you can to prevent something destined — it will still occur.”
Reconciling Fate and Free Will
The great mystery is how fate and free will interact.
Your life may indeed contain patterns written long before your birth, yet you still play a creative role in how those events unfold.
The challenge is to live passionately and artistically, without becoming overly attached to the role you play.
Passion for Life
The defining quality that distinguishes extraordinary lives from ordinary ones is passion.
Just as romantic love is defined by passion, the love of life itself requires deep absorption and attention.
When your life becomes the object of your passion, something remarkable occurs.
You begin to fall in love with your life.
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Dadhichi Toth is a Vedic astrologer with 37 years experience. He specialises in remedial astrology and has helped thousands of people over his many years of clinical practice. He is the founder and CEO of astrology.com.au. He can be contacted at [email protected]