Monday, March 25, 2013

Inside the Storm: Part 1"

This was written on February 26th, 2013

I don't have "it" all figured out.  Not by any stretch of anyone's imagination.  I won't ever have "it" all figured out, and I am okay with that.  Having said that, there are certain truths that I have come to base my life on over the last 3 years 9 months and a few days, but whose counting?  I am currently trekking through something that has pain swirling around within me, sometimes crashing in waves down upon me, ad honestly, it hurts.

Right now I am raw, one big gaping open wound.  This situation, that I have co-created on some level, in my life has shaken me to my core and shattered all that I believe into millions of tiny little pieces.  I sit among them, I sift through them, some of them still too hot to touch, and I burn myself.  While this situation was not my foundation, it had been built with these truths that I have come to believe, that I have come to rebuild my life upon in sobriety.

Over the past few years I have torn my foundation down to its roots so that I could rebuild it.  I've uprooted myself as life has shown me the cracks in my foundation, places where I was growing in soil that wasn't mine to grow in.  I have been rebuilding, especially over the past 4 months, sure to plant my roots from within my center, for that is where my strength lies.

But this even has shaken me to my core and caused me to wonder and doubt my building blocks.  I believe everything has a purpose, so I seek out the purpose because, if I can't find it, then everything I believe in is wrong.  As I write this I realize that within this statement lies part of the problem.  "I seek out the purpose."  I've written so much about shifting one's perspective, and, it was a recent surrender of my perspective on everything in my life, and an openness to seeing things from a different perspective, that brought me to this place.  Part of it anyway.  How much of my life have I spent "seeking?"  Not always, granted, I am often open to seeing the gifts, blessings, and opportunities in a situation, and in just being open to them, they come.  But here I am "seeking" purpose, instead of being open to it and letting it show itself.

"Seeking."  It's interesting because I had a reading a week and a half ago and seeking was something we briefly talked about.  I didn't really have any questions but I did want to talk about my gifts.  The first thing she said was that she saw a beautiful white light hovering above me, waiting for me to invite it in.  Later we spoke about my smoking cigarettes and I told her that I have searched and I had dug deep to try and figure out what I am looking for in my smoking habit.  I told her that I know I am searching for and seeking something, I just don't know what it is.  She said it's the white light, that's what I'm searching for.  She said that the white light isn't about "seeking," it's about inviting it in and letting it flow through me.  I didn't get the connection until I started writing this.

So much of my life was spent looking outside of myself for something.  To quote Mastin Kipp over at The Daily Love, "Addiction is searching for the Divine in all the wrong places."  That was my life.  Searching for something to make it better, to stuff it, cover it up, numb it out, make it go away.  I have learned that I am not out there, I am in here <3.  That's one of my statements and I painted a beautiful girl on a t-shirt and put that phrase on there.  I know I am in here <3 and that the only way out is through the door marked "in."  Yet there is part of me, even in all the peace I have found over the last few years, that is still seeking something in the outside world, something I know doesn't exist because it's IN me.

The past week has been nothing short of an emotional storm, and yesterday was the worst of it, causing me to doubt everything, including what is real and what is not real.  It has also caused me to pull out every healthy tool that I have, every healthy tool that I advise people to use, everything I use to coach and help people with.  Is it helping?  Yes, it actually is.  Doe that mean the pain is less?  No.  Yesterday the waves kept crashing and it literally brought me to my knees and none of all that I thought I knew was helping.  Yet, I have seen an old belief pattern surface in the need to torture myself with thoughts that only perpetuate the pain.

You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise Hay, has been a blessing over the past couple of months as I have used the affirmations and she has helped me to figure out how to word a new one, "I am willing to release the need to torture myself."  That is the affirmation of the moment.  Reminding myself, as self-love has been a prevalent word in my mind as 2012 ended and 2013 began, that I love myself, has also been helpful.

Pain comes up because of how we perceive a situation and what we believe about it.  I remember wen I read Eckart Tolle's words about how emotions are IN you, they are NOT you.  It was such a profound concept to me at the time because, before that, I operated from the belief, "my emotions are me."  I so closely identified with the emotions that they were who I was, and I was them.  When I read his words something sparked in me and I knew they were truth.  But I'll be honest, the other day I told someone that while I share that thought about how pain is IN me, it is NOT me, it wasn't helping me.  Yet, I realize now that sometimes it seems to not be helping because, while I am saying that statement, I am also identifying with the pain as me to such an extent that I have trouble separating where the pain ends and where I begin.  It's all in me, my thoughts and beliefs about things, even the tools I use and suggest.

I am walking my talk, sorting it all out, stumbling, forgetting, remembering and sometimes being a bit hysterical as I allow pain to take me over to such an extent that I can't see straight.  And I suppose, what better way to know if and how these tools I use work then to exercise them during an event that has me in pieces.  Although, honestly, that thought is not always comforting.

I continue to walk forward, and in some moments I only intend it as I stand still in the storm of it all.  And while I've been writing this, something occurs to me.  To leave all that we know, to step into who we are becoming, perhaps sometimes it all has to be torn down.  During that reading she confirmed something I had been feeling, I am on the cusp of it all, stepping into my gifts, having my dreams.  She told me, when I said I just want it all to happen right now, that it IS happening, and I feel the truth of that.  But that was before this even took place.  And I have been in the in-between place of not quite who I was and not quite who I am for some time now.  Perhaps the only way for me to truly step into the beauty I am becoming is to have everything I think to be true, shattered into pieces so that I can sift through it all and choose.  I'm not sure.

All I know for certain is that I will be okay.  I will rebuild.  And I might have another stormy day in which nothing is real, including me and the ground beneath my feet.  And maybe part of it is what I have only half-heartedly believed, only because it hasn't taken the full trip from my head to my heart yet, which is that only love is real.  Everything else is an illusion.  Everything else changes.  Only love, the true form of the Soul and the Creator that is all things, the spiritual eternal concept of love, is real.  Perhaps the thought came up in hysteria so that I could ponder it in clarity, or semi-clarity at least.

I don't do it perfectly.  I believe all that I teach and I am still deciding if I believe it all as I sort through everything, and I walk it to the best of my ability.  That's an important statement, "to the best of my ability."  As Don Miguel Ruiz talks about in The Four Agreements, your best is going to be different from moment to moment.  I walk it the best I know how, in each moment.  The principles I have been living and growing by and transforming into are easy to practice when things are flowing smoothly.  It's only when I take myself out of alignment with all of that, tat they really get put to the test.  When it is the absolute darkest for me, do I use these tools?  I do.  The best I know how.  And I'll shine the light on the reflective surface of my life as best I can right now and I'll do my best to remember that, if I shine the light and open myself up and if I don't "seek," what I need to see will reveal itself.

This is me right now.  Real.  Raw.  Wounded.  Still intent on healing.  Hurt.  Pained.  Unsure.  Yet I know the Power that created me is with me and when that belief truly takes root and makes the trip from my head to my heart, then I will no longer be afraid.  I think the jist of that comes from A Course in Miracles.

One present clean and sober moment at a time.

With love and light,
Tia

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