Stop Hiding and Start Living

There is a book called The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart by Daphne Rose Kingma. I highly recommend it.  It helped me so much and is one that I will read many times. Mine is highlighted and marked up.  

In it she talks about how your crisis is here to teach you how to integrate whatever is hard for you to accept.  It is so hard to accept some things in our lives, but when we do, it is then that we start to be transformed.  If we resist and refuse to accept what is, then we live in fear and silent desperation. Weirdly   when we accept the bad and integrate it as part of our life experience, then we can learn what it is teaching us.  Also, there is such peace in letting go of resistance.

I've been in both places and believe me, opening your heart to the lessons and letting go of what you thought your life should look like is the start of feeling so much better.  I've been in that place of trying to hide what was happening in my life.  Hoping no one knew how bad it really was.  I was pretty successful for along time, but it about killed me.  I retreated to eating and watching too much Netflix and staying in my house way to much.  It felt safe, but the price of that safety was too high.  It didn't help me or anyone else.  Mitch once told me. "Mom, as long as you're hiding it, you won't ever be able to accept it."  He was right.

Part of the reason for this blog is to hopefully help myself and you to stop hiding and start accepting and working on transformation.  Start reaching out for help and stop worrying about what others think.  We are all in this together, so maybe we should start acting like it.

Stop Resisting And Start Living

Pain is in the resisting of what is.  When I first read this, I had a moment,  one of those moments that changed my life.  As I thought about it, I realized how true it is, that the pain in any situation comes in the resisting of it.  When you accept what is, then the peace comes.  Stop resisting how things are and relax into acceptance.  After you do that, you feel the peace of letting go of trying to control a situation that you have no power to control.  

Accepting what is doesn’t mean you have to like it.  I think we get caught up in the thought that acceptance means we are ok or approve of how things are in the moment.  That isn’t true at all.  Accepting what is brings power and peace.  It means letting go of feeling responsible for, or in charge of others or their lives. It means changing your focus to yourself and what you have control over.  Sometimes it’s helpful to remind yourself of what you actually do control.  We all get confused about this at times.  

Acceptance means that we accept ourselves and the people in our lives, as we and they are.  It is only then, that we have the clarity to function and make decisions. Letting go of dreams is hard. The dreams we had for ourselves and for those we love, but we have to let go of old dreams to make room for new ones.  Letting go of our idea of what life was suppose to be like is hard work, but so necessary.  We have to have dreams and hopes for the future.  We might just need to shift the lens of what the future looks like.  The freedom lies in our ability to adapt and change. Don’t hold on so tightly to what you thought would be and miss all the amazing things that are.