Finding what has been lost - Grace

With life you get hurt. Sometimes it is just little things said to you by people that say they love you other times it hard hurts where you feel like you have been gutted and left for dead. You think you will never be the same and that is true but what can you do but keep moving.

You know you have lost small chunks and big chunks of yourself but you learn to function as this new person you have become.  You get use to feeling less than the person you were and eventually you accept that this is the person you are and then the memory of who you were fades all together. 

This is the point of acceptance and it feels pretty god to give up or give in. You can stop trying so hard and spend your time doing something besides thinking about trying to get back to the person you were. I feels like freedom.

You get on with it you do what is required of you everyday. People look at you the same they don't know that there has been a shift within you. You don't know this yourself except you have more energy you feel a little lighter and a lot less emotional.

Finally one day out of the blue something happens that makes you laugh. It feels peculiar but it starts to happen more often and then there is the singing in the shower.

Many months later you realize that without explanation you have returned to yourself. You are not the same but actually better. You know that something extraordinary has happened and you accept the grace that has been given to you. Once again.

A Better Dream - More letting go

I heard the phrase "a better dream" today and it struck me by the power of these few words. Life for me has been about achieving a dream of emotional happiness. Finding the dream of a life where all the boxes had been checked and in the end would make me feel love and satisfied with my life.

For most of my life I tried many different ways to create the dream that seemed to work for a lot of people. I lived a very conventional life during two long term relationships. The the relationships didn't survive and when the second ended I nearly didn't survive. I had lost my best hope of achieving the dream I had in my mind.

I have been forced to look at what I have done with my time here on earth. Some would say it is just life but I expected better or I expected that it would be easier to to create a life with another person and I expected that it would be permanent.

I have always been a dreamer thinking that everyone finds the kind of love the love we see in the movies or the kind of love my parents had. The kind of love I might add that nearly destroyed my dad when my mother died.  I am have been like him with every relationship lost I have felt devastation. A bit dramatic but it felt like death each time.  I held tight to the dream of living life a certain way experiencing the ups and downs and having someone standing beside me.

I have given up on the pursuit of that one dream for a better dream. The dream of living each day with the expectation of wonderful moments where ever they come from. With some painful maturity under my belt I can admit I have no idea what will make me happy today or any day in the future.

I feels really good to be free from the responsibility of searching for something. I can reclaim all that lost energy and just live my life and that is what I am doing. I can have a better dream one that doesn't have to look a certain way. I can be open and let my life flow towards me instead of chasing an old dream that never really worked for me anyway.

A better dream......

The Three of Me - Living life a new way

I have been a selfish person most of my life. This doesn't mean that I didn't do a lot of things for people or that I didn't make plenty of sacrifices of my time and energy but most of the time the pain in my mind got top billing. I lived despite the circumstances I carried around in my mind.

I have experienced a lot grace throughout the years and have be reborn emotionally many times. At the end different episodes of my painful life I would emerge happy and lighter but in time something else would happen and I would enter a new period of pain and again a rebirth.

The difference for me this time is that I feel like I see myself from outside myself. I can look at how lost I have been and see that this kind of pain and suffering is a selfish pursuit. It couldn't be helped  I was trapped with only my own mind to give me advice and that was a dead end proposition.

But I feel healed in a way I have never felt before. I can see that I have been my only friend and my only enemy all along. I have discovered grace once again and I am feeling extremely grateful today.

I believe we have three parts of us that live inside and we must find harmony within ourselves in order to find peace and happiness. We have our mind of course and then our emotional self and last but not least the spiritual self or our core self.

The mind is easy to explain. Your mind believes you can think yourself out of any problem. Your emotions show up when the mind can't solve the problem usually with a meltdown or a burst of anger. Both are just distractions and provide us with a temporary solutions and we can get caught in a loop that just fills our time.

The harder part to describe is the spiritual self or the real self. It is a part of you that knows what you really want at that moment. The part of you that says ugh when you agree to do something that doesn't truly feed you. It is the part of you that patiently waits until the other two are exhausted before saying just the right words that change your life. It isn't interested in a discussion or how you feel about things it just knows in that moment what you really want.

The trouble is that when life hurls rocks at you starting at an early age it seems our mind or our emotions take control and we spend our lives unbalanced feeling like we are just not right going back and forth between thinking and emotions.

My mind has always controlled me and my emotions played second only emerging in sadness and suffering. My thinking self knew sadness was the logical outcome in certain situations so it was acceptable to let my emotions take center stage for a certain period of time.

It never seemed like a war within. It all seemed normal just part of who I was. I was mostly unhappy and felt sadness even when some my dreams came true.

My awakening came when my mind and emotions were both exhausted and there was no one left to run the show. It was quiet there for a really long time and it was uncomfortable for a really long time. I didn't know what was happening. I had never lived in silence before but I didn't have a choice this time.

One day one moment I heard a voice. Not audible so don't lock me up but a small voice that said "you are doing this to yourself". My mind was so weak at that point it barely had an opinion. I didn't change a thing I was doing but I started to get better. I have always wanted to get better but this time my mind didn't have a plan. This getting better as you know took awhile but I had nothing but time.

My core self is managing my mind and emotions these day. I say managing because my mind isn't always willing to do what is best for me and demands top billing and my emotions don't honestly reflect the reality of the situation or the truth about why I feel the way I do.

My mind and emotions grew from my childhood experiences and it is taking time for them to grow up and see I am no longer a child. My spirit wasn't affected by those experiences because it only lives in the moment. It has been watching and waiting for its turn and that time has come.

With  this balance life feels more like a vacation than a war. I am looking forward to what life has to offer now instead of bracing myself for more of the same. I know there will be ups and downs but now I know I can face them without fear.

Happy New Year.