Life as I know it

"In order to make any progress in learning to Love and trust ourselves we need to have a Spiritual belief system that supports the possibility that we are unconditionally Loved. This is vital in helping us to stop shaming and judging ourselves."Robert Burney, Codependence, The Dance of Wounded Souls

I am in awe of our human spirit. Our beauty, our light, our radiance.

And in my awe, I am intrigued. By our resistance as human beings to resist being Love. Being That which I believe to be a spiritual truth: We are Love. We are a reflection of the Divine, God, goddess energy, Great Spirit, Higher Power -- whatever we call the God of our understanding -- We are Love.

When I was in my twenties, three separate events lead me to believe I was subconsciously trying to 'kill my essence'. I didn't believe and didn't feel, suicidal, but three separate incidences lead me to believe -- my subconscious was trying to tell me something, and I wasn't getting the message.

After the third event -- where I ended up in intensive care in a hospital in Hawaii after almost drowning in a scuba diving accident -- I returned home and went to my doctor.

"I think I'm trying to kill myself," I told him. And I laid out the facts. An ectopic pregnancy that ruptured and almost killed me. A car accident that I miraculously survived and the diving accident.

"Ridiculous," he said (or something to that effect). "You couldn't have predicted nor planned any of those events. Maybe you're just accident prone."

I didn't believe him. Consciously or subconsciously, if I was accident prone, why was I choosing that as my path, as my way of being in the world?

And so, I set out to uncover the 'truth'. What was going on in my psyche that I kept putting myself in such danger I almost died?

It was attention seeking behaviour. Whose attention was I trying to get?

It took many years. Many years and many difficult and challenging and painful situations to finally see the light. I wasn't trying to kill myself. I was trying to get my own attention. I was trying to wake myself up.

I was trying to wake myself up from a deep psychic sleep where my pain lay buried beneath sorrow and grief and shame and confusion. That place where my 'essential truth' lay covered up by a life of self-denial and abnegation of the beauty and wonder of my spiritual essence expressing itself through my human being.

It wasn't until after the experience with the man who abused me so completely I wanted to die that I realized -- that relationship was just another way of waking myself up to my truth. That experience was just part of the journey of my awakening to the beauty and wonder of who I am when I let go of fear and shame and self-pity and self-denigration and step fearlessly into being who I am in Love with all I am -- past and present.

I sometimes jokingly say -- I'm an experiential learner. I like 'big' experiences to get the message. Sometimes, the universe needs a two-by-four to get my attention.

I'm giving it up.

Giving up going 'big' for getting real.

Real up close and personal, real involved with living this one life now, exactly the way I am without all the need to take it so personally I think it's all about me, myself and I.

It's not.

All about me.

It is all about how I respond. How I react. How I move through each moment of each day -- in Love or in self-disgust.

I've had a lifetime of loathing who I am and how I am in the world. A lifetime of listening to others tell me my worth, tell me what I can do, what I should believe, how I should be in the world.

Here's the deal. There's only one way for me to be in the world -- and that's in Love.

In Love with me and the world around me. In Love with LIFE. Beautiful. Messy. Unpredictable and oh so fragile and precious LIFE.

Which means, regardless of what is going on around me, I always act perfectly human in all my human imperfection. Sometimes, I fall down. Sometimes, I soar.

Doesn't matter how high I fly or how low I go. What matters is, no matter where I'm going, what I'm doing, I'm doing it in Love with who I am, how I am, what I am in the world today living LIFE for all I'm worth.

Enough letting myself down easy. Enough beating myself up hard. Enough.

I am enough.

Just the way I am. Right here. Right now.

And the rest... it's just part of this human experience called LIFE on earth.