ooo...hmmmm..scary stuff..just in time for halloween ;)

Sometimes looking into and at those dark recesses of our mind can seem scary. That is only because we believe we are going to see something we don’t want to or that the boogy man lives there. Now is that true? How many times has your behaviour made you feel ashamed or angry or sorry or sad? How often during the day do you have ugly thoughts about yourself and others..they seem to rush in uncensored and so natural that we hardly notice they are there..we are just used to the feelings of unease, doubt and depression. We THINK looking at our dark emotions is painful, that if we actively seek them out to look at somehow we are going to be eaten by the boogy man or woman and we will disappear forever in the murky underground. The thing is..we are already disappearing each time we have a ‘bad’ day or many strung together..who calls that living? We are in the underworld thinking we have no control so we let our thoughts control us, fearing to look them in the face and see them for what they really are..BOOGY MEN..meaning..make believe..a story we accept as truth..basically dark fairytales for adults. When we begin to explore both the behaviors we don’t like in others and those that we don’t like about ourselves..and lets get really honest here...aren’t they one and the same?, we get to find out the truth behind the fairytale, that it is just a play of the light and shadow that had us scared to go in the celler, that it is indeed the wind and not a ghost, that we ARE the light in the darkness and that infact the darkness is exactly the same as the light. If you are standing in a dark, completely silent room, you see nothing, you hear nothing..most of us are apprehensive..if not outright terrified because of what we do not know, what we cannot see. So turn on the freakin lights!! You will find a room filled with gifts..called..freedom, grace, gratitude, reality, happiness, love, acceptance, openness, and the greatest one of all understanding.

an intense truth

Walking into the fires of hell is the only way to know what is on the other side. We live in our own created hells everyday, thinking we are comfortable there, afraid to believe that there is anything other than what we imagine in front of us. We naively believe that it would take too much work, too much effort to actually change the way we see ourselves and the world. So we remain on the treadmills of our own created hell, suffering..innocently. The only thing we risk by taking a chance at loving ourselves and then others is the comfort of what we perceive to be out lives. Most often when something feels uncomfortable we back away from the heat, afraid to be burned. What we don’t know is that the fires we are burning in already are consuming our very happiness and peace, the fires burn low and hot almost undetectable, eating away at any and all loving kindness we have for ourselves. What we don’t know is that going through the uncomfortable fires in front of us is far more kind to ourselves than remaining where we are. Courage to move from what is comfortably eating us up into what will definitely be an uncomfortable journey, one in which we will be completely cleansed from our fearful thoughts about ourselves, seems impossible to find. And yet we have all done is at some point in our lives. Can you remember a time you did something you were terrified of doing and after doing it, asked yourself, what in the world was I so afraid for? You may even giggle at your fear now. Facing ourselves is the only way to freedom and facing ourselves means going through the fires of our own thoughts and beliefs to find what resides on the other side.

Finding kindness for yourself

How do we find the kindness we inherently have for ourselves? And why in the world do we feel like we have lost it? Kindness, even love for ourselves is always present, like an eager lover waiting for us to recognize that it is right there, if we just look we will see it, feel it, be it. It never goes away, it waits patiently to be remembered. It is the soft breeze, the loving embrace, the beautiful meadow, there just for us. This auther used to think that kindness, gratitude, peace, grace, generosity, happiness and love were something that happened to her, something she had to obtain from outside of herself, some surreal experience she could only obtain by searching far and wide, reading a gabillion books, suffering untold miseries, attaching to her perceived terrible past experiences, and finding a way to give up living the life she was living. BOY oh BOY was she mistaken, if only she had known how simple(notice she says simple..not easy) it is to become aware of the simplicity that is this..all of those experiences of being kindness, gratitude, peace, grace, generosity, happiness and love..ALL of them are WHAT and WHO she is, and it doesn’t stop there..they are what and who everyone is. Available to us all in every single precious moment…always..yes always..whispering this great truth feels exactly like heaven..because heaven is right here, right now..always was..always will be. So how to start to experience this? The simple first step is to accept where you are right now. That is it, accept where you are right now. So, for example, 20 minutes ago this author was..um..slightly agitated that she wasn’t getting time to write these very sentences..wasn’t being granted the silent quite time she believed she so desired(even now there is much laughing and music playing going on below her ;)), so she started to be less than kind to those around her..the truth is she acted like a hurt angry OLD witch, so when she became aware of this she simply said to her precious self..would you look at that, here we are again, it’s OK. That’s it…it’s OK that you are being a total turd because that is who you are being right now, it is OK. She holds herself in her truth of the moment(being a turd), without trying to change a thing, without judging herself, without beating herself up for what she believes is unattractive ugly behaviour, without apologizing to anyone, without moving to another state of being, she simple accepts completely and authentically where she is, right at THAT moment. This is the first step to finding kindness for herself and only then can she possibly find true kindness for those around her. Seems strange? Nope..simple. What happens when we do this..accepting ourselves where we are at..is that we allow a space for kindness of a seemingly magical sort. By accepting ourselves..only completely…where we are at, we give ourselves complete and total acceptance of ALL that we are..not just the pretty, ‘good’, feel good parts of ourselves..ALL of ourselves. From this place kindness is possible. It takes less time to move into a place of freedom, peace, love…a place where we can apologize to ourselves and others…a place where we can completely let go of our tension and relax into being who we really are, open to the next experience, willing to see ourselves and others in ALL of our aspects without judgment, without ridicule, with eyes and hearts wide open to the entire possibility of our beingness. Start with the simple act of accepting yourself exactly where you are. from my heart to yours....

The blame game. Yes we all do it. We find ourselves struggling to accept, understand and love ourselves and we look for the persons or things responsible for the reason that we think we can’t love ourselves. We blame our mothers, fathers, siblings, mean kids, older family members, our dog, the doctor..WHOEVER we can find to lay the blame for our internal nightmare. We do this innocently, you see when the suffering gets too great, and the mind can only take so much, there is an automatic switch to find some kind of relief, and the blame game is the beginning of that relief. It can lead to obsessions and addictions, again all innocent ways of finding relief from the pain and suffering we experience. In every situation that we choose to use as a scape goat for our pain we know that somewhere, no matter how horrific the memory is, no matter how terrible someone was to us, we know, that in some nanosecond of time we had a choice, either on how to react or in the meaning we would give the memory in the very next moment. In every moment there is responsibility for our choices of how we will perceive ours and others actions. And when we realize that we have and have had even the slightest bit of choice in any given situation, we are set free of the blame game..only completely. We have innocently used the blame game to gain some sense of relief, it has been a true and trusted friend for most of us, for years. It is a friend worth letting go of. When we blame others we cause a fundamental separation from what we really are..love, and that causes the suffering and pain we call ‘not loving ourselves’ which is really..are you ready for it??? ‘Not loving OTHERS’. When we deny anyone our love by blaming them for uhem..not loving us the way the should have or not supporting us in the way we wanted them to then we are not loving them the way we were made to love or supporting them in ANY way. And that, my loves, is what causes OUR suffering, we break from the core of who and what we are when we blame anyone for any of our suffering. By holding on to blame we prevent ourselves from living our happiness, our grace, our peace, our desires. Blame is the single enormous mountain keeping you from what you really are.(and of course blame is another word for fear, something to think about!) To begin to leave the blame game all we have to do is start today to take steps toward complete self responsibility, seeing where we made choices that affected the rest of our lives, how WE choose to perceive things, how we shut ourselves out and went into protection mode when we perceived ourselves to be threatened in anyway. WE built this fortress that we chose to live in, it is up to us to tear it down. What if we made a list of all the people and things that we blame for our current situation and then sat down with that list and got radically honest with ourselves about what really happened OR how those we blame helped us to see something we would not otherwise have seen or showed us through experience how to really LOVE others? What if we began to see those people as the gifts that they are to us and then really began to meet ourselves with understanding…acceptance..love? Exiting the blame game is the greatest gift we could ever give ourselves.