expanding
Brasil has been expanding both my psyche…. and my waistline.
Try as I may, I think I need to accept that my body type has never been stick-thin, and to maintain that image means I would have to regress to some less savory eating habits and rules, which I’m simply no longer willing to do.
I am an athletic, pear-shaped, lady.
Why is this so hard to accept? I almost wonder if it’s because I remember so many past lives. When I deeply mediate, it’s like I get to flip through each life and get the broad strokes of what I learned, both the positives and the negatives, and I can relate the attributes I displayed in each life to my current life. Maybe I just have an attachment to an older version of myself… Who knows.
I do find it frustrating, though, that my overall sense of wellness and fulfillment can be totally thrown off kilter by a bad photo. It’s such a small, insignificant, thing in the grand scheme of things, but man does it shatter me for several moments in time. All the work and healing and empowering transformations I’ve done with awe- inspiring success somehow pale in the face of a handful of bad pics that allude to be having the exact body type I have.
It still is a mystery that escapes my awareness…
But, I also think that the way I feel in my skin does actually directly relate to how I (subconsciously) feel about my life, and where I am currently at. Being a woman of insatiable ambitions, my focus seldom seems to be in the Present. The Peace of Now evades me, at least in the life chapters I’ve encountered thus far.
Yet I feel this rush of empowering peace making it’s way towards me, should I have the guts to pivot in the way my intuition is nudging me to. In my life, I have learned to listen to my intuition early and often, and I feel so confident listening to it when it asks me to take action. But to take inaction? To choose peace and surrender over flighting for the next goal? That, quite frankly, might be among my worst nightmares.
The waiting and surrender has typically been where my own version of emotional waves come in. It is the landscape in which my inner critics become loud, and insistent. It’s where my deepest, inner, darkness lies.
My comfort pattern truly is staying busy pursuing new goals and taking immediate, intense, action to that end. But, from experience, there is nothing worse than wasted action. To invest so much time and energy and anxiety into something that bares no fruit, serves no purpose.
Life has been teaching me, through my own blood, sweat, and many many tears, to surrender to just being and allowing the fruits of my past labors to come to me; to only move forward with inspired action, and to be present in The Now until it’s time to move, again.
And, while I’m on board with this, theoretically, I still have not managed to navigate the inner darkness that arises within the “waiting period” with much success, at least not from the perspective of my ever-high-expectations for self. Willingly surrendering to anyone, or anything, when it’s not in the context of a fun Game of Wills is such an excruciating process for me. I have actually watched myself inflict emotional cruelty onto others in this context, which has made me apprehensive to let people stay close to me should they create a circumstance where I have to wait.
I don’t perceive myself as a toxic person, generally, but my hands are not free of blood, either. As much as I try to instill emotional safety in my relationships, I’m simply not great at it. We can only be as emotionally safe for others as we are for ourselves, and while I have made some absolutely massive gains over the years with unspeakable amounts of intentional work, I’m still far from perfect.
The waiting game I am currently in is around the right people in my life. I regret no bridge burned, at all, but I do regret the initial investment into unequal dynamics. That’s where guilt starts to eat away at me, which then leads to the hyper-self criticism and emotional cruelty as my mind tries to make sense of my many dichotomies.
What I truly miss the most from my past lives, and why I spend so much energy continually visiting them, is the people. The souls where we just get each other. It’s such a rare experience, to meet people who jive with you now, and who change and grow with you. I seem to constantly outgrow the people in my life. Not in a linear sense, at least not always, but we always seem to grow apart, despite best efforts…. Though, as I have come to find, these “efforts” require me to shrink… and in both body and psyche, I legitimately refuse to shrink anymore. So, I find myself in these chapters of waiting for the next round, not sure if that round will stick or if they’re good relationships just for that time…
I think my main lesson here, today, is to just let these things be, sometimes. I won’t always feel like a Superstar version of myself, both relating to my appearance or the way in which I move through the world. So, today, in this moment, this is where I’m at. And, I also know myself, so I know that this can shift in like 10 seconds given the right stimuli….which absolutely doesn’t make me feel like a psycho……(rolls eyes)…
Anyways, today I am choosing to allow the discomfort of the Present to be what it is, and surrender to the flow, knowing that the influx of self criticism will end as quickly as it began.
One step better than yesterday, so I’ll take it.