Struggle. Life is hard, life is tough, you have to fight in life. Life is meaningless, purposeless, but actually you have to fight your entire life to see if it had any meaning.

This… this was what I believed for more than 30 years. And everything inside me was screaming that this is not right, it is not correct, it is not like this! But who was to listen to it? Not my mind, for sure!

I was looking around me, and all I could see was a world of struggle. A world of fight, battles, losses and suffering. That was my reality. It was difficult, and everyone said it was, so it must have been true. If several people tell you that life is in a particular way, and they also demonstrate you that it is like that, what else could your mind know? If you are a fish, and have always been swimming in a stream, how could you possibly imagine that there are birds that fly and animals that live their entire lives on the land? How could you possibly believe there is anything else but your reality, if you have never seen or experienced a different reality?

And my reality was one of struggle, fighting for what I wanted, going out there, pushing my limits, facing my fears and conquer it all. Or at least, that was what my mind knew to do best. It was also correct according to all those motivational speakers, from the ‘90s and 2000s. All I could hear back then was that you need to use your force and make it happen if you want to achieve something. And I did, and I actually became good at it.

As soon as I had the first look at my chart, seeing the 28-38 channel there (Channel of Struggle), everything became clear and made sense. My first thought was that Struggle was part of my design, life path, life journey, ME overall. I felt doomed, and I didn’t like having that channel there. I felt like there was no way to avoid it, no way to avoid all the battles and the struggle, so I tried to befriend it. My only hope was that whatever I had in my chart, had different possibilities to be used, and as a life of battles and struggles was not necessarily my dream, I started investigating to see what the light of this channel was.

Gate 28 is also called the Daredevil or the Game Player. It is afraid that life is meaningless, and it is always in search of a purpose, something to dedicate its attention to. It faces darkness with courage and is not afraid to dive deep into the deepest darkness. This is not a gate for the faint of heart, nor for the ones that want to avoid their shadows. This gate loves shadows and darkness, because in there it can find the root cause of a situation and eliminate it. It shakes hands with Gate 38, the Warrior, forming the Struggle Channel, and together they venture to the darkness, to look for the shadows and integrate them. Gate 28 understand fear and enjoys overcoming obstacles. Or at least this is what it does on the good side, because on the shadow side, this gate can get very afraid of death or purposeless death to be more precise, and can either refuse to take on any risks, or it starts taking crazy and illogical risks just to feel something.

Gate 38, the one that was in transit last days, is the gate of the Warrior or of the Purposeful Fighter. I have seen this gate in action during these days, and it seems that people are just engaged in fights and struggles, situations and environment keep shifting, the battle seems chaotic, and the general mood is an aggressive and confused one. But the good side of this gate is perseverance, and not giving up in the middle of the “battle”, but keeping on with it, until the end, whether is successful or not. If Gate 38 meets Gate 28, this channel has also the power to hold on and not give up until there is a clear outcome of all the energy invested in the process. The struggle is the shadow part of Gate 38, not it’s light! The struggle comes from the mind that doesn’t want to let go of control and fights the natural course of life.

We all have a mind that has been conditioned, and that sometimes takes on the controls, whether we realize it or not. But the mind doesn’t have consequences, and the mind doesn’t know much, to be more precise. The mind can only take decisions based on what it knows, and what it knows is limited. A mind cand never know when another person will appear in our life, or what natural event that will shake our existence will happen tomorrow. The mind is fixed, it knows what it knows, and can’t go beyond its limits, unless it learns something new. And, most of the times, it doesn’t like to learn something new! Because that would mean that until now, the mind was not that knowledgeable, not “all-knowing and mighty”, it wasn’t perfect! The mind can’t take that, it has a huge “Ego”, and it will always try to take and keep control of our lives. So if our feeling tell us to go to the right, but the mind’s logical conclusion is to go left… there is where the struggle begins.

The only struggle that I could find in reality, was the one with my mind and my thoughts. The only struggle that there is, is with myself, because everything else around me just flows naturally. I can choose to flow with it, and surrender, by following my Strategy and Authority, or I can fight it, oppose it, and hope for a small win. But why fight? Why struggle? When I could choose to honor life, honor everything that life brings as an experience, along my way and fight for myself together with Life, and not against it.