Most of us have had that moment where everything in life seems to be flowing smooth, we feel gratitude, we feel confident and then blam! It happens. A person or circumstance challenges us, triggers us, and threatens to knock us off balance.

That’s The Trickster.

The Trickster is an archetype. So, it’s like an essence or a character like The Joker in Batman. It’s the thing that will look into our eyes and laugh at us as it burns a huge pile of money that we really could use in a big way. It’s any event that throws us into a spin, gets us off balance, and threatens to take us down.

Why Does The Trickster Seem to Arrive When Things Just Start Going Good?

This is one of the most frustrating aspects of human life. The bad news is, almost no one gets out of this. The good news is – you’re not alone when it happens to you, because it happens to almost all of us. If you happen to be stubborn and intense like me, The Trickster will come in like a bull in a China shop and cause what seems like a huge mess. It’s a huge emotional mess – if we let it get us to that.

There are ways to stay balanced and confident while facing a trickster moment in life. But first, why does The Trickster have to come onto the scene at all? And why when things are finally balanced do we see it come up again to challenge us?

The process we go through in Earth school has to do with cycles within a vast system that is beyond human comprehension. It’s for this reason that life seems so confusing in the first place. Our soul inhabits a body, and we spend a lifetime in a vessel that we simply cannot understand every aspect of; and most of us understand very little about our body. The entire experience of being human is a mystical mystery. That’s why we use archetypes, personality types, and other symbols and stories to try to understand the human experience and relate to what’s happening while we are on this amazing soul journey. Being challenged is one of the constant facets to being human. We’re always trying to survive, and there is always struggle and loss in that endeavor.

There is joy and there is sorrow in every human journey. We spend time and energy trying to create a life for ourselves that will bring us joy, and we tend to avoid sorrow and negative emotions. The problem with avoiding any aspect of our being, is that it is simply unavoidable and eventually we will see the shadow side, or the dark parts, of ourselves and others. We live in a paradoxical reality. We only know light because we know dark. We only know nice because we know mean. When we’re floating along in life, finally feeling joy that can last for a while, we shouldn’t expect the rest of our life’s experience to be a paradise with no upsets.

This is why The Trickster appears to us when things seem to be going well. We tend to feel victimized as if nothing ever works out for us, and we tend to be sorrowful or angry and want to blame someone or something for our perceived bad luck. We tend to miss the true message of the upsetting event or person. We tend to miss the opportunity to make the experience a spiritual one or to make the experience one of personal growth.

The Trickster is something to be grateful for. This is because The Trickster is trying to get us to look at something we are wanting to avoid looking at, and to address this, to face this, to overcome and transcend this because it is simply the next step for us on our soul growth earth journey. Did we really think that being happy for a while meant we didn’t have a next step?

How to Handle The Trickster When it Appears

Now we get to the good stuff. How to just say – “Not today Satan!” – and how to know (more importantly) when not to say that out loud and still get the same results.

It’s tricky dealing with The Trickster.

Imagine the one thing right now in your life that could throw you into a whirlwind. What if it’s something really bad that you imagine like your house burning down and losing all your possessions. I feel even a bit of fear in myself just writing that sentence and maybe you felt a little anxious too when you read that sentence. In our reality, we know that people’s homes have been destroyed by natural disasters, and some places in large quantity. It’s an event that can feel devastating. Even more so for those already living in impoverished conditions.

How is it possible to see a devastating event as an opportunity for personal growth?

Because seeing it any other way will crush that opportunity, and maybe your will to survive. You can’t give up. You’re still alive. You must go on. And the way to handle the situation effectively is to avoid asking “why me?’ and avoid feeling like a victim. Understand that what seems huge in this moment will morph as each moment goes by, where we evolve to the natural next step out of the chaos we’ve just experienced. We are forced to move forward. To rebuild and to start over. It’s not because we have bad karma or “deserved” to have a crisis in our lives that a tragedy happens, it’s a human experience of loss and emotional pain, and those experiences are as much a part of being human as are falling in love or becoming a parent.

We absolutely have to take the good with the bad, having grace for both, if we want to fully embrace this mystical soul journey on planet Earth. We can do this more easily by knowing that our journey of being alive at this time is very temporary. Our soul is infinite and eternal, the experiences it has when incarnating into a living reality are temporary. We are only “alive” for so long in the human form, and as humans we are always aware that every moment of our life brings us closer to our death. As we don’t understand much about life, we don’t understand much about death. We all experience both. We all experience joy and pain during the time we have on Earth.

There are more subtle forms of The Trickster. For example, the temptation will come into view again and again to pick up a bad habit we’ve vowed to change. Smoking, drinking, any addiction, including being addicted to unhealthy relationships and unhealthy dynamics, such as codependency. The quieter form of The Trickster is self-sabotage. There is an Archetype called The Saboteur. We all have one within us, it’s again, a part of the human make up and the human collective. Why do we fall back into old unhealthy patterns? Why do we work so hard to overcome something just to go back into the same unhealthy pattern when the temptation arises?

Because until we don’t fall back into the temptation, until we do it a different way and make a new and better choice, we’ll face the same challenges and disappointments again, when things don’t go the way we want them to. We will be shown again and again that bad choices lead to bad outcomes and good choices lead to good outcomes. The wisest among us will take note that anger and actions committed out of anger have the most negative results for us and for the human collective. Selfishness is a close second to anger.

The key to handling the hard parts of life is to remember they are temporary and they are a part of being human. We don’t have to freak out or feel any way at all about these moments that are considered tragedies and crisis. We don’t need to feel like loss is a tragedy every time we experience it. Sometimes loss of a job or of a relationship is an extremely positive event in our lives, and at the time it is happening it feels like we can’t possibly go on into a state of joy under the circumstances. These are “Dark Night of the Soul” moments. Moments that make us grow up instantly, or that slap us across the face with the hard realities that go along with human life.

Some people survive these extremely challenging circumstances and some do not. Some addicts get swallowed up in darkness and some get out of the darkness and step into a whole new reality of a better life. Some people end toxic relationships and move on into inspiring roles in their life, and some people stay in unhealthy or abusive relationships and endure the consequences of the personal and emotional weight it carries. The game of life is adventurous because of free will, and because of the fact that there’s a limited about of time to exert free will to create the life of our wildest dreams, or at least to create our best life.

The Trickster comes in to help us be the best version of our human self. Sometimes it’s an ultimate test for necessary and huge soul growth that a person can surrender to. Other times it’s a huge wake up call and the person is forced to change. There are times when it is a rite of passage moment and it’s a part of our initiation into adulthood or positions of significance in our community. The process almost always results in discomfort. How we handle it and how we react or don’t react are either opportunities for growth and empowerment, or they are bad habits that drag us down and can keep us down.

That’s why it is tricky – when challenging circumstances arise in life, we immediately want to sink into a deep depression and feel like a victim of bad luck or a curse. Anything that disturbs us can set us on a course of action that yields either positive or negative results, depending on the choices we make and the path we choose to take and the value system we chose to live by through the most testing and difficult moments. The Trickster can trick us into staying dark and possibly hitting rock bottom, because it can appear as a “bad thing” that has “happened to” us instead of seeing it as a potential opportunity for major soul growth and personal transformation. The difference in that perception can mean the difference between living in our heaven on Earth or our own personal hell.

When The Trickster appears, we are best to stay very calm and at peace. We can surrender what we cannot control and be responsible for how we rebuild any aspect of our life that has been knocked off balance. We must realize the temporary nature of difficult situations and we are responsible for moving on and not replaying them again and again in our minds and thus in our lives. Moments are meant to be learned from, no matter how they appear. Mistakes are meant to be learned from. We are in control of our reactions and decisions. We are in control of what we place attention on and put energy into. We get good at handling The Joker when we don’t even flinch as he burns a huge pile of money in front of us while we are on our last $10.

When The Trickster arrives, stay calm and remember it’s a part of being human. Let it lead you in the right direction. Let it shine light on what you’ve avoided. Be confident that you can handle what you see with grace and that it is for your highest good to make correct choices in the opportunity to grow from the challenge.

Find the good.