Choosing Healing

Even healers can be afraid of their healing…

Oh, how I’ve been aching for myself.

A pattern has emerged in this healing, loving, returning journey of mine back to me.

For the most part on this journey, I actively, courageously, mindfully choose love. I choose and I choose again, and in those times of consistent and powerful showing up for myself and in love and not fear, I reach a breakthrough. A breakthrough so potent and revolutionizing as to dismantle old, un-serving beliefs and permit a rise so completely anew in healing, in love, in bliss, in contentment.

My first reality-shaking breakthrough on this healing journey was forgiving my father for being human; and in doing so, restoring faith, communication and love, into 24 years of an otherwise broken relationship.

Forgiveness changed my and my father’s life and relationship with another, and it was the most liberating experience I’d endured yet. When his visit out in California was over and he left, I sunk deeply, even subconsciously, into a state of escapism and self-sabotage by drinking alcohol to excess, distracting myself with a partner with whom love did not exist, neglecting my self-care, my health, my self-love.

Five leaps forward and ten stumbles back. This resistance to healing continued for longer than I wish to admit, in my mind’s attempt to create more suffering in the wake of the rejuvenating healing that I had just allowed myself. Patterns.

Just a few weeks ago, I tuned in so deeply to myself that I ran the other way yet again. I sat gently and quietly enough to love myself back into remembering my life’s purpose.

The reason I am on this planet.

What I am here to share.

It felt good to know it, to return to it, to exhale and surrender to it.

And then, before I even knew what was happening, I found myself blocking out and engaging in various distraction and resistance techniques in attempt to un-see what I had seen. Truth.

Truth is scary. Truth is unavoidable. Truth will catch up to you and surface, no matter how far, how fast, how strategically you run. And once, and only, when truth– and self-awareness– are present, you can take monumental action.

Until you shed light and awareness in a space, you can continue living in ignorant darkness; to change a thought, behavior or state of being isn’t an option when you’re unaware of its reality.

But when you tune in deeply enough to reach a state of awareness and the truth reveals itself to you… now you have a choice.

You have a choice to do something with that truth– acknowledge it, accept it, work with it, act on it– or run the other way.

Last week, I ran. I ran in the same way I did after re-building my relationship with my father. And I’m finding all too soon that running doesn’t work for me. Running leaves me feeling empty, resistant, closed off, and fearful.

This week– today– I choose courage.

Today, I choose love, presence, faith, and surrender.

I know what I’m here for.

And I am here.

 

@leahlivefree Photography.

@skaythephotography.

 

I am here to break myself, and then others, back down to love: to soft, to water, to open flow.

I am here to guide myself, and then others, back to sacred empowerment, to wild, to connection, to knowledge. I am here to do this through nature.

Surrender Song

 

@Goodgrateful Instagram.

How To Love One’s Demons

Demons. Monkey chatter, the ego, fears, self-doubt, that voice inside your head that tells you you’re not good enough– we all have them.

It wasn’t until an honest conversation with a best-friend-mirror last night in which I realized my demons were paralyzing me from writing.

I am well-versed in embracing the light. In loving it, channeling it and sharing it. I am much less comfortable and fluent in loving the dark. I knew deep down that an error in a recently published article of mine was instilling such fear in my mind that I had been avoiding Good & Grateful and neglecting the addressing of these deep-rooted emotions, and everything I had been trying to write in recent weeks felt inauthentic because of it.

It felt inauthentic because it wasn’t the piece that needed to surface; they weren’t the words of love and acceptance that my very demons needed more than anything, and anything else was neglect. And healing holds no space for neglect.

This morning, I embraced a healing first: I have journaled my demons in tangible written form for my eyes to see. I acknowledged them instead of neglecting them. And I went through each demon-fear and without judging it or trying to change it, I thanked it for being present, and I told it that I love it. Holding my heart, I went through each fear and thanked it for being here, because each of them have taught me exactly what I need to heal. I spent generous time with each demon until the flutter in my heart ceased upon reading it and instead transformed into hosted contentment, and I thanked them again.

I share this with you all because it was a powerful experience for me in working alongside my demons in the process of healing. It was an expression of love and light to the places that need them the most; the icky, messy, uncomfortable places to reach and hold onto. I also chose to embrace a further layer of vulnerability by sharing my particular demons, the ones preventing me from writing.

We are not strong, admirable or beautiful for the light we give alone. We are magic because of the way we light-work alongside our darknesses. The mind is incredibly powerful, and often times we forget that we are our toughest critics. Thank you to an inspirational, talented best-friend-mirror who helped me see this by sharing her own demons with me.  I encourage us all to explore the heart space in offering love and gratitude instead of avoidance next time our demons surface, for they will– and I know that my heart and I will be waiting.

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My demons:

• I’m terribly insecure about the title error in my elephant journal article
• I’m embarrassed
• It makes me feel like:
  • I’m really not a good writer
  • I shouldn’t have been and don’t deserve to be published
  • My writing is emotional fluff and I have nothing substantial to write about
  • All I do is share my feelings like an over-emotional little girl who’s trying to make up for 24 years of silence, misunderstanding and repressed expression 
  • My followers, the editors at the journal, and I think I’m not credible and that I have lost my credibility as a writer
  • My blog and Good & Grateful Instagram are now tainted with the error and they are no longer “clean” and attaining to be perfect 
  • I have nothing to write and I know nothing worth sharing that brings value to other people

And after it all, with love for the darkness and the light that makes it so,

XO, my Good’s & Grateful’s

@Goodgrateful: Journaling + making vision boards with a soul sister = a solid Friday.

You Weren’t Meant To Save Each Other

Previously published by Thought Catalog at http://www.thoughtcatalog.com. The original article can be found here.

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You and your partner will never be able to rescue each other: but there is someone else who can and will.

This is a story about an ego-love: a love that you love to hate and hate to love.

An audacious, fiery, carefree, exhausting love. A try-hard love, a defensive love, an I-swear-it love and a not-enough love. A love that drives you crazy and makes you second guess and pushes you away and keeps you coming back. A love where you’re never on the same page, because when one of you is up, the other is down. A love that you found, or perhaps, it found you, to prove something– to rectify and fix something. It arose to try and save you, to save them, or to save each other. This is a story about a rescue.

∴

I wanted to save him, to heal him. Because in doing so, I was proving that I, someone like me, was deserving of and capable of being saved, too. Losing him, losing the battle of ‘saving’ him (because you will always lose in an ego-love), was the ultimate death and torture of my ego and the self-devised narrative of this worthiness-rescue game.

I was always on my toes with him. I knew from the very moment we began that he would outrun me. He would exhilarate and exhaust me, for as light and reckless as I wished to be, I had a passionate heart that weighed me down and an always-at-it-head that grounded me. But I ran. And I kept up with him, for a little bit.

I learned to play the games: to return not-so-playful and all-too-true jabs, to be a little more careless and a lot more competitive. I learned to love the way he knew how to love. But I never unlearned my own ways of loving. And sometimes, I would sneak in droplets of my love-water, biting the bullet of ego-jabs, to try and nurture his garden with encouragement, support and faith. I so badly wanted to help him grow and reach his sunlight. But his walls were solid and his knives sharp, and my efforts to drop barriers and release my light left me unarmed and burned. Despite it all, my hope and I remained desperately devoted to him.

After the failure of “us”– after the failure of my rescue– I fell into a deep depression, suffering withdrawals from my pain-addiction to him and clinging onto a dear, toxic, unhealthy, false sense of life.

I fell sick for two whole weeks when he finally left. I lost my voice. I became incapable of speaking this very trauma-induced pain of him, this pain of my own mind. In fact, I had lost my mind.

I went to all of the dark places, because I convinced myself that that’s where I needed to go to find him. And my ego and I would pull us both out of there, into light, into safety, into love.

I know now that he’ll never come back to me. Not that I need him to, in my healthier state of self-love. For he knows he’ll never be able to give me what I need, even if I sometimes forget it. He won’t respond to, address or hear my attempts of reaching out or reminiscing, because he knows that I’ll come around and one day, once again remember he can’t love me the way that I can love myself. And that will hurt him and guilt him all over again.

When he finally left me, for the last time– emotionally, mentally, physically, psychologically– he looked me in my eyes and said, “You are a beautiful person.”

And after all of the hurt, the heartache, the mind games and the ego-pain, I felt like maybe, a small shard of my love did really get through. Maybe, after it all, a piece of me was able to reach him.

That, I will never know. But I will remember that moment forever, because it marked the first day of my next and final rescue. The only and the most important one: the rescue of myself, from my own mind. And I knew then that I would be the only one to carry myself into salvation– into love– and that I was the only one standing in my own way. And I knew then that I would be victorious. I will be my own savior. And he will be his own savior. And we will both be beautiful.

What Must Life Be Like

Forgive To Fly

Let’s talk about forgiveness. Not too long ago, I was in a darker place. I was not surrounding myself with kind, insightful, loving thoughts, and that reflected in the life I led, my notion of self-worth, my dreams and the low-vibrating, also struggling, like-minded company that I kept. I was stuck. And I knew the health of my well-being and spirit desperately needed to spread their wings to fly and soar into a space of love.

@Goodgrateful: With self-love, I found forgiveness. And now, I am soaring.

Fast-forward to my present, and Good & Grateful‘s blossoming in the beautiful San Diego. I found that space of love, but I did not find it in California. I found it in myself, though distance from the negative associations of my prior helped allow for my discovery.

There is an important distinction here in running from problems that are within, and removing oneself from an external environment that no longer serves us. I am sure, as I continue on this learning-journey, I will find that my environmental struggles were only mirroring my unhealed internal, as everything comes back to the self. I am sure, as I continue on this learning-journey, I will be able to return to those once-places of pain, and lend enough love to them in order to rewrite their scripts. That, I believe, is true growth.

But back to forgiveness. In this current life-chapter, I have focused intensely and intimately on self-love. I am, like many, often too hard on myself. I hold myself to unrealistic standards of perfection that only perpetuate a mindset of not being, and never being enough.

Intensifying healthy, loving scripts and positive mantras have helped me to shift my thought-patterns. Meditation, exercise and conscious eating have aided me in a newfound understanding of self-care. Treating myself magnificently, and humbly, remembering that I am the full moon as I am the mud that hosts the lotus, has taught my new company to honor, respect and love me in the same ways.

@Goodgrateful: The quarter moon on April 5, 2017, at Balboa Park.

“May we exist in muddy water with purity, like a lotus.” – Zen Phrase

But at the core of it all, I am relearning that we are all and only human. If we are the universe and the earth, then we are every piece of it. We are the full moon and the sun, as we are black holes and vast emptiness. We are the flowers and the trees and the ocean, as we are tornadoes and dirt and the tectonic plates that crack and shift. We are everything while we are nothing. We are light and dark.

A flower isn’t perfect with its curved stem or curling petals, but it is beautiful. The sunset is only as spectacular and special as the clouds that blur and shape it. We humans were not made to be perfect. We are breathtaking and magnificent only because we are not so.

In this space of love, within myself, I have come to forgive myself for my shortcomings, my mistakes and my pain of the past and current. I am freed from the suffering that I clung to for so many years. And remembering that I’m trying my best and that our best is all we can do has helped me to heal painful relationships of the past. I am able to forgive others and accept that they are on their own journey– one that I may never understand– and they are learning and trying, too.

Self-love has permitted me and encouraged me to break free from the past. I am ever-growing with deeper learning and loving, and I am ever-releasing myself as pain’s prisoner.

With forgiveness, I have tasted unwavering joy and contentment. My relationships with my self, and others, have peacefully heightened and become more enriching.

We are much less defined by the outcomes as we are the way we handled things in getting there, for it is never the destination: it is the journey.

And I plan to continue making this joyous journey beautiful: to be ever-learning, ever making mistakes, ever-falling and ever-getting-the-heck-back-up, gently and lovingly. And now, once again, I am soaring.

And now that I am here within myself, I can finally say:

I forgive you. I forgive me. I love you, and I love you, me.

@Goodgrateful: Sunset over Pacific Beach in San Diego, California.