Staying Still

When It's Cold Freeze!

Exercise: 

What condition, person or experience in life are you avoiding? How much time, thought, and energy has it cost you to do so? What toll is this taking on you?

Let's try something different today. Accept that situation, person or experience completely for a moment. And whatever you're feeling about it.

If it's cold, freeze. If it hurts, hurt. If you're scared, feel that. Stop fighting it.

The moment we stop fighting what life is giving, the moment the sting is taken away. And the person, situation or experience, loses the energy you've given them through the fight. It fades away naturally, or changes for the better.

Mindfulness of feelings

We do not have to be a slave to our emotions.  They don’t have to control us, and they most certainly don’t have to last forever.  Yes, it is true that unpleasant emotions when they arise feel like an eternity, but I wonder how much of that is due to the negative way in which we interpret our experience and less with the physiological emotion itself.

The practice of mindfulness can help us learn how to cope more effectively with our emotions.  Consider the following:

•    We experience emotions continuously throughout the day. Emotions are passing body sensations NOT inherent aspects of our selves.
•    Emotions often start out as a small nudge that gradually increases in intensity and then decreases.
•    Learning to watch our emotions come and go, we see how our mind works.

On Becoming

On Becoming

I love the song by Tenth Avenue North that goes:

You are more than the choices that you've made,
You are more than the sum of your past mistakes,
You are more than the problems you create,
You've been remade.

Today I find these words especially applicable to the news from a friend in my transplant support group who after two heart transplants over a nearly fifteen year span of grit and fight, she now needs a kidney transplant to stay alive. Her ordeal is nothing she can’t handle; in fact, she is one of the strongest and resilient human beings I have met so far along my own journey with a heart transplant.  What makes this challenge different is that this time it’s not just herself she is fighting for.  Two years ago she and her husband became parents together after adopting a baby girl. More than ever, I am reminded by my friend’s struggles that our bodies are only a small part of who we really are.

Not just flesh and blood, our bodies are the vehicles we are given here on Earth to experience feelings, spread love, and enrich our spiritual journeys.  Remembering who we really are at our core and sharing that understanding with others is at the core of our self-actualization.