Tag: addiction

The Bottom Half

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“To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards of us all.”
-Abraham Lincoln

Donate, protest, keep sharing, exposing and doing what you can. Do the right thing, don’t look away.

That is the top half of freedom. The bottom half hides in a dark well, looking up. Another kind of protest, a quiet conviction FOR something, a belief, a knowing that burns truth and passion into your soul. The thing, or things, the parts of yourself that fascinate and excite you, and scare the shit out of you. The heartfires you want to pursue, the love you want to surrender to, the power you want to inhabit. But you’re afraid to admit it and say it out loud, especially to yourself. Because once you do, you will have to do something about it. It commands your attention. And you know that if you ignore it, you won’t be able to live with yourself.

Eckart Tolle said that his life changing moment came when he heard the words “I can’t live with myself any longer”. The awakened question appeared, “who is the ‘I’ that I can’t live with?”

Who is the ‘I’ that’s talking to the little suffering self that I think is me?

To feel that ‘I’, that voice, the entity that’s watching, is to know it surrounds you and IS you at the same time. That voice, that feeling, knows who you are and what you’re here to be. It speaks louder and feels stronger than who you’re not, while the skittering monkeymind self runs around in a junkyard, trying to drown it out. It bangs on cans and spins circles in the garbage with distractions and arguments. But the “I” inside and all around is incessantly still and patient. It only wants your emergence out of illusion. And it won’t shut up, ever.

The trials of life, and resistance to them, of giving up and starting over, and over again, through it all I begin to hear more of what this other “I” tells me. Especially when what it’s saying pisses me off; because dammit I can’t escape it. The truth has a funny way of backing us into a corner. It nags you in the back seat, and floats around in your depths. Pull it up and to the front, let it breathe fresh air. Fight, thrash and cry with it. Your tears unleash it and will calm you down. The feelings felt, the words finally spoken, this other “I” moves in and takes charge.

Drive where it tells you, take the lid off the well. There’s nowhere to go but beyond what you were. Hidden in dark water, asleep in the dirt; you’ll wake up to the sky, in the garden.

Set Yourself Free

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“Grief is the price we pay for love.”

Heartbreak. Is it worth it? Yes. The person you’ll become by being a willing participant in life, in diving into the mysteries of your heart, is why you’re here. You can’t know who you are by staying shut down and afraid to be vulnerable. It’s an honor to feel with such intensity, depth, and enormity that you think it might kill you. Some spend their whole lives only knowing the painful numbess of their own repression. You could die tomorrow, in the prison of your own making. That is the real killer. Don’t waste this life regretting that you didn’t honor the gifts you were given. Not just your talents, but your deepest expression of connection. Most especially in the terrifying, exquisite dance of intimacy between two hearts.

When love arrives, in whatever strange form it does, allow it to do to you what it will. Even in surprising friendships, connections with animals, familial bonds, or passionate human desiring, love is your greatest teacher. One of it’s infinite lessons is to remind you that you had it all along. The Wizard behind the curtain is you.

To survive your biggest fears, the simplest answer, and most difficult endeavor, is to love yourself first. Above all else. And to forgive yourself for every fall back. Not just once, not just on paper, but as an ongoing practice. It is not a meme, or a self help quote, or an overused platitide, or a nice concept. When taken in, when surrendered to, it can never be overstated. It is the key to the door you’re afraid to open. It is your mission. With love of your own beautifully imperfect self, you can venture through the treacherous wilderness of the world, and relationships. That sword of Self Love cuts through the bullshit. It burns straight into the core of your life and unearths the treasure that you came here to find.

Love is the calling, fear is the challenge. Accept regardless and step out into the deep. They go hand in hand as the soulmates of your life. Trust is the boat that carries them. Don’t watch it go by. Get on board.

21 Days, Day 3 – uh oh

“Oops, I did it again!” It’s astonishing really, how many times we make a decision, a declaration, such as, “this time I’m doing it, goddammit, as God is my witness, I’ll never (fill in the blank) again!” And then, uh oh, we do. “I’ll only be (fill in the blank) from now on!” And then, uh oh, we aren’t. I decided on Sunday, day before yesterday, again. I made a promise to myself.

And then yesterday, on Day 2, I got a bug, I felt a little sick. I woke up all puffy and achey. But because I’d made my declaration to myself, I ignored that I was actually feeling sick. “Nah, just temporary, you’re not sick, you just feel off, this is your battle, your challenge, push through it!”. And I went to class, my daily workout. This was just one little part of my declaration, my Grand Plan to be the person I dream of being, now. Then, though 95% of the time I feel great after moving my body in the way my former Dancer self used to, and it makes me stronger and more determined in my new decisions and declarations, this time, hmm, I still didn’t feel so good. Dammit! Why can’t I just keep going with my awesome self and go to my favorite cafe and write all day, on this precious day off, like I was planning to! Why am I sabotaging myself, again?

But that right there, assuming I’m sabotaging myself, that’s the pattern. I’m feeling great and then boom, some type of doubt or fear comes up. It’s either in the form of something on the outside happening that I have to stop everything and deal with, which then seemingly takes me off my path. Or more often than not, something on the inside happens. Like I feel sick, which translates to weak, which translates to “see, you can’t keep up that power, that strength you thought you had, this new life, new person you want to be, it’s just too hard, there’s too many things to overcome, I’ve spent too many years doing this over and over, I really don’t know if I can change in the fundamental, earth shattering way I will need to in order to change my life”.

All this comes from a belief that I’m sabotaging myself; which, on the one hand, on a surface level, on the level that my Little Me mind can recognize, I am. My Little Me mind has grown up and is at the stage where at least it can see my patterns of letting myself down. From a psychological perspective, it’s a pattern of believing I sabotage myself, of knowing that this is a pattern we all engage in, in one form or another. Sure, I can leave it at that, understand it, and try again.

But underneath that, is this. My soul, the Spirit that is me, the God that is me, is also whispering to Little Me, and they are having an ongoing conversation. Right now, the God that is me is speaking louder, thank heavens. “No, what you think is your sabotaging pattern is just Me speaking to you. You need not force yourself to do or be anything, you need not have to make it happen, you need not have to change, you need only to see that you already are worthy of all of it, perfect now, and I am giving you what Little Me sees as an obstacle, what Little Me sees as your sabotaging pattern. I take you beneath, to the underworld of doubt and fear, so you can see it for what it is, only that. They are just feelings, feelings that are part of what you chose to experience by coming to Earth. And when you feel it, you then come bounding out and up into your world with more clarity on the next right thing to do, with more strength and power than you actually had before I took you down there, more knowing that you are really Me.

I was, am and will be, giving you these moments, these gifts, every day until you reach the next dimension (the glorious secret I am keeping from you, the best surprise ever!), to have you feel everything there is to feel in this dimension. The more you feel, the more you experience the depths of doubt and fear and the heights of joy and love, the more you know that it is always changing. So, the less you fear the doubt and fear, and the less you attach to the love and joy. You see that you are creating all of it, to simply show you more. You see that doubt and fear and love and joy are equal in their ability to help you expand, which is the only reason you came here. The more you see this, the more love you can have for your doubt and fear, and for your human self. You can then say hello to the doubt and fear and know they are just your friends. They aren’t there to hurt you, they love you. And you learn to love them too. You wouldn’t be able to love them if you weren’t already Love, the more free you become, the more you see that you and I are One.”

So my lesson given to me today by my Creator, by the Creator that is me, is that no, getting sick and not working out, breaking my cleanse slightly last night by eating to push down the doubt and fear, feeling regret and shame this morning because of it, feeling I’ve fallen back yet again, is not my “sabotaging pattern” at all. It is meant for me, it is my gift to myself, because look, had I not gone on yet another dive into the underworld, whether in a few seconds or a few days or weeks, I wouldn’t have seen this truth. And I wouldn’t have written these very words.

Questions to stop asking

There are so many things I want to talk about, and of course the clincher is what to say right now. I get hung up on, what is the most pressing to work on? What do I want to do here? What’s the point again? When I think I’ve decided, then this road sign in my subconsious immediately shows up to say, “Stop! Uncharted territory, go back to safety”.

I think I’ve narrowed down that road sign’s real voice – “who is going to read this?!” And more to the point, who is going to read this whose opinion of this I care about? Certain people have been popping into my head and when they do, there’s a tinge of anxiety. “Oh god, if they knew this then…” Well, then, what? They would think differently of me, look down on me, know my weaknesses, and therefore, be more capable of hurting me? Is that what it is? Ok, then what? How could they hurt me?

Aha, I think I’ve reached the end. The part of me, the real me, the I, that is all knowing, all powerful and all love, that part knows they can’t hurt me. But the little personality me struggles with the question of “they could hurt me…in some way! I don’t even know how, but they just could!”

Well, isn’t it better to at least see that the little me can’t even see how they could hurt me? Yes, that’s already a step up. I can’t even think of what it is exactly they could do, probably because I’ve only just started to go public with myself. I realize that the more I do this, the more risks I take, the more fear I conquer, the more challenges and new fears to overcome will of course continue to show up, and in bigger forms than before.

But strangely, I’m not caring, and more importantly, not even thinking of any one terrible thing that could happen if I speak my truth. So instead of trying to come up with something, I’m going to move on, up and out, of putting any of my precious attention on that crap. Crap is actually a benign word for it, Insidious Evil is more like it.

So, whoever that person is, who, if I knew they saw this I’d feel humiliated and victimized, whoever they are doesn’t even exist.  They are living their own lives within their own minds and whatever I think they’re thinking is not even true. ‘They’ are simply a feeling of something “out there” that’s going to get me, somehow, some way. And nothing ever is. I am forever.

Therefore, here it is, last night was a struggle. After the last post, though there was some relief to be writing, I ate what I didn’t want to eat out of some vague anxiety that I couldn’t put my finger on, I sabotaged my good feelings, and it doesn’t even matter. The work is this – stop trying to figure out why I do things that hurt me. Just notice the pain of not knowing how to be the idealized person I want to be. That pain is just the little me continuing to fight for survival. I acknowledge her, I forgive her, I love her and I continue, with the other me, the I Already AM by my side who knows everything is always working out exactly as it must.

(artist unknown)