Self Acceptance

There is a lot going on in my life right now. The past several months in particular have been some of the most stressful ones of my entire life. But a most interesting thing is happening. . . .the awareness of certain limitations that I have is actually serving to liberate me. By accepting myself as I actually am, rather than keep working to change into who I would like myself to be, I am starting to feel a sense of peace come over me that I find surprisingly unexpected.

Personal growth is a wonderful thing, but there is also growth to be found in self acceptance. For 26 years I have been living with life experiences that I thought could be "fixed" or "healed" or "changed" in some way, and I have been beating myself against an unyielding wall. But there are some things that no matter how hard a person tries, they just aren't going to be able to fix or change. There comes a point when we simply are who we are, with no apologies, and no regrets. And I think I have finally reached that point in my life. And I'm ok if this is as good as it's ever going to get.

But the other side of self acceptance is a sense of purposefulness. . . .a line that gets drawn in the sand. . . .an inner voice that rises up and says, This is who I am, and I'm not going to stuff myself into anyone else's box for even one more moment. . . .and I won't let this box suck the life out of me.

I see now that change happens all on its own. I can't will it to happen, and I certainly can't stop it when it does. All I can do is let the river carve the canyon. . . .and so I will. . . .

The Fight that Chooses Us

All we humans want is to live our life in peace and harmony. And while I believe this generally to be true, why then is there so much war? So much conflict? So much struggle? I do not know the answer to these questions, but what I am coming to understand is that we do not choose the battles that need to be fought. . . .they choose us. . . .and the only part we have control over is how we choose to respond to the battles that choose us.

I have had so many fights to fight across the journey of my that I can't help but wonder why. But right now a very specific battle is choosing me. Do I tuck tail and quit? It is certainly the easier option, as it is a David and Goliath type of fight, one that I most certainly will not win. But what makes it not so easy to quit is that the circumstances are affecting me personally, meaning that it is my fight to fight. . . .so what am I going to do about it?

We may all want to live in a happy-go-lucky peaceful world, but that is not the way of life. We fight for our children in a million different ways. We fight oppression when it is forcing itself against a person's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We fight disease of a million faces when it invades a life and the relationships that surround in support. We fight governments and organizations that deny our rights. There are many fights to be fought, but they are always the fights that choose us. . . .the fights that drop themselves like houses falling out of tornado infested skies smack into the middle of the journey to our life purpose. But these life altering battles actually end up defining  our life purpose by the forging of our character and the calling upon our personal passion with which we fight these most unwanted fights.

No one wants war, whether they be global, local, or personal. We all want peace. So how can peace and war coexist? Is there a way for a Peace Warrior to walk with integrity? There are many guides on how to fight this kind of fight because I'm not talking about battling injustice with violence. Jesus lived the truth of his passion telling us to Pick up your cross and follow me!  This has always held great power for me in my journey, as this tells my heart that I am actually responsible to carry the burden of responsibility for my own fight. Gandhi showed another way to fight the fight, as did Martin Luther King, Jr.

These Peace Warriors serve as guides, not because they fought for other people, but because they responded to the battles that rose up in their time and space and chose them. They weren't fighting someone else's fight, they were fighting their own. And they didn't shrink away from the battle because it was uncomfortable or inconvenient, they rose up in protest at great personal cost.

There are many Peace Warriors in my life. My aunt who battled long and hard to make sure her two children received the medical interventions they needed in response to the unchosen birth defects. My friend whose parents are both battling for their lives. My cousin who battles for the environment, and her son who battles for the voiceless children on the other side of the world. My brother who battles diabetes and the ever encroaching disability that results. My friend whose husband battles throat cancer. And the list goes on and on. . . .but not a single one of these people wanted these battles. . . .no, these battles all chose them.

The powerlessness I feel about global battles does not apply here. In this situation I am not powerless at all. I hold a great deal of power because this is actually happening to me right here. . . .in this time and space. . . .and within my personal capabilities to stand up and fight. So now I have a choice to make. Is this battle worthy of being fought? Is it something I feel passionate enough about to step up and become a personal target of the subsequent negative forces that have already started to rise up and surround me with pressure to sit down quietly and stop making such a raucus? Do I silence my personal truth so that other people around me feel more comfortable?

I may not want this battle. . . .but I will most certainly find no peace if I simply turn around and quit.

As Good As It Gets?

Spending a week in the hospital with nothing to do but think about my life. . . .where it is. . . .and (more importantly) where it's going. . . .has me thinking about that quirky Jack Nicholson/Helen Hunt film. I love that line when he's sitting in the psychiatrist's office looking around at everyone as he's waiting to get his prescription filled and he says to the "oddball" group, What if this is as good as it gets?

Recent events are forcing me to take a deep hard look at who I am and accept what I see on a level that is actually painful. I hated how emotionally fragile my mother was, and the thought that I may actually be more like her as not makes me cringe in horror. So, what does it mean for me to accept that I may be more emotionally "fragile" than the average person? And, perhaps more importantly, to not apologize for it?

Perhaps I do feel more deeply, or am affected more deeply. But does this necessarly have to be a bad thing? Or is it just what it is? I have also had to experience more life challenges than the average person, so these experiences (or more importantly, the journey to heal from them) has given me an emotional strength that I think many people do not have. I'm not afraid to experience "hard" emotions (the way my mother was), and I don't walk around them or try to change them when someone else is feeling them, either. I can "walk through hell" with someone else precisely because I have had to face my own long dark walk through hell. The difference between me and my mother is that I am not permanently incapacitated by my emotions as she was. . . I am compelled to take action because of their power to incapacitate.

I'm about to go through another period of transformation. There is a part of my personal hell that has opened up a portal that I will step through, because I am only just now beginning to understand how my avoidance of this part of my history limits me in some very important ways. And if there is some way for me to work through these blocks, then I will do that hard work, because I'm not yet willing to accept that the current state of affairs is going to be as good as it gets for me.

I will not allow my mother's fate to be my own.

However, there is a price to be paid for liberating my spirit from the power that the expectations of others has held over me and the choices that I make in my life, because by so doing, I am forced to ask for my needs to be met directly by an environment that may be unable or unwilling to do so.

I can't help but wonder, though. . . .what will remain if this environment can not meet my needs?

Perspective and Truth

I've had an interesting week :) And spending four days in the hospital with my insides all tied up in knots (literally) left me with not much to do but rest and try to understand how I ended up in the hospital at all.

While I was lying in wait, I read the latest installment of James Redfield's Celestine books, The Twelfth Insight. The part of this story that jumped out and grabbed me was the idea about how we are living in a time when Absolute Honesty is an imperitive, if we are to navigate through the sea of globalized manipulation and corruption.

For the past year and nearly a half, I have been immersed in an environment that was very toxic for me, but I felt (for many reasons) unable to "speak my truth," so to say. I wasn't dishonest, technically, but I also never verbalized directly to the significant player how her actions were affecting me. Hence, I remained feeling all knotted up inside each day, absorbing all of that caustic toxicity, which resulted in very painful intestines physically all knotted up. So I can't help but wonder if the practice of Absolute Honesty could have made a difference. Would the environment have changed had I told it how my anxious body cringed in its presence?

The hard truth for me to own is how much of my personal truth I actually hold inside, and not just with this experience, but in many ways. I withhold the complete truth so as to not hurt a friend's feelings. I give partial pieces of information in such a way as to present a reality the way I would like it to be for any number of reasons. I love the line from Something's Gotta Give when Jack Nicholson's character declares that he never lied, that he always gave some "version" of the truth. (You gotta love Jack :) But the bottom line is that there are a lot of ways that I withhold all or part of my personal truth.

The problem is that I have never really seen Absolute Honesty in motion. The socio-political world is nothing but half truths and outright lies, and I grew up in a trio of family systems that practiced varying degrees of feeling avoidance, secret keeping, image making, and self-interested deceptions. There were always at least three sets of "truth" on the table: the version we invisibly agreed to support, the version we shared publicly, and the version I experienced inside. . . .and they were very rarely (if ever) the same. So I'm having a hard time comprehending how to put this idea of Absolute Honesty into motion in a meaningful way, but I absolutely feel the need to do so.

Truth is a funny thing. Everyone can look upon the exact same "reality," yet every person sees it differently through their personal perceptions, lenses, and interpretations. . . .much like the white light of reality being split through a prism of multiple perspectives. But I wonder. . . .is there a difference between truth and honesty?