Be good to you

I spend a great deal of time trying to bring things into my life. I lust after new experiences, new relationships and connections, deeper knowledge, and more of all the good stuff this crazy-ass world has to offer. It’s a big beautiful party not to be missed. I love living my life this way, being open to the massive potential of the universe. I’ve gotten much better at saying Yes to life and being more of an architect of my experience here. Much gratitude for this.

But I’m also looking for inner acceptance and a deeper sense of true self-love. And bringing in all these experiences sure doesn’t hurt, to be sure, because over time they make me wiser, more fulfilled, more compassionate, and more self-aware.
But I think that inner serenity that comes from loving yourself might be more about what I’m willing to say No to rather than say Yes to. And of course saying no to things, for me anyhow, takes more balls.

In the past 2 months there have been a number of people, habits, opportunities, patterns, and so forth that have gotten the proverbial boot from my life, with good results. In my personal relationships especially I’ve sharpened my intuition as to who really has good intentions at heart, and I’m learning now more than ever that if someone treats you poorly, you walk away.  I’ve been told over and over to be wise with my decisions, to be careful of who or what I let into my life. I don’t want to be ruled by fear, because life always includes hardship and pain and sometimes you have to take risks, but wherever your attention is placed, there flows your energy. Therefore fill your life only with what you really want, and a limited amount of what you don’t, as much as you have a say in it.

“Choose with compassion for yourself—where do you wish to place your focus? What plants are you nurturing and nourishing?” A very good question.

So, my challenge now is to pay close attention to those things that hinder rather than help me, and to have the guts to say no to them without feeling some sense of obligation to allow absolutely everything and everyone into my literal or figurative life. 

I think what we allow and permit in the form of our relationships, thought patterns, etc. is a direct reflection of how we really see ourselves. So if you want to be truly good to yourself you have to say no to all the shit that doesn't match up with what you want to experience. Let's do it.

Amen.

"Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here"

It occurs to me how much time I spend trying to right past wrongs. Big, heart-wrenching things and small, trivial things that should never have became things but they did. I don't even realize I'm doing it most of the time, but I basically walk around all day imagining how things should have turned out or where I went wrong or what I did to deserve something or why I treated someone the way I did and what meaning they all hold.  I still hold out for some kind of redemption of sorts. I refuse to believe in the reality of certain things and instead search for some way to turn it all around. It goes something like this: 

"Once I met a woman who’d been attacked by a man as she walked home from a party. By the time I met her she lived in a group home for those with brain injuries. Her own injury was the result of the attack, her head having hit the sidewalk so hard in the course of it that she’d never be the same again. She was incapable of living alone, incapable of so very much, and yet she remembered just enough of her former life as a painter and teacher that she was miserable in the group home and she desperately longed to return to her own house. She refused to accept the explanations given to her as to why she couldn’t. She had come to fervently believe that in order to be released she had only to recite the correct combination of numbers to her captors, her caretakers. 93480219072, she’d say as they fed her and bathed her and helped her get ready for bed. 6552091783. 4106847508. 05298562347. And on and on in a merciless spiral. But no matter what she said, she would never crack the code. There was no code. There was only the new fact of her life, changed irrevocably.  I understood her monumental desire and her groundless faith: I believed that I could crack a code too. That my own irrevocably changed life could be redeemed if only I could find the right combination of things. That in some indefinable and figurative way that would make it okay for me to live the rest of my life." (-Cheryl Strayed, Dear Sugar)

The clarity of those words hit me like a ton of bricks. It's easy to recognize the futility of reciting  a 10-digit code as a way to change something that happened to you and make it all OK again. But it's not so easy to spot the hopelessness in the constant, desperate searching, in its various forms, that fills up the day far too often. Always looking for the right thing, the person, the experience, the opportunity, that holds the power to alter reality.

Maybe for me this comes from my deeply embedded sense of justice I've always had. Or my belief that I can make things happen, for better or for worse through sheer determination and hard work. It doesn't matter. It's a pattern that needs to change. It's time to learn that it's actually OK to have the strength to say that some things will never be right. It will never be OK that some things happened. Knowing is far away, if it comes at all. That's powerful stuff.

I'll end with this:

"Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room. Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here."

LoveLoveLoveLoveLoveLoveLove

"Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by time, leavened by generosity, nourished with humor, and loaded with promises and commitments that we may or may not want to keep. The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love"

--Cheryl Strayed

 

Poetry is not

an expression of the party line.

It’s that time of night,

lying in bed,

thinking what you really think,

making the private world public,

that’s what the poet does.

~ Allen Ginsberg

 

I love this. I've never claimed to be a poet, but maybe all honest thinking, feeling, and writing is poetry, you know? Maybe we're all poets when we're by ourselves, just being. When we escape our egos, even momentarily, the poetry and beauty and truth can flow.

Revolution

Looking at my calendar today I realized a minor life event occurred exactly one year ago. The event itself was trivial as far as things go, but it launched a thousand ships that I could never have foreseen, and took me for a ride that was painful and confusing  at many turns.  The fact that a year has passed both surprised and saddened me. If you had told me one year ago I would be in the general place I’m in now, I would have been pretty depressed. Because fundamentally certain realities are exactly the same as they were then. One generally likes to see progress in life, you know?

But this of course led to an afternoon spent contemplating what real change really means and whether or not externals really matter so much when we’re speaking about transformations of the soul. And I realized that I have in fact made more progress than I would have ever imagined in a year’s time, mostly because I’ve learned to work with, transcend, or just ignore those very externals that stubbornly remain in place. Yes, there were a handful of things I wanted very badly to be different in my life by now because I thought they would bring me more happiness, but not getting what (I thought) I wanted is actually….OK. I am OK with things just as they are. I am OK with exactly where I’m at. And I think it’s because I’ve fallen madly in love with myself in the past 6 months.

It really hasn’t been until recently, in hindsight and through this new lens of self-respect, that I see previous patterns of mild self-loathing. It makes me sad for the time I wasted not feeling like life was enough or living someone else’s life because I wanted so badly to be filled up inside. I tried many things to accomplish that feeling of fullness inside. None of them were successful of course. They were all from the same “outside-in” approach, which never works.

There was not an exact science to the self-love journey. I know I got serious about opening myself up to people, and to loving and accepting them more fully. I spent a great deal of time meditating and practiced being vulnerable more and more. I became more and more gentle with myself and forgave myself for certain decisions I’d made. I think these all contributed to the positive place I’m in now. I still have to work at it every day.

Currently I feel like I’ve stopped looking for anything on the outside to tell me I’m healthy and beautiful and kind and giving and interesting and funny, or that I can powerfully create realities in my life. I feel it on the inside. It’s certainly nice when those things are manifested physically as well, but I believe when they are it’s the result of my open heart and mind creating them in my soul first.

"I love finally being able to open completely to the whole range of my experience, including all that wanting, including all that hurt, including the pain and the joy. Opening to the whole thing. Because I love myself and it’s all part of the journey that will ultimately bring me more love and connection to all that is good."

I am brave. I am full of love for people. I am strong. I am creative. I am capable of growing from sadness and disappointment. I’m not afraid to let my light shine. I take risks. I am open to all possibilities.

Hitting the reset button

Once again, I'm trying something new.

There are a handful of people in my life, whom I've known for varying amounts of time and have varying connections to, with whom I've intermittently struggled. It's different for each of them, but the central theme seems to be that I feel they have wronged me in some significant way, and although we've gone through the perfunctory "moving past it" stage where a conversation is had and apologies or excuses are offered, in my head and heart I haven't really let it go.

I know this because I don't really trust them, despite my stated "forgiveness". In my subconscious mind they are only pretending to care about me. But really they're just waiting for me to let my guard down so they can perpetrate the same disrespect, hurtfulness, and/or manipulation again. Fool me once, I believe is the expression.  I "need" to perpetually keep my guard up because as all smart people know, you forgive, but you never forget, right? You need to learn from the experience of being "attacked" and alter your relationship to these individuals, closing yourself off to them in the appropriate manner depending on the situation. You must also replay the event or circumstance in your mind over and over so you can effectively demonize the other person and hope for some kind of justice to be served (a nicer way of saying "revenge"). Don't get me wrong, I feel this way about a very small number of people and have great relationships with most. But this is the gist of how things have worked for me on a certain level with some.

The above pattern of thinking reveals many things: I apparently think I'm the center of the universe, I have quite the ego, and I enjoy seeing myself as a victim. And all that thought and emotion and energy, it really just amounts to immobilizing shadowboxing. So lame.

Sometimes when I'm stuck in my own head resenting someone (for something really stupid no doubt) I think back to the movie The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. How lovely to be able to erase someone from your memory completely. What a way to move on. If only it were real.

But I think we have that power. To erase and forget certain things if we choose. Of course not an entire person or relationship; that misses the point : ) But what's wrong with having a very literal reset button with people?

It seems counter intuitive because we feel too exposed to potential hurt. Wayne Dyer says we allow our negative beliefs about ourselves and the world around us to exist because we think we need them to protect us against future pain and disappointment. This makes sense to me. If I believe someone doesn't have my best interest at heart then it's easy to reject them before I am hurt in some way again.

But if I choose to forget how someone caused me to feel and interact with them as though it never even happened, without worrying about what they might do in the future, I'm living in the now, which is a place, I'm discovering, that's pure freedom and joy. This is authentic forgiveness and I like it.

And true forgiveness feels so amazing! You suddenly realize how much time and energy was spent fighting against a mental construct. It's the best feeling in the world to move past something and be able to put your energy to better use (and nevermind the fact that many of the feelings of resentment I have for people stem from making sweeping assumptions or a having lack of self-love on my part, which are two other areas that need some renovation).

I know wiping the slate clean may not work in any and all situations, and sometimes out of self-preservation you need to alter your relationship to someone based on their actions and your needs. But recently I've tried the reset technique with a few of my on-again-off-again "nemeses" and I'm pretty happy with the results. It's helped me apologize more frequently and sincerely when I've done something wrong too.

Although many things are shifting for me in positive ways which has given me a bigger heart and more security and bravery in general, I think this practice of letting go of resentment and embracing a true "forgetting" of the past is one of the best things I've done in a while.

Belief vs. Action

I've been meditating today on the idea of allowing space for things to emerge in my life. This is different from just believing that I can make positive changes in certain areas. It occurs to me after speaking with a very wise friend that though I may say I think and feel one way, my actions speak otherwise.

Example: one of the changes I'm making is working on more authentic connection with others. Being totally vulnerable and embracing whatever comes with that. I think about this, desire this, envision this, and so on. And though I contrive situations to help make this happen, and have learned to put myself out there quite a bit, I still do alot of little things that negate that goal. I tend to always shut and lock doors behind me, even when no one is around. I wear sunglasses even on cloudy days. I stay in my car when I'm early for a meeting. These may seem like little things but they all point to the fact that on some level I would still rather choose to shut people out and hide myself away. Because the truth is authentic connection used to make me sick to my stomach. I'm learning to let go of this fear but its still a process I suppose.

We do many things on a subconscious level without realizing it. All part of the story we try to tell about ourselves. I believe that people always perform in accordance with what they think is true about themselves and the environment. And guess what? It's always a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think you lack something, you behave as though you lack, and then create a reality where you DO lack. Simple as that.

Actions speak louder than words, and although I think sometimes thoughts and feelings need to change before our actions do, the changes we think have taken place may not have if our actions tell a different story. Learning to look more closely at actions is a tool I plan on using more in the future.

I always wonder why birds choose to stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere in the world. Then I ask myself the same question.