The Phrase That Keeps You Stuck
I was sitting with a woman recently who had just come through the collapse of a business partnership. She had been overridden, dismissed, and eventually pushed out of something she helped build. She told me the whole story with remarkable clarity — the early warning signs, the moments she stayed quiet when something in her said speak, the agreements she signed against her own knowing.
And then, at the end of it all, she folded her hands and said, “But I guess it was meant to be. I obviously needed the lesson.”
I want to be careful here, because I understand why we say this. I have said it myself. When something painful happens, we reach for meaning the way a drowning person reaches for anything that floats. “It was meant to be” gives the pain a shape. It suggests a benevolent intelligence behind the wreckage. It lets us exhale.
But I have come to believe that this phrase — as it is commonly used — is one of the most quietly corrosive ideas in the entire spiritual world. Not because meaning doesn’t exist. But because of what we are actually doing when we say it.
What this phrase is really doing
Listen closely the next time you hear someone say “everything happens for a reason” about their own life. Notice when it gets said. It almost never follows a triumph. It follows a boundary that was crossed. A relationship where someone tolerated the intolerable. A deal where someone knew better and proceeded anyway.
In those moments, “it was meant to be” is not a spiritual insight. It is an anesthetic.
It numbs the one place we most need to feel: the exact moment we abandoned ourselves. The woman I mentioned didn’t lose her business because the cosmos had a curriculum for her. She lost it in a series of specific, identifiable moments — the meeting where she swallowed her objection, the contract she signed while her stomach turned, the year she spent hoping the situation would fix itself. Those moments were hers. They belonged to her. And “meant to be” was the story that let her never have to look at them.
This is how we hand our own authority away and call it faith. We take the most important data of our lives — the moments where we betrayed our own values — and we file them under “destiny” so we never have to review them.
The universe is not withholding a lesson from you
There is a version of spiritual thinking that imagines the universe as a stern schoolteacher, repeating the same painful pattern until we finally “get the lesson.” Same kind of partner, same kind of betrayal, same kind of financial collapse, yet surely, we tell ourselves, this keeps happening because there is something I have not yet understood.
But here is what I have watched, over and over, in my own life and in the lives of the people I work with: understanding is almost never the missing piece.
Most people repeating a painful pattern understand it in exquisite detail. They can trace it to their childhood. They can name the attachment style, the parent it echoes, the fear underneath it. They have journaled about it, processed it in therapy, cried about it at retreats. Ask them why they keep attracting emotionally unavailable partners, or why they keep undercharging for their work, and they will give you an answer so precise it could be published.
And then, the next time the moment arrives, the moment where the pattern either repeats or breaks, they do the same thing they have always done.
This is the distinction that changed everything for me: a lesson lives in the mind, but a skill lives in the body. A lesson is knowing why you say yes when you mean no. A skill is the felt capacity to say “no” out loud, in real time, with your heart pounding, while someone you care about is disappointed in you.
The pattern does not repeat because you haven’t learned. It repeats because you haven’t yet built something. And no amount of insight substitutes for the building.
Why the ego loves destiny
The ego, contrary to how we usually talk about it, is not primarily arrogant. It is primarily comfortable. It will accept almost any story about your life as long as that story doesn’t require you to do something difficult right now.
“Meant to be” is the ego’s favorite spiritual phrase because it converts an active assignment into a passive experience. Instead of “I need to develop the capacity to hold my ground under pressure”, which is hard, unglamorous, repetitive work, we get “the universe is unfolding my growth in perfect timing.” One of these requires you to change. The other requires you to wait.
And waiting feels spiritual. It has the aesthetics of surrender, of trust, of faith. But there is a difference between surrendering to what you cannot control and surrendering what was always yours to do. The first is wisdom. The second is abdication wearing wisdom’s clothes.
True spiritual maturity, I have come to believe, asks us to make a surgical distinction. There are things in life we do not choose — loss, illness, other people’s decisions, the timing of grace. Meaning-making around those things can be sacred. But our boundaries? Our values? The moments where we knew and did not act? Those were never the universe’s to carry. When we hand them over, we don’t become more spiritual. We become less sovereign.
So the practice I offer people is blunt: retire the phrase entirely wherever your own boundaries and values are concerned. Replace it with a harder, truer sentence: “This happened because I haven’t yet built the capacity to do it differently.”
Notice that sentence carries no shame. “A capacity I haven’t built yet” is not an indictment, rather it is a diagnosis, and a hopeful one, because capacities can be built. What it refuses to do is hand over your agency.
The deeper version of the phrase
To be clear, I am not asking you to abandon “meant to be” forever. I am asking you to earn a more mature version of it.
Because something remarkable happens when you stop using destiny as a painkiller and start doing the actual work — when you practice the “no,” when you hold your value under pressure enough times that it becomes part of how you move through the world. Your perception changes. The static clears. And you begin to notice that certain choices arrive with a quality of unmistakability. A clarity that feels less like deciding and more like recognizing.
People describe these occurrences as feeling like it was “meant to be”. I no longer argue with the phrase because at this stage, it means something entirely different. It is no longer a story told after the fact to excuse what happened to you. It is an awareness arising before the choice, about what is yours to do.
This is the evolution: “meant to be” stops describing events and starts describing alignment. Not “the universe decided this for me,” but “I have become clear enough to recognize what is aligned, and I have built the skill to act on it.” The first version makes you a passenger. The second makes you a co-creator who can finally hear the road.
The universe, in my experience, is not writing your story without you. It is waiting, patiently, endlessly, for you to pick up the pen with steady enough hands.
Two questions worth sitting with
So I will leave you with the two questions I ask myself whenever I catch the old phrase forming in my mouth.
First: what pattern in my life am I still narrating as destiny, when the truth is I haven’t yet done the daily work? Not the understanding, I probably have that. The daily actions. The practiced, real-time, heart-pounding act of choosing differently even when it may cost comfort.
And second, the more beautiful question: what clarity has already arrived that I keep treating as a someday, because acting on it would ask something of me today?
Sit with those honestly and you will likely find both answers waiting. Most of us do. The pattern we are still narrating as fate, and the aligned choice we are still postponing. The work of a sovereign life is closing the distance between these two.
If something in this is landing for you, consider reaching out or joining us in a retreat this year. Words on a page can’t do the work with you, that happens in a room, in real time, which is exactly where your patterns live too.
We’d love to work with you.
