Am inspired by this

I'm going to copy and paste this article I've been saving for a few years now. It's a beautifully written piece about love. It spoke to me, on so many levels, the first time I read it. It was just one of the many things I came across in my path to good mental health that I was (am) on. It still speaks to me.

I'll warn you now though, that it's kind of long, so settle in for a good read.

(Also side note: apologies for the bitch/whine/moan session the other day. It felt good but probably not necessary to focus on negative things. (Must think positive!))

Learning to Love and be Loved.

Finding your Soul Mate: Is it Psychic destiny, spiritual law or a matter of self-esteem?

Love.

You may notice I made that an entire sentence. That one little four-letter word can easily be a sentence on its own, an entire book or the meaning of life. I doubt there has ever been a person on this planet that has not at some stage pondered the meaning of this little word. Men have lived for it and men have died for it.

Love and God are probably the two words that encompass infinite connotations.

Most commonly we think of Love as being in love with another person or being loved by another person. Unfortunately, I am no expert on the dynamics or mysteries of finding or keeping Soul Mates.

Being in love can make your heart sing.

Losing love or being unloved can make you feel like your Soul has had all the lights turned off.

Love is so profound, so complex and so illusive and yet it is the most basic and natural part of our humanness.

As important as loving and being loved is, I want you to consider a much more important aspect of love today; that is, Self-Love.

Without self-love we are without purpose and are lacking authenticity. Without self-love we are simply not real. At the very core of our existence is the hunger to know ourselves, to be connected with ourselves, to feel valued, secure and important. We all struggle to know and understand ourselves, but rarely do we dare to love ourselves or even to consider the possibility.

And yet there is that longing. Deep within our heart of hearts is the knowledge of the possibility that we could. Imagine your potential if you could meet with your true self and find that you did indeed truly love who you are?

Let's first get rid of the idea that I am talking about ego, vanity, boasting or arrogance. Self-love has nothing to do with these characteristics. These are masks we wear, to hide the fact that we are insecure. Self-love does not involve insecurity or vanity.

How on earth did we all get so stuffed up that we actually believe we are something less than perfect?

We have all learned to wear masks. We have had to; sometimes its a matter of self-preservation, mostly its just social conditioning. It's funny really, to consider we are all searching for our soul mate from behind our masks.

How will they know us? How will we know them? If we are hiding. Usually we don't even acknowledge our own falseness and yet we expect others to be authentic and to see us as authentic.

If you are seriously looking to bring loving relationships into your life, then you must first stop and consider who and what you truly are.

Like attracts like: You can only attract someone similar to yourself. Many people write a list of their Ideal lover. Things like tall, handsome, successful, healthy, good with kids, funny and interesting. Light a candle, make a wish or say a prayer. It's not going to happen and if it does then it won't last unless you are compatible with this list.

If you feel insecure, tired, frustrated, unattractive and bored, then you know and I'll tell you anyway, just in case you don't know. You will attract the person who is similar to your real self not your phony self.

You may meet Mr Wonderful, but I assure you he will be Mr. Phony Wonderful. I suspect you have already met him, you have probably met him many times and you will continue to meet him. Why? Because, you are Ms. Phony Wonderful. (Sorry about the bluntness I'm just getting it out of the way so we can get onto the real issues).

First you must define what you need from Mr Wonderful. Not his attributes, I'm talking about what you think he is going to bring into your existence. Is he bringing you affection, admiration, sex, motivation, self- esteem, approval, happiness, and entertainment? Is he going to make you feel worthy, special and happy?

Now ask yourself why you are lacking these things in your life? And how you can get some, if not all of them by yourself? Whats preventing you from giving yourself all of the above? Don't you think it will be more difficult to inspire a stranger to bring these things into your life than it would be for you to bring them in yourself? Would it be impossible to attain these things without Mr Wonderfuls help? Many women have found that Mr Wonderful simply bought an appetite for food and dirty socks, so be careful when you define what it is that you expect.

Here is your first clue to finding your soul mate.

Be who and what you are looking for. Again, you can only attract what you magnetize. To be a magnet you must be compatible. Mr handsome, rich, talented witty,considerate, kind and loyal, is not looking for Ms bored, critical, unhappy and destitute. Sure, I know you look around and it appears that everyone but you has someone special and you desperately want that in your life. But look closely, most of those people are somewhere between meeting a replica and leaving a replica. What does the divorce rate tell you? It says all those people believed they had found a Soul mate and all those people discovered they did not.

The mask has to come off and when it does its devastating. We blame ourselves, we blame our lovers, but no ones to blame at all. We were simply caught up in the illusion of who we thought we were and who we thought they were. The cycle will repeat and hearts will continue to be broken.

That longing and that knowing, that love is available to you, it is not out there in the shape of anyone else, that longing is your own voice calling for you to step up and love yourself. If you really want to love and be loved you must first meet with your authentic self. You will need to peel away the layers of protection and conditioning, let go of self-doubt, drop the pretend you, and start feeding your Soul, by being your authentic self.

I don't know how or why we have been so minimized or why we have become so disconnected from ourselves, but the time has come to simply re-claim ourselves and put ourselves back together.

Are you brave enough to give yourself a voice? Would you stand up for yourself and eliminate criticism and disrespect from people? (Including yourself).

Would you be willing to try new things and allow yourself to fail, but still keep on until you achieved it? Is it possible that you might make your home beautiful, comfortable and enjoyable for yourself?

Spend time alone and entertain, enjoy, create and relax with yourself.

What would happen if you got to know your body and felt fascinated and attracted to it? Perhaps you could marvel at its perfection and magnificence, feed it well, give it pleasure, move it and challenge it.

What if you dumped all those energy vampires you call friends, those people who bring you down and suffocate you?

If you were really tired and stressed, would it be a possibility that you could go to a spa, have a massage, stop working and go out to play?

What are the chances you might change jobs, move to another town, take up acting or dancing, buy some great music or clothes?

Can you start telling jokes, bring positive, up lifting conversations to your table, inspire or motivate people? What about yourself? Can you dismiss, walk away, or insist that people stop bringing you down with their gossip, sarcasm, negativity and doom and gloom?

Can you and will you, stop beating yourself up and hurting yourself? What if you took all those painful memories and decided they are not little movies to re-run over and over, would you or could you decide to turn them off the second they came up?

What if you started making thoughtful and special meals for yourself? What would happen if you decided to treat yourself the way you would want a lover to treat you.

Isn't it possible to be in love with yourself?

Wouldn't you be willing to supply all of the above to Mr Wonderful if he walked in? Why are you less considerate of yourself?

Why have we never been taught or encouraged to Love Honor and Cherish ourselves. In fact we have been taught exactly the opposite, haven't we?

Undoing and re-creating your history

Take your mind back to your earliest childhood memories; if you can't remember your own childhood then think about your own children or any child under 5 yrs. In these years we are as true to ourselves as we will ever be.

We learn more in the first 5 years of life than we do in the rest of our lives. Now that's amazing, considering you do not know the language, you do not know the social requirements and you are totally incapable of providing for yourself. You have no income, no real talents or skills, no language skills and no personal possessions.

I'll say it again, because I really want you to get it. You learn and achieve more in the first 5 years of your life than in all the years that follow.

At this time of life we are all equal: We live in the present moment and we trust that all our needs will be met. If we need or want something, we can communicate those needs and will continue to do so until we get what we want.

We are hungry for knowledge and excited about everything we contact. We trust everyone and totally believe in ourselves. We learn to speak, walk, eat and play. We tie knots, button shirts and put on socks. Many learn to swim or ride a bike, catch and throw balls, dance, sing, skip, run and jump. We learn colors, shapes, numbers and alphabet, often we can write and usually we can paint.

We enjoy every day and never worry about tomorrow or regret yesterday. We have no fear, guilt, self-doubt or judgments.

We never considered that we couldn't do things. We all fell many times when we began to walk, but we never considered that we should give it up and accept that it couldn't be done. There is not anything you ever learned that you got perfect the first time you tried. You learned what you know for one reason, and that is, you believed in yourself and you kept on until you got it.

If you consider what you were able to achieve within the first five years, with no experience at all, imagine what you could do now, with all the knowledge, experience and resources you have. All you would need is to get yourself back to that state of believing in yourself, that tenacity and that ability to live within the present.

The greatest handicap we all have is the layers and layers of conditioning and baggage that has been piled on top of us. That beautiful, talented, brilliant child that you were has been smothered and retarded by incorrect information, humiliation, restrictions, criticism and boredom. Schools teach us a lot of great stuff, but unfortunately they also teach us about failure, comparison, unfairness and quite often cruelty. School and childhood, for most of us, is the original source of self-doubt. I have never known such cruelty and injustice as I found during my school years. For many of us childhood was a time of personality, character and humanness assassination. A breeding ground for the destruction of the spirit.

Life presents many joys and much heartache. Every experience, every thought, emotion and action, that went before, created the person you are today. The good and the bad were equally important in molding who and what you are today. If you stop carrying and resenting your past pains you might consider them to be your "rights of passage".

Bad things happen for good reasons.

Many times bad things happened for good reasons and we can't really regret them, as often, it is the hardships that gave us the most valuable aspects of ourselves.

At some point, and I hope that point is now, we must stop and address where we are and where we are headed. This is a most important crossroad as this is the point in which we need to ask, What needs to be released? What am I carrying that is too heavy and restrictive? What aspects of myself are holding me back?

So many people are carrying such heavy loads that they can hardly breathe. Suicide has reached epidemic proportions in the western world; drugs, alcohol, food, sex, work and gambling addictions have become so common that almost everyone has at least one of the above afflictions ruining their lives right now.

Its easy to look at the drug addict or alcoholic and express your judgments, but what are you currently using to medicate or tranquillize yourself with?

If you seriously wish to find happiness and fulfillment in your life you will need to get honest with yourself and seriously consider what needs to be let go of. It's not so much about what you have had happen, it's about what you kept and have continued to carry.

No one and Nothing will has ever hurt you as much as you have hurt yourself. People and events can hurt you deeply; one minute of criticism, anger, ridicule or cruelty can travel with you for years and years. It can change you on the deepest levels, it can change your personality, and it can change the course of your life. But, is it the event or is it the time and emotion that you, yourself, put into it that changed you? Maybe only 10% of your limitations originated at the event; maybe 90% of your limitations were maintained by you, carrying the event.

We all have wisdom with hindsight.

I once confronted my Father about childhood issues I had with him. He was deeply hurt and struggled to explain himself. He simply said, "I did the best I could, with the limited knowledge I had, at that particular point in time" Many years later my own son came to me and confronted me with things from his childhood that he held me responsible for, I remembered my Fathers words and I said to my Son, "I did the best I could, with the limited knowledge I had, at that particular point in time".

Your Father may have abandoned you as a child; It is not your fault, he did not leave you. You are not responsible and you cannot undo it. He will not re-immerge from the bottom of your bottle and give you back your Father.

Your Husband left you destitute and it is not because you are unlovable; there are probably thousands of reasons that added up to bring about this behavior and you will never know what those reasons were. It will appear to be about the last fight or the last disappointment, but it's not. Its about everything that made him who and what he was at that time. It is not your fault. On the off chance that it was your fault then what can you do? Eat until the pain stops? You cannot eat him back, so why are you continuing to stuff food into your body. It will not change the fact that he has gone.

You were humiliated in third grade and you are now 34 yrs old; that humiliation may be the core reason why you gave up trying new things. That one moment in time shaped
the rest of your life, that one moment is behind every failure that followed. Because you unconsciously decided to maintain it in your psyche. It's killing you. Let it go!

My point is this. People and experiences can hurt you and permanently damage you, but what is, is! If it could have been changed then you would have changed it way before now. Some thing's cannot be undone, you must decide to let go and leave them at the original source.

Somewhere, as you sit here reading this, someone is holding a gun to their head and their life is about to end. This is the tragedy of how someone can take on layers and layers of incorrect information about themselves. It is rarely about whats happening; it is always about what we decide to believe and how far and how long we decide to carry it.

This is an extreme example and I don't mean to freak you out, I really want you to see how important it is to let go of all the things that you have carried for far too long. If you have any belief that you are unlovable or unworthy then the belief is wrong. It only takes one minute for an event to destroy you but it also only takes one minute for you to decide what beliefs you will validate or carry.

Most of our insecurities and fears originated in false information about ourselves.

It could be very simple for you to take a few minutes to think about the thoughts and beliefs that are not valid, have no purpose, are totally untrue, unfair, and down right stupid, that you may have carried for years and years.

If you did this right now you could then also decide to give them back, challenge them and eliminate them. It is possible and very, very easy to make a decision to re-create new and better belief systems.

Imagine if you had the tools as a child to say to that Teacher or Parent; You're wrong about that, you've made a mistake and you have shown me your ignorance; I will not be taking it with me.

Imagine if you had been able to say to your cheating husband you've made a big mistake here and I'm thankful to be cutting you loose. Imagine if every time you failed at something you said to yourself “Well that doesn't work, what else can I try?"

You could do that now you know. You could do that all the time. That's how your future could be. If you loved yourself.

Love attracts love, but it starts from the inside and then works its way out. It's then and only then that it can gather to itself and be returned. It's very true that the more love you give away the more love will come back to you. Be in love with yourself, let yourself love life and all that it encompasses. Why wait for someone or some later time when you have all the love you need within yourself, right now.

Your Life's purpose.

We all wonder what our life's purpose is. What we are here to be or what we are meant to do? It's very simple, you are here to be you.

There are countless billions of people on the planet, with many similarities and
many differences, but there is only one you. The lives of your Parents and Ancestors have been passed to you like a baton in a relay race. You have some handicaps and some advantages. Good things and bad things will come your way. Some people will lift you up and some will push you down. This race is entirely your experience, not one other person in the history of the world has your entire unique make-up.

You are not here to be "the assistant" in someone else's life. You are here to be you.

You have your own unique DNA, personality, experiences, emotional and physical history and many thousands of influences that make you who, what and how you are. No one, absolutely no one, knows more about you than you do. So, be yourself and no one can tell you, you are doing it wrong.

If you spend any time at all thinking you are any less valuable or worthy than anyone else, then it's your thinking that is wrong. In life, we have many baited lines thrown to us, with a little attention we can be prepared for them and take the time to decide which ones will hurt us and which ones will feed us. You have the power to decide which ones you will grab and which ones you will run with. Remember this: A soaring Eagle pays no mind to the opinion of the lowly ground creatures.

Metamorphosis

Take a moment to consider the Butterfly . A Butterfly starts out as a Grub. It is really limited. Of all the creatures I guess its one that has the least going for it. Its plain, untalented and at the very bottom of the food chain. Its the most likely creature to be eaten up by just about everything. It has no defenses at all.

A Grub then goes through a stage of being totally bound and locked up in darkness. It cant move, it is in total darkness and stillness, but its in this darkness that the metamorphosis begins. Imagine the immense struggle, danger and fear involved in having to push himself out of that cocoon. (Imagine if he decided at this stage it was all too hard and just gave up) When he finally does, he emerges with great beauty and so much potential. That he can fly!

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I've looked for it on Google, so I could give credit to the author but I can't find it and my notes only say it's by K.m.

I hope you enjoyed it. I couldn't think of anything particularly meaningful or interesting to write about myself so I thought this would be a good time & place for this.

Now to bed. It's almost 3:30am and even though I had a very relaxing day today, I'm tired. Another day off tomorrow, thank goodness. I will try to have a day of fun now that I've had a day of rest. Then back to work on Saturday with a much better attitude.

Onward. (Thanks J!)