Life extracts its toll. Period.

No one escapes trials. They look different for each person. Trauma is relative. The child who comes from a very loving home and environment can be traumatized by something that would seem, to the child growing up in the ghetto, as less-than nothing.

Yet, it isnt nothing. For regardless the cause, when your overriding reality is suddenly disrupted by something unexpected, the reverberations live inside you for a while. There is no set time limit on how long you reel from the aftereffects of any one incident. It takes as long as it takes.

The only variable in the equation is your choice. And it is your choice to compress, eliminate or expand the time it takes you to move away from the cycle of your pain. It is your choice to stay locked into the past or future, or living inside the present moment.

Working within the healing arts exposes you to trauma of all sorts. It is virtually impossible to insulate yourself completely from the pain of others. To compound matters even more, healers often must run through repetitive internal gauntlets of personal doubts about their abilities, skills, sensitivities, and, yes, even intention.

It can be an extremely vicious circle when self-doubt creeps in to the work youre called upon to do. It can begin through any number of ways, but a sure-fire entry point is that place where you accept there are dues to be paid.

In some situations, dues are simply an exchange for services: In return for this, you must pay that. But in a lot of cases, the concept is expanded to include something like if you want to do this, then you have to pay just like that. In essence, dues are a statement that this and that are the way things are; for me, for you, for everybody.

Thats where the problem occurs. When you accept someone elses definition of dues (or their way of paying them), as your own, you are living their life, not yours.

Just like with natural consequences, there are natural dues. But they are written in broad strokes implying that, of course, there truly is a passageway and cost to gaining any kind of knowledge and experience. Paradoxically, while dues in general are not specific, the passageways and toll booths leading to them are very specifically designed for the individual.

Thats why the dues for you are not necessarily the dues for me. Even though, for example, we both want to be good Doctors, its going to take you a whole different set of lessons than me to get there.

And dont forget, this concept runs both ways. As you must free yourself from adopting others paths without taking the time to adapt them to your particular needs, you must also free others to find their own ways without imposing your definition of dues on them.

When you choose to enter into agreement with the concept there are dues to be paid that conform to a fixed, outward-driven criteria whether this be with yourself or others -- you are moving as if there is only one way to gain experience.

Where that falls flat is that it eliminates the factors of choice and your ability to affect both your circumstances and your attitude. These are among the most powerful tools at your disposal. To impose the concept of dues on them is to choke your potential.

As a healer, it is of paramount importance to live within the what is of the moment. That means maintaining freedom from any assumptions or expectations of how things will work out, or, by extension, what they will cost.

Believing that in any one situation you are just paying your dues implies that youre enduring what is happening now, rather than doing something to create a new moment.

Things do happen and you do get affected. These are the dues of life. It is ongoing. Things happen every moment. You are affected every moment. And though we may guess at how long any one particular incident may continue its effect, or how that will specifically manifest itself, we never really know; not for ourselves, not for others.

Dues are, by definition, that which is deserved, or owed. It does not mean that which has been pre-determined. When we lock ourselves into a belief system that were just paying our dues were prolonging our time in a place of reaction rather than action.

Never should we discount the experience of others, but neither should we cling to it as something that defines our own paths. So pay your dues, to people, to situations, to your God, but only that which is earned or deserved. As long as it serves you, as long as theres an even exchange, its worth it. But when the balance gets off kilter, its time to start to seek an approach that frees, rather than constricts you.