Words With Myself

The Path of Toxic Positivity

After a difficult weekend, myself and reality finally came to a head. I had been ignoring everything that was going on in my life and marching forward instead of confronting the truth of my situation. I am unhappy, depressed and exhausted, and that is OK. What is not OK is ignoring this fact and letting it fester until it crippled me into submission leaving me exhausted and stripped apart. We cannot bottle things up forever, we can't keep pretending everything is OK when it is not. We must muster the strength to confront how we feel and allow ourselves to confront the problem head on in order to address it.

Live with an open heart

It's true, loving things hurts. Caring hurts. Whether it is deliberate, accidental or by means of the laws of nature, any time we open our heart there is going to be suffering that comes along with it. Does that mean it is the wrong thing to do? Absolutely not.

Inconvenient Growth

Sometimes we can fall into the trap of believing the lessons we get from healing can actually be standing in the way of our goals, because the lesson contradicts the intention of the goal. It can be incredibly difficult to let go of out expectations in life and fall into the void uncertain of what is on the other side. The catch-22 being, until you jump, you will never know and constantly live out this unsatisfied character detached from their purpose.

Momentum For The Moment

Momentum can be a powerful force in our lives, both for good and for bad. Each positive step we take will lead to the next, same for each negative step. Confidence, strength, self-assurance, non of these a permanent characteristics despite many people trying to portray otherwise. We all have moments of weakness and moments of strength, sometimes we doubt ourselves and other times we celebrate our achievements. However, we can change the course of momentum in our lives for better or for worse, if you are down now you can take steps to be up, if you are up now down is only a few steps away.

War With The World

Many people avoid making enemies, but to take any form of stand or doing anything of impact is going to cause you to make enemies. This leaves you with a decision to make, am I going to avoid taking a stand or staying true to my beliefs, or am I going to make enemies. The choice is yours to make, but for myself, I would rather be at war with the world than be at war with myself.

Hurt People Hurt People

Hurt people hurt people, an old adage but an unwavering one.  Trauma has symptoms when left untreated and if we are constantly acting out of trauma we are likely to end up spreading that trauma onto those around us.

Feeling how i’m feeling

When I feel a strong emotion, my default go-to is to analyze the who, what, why's of the situation and try to understand what is causing it. I have gotten so used to doing shadow work, it has almost become my instinct to delve into what I am feeling before I have even had a chance to truly feel it. Shadow work has become some form of defense mechanism as I know that understanding and processing trauma is the road to heal it, I am trying to shortcut the negative emotions before they even arise. I think in some way, I am cheating myself from actually processing the trauma. Rushing to get through it and not allowing myself to feel how I feel or process what I am feeling and instead rushing to try and logic my way out of it.

The Good Life

We all have an idea of Good and Bad, what that means to us, and it is probably completely different for every single one of us. Good and bad are subjective, not only to each individual but also subjective to the moment for those individuals too. When we try to control our life into submission and create a life of good without bad, we end up causing ourselves far more suffering in the attempt to control than we would have with just allowing things to play out how they were meant to. When we allow ourselves to enter a flow state of non-attachment, we can truly experience life in the realest sense.

Fear is the limit (Part 2)

Second part to the Fear is the limit episode a few weeks ago, expanding on what fear is and how our approach to dealing with it drastically impacts our life. How is fear controlling you and what are you doing about it?

Where did I go?

When we are growing up, we fall into the trap of building an identity. We create a mask or a series of masks and learn to keep ourselves sheltered. Over time, we keep checking our reflection and all we see is the mask so we forgot we ever put one on in the first place, believing the character we created is truly ourselves. Who are you really? What do you really want? When you answer these questions through the glasses of the mask/character, we get answers like "I want to be rich" or "I am a loser", answers that attach to the identity we created. We learned that people value rich people, so that is why we want to be rich or we learned that we are a loser because nobody wanted to be friends with us, we traded who we were for somebody that was more palatable for other people. It is time to stop playing the character and start living as authentically as we can bare.