Hungering

Our lives are the opening and closing

of hungry mouths

eating over and over again

this human experience

over and over again consumed

by joy and grief in the endless

cycle of the in and out breath

what is this life if not the endless

expression of love

as we learn to love ourselves

as easily as the grass

grows green in the spring

open your mouth

and swallow everything

we are all so hungry

for the bitter and the sweet --

the soft taste of salt from tears

Eat this life up

Eat it whole

Eat every precious moment

that your breath allows

Oh, Beautiful Sky God

Endless Starlit Heaven,

pour into me the Milkyway

pour into me endless expanse

fill me to overflowing

with starlight and love

show me how to devour

this life --

because I am hungry

and the leaves are turning

from green to gold

show me how to exhale

in the chilly morning air

atop this mountain

as the wind makes rivers

through the shining leaves

I am hungry for the stillness

and the expansion

and the silence that surrounds

all things

Forgiving others & forgiving ourselves

When people think of forgiveness the focus often turns to the other person. What they did wrong. Why they should apologize. How hurt they made you feel. How you’ll never be the same. We become a victim to their actions and feel that we can’t be free until they understand just how much they hurt us.

I’ve been there. I’ve carried that weight so many times I’m surprised that my back didn’t break over and over again. I’m not talking about petty arguments, though the sheer weight of those I’m sure would break me if I let it. I’ve been bullied, abused, taken advantage of, left, lost, and broken by so many people over the years. Close family, intimate partners, and even strangers.

Over and over again my life has been one type of abuse after another. If you knew my story you would probably tell me that I had a right to be angry. That I had the right to never forgive the people who hurt me. That the people deserved anything terrible that happened to them.

But I can’t carry that weight either. I can’t live carrying the weight of the people who hurt me and my own anger and resentment.

I am reminded of the story of Sisyphus. I can see him rolling that boulder uphill over and over again and the anger, frustration, sadness, and shame as it rolled back down over and over again. For me, as I have come to understand it, is what holding on to anger and resentment is. I’m literally torturing myself by trying to carry all the things that have happened with me as if I couldn’t just set them down and keep moving forward.

And that’s what forgiveness is, ultimately. It’s the setting down of the burdens that you thought you had to carry. It’s the realization that you don’t have to carry them anymore. That you can not only move on – but move forward.

Perhaps even more profound is that after you set down the things that people did to you, you find that you have to forgive yourself. That you’ve been carrying anger and shame and frustration at yourself the whole time. Why? Because you let someone take advantage of you. You let someone hurt you. You let someone abuse or bully you. This is how I’ve seen it as I’ve come to forgive those people from my past.

I’ll even tell you why. Because I’ve come to understand that regardless of when these things happened to me, whether I was a child and it was an adult or classmate, or whether I was an adult in a situation I knew was bad, all those people, and me, were doing the best we could.

I really don’t believe that people get up in the morning wondering how they can fuck someone over today. Or how they can completely destroy someone’s self-worth. Or how many times they plan to hit a person or how many fights they plan to get in. But there are still people who do this, but if God came down to me right now and told me all the people, past, present, and future who would do (or did things) things that would hurt me, and said that they were doing the very best they could I would believe it.

I have to believe that if they knew what they were doing – or knew a better way – they would have been doing it. But they didn’t. They were acting as the very best person they knew how to be in that moment in time. I know I was. I was trying my damn best, so how could I assume that they were any different?

As this came into my awareness I suddenly saw my life very differently. I was able to forgive so many people for so many things, and more importantly, I was able to forgive myself for any of the things I was blaming myself for from those situations. I was able to set down all the things that I thought I had to hold onto because I had the right to hold onto that anger and resentment. I realize now that I sure do have the right – but it’s not a right I want to hold onto anymore.

Instead, I’m choosing to love them, and my self, because we’re all just doing the very best we can.

My spiritual awakening

The more I step into the stillness the more I can see the world around me. I can see everyone is hurting, and are choosing to act from the broken places inside themselves. Or at least, from the broken places they believe they are.

I don’t even know how to react anymore. How to occupy the same places that I see the world around me in. The anger. The fear. The sadness.

I know I am not any better than the people around me. I was there too. Not too long ago I was living life from all those same places. I was so angry at the world for having dealt me a bad hand. So angry at everyone around me for not being exactly how I wanted them to be. Angry at myself for not being the person I thought I should be.

I’ll be honest, I was just angry. And that angry turned into depression and fear and I was ready to end it all. I thought that I couldn’t go on living in the world.

That’s when I decided to start working on myself. When I decided that I had to try to find happiness in my life because I couldn’t keep living from the same space. All I knew is how I had been living so far wasn’t working and I had to find another way.

I started working with a life coach I found through a podcast and what started to happen was a lot of shifts in perspective. Things started to shift because what I really needed was someone to help me see things differently.

What has happened since then are some monumental shifts. A spiritual awakening.

What that has really meant is that the more I open myself up and look at the dark parts of myself the more I can see and let go of the beliefs that I have been living from that haven’t been serving me.

There was one that came up that I felt like a shattering if who I thought I was. I was living with the beliefs that I couldn’t trust myself. I couldn’t trust others. I would never experience love. That showing emotion made me unsafe. That I would always be alone.

As these beliefs came up I saw them burst and shatter. I saw my entire life on a board with every decision and friendship and relationship and at the bottom was this moment, and it stretched out across my entire life affecting every single thing that I did. Every interaction.

I was literally living my life from this space of being not good enough to be alive. But I was still here. Still breathing. Still trying to be alive even though I was making decisions from a space where I would always, always sabotage myself.

By seeing and acknowledging these things from my past I have been able to let them go. When I saw all this and saw this idea of myself shattering into a million sparkling pieces I knew something was going to change. I don’t know exactly what that means yet, but I feel different. My life feels different. I am a bigger space than I was before. I love myself. I can feel the emotions that I had disconnected from or so long. I am alive again.

I guess, what I didn’t know was that I was the walking dead. I was so numb that even though I was breathing I wasn’t really alive. But I’m alive now, maybe for the first time since I was 12.

It’s so scary being in this space. But it’s also so freeing. It’s so beautiful. It’s so spacious and open. I am living from this space right now.

I can’t wait to see what my life will become living from this beautiful space.