Its a good question to ask on a daily basis. Lately I have just been using the word love as a mantra when I wake up with my anxiety or Post Trauma symptoms and pain in cells of my body or sensations of trauma I just say the word love and imagine my entire being flooded in light and love. Today I got out of bed successfully with a minimum of tussle. I sat outside and really felt the ground beneath my feet. Its an execise that was prompted by reading about yoga posture antitodes for over thinking in Mike Dowd’s book on brain drain and specifically those patterns of dysfunctional thinking that get us in trouble such as rumination, analayis paralysis and globalisation of pain or negativity.
Anyway my feet loved the feeling of being in touch with the ground I had some thoughts but not all the critical negative ones I can awake with (at least not for a while) and I got under the shower and concentrated on the feel of and warmth of the water on my skin. Since then I have had breakfast and opened up my blog where the focus of a few posts I have read has been on love and finding goodness within the pain. What a lovely shift I am noticing in the blogs of some writers who are really coming to terms with past pain and fracture through the active practice of self compassion. This fills me with joy. I read my poetry book and soon I will take Jasper out for a walk but just for now it feels good to be home.
A lot of my negative thoughts this morning were focused on my garden. It has been SO DRY here in my home town and there has been no significant rain for months now. I hate to see old plants dying and I admonish myself for not keeping the water up to them. Anyway despite this projetion of my own ideals on something that is just naturally doing its thing in response to a stressed climate things are well in life today and I am learning a lot more about what makes love grow in my life. I had a really down day on Saturday but I managed to come through it. I had thoughts of no one caring for me but then I took Jazzie and I off to the dog park and connected there and got several invitations for connection from friends. I also learned a lot from the book I have been reading on emotional sensitivity which is helping me to realise a lot of what I beat myself up for comes from the past and past voices I have internalised. I beat myself up more than I should and see mistakes as life sentene rather than just learnings and often mistakes were not really mistakes but a result of being a human who is growing and developing consciousness like everyone else. When there is less pressure to get it right I see I can be more loving to myself and others too and that is a good thing as it makes me feel relaxed, open and expansive rather than stressed, contracted and punishing with those who are bugging me.
Oh did I also mention it helps to see the sun which to me is the best reminder of how love feels. It just shines equally on everyone and opens the heart to joy. How then can I learn also to be that sun too and let my inner light shine? Meditation on this to follow from the book on sensitivity I am currently reading. We can be a light and we can ask how loving am I being today? And even when we are not we can just notice that and give love even to that. Its a fun practice I am finding that helps things to lighten for me but then I also realise the dark days on which love is absent just are as they are too and often in time if I just hold on and keep moving forward things change in time, too and light and love finds me again some way further down the line.
Emerging From The Dark Night 