Coming Together

Being quiet and resisting distraction has allowed me to follow my instincts, signs, intuition, gut, heart, curiosities. 

I'm pleased that in following these I'm beginning to see a picture develop in my minds eye and I'm pretty blown away by who I am!  HAHA!  When I use the term "who I am", I am referring to my inner being who already IS everything I want to be. 

I'm excited to learn more about the things that interest me (my JOY) and light my fire.  I'm excited to be able to share it all with you as I learn it.  Just before Christmas I  found an old single journal entry I'd written on loose leaf paper.  I was really dumbfounded by it.  I could have written the exact same words the day I found it, 12 years later.  I know I've made tons of progress in the last 12 years, but I'm still working on the same issues.  I'd grown, but I hadn't changed.  That was a real gift of validation for the work I'd begun in October. 

Most people would assume that when I cancelled my calendar I was taking a break, but I was really getting down to business for the first time, at a new level of awareness.  I'm so incredibly grateful that I was afforded the opportunity to release my obligations outside of my family to change my focus and create a new way of being.

The challenges I've faced so far have been changing habits, which are really addictions. 

The first was the addiction to produce.
Learning to allow myself to be...in my own thoughts, present in the moment, whatever that moment is.  To feel whatever I'm feeling without rejecting it, without trying to change it.  In October I was depressed.  I've been depressed before.  I know many steps to overcome depression, I've done it before.  But in relinquishing my schedule, I gave myself the time to feel sad, to cry, to feel the pain in my body, to honor it.  To sleep, to lie down, to rest.  I resisted to urge to "do" because the "doing" was just a distraction, but wasn't solving my core issues.  The American culture has trained us to believe tht being sick or being tired is equal to being of weak character.  We are trained to "work hard".  When we describe our strongest traits, we often call oursleves "hard workers".  Ugggh, what an awful description.  We wonder why we are constantly struggling to swim upstream!!  I dont want anything to be hard, and I dont want anything to feel like work!  So I resisted the habit of beating myself up for not feeling happy, not feeling energetic and not feeling like "doing" anything.  It wan't an easy habit to break, but it was liberating as I released that paradigm from my way of thinking! 
"There is nothing wrong with me" was a good beginning mantra, and over the weeks graduated to "I am perfect the way I am".  Now, I was on the road to healing myself!!

The second habit, or addiction I chose to change is the addiction to approval.  The addiciton to other people's admiration.  With the ease of social networking, it's so easy to put yourself out there for the approval of others.  It took self discipline and restriction to cut myself off from my audience so that my need for attention would be shaken to the core.  When we are addicted to approval, we aren't in touch with ourselves at all as we are continually making choices based on what we think other people will applaud.  Going within to accomplish real change cannot include other peoples opinons, real or imagined! 
"There is only YOU"  is the mantra that opened the door to this new way of being.  I've learned that using other people for a barometer of my success or failure has been a dis-service to my-self.  That in order to grow we must belive in our own opinons, which really means that we must TRUST ourselves.  In order to trust ourselves, we have to KNOW ourselves and LOVE ourselves........only with these three characteristics can we ever fully BE ourselves. 

And herin lies the premise for the course I'm taking, living and creating each moment of this hiatus from my old life:   Learning To Live.