— Blue Onyx Arts

Experience becomes Knowledge becomes Understanding becomes Joy. Each step is important in itself. Without one there cannot be the others. All steps must be fulfilled fully in order to get to the next one. Experiences must happen, whether seen at the time as positive or negative, they must create their own mark in order to move on to knowledge. What is extracted from experience is knowledge. We know looking back on our experience how we felt and what happened in a physical and psychological way, this is the knowledge in a very academic sense. Now this gets transmuted to understanding, a large threshold to cross that many people get stuck at, because instead of understanding, they’d rather live in the experience and knowledge and be the victim over and over again. Understanding walks hand-in-hand with compassion. To understand the situation from a removed view is to have compassion for others but especially for yourself, then once you’ve hit the point of compassion you are open to reap the rewards and benefits of joy. You have used your heartache, hardship and difficulty to move to a place of joy. You have done the work in order to set yourself free, you now hold the key that allows you to see that experiences are nothing to fear, they can and do hold joy at the end of them.