Trust the Truth of What You Feel

Dear Friends,

When the glamor fades and the complexity is dissolved, the true, the necessary and the important can come forth. We are all like crows, attracted to 'shiny', and like children, sometimes impressed by big words and bamboozled by complex ideas. Disasters often hide some essential truth in their complexity, yet can also bring to light a deeper truth, as in who your friends really are and what matters most. If we can look beyond, not under the rubble, there is some truth that is trying to be born.

It's more simple than the complexity that's trying to hide it. It's less glamorous than many solutions currently offered.

What lies deeper in our current crisis is how we've allowed others to make money off our needs and wants. Our eyes have been bigger than our stomachs, our wants larger than our pocketbooks. We have trusted in the glamor of credit cards and the complexity of loans to 'make' our lives better when they don't really work. We have believed in a system that says you can just borrow and pay it back later. We have done that and now truth comes, knocks on our door and says now we owe more than we ever realized we would.

We are in an energy crisis. We have been trying to get our energy from something outside of ourselves. We've all been taught this so it's not a crime, just something that maybe we're ready to be done with. Maybe it really is time for a change in how we see ourselves and how we can take responsibility for ourselves in a new world that's different than the old. We are trying to birth a new world and the old one is crumbling down around our ankles, catching many of us with our pants down.

All the energy you will ever need is inside you. We have been taught it's outside of us, in another country even, but it's not. It's in us, in you and in me. We are self generating energy machines and we can learn how to nourish ourselves and not feed off of others.

How to even begin? Trust is what can take us to the truth of what we believe. When we really feel into what we believe, we can parse out the falsities and discard the 'shiny' for a more real perspective. It can feel overwhelming and strange, to trust yourself. Each of us will never know everything, yet we can begin to feel what is right and what is true. I can feel what's right for me. You can feel what's true for you. We can respect our differences and our commonalities. We can come clean about our childish whims and act now with greater compassion and responsibility.

We can step into the now and feel out the truth of what's before us, step by step. There are big problems all around us and fear like a hungry wolf stalks us daily, especially if you listen to the news. Yet what lies deeper is a new world trying to be born in each and every one of us. You are the awakening consciousness of the new world. One breath at a time, one day at a time, one truth at a time. This is the only way it can happen. In you are the keys and the opportunity to be part of the present and thus a path to all our future. It's not going to come from outside of us (even if the aliens land!).
We can do this, I can do this, you can do this.

Listen, it's speaking now, like a whisper in the trees.

Blessings,

Laurel

Forgiveness

The trees tell me they are in a constant state of total acceptance of all that is. From this place of awareness, forgiveness is unneccessary. Oh to be so free from judgement!
Life has it’s conditions, this is always the case. We have basic needs of survival, for food, shelter and protecting our children until they’re grown. We can offer a homeless person five dollars or even twenty, but we might not invite them home. Life is conditional. A mouse may choose to go on living, would rather not be a meal for someone else if he can help it, yet someday he might be that meal. We all make choices to continue living, just as what ate the mouse did. Our life is an amazing gift and we own the rights to care for it.
Acceptance takes us to another level of care. We can accept a homeless person’s right to be and choices she makes. We can offer compassion for those choices, out of respect, not guilt. We would not think of uprooting a tree growing on a windsweept cliff, judging it a poor choice of this tree. We might even admire it’s tenacity to handle such adversity. There is a randomness in nature that fits a perfect bell curve, we too are part of that.
Acceptance is a big goal. Most of the time we look at it as something we offer the external world, yet it truly begins in how we treat ourselves. Our humaness is not always easy to be with. An ideal is held in our minds eye and we strive to meet it. We fail, beat ourselves up and sometimes give up, locking into a pattern of stubborness that protects us but does not serve us. We hold up our imperfections to others and suggest that we can’t do anything about them. We wallow in being stuck, judge ourselves incapable, and deny responsiblity. We are more than this.
Today consider looking at some aspect of yourself that you don’t like. Maybe not the biggest, toughest thing. Pick something small and maybe concrete, a little habit of picking at your cuticles, or judging a particular type of person, anything really. Then hold that part of yourself as human, not perfect but okay. Hold yourself in compassion for this little fault, for this small imperfect part of you that is oh so human. Open your heart to forgiving yourself for this and allow your love to embrace it as you would a small immature child. This is a part of you, allow it. It’s okay to be an imperfect human. Allow your heart to nourish this part also, not just the parts you like.
This is how we begin to open to a new level of awareness, in just small steps as this. This is what is held in our ’shadow’ side; the parts of ourself we don’t want to see and face. You have probably tried the ‘all is love and light’ path and sensed that it’s not taking you where you want to go. Light does not exist without the darkness. They balance each other and teach humanity how to achieve balance also. Think of the darkness as moving the light forward. When we feel or see that disliked part of ourselves, we finally have the opportunity to take action.
We can choose to ignore it thus causing it to be projected outside of ourselves (hence our troubled relationships) or we can begin to befriend what we don’t like. In quantum physics the observer changes the observed. We can begin to heal ourselves by sitting in acceptance of what’s not so nice. This is challenging of course, yet now is a good time to start. In wanting our world to be filled with peace and light, we can create it by taking in vs projecting out what we don’t like. In loving what is, we absorb and transform our personal darkness into light and sadness into joy.
We have perfected the pushing away of what is not good and it hasn’t worked. Now we can begin to be present for ourselves in a new way that heals us. This builds trust and awareness, and awareness opens new dimensions of reality, allowing new depth and meaning to nourish our hearts.
Blessings,
Laurel

Opening a Heart Space

On the last post, I wrote about the heart and the mind and how their perceptions are very different. For most of us, getting out of our minds into our hearts is not easy. We are very used to living in our thoughts and only allow ourselves to feel something occasionally. A feeling may surprise us into tears or laughter. We may even daydream about feeling something strongly but don’t actually let ourselves go there, to feel it.

This was a long road home for me. My Mom was the overly emotional type who was always in tears about something. My Dad, being the practical and logical type, dealt with the world through his head. Being shamed for crying too much, I tried to be like my Dad. It looked easier. Don’t feel, don’t cry, don’t even talk about it. Zip it! Or at least hide until the crying stops.

Yet I was the super sensitive person who felt everything, especially with nature. So I spent alot of time outside, thank goodness, with the flowers, trees and animals. My healing process began when I allowed myself to feel, as scary and overwhelming as that was. There was no trust of what I felt and it was painful and scary to feel I was becoming my Mom. With people I trusted, I cried. I began to feel the dismissed hurts, the minimized needs and unmet wants I’d had as a child. It felt surreal at times and I questioned my sanity. Do I really have to do this? It was a way back, I’m sure not the only way, but because I sat with those who respected my tears and feelings, I began to do the same. I had spent most of my life discounting, minimizing or avoiding how I felt. Sounds familiar?

Culturally, we regard the mind and our thoughts as the supreme answer to eveything. Yet when it comes to some things, it falls so short. I have witnessed this especially in parenting. A 4 year old child asks a question and the parent tells her an answer that is just a mental explanation. Children under seven don’t understand the difference between fantasy and reality and are not cognitively very developed yet. The answer given doesn’t access the feeling level the child lives in so the child continues to ask the question or seek an answer. The parent gives a linear, logical answer to an emotionally based child. You can see the gears spinning in a child’s head as they try to understand what is being shared. You can feel the disappointment in the child’s heart. So a child is taught to process everything mentally (ie safely) as soon as they are able. Children don’t want their parents to feel uncomfortable and learn to suppress, parents want their children to be happy.

This is not an uncommon story, mine or the child’s. Yet nowdays we hear alot about emotional intelligence. How can we raise ourselves and our children to be astute emotionally? We begin by allowing ourselves to listen to what we feel right now.

Let yourself feel whatever you are feeling. This makes sense and sounds so easy, but try it when your mind comes storming in and says if you feel this, you’re going off the deep end, or making a mountain out of a molehill, or you just don’t have time for this right now. The minds’ job is to keep you safe so now it shames you just like your parents did. Intellectuallizing, explaining, shaming, whatever works to keep you safe from feeling that hurt like when you were a child. Now the mind runs riot over you and doesn’t allow you to feel any at all, or just the ‘good’ ones.
If we open our hearts to all of who we are, this is not some fantasy daydream world. This is deep dark soil where the loam of the new you can be born. Born out of the patience and persistence to own all of what’s in you, light and dark, up and down, you begin to piece together the fragmented emotional body. You begin to own a clearer sense of what works for you. You don’t feel everyone elses feelings and not your own. You live in you, not through others. You begin to know how to feed yourself because you know how you feel about what’s in front of you, or know to take the time to feel it out.

Here the mystery is regained; the fullness of trust in self. This is what it takes, step by step, allowing yourself the gift of this next feeling to grow compassion for yourself and thus for others. We all want to be compassionate people yet our minds are often not. Learning to live truthfully and listen to our emotions begins to bridge the way back to the heart. This is a feminine (not female) way. This honors the half of each of us that is now ready to come forward to take a place in the world. This is true intelligence, a clear heart supported by the subservient mind.

Blessings,

Laurel