I think it is fair to say that I am almost always trying to better myself; I am always trying to learn or relearn things about myself that are most true to me. I feel that when I am living in alignment with who I am authentically I am content. Contentment leads to a sense of peace in me - something I rarely am, but constantly fight to be.
I turned 40 a little over a week ago. I am excited to be 40 and looked forward to that birthday for a long time before it actually happened. I have earned my age. I have clawed and scrambled and struggled to get through almost all of those years. I don't want to have to do that anymore. It is tiring and draining and, I am beginning to see more clearly, more often than not unnecessary.
My biggest foe in life is myself. I cannot see myself clearly. I am my own worst critic - harsh and cutting. I am cruel to myself. When I allow myself a moment to try and take a look at the whole of me I want to cry at the woman I see who has endured years and years of self abuse. I want to hold that woman and tell her of her beauty. I want to whisper a million different kindnesses in her ear. I want to show her who I see her to be. I want her to see all of the good that I see. All of her successes. All of her beauty. I want to bestow grace upon her and let her know that it is okay to fail. It is okay to not have everything be perfect. That to have failures and imperfections is to be human. More than anything I want her to love herself because without love of self she can never truly love another.
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Because I often have a battle raging in my head I live a very distracted life. I am almost never really in the moment, although I am making some slow progress. I have been working on being present for a long time. The one thing I can say is that even though I still have a long way to go to quiet the violence in my head for a prolonged sense of time I am more aware of the noise now and can pick up its crescendo much more quickly; this allows me to focus my path towards presence and stillness much sooner than I have in the past quieting the war in my head.
Sometimes I get discouraged and wonder how it is that some people live without this critical dialogue in their head. How is it that some people don't struggle with the emotional baggage that I do? Then I remember that we each have our own struggles. That no one is immune to them. No one. My battle may be different from someone else's, but it doesn't mean she doesn't face her own foes.
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I have started to do a bit of reading about the power of the mind and of the conversations that I allow to happen in my head. I feel that a lot of my lack of stillness and lack of presence has to do with these conversations. I feel that I allow busyness to take over as a means of trying to drown out the dialogue in my head instead of facing those words head on. That state of busyness leads me to exhaustion as it feels like I am constantly running from something.
I need to learn to handle these conversations. I cannot take them with me where ever I go anymore. I have dragged them with me all over this country and they have only weighed me down more with each move. They have packed themselves into my psyche and feel like a ton of bricks. I must deal with them once and for all before they destroy me for good.
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I want to be able to live a life where I can truly SEE the true whole of me, not the awful picture the self-critic paints. I want to feel STILLNESS within instead of chaos. I want to stop the busyness and live in a state of PRESENCE - there is so much beauty in my life that I don't want to miss out on anymore. I want to find BALANCE to be able to live in harmony with myself.
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