angelbirdflies

"The moment you see how important it is to love yourself you will stop making others suffer." -Buddha Perhaps we can stop treating ourselves like the enemy.  Perhaps we can stop focusing on the problems we see, because, let's face it, everyone has them and they tend to sprout new heads the moment we slay them.   Perhaps we can simply examine how we approach ourselves and learn to do it with some space, some kindness and YES love.

On the trail when I see a sign like this, I don't stand in dismay, staring at it, wondering what I might have done to warrant its closure.  Did I walk too vigorously?  Did I stray from the trail?  Was I too frequent or unusual with my foot traffic?  Ridiculous.  No.  I just find an alternate route and keep walking.  I trust the closure for it's own sake.  I look for emerging wildflowers.  I befriend the trail, as is.  It's time to apply the same logic to my life.  When a relationship ends.  When a shift happens.  When a trail closes.  I don't need to examine myself to the nth degree.  I can just see it for what it is.  Trail closed.  And walk on.

When I was nineteen I forced myself to sleep alone in the woods, far from civilization, once a month for a few years (weather permitting).  Then, one early morning, as I lay there wrestling with my fear it dawned on me... "I'm afraid of being alone."  It was that simple.  I got up, packed my bag and never slept alone in the woods again.  Twenty two years later, after several relationships and heart break, as I lay in bed wrestling with the dark I realized, "I'm afraid of being alone".  I can't just pack up my sleeping bag this time.  But the same compassion finally overtook me and I turned with loving kindness to the woman and said simply, "I know".  

Therefore, steal, or still, the echo, so that you don’t allow an event, however unpleasant or momentous, to claim any more time than it took for it to occur... What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.  Therefore, rush through or past them as though they were yellow and not red lights.  Don’t linger on them mentally or verbally; don’t pride yourself on forgiving or forgetting them — worse come to worse, do the forgetting first.  This way you’ll spare your brain cells a lot of useless agitation; this way, perhaps, you may even save those pigheads from themselves, since the prospect of being forgotten is shorter than that of being forgiven.  So flip the channel: you can’t put this network out of circulation, but at least you can reduce its ratings. Now, this solution is not likely to please angels, but, then again, it’s bound to hurt demons, and for the moment that’s all that really matters. -Joseph Brodsky I re...

How do we love ourselves when we are at our most unloveable? How do we open our hearts with compassion to our own ardent stupidity and love ourselves anyway? And not turn toward some unsuspecting OTHER in the hope that they will alleviate the pain associated with coming face to face with our own shadow?  Or hide from it with our distraction of choice, meditation, exercise, do gooding or the host of others employed by humans across time?  In that fierce darkness, when all of our external brilliance has forsaken us and we stand naked, bald and exposed before the condemning mirror of other, can we in that bleak moment offer up a spacious presence for life as it is, right now.  Shaking and uncertain, I stand on that precipice expanding my heart large enough to hold me, unloved or unloveable, exactly as I am right now.

I am not interested in enlightenment, if it means detachment from the emotional body, the earth plane, the challenges of being human.  I am interested in enrealment, because it means that my most spiritual moments are inclusive, arising right in the heart of all that is human: joy and sorrow, shopping list and unity consciousness, fresh mangoes and stale bread. Enrealment is about living in all aspects of reality simultaneously rather than only those realms that feel the most comfortable.  We are not just the light, or the mind, or the emptiness, or perpetual positivity. We are the everything. It's ALL God, even the dust that falls off my awakening heart.  - Jeff Brown