There’s nothing wrong with struggle.
You can be a victim for as long as it takes. Honestly, it’s kind of romantic. I like to roll around on the floor. I’ve been poor for so long, and I’ve enjoyed parts of it. I like being scrappy. I like creating art within limitations. There’s something beautiful about wanting so badly to change your world, trying and trying. The longing, the fight, the underdog story: it’s cosmic poetry.
So if you’re in the thick of it right now, I don’t even think you’re “doing it wrong”. There’s no wrong or right way to do any of this. Everything is divine, including the struggle.
But when you’re done with the fight, when you’re ready to step into a different way of being, there’s a way out. Let’s talk about both.
What struggle gives us
Struggle isn’t just something to survive. It gives us things.
It gives us desire. If you have no struggle, you have no desire, because why would you want anything? You’d just acquire it and end up in the same place. Desire, acquire, desire, acquire: that cycle is part of what makes life on Earth interesting.
It gives us empathy. I was born into a disenfranchised experience, and I believe it was so I could understand what struggle feels like and carry that compassion with me. We’re not meant to suffer forever, but struggle is how we remember to care about people who are suffering now.
And it can give us growth. Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun coined the term post-traumatic growth in the 1990s to describe the positive changes many people report after a major life struggle: deeper relationships, a stronger sense of personal strength, new possibilities, and a richer spiritual life. Struggle can crack us open in ways comfort never does.
Who am I without the struggle?
Here’s the part nobody warns you about. When you start tapping into flow and things begin to get easier, it can feel genuinely disorienting. You might have a little identity crisis: who am I without the fight? If you’ve been the scrappy one, the underdog, the person who has to claw for everything, ease can feel like losing yourself.
So before you try to leave the struggle behind, make sure you’re actually willing to let it go. Appreciate it first. Thank it for what it taught you, for the desire and the empathy and the fire it gave you. You don’t have to hate your struggle to graduate from it.
When you’re ready: going with the flow
When you’re done with the fight, here’s the key: when things are too hard, it’s because you’re not going with the flow.
Now, going with the flow doesn’t mean floating through life while everything magically works out. It’s not passive. It sounds more like this: I’m going to work. I don’t want to go to work. Why don’t I want to go to work? Then you process it. You feel what comes up, you look at it, you hold space for it, you integrate it. That’s going with the flow. As things come up, you meet them instead of fighting them.
It’s grueling. It’s brutal, honestly. You have to do a lot of inner work before your life turns into a Starbucks commercial. But that inner work is what changes the outer world.
The hard way vs. the flow
The “everything is so hard” vibration shows up all over our culture. It’s the Protestant work ethic, the belief, as sociologist Max Weber described it more than a century ago, that relentless labor proves your worth. It’s work addiction. It’s the endless battle to change your appearance with Botox and surgery. It’s the fight to contort reality until you finally get what you want, or the fear of losing something you’re barely holding on to.
Underneath all of that is attachment. If you’re desperately attached to a specific outcome, there’s something inside you that needs to be integrated. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have desires or goals. It means the clawing is pointing at a wound.
And here’s the irony: when you stop clawing and move into flow, you don’t lose your power. You gain it. When you’re in a receptive state, allowing divinity to move through you, you actually have the most power to change your life and the world.
I know this can sound like victim blaming, as if your struggle is your fault. That’s not what I mean. Taking accountability for how you relate to your circumstances isn’t about blame. It’s about empowerment. If you’re a victim, you’re powerless. If you can change your inner state, you’re not.
What the old traditions knew
Mystics have been mapping this terrain for thousands of years, and almost all of them honor the struggle before they point the way out.
In alchemy, the Great Work begins with the nigredo, the blackening: the stage where the raw material is broken down, decays, and turns dark. Alchemists didn’t see it as failure. It was the necessary first step before the albedo (whitening) and rubedo (reddening) that led to the philosopher’s stone. No blackening, no gold.
In the 16th century, the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross wrote about the “dark night of the soul,” a painful season when every spiritual comfort falls away. He saw it as a purification, a stripping-down that makes room for deeper union with the divine.
Taoism offers the other half: wu wei, often translated as effortless action. The Tao Te Ching points to water again and again. Nothing is softer or more yielding than water, yet nothing is better at wearing down what is hard and strong. That’s going with the flow. Not doing nothing, but moving with the current instead of against it.
And the Hermetic Principle of Rhythm, as laid out in The Kybalion, says everything flows out and in, rises and falls, like a pendulum. Struggle and ease aren’t enemies. They’re the swing of the same pendulum, and the work is learning not to be thrown by it.
Finding the balance
There’s an opposite trap, too. If you get so spiritually awake that nothing seems real and you don’t want anything anymore, you can’t really participate in life. Some people go live on a mountaintop, and that’s fine if it’s what they want. Not me. I like being on Earth. I like to play. I want to make things.
So for me, it’s about balance. If things are too hard, I’m not going with the flow. If things are so easy that nothing feels real, I’ve drifted too far from my desires. Going with the flow is the middle path: still wanting, still creating, still playing, without the white-knuckle grip. The Buddha found the same thing. Before his awakening, he lived in luxury as a prince, then nearly starved himself as an ascetic. Neither extreme worked. He called what he found in between the Middle Way.
One practice that helps: start treating everything as a blessing. Even the hard things. If someone punches you, the 3D response is to punch back. The 5D response is: “What a blessing! I will no longer be in your presence. Thank you for the experience.”
If you treat everything like a blessing, it becomes one, and your vibration rises with it.
So struggle as long as you need to. Roll around on the floor. Be scrappy. It’s romantic, and it’s yours. And when you’re ready to get out of it, the door is inside you. Go with the flow.
A tool for the flow
When you’re ready to trade the clawing for the current, I made the Quantum Dolphin through Dolphin Technology for exactly that shift. It’s designed to align you with the Dolphin Abundance Timeline, a reality where joy, rest, and flow generate more than struggle ever could. Dolphins don’t fight the ocean; they play in it. The pendant combines jade, lapis lazuli, aventurine, amethyst, and tourmaline with magnets in a grid, handcrafted by Japanese master jewelers and created with French radionics inventor Mickael Loup. No activation required: just put it on with an intention to let ease lead the way.
Thank you for raising the vibration of earth. If this speaks to you, join UNICULT.
