Marching On
AKA: Tell me you’re on your healing journey without saying you’re on your healing journey
Whether I wanted to or not, I frequently found myself in heavy reflection this month. Processing my feelings, confronting old patterns. And don’t even get me going on the days when I found myself re-confronting a different flavor of old patterns I thought I’d already worked out and turned into lessons learned. All this, while trying to force myself to do the bare ass minimum of my routine self-care, and doing what I could to stay the course-steering my life’s ship as best I could despite perceived disruptions. This month, changed perspective once again fully extended its pimp hand across the universe to bring me its sweet, sweet reality check of a caress. But it led to some important lightbulbs for me.
Lightbulb #1: There’s a lot of freedom in changing your perception. Like more than I initially thought possible.
None of the times I thought I’d lost in life or failed had I ever really lost or failed. My perception at the time and my wounds said I had, but I really hadn’t. I just shifted into a different pool of opportunity. (It may have been a pool filled with little kids pissing and sh*tting in it, but it was an opportunity-filled pool no less.) My perspective has shifted so much in so many ways, and it thankfully continues to do so. Afterall, I AM the captain of my motherfucking ship (in this case, the ship being my life and myself). I AM in charge of me and what I do or don’t do, and with that freedom comes great responsibility: to bravely do so from a place of empowerment. And bonus: I’m now learning to enjoy life through a different lens-one with upgraded life experiencing capabilities.
Lightbulb #2: We’re all just specks of dust in an endless universe, playing out our karmic life lessons through the lens of our lived experiences.
We have no control over how other people view things through their own life-colored glasses so don’t take on that responsibility. People will misunderstand your heart and intentions, seeing a distorted version of reality through the windows of their unhealed wounds. And, just because you do the healing work, doesn’t mean that everyone else around you does or that they’ve reached the same level of healing that you have. This means as much as we want to, we can’t hold anyone else to our own personal standards of behavior. Everyone is navigating their life path through their experiences with traumas, perceived failures, hurts, grief, and more. If/When more people consciously make an effort to see one another in this light, I think we can really make some actionable, positive changes in this world. But it all starts with self. We each have to make the commitment to better ourselves and somewhere along the way, our compassion meter will get realigned as well. And this is a bitter pill to swallow. But, we all encounter our own versions of this throughout our lives courtesy of the aforementioned pool of opportunity.
Lightbulb #3: Time is literally whatever you make it.
This month I played around with how I view my time; mostly, changing my perception and concept of it. Whenever possible, instead of fighting against it I surrendered into its flow. Now that I’ve done this more, it feels like this is how time was always meant to be experienced-in this graceful, unrestrictive manner. The days I did this, I felt I was living in a more harmonious, ‘moving prayer’ kind of way as opposed to obsessively jumping from one task to another until bedtime. Obviously, this is not possible every day but on the days that it is, I fill my cup to the brim with that energy and take full advantage of the creative flow that’s typically born from it.
Lightbulb #4: All newness takes time to get accustomed to.
At some point in my life EVERYTHING was new: it was new to tie my shoes; new to brush my teeth, new to eat solid foods. All things that I, like most people, take for granted because we’ve been doing them so long. I don’t have to think about how I’ll perform the necessary functions to complete those tasks, I just do it. Why? Because after much repetition, those tasks graduated from newness to normal. So now when I start to feel my body’s physical response to newness (anxiety) creeping in, I try to stop and remind myself of this. I breathe, get centered, and remind myself that if I could learn to do all the things I already have so far, I can learn to do whatever this new thing is too. That I’m no longer held to anyone else’s standards of how I do this, that I have the freedom to approach this newness however I see fit. To make it work for me. This lightbulb was about learning to be comfortable in the discomfort; in the uncertainty of the newness at hand. To sit amongst the chaos, whether real or imagined, while remaining grounded in the present; relying on my faith, knowing that everything is happening for me and not to me.
