I am writing today because soon my phone will be cut off and i will not have the means to share my experience.Lately I have had so many experiences that are contributing and supporting my beliefs that their accumulation is daunting in being able to sufficiently share enough to expose my truth in a way that leaves others with sufficient tangible evidence to my reasoning... but i look at authors throughout history and somehow they were able to have the courage to sit and write their truth...and so i pull on their courage and share my own.
This blog is an interesting place for me to share this knowledge as it was started as almost a parody on my life.... a 24 year old having sexcapades and random experiences that i felt were both funny as well as educational... it has become the diary of my soul's journey and because of its history in my life it demonstrates we are never separate from our experiences. My sex life, my relatability with men, as well as drugs, drinking, partying coupled with my experiences in the other areas of my life including travelling.... demonstrate that the individual is not separate from their experience... no matter how much one tries to deny their true nature.
i speak from lived experience...one i have had to teach myself to be proud of... in the face of judgement. It is an interesting experience being me... the evolution of my desire to expose myself and my life experience to a world that is more apt to judge than find relatability in my words i hope that ultimately my journey is an echo of all those before and after me and my ability to be courageous in the face of criticism, in a world that would rather you delete your facebook page to not expose yourself to the awareness of yourown personal journey than embrace it. I suppose it is the proverbial cross i bare...and a promise i have ultimately made with myself to be willing to stand naked in all my vulnerability in order to inspire others to do the same.
We are not perfect. That is the truth.... but we are perfect in our experience... we are perfect in that we do what we can for ourselves...for our soul's journey and like Oprah always reiterates...when we know better we do better.
This blog shows a story... one that i have struggled to own... but it has kept me honest... in fact i would have to say that my courage in sharing my experience on line... even if no one reads it has kept me honest to myself and therefor has allowed me to go deeper in my spiritual journey.
There have been times where the fear of someone finding out this blog was written by me has scared me enough to come to it and delete sections i fear being judged over.... ultimately it has never been the judgement i fear... but rather the fear of not acquiring a job... something I can see plagues almost everyone...and what I alluded to in my last post. I suppose with all the things happening in my life recently i have come to make peace with myself, my life and ultimately the universe... and that I have told myself that if i die tomorrow I am proud of the life i have lead... my behaviour and ultimately the legacy i will leave...however in that peace i recognize that the 30 years i have been afforded to experience life as a human being offers me a unique point of view that would be lost if i die tomorrow... and so it is now my promise to myself that I expose and document my own truth....from my perspective... in the hopes that offers a unique perspective that contributes to the dialogue and ultimately the shift in humanity that must occur if we are to save ourselves from inevitable self destruction. Brene Brown, god love her, has exposed the scientific evidence of strength and its correlation to courage. I thank her for her contribution in validating the exposure i put myself in by sharing my life experience... raw.
I have come to see it is my ENTIRE experience that has afforded my insight and not portions of it...and so proudly share the evolution of my sould via this medium....and i hope to one day have the courage to share my name, face and the countless videos i have made about my journey and my insights... but for now... this will have to suffice my soul.
I believe that it is our fear of sharing ourselves that leaves us sick and uncomfortably depressed. it is our fear of weakness, of empathy and of spirituality that perpetuates this behaviour and i hope that by shining a little light on my own raw experience that others can find their humanity. I digress.
This year has been the year of full circle moments for me.... and has most recently ended in my making peace with mother nature. A far stretch from everything I have yet written... but its easier for me to start at my most recent experiences to pave the way back in time to put all the pieces together. A strange day 2 weeks ago...that started with finding a quote in a tree on a nature hike by seamus heaney who wrote a poem on Beowulf that i shared on this blog in thr audio'poetry of self compassion'. it is an image that i have recited in my head over and over again throughout the year...that it seemed fitting for the universe to remind me of it. Although sharing the entire experience of the past two weeks seems rather daunting when everyday seems to expose new growth in my soul...i will attempt to share the most important aspects. i knew the poem by seamus heaney...before i knew what the original was about...but in summarizing both they explore an idea that is being illuminated throughout the world right now. In the original, from what i understand...Grendle the siren is killing all the men of the village and it is beowulf that is sent to kill the siren.... that he is successful and is given riches and the crown...seamus heaney's version and subsequently its presentation in the audio file i came to listen to exposes grendle as the parts of ourselves we fear. That if we ultimately face our fears and make peace with those not-so-nice parts of ourselves that we can become our own hero. Stretching it a little further i saw that the juxtaposition of bothbpieces of work expose a deep struggle faced all over the world... that grendle is in fact the feminine traits of a man who feels vulnerability and emotional exposure is weakness.. that by killing off the feminine power and riches will be his...but in makingbpeace with her...he becomes whole and his own hero. Written by men it makes sense that the allusion to the feminine is apparent but exchanging the two characters in their sexes could also be true of our inner desire as women to stave off our masculine traits.
It has been difficult for me to sort through all my feelings and thoughts tgrough this journey to be able to properly articulate it.... but this is my attempt. it is this body of knowledge that i have explored my inner being coupled with all the experiences and acquired knowledge in other areas.... it is difficult to expose it all as their are so many facets and tangents that i fear i will lose you, the reader.... but if i am successful than i hope to share what has broughy me peace in the hopes that my journey can be replicated...and if my ultimate desire to reach enlightenment is ascertained there is some evidence that i am no different than any other human being and my journey is a tangible experience. Thebpoetry on self compassion exposed that it was a HUMAN experience to hide the parts of us we dont like from ourselves...and that if we are to ultimately become whole we have to be willing to let go of the judgement... not only stop caring about what others think of us... but to let go of the judgements of ourselves. That the only way to do that is to make peace with them.... which ultimately requires stripping ourselves ..myself from duality...ironically one of the teachibgs to enlightenment is the letting go of the dualistic mind and functioning from a singular heart. hmm. so throughout the past year much of my intrrnal reflection has been on what parts of others and ultimately myself i judge. Money, health and my ty Money and health are still waiting to be addressed in my world...but i can attest that all three are intertwined... i believe the body has an inate ability to function at an optimal level and if its been supported and the individually is mentally sound the body will be able to keep disease and illness at bay. And so my practice in both of those areas is to avoid beating myself up for lack in both areas committed in figuring myself out...and believing that once the others are sorted health and financial abundance will be the ultimate result of that...i digress.
It has been an interesting journey growing up as a girl and turning into a woman...learning about the plight of women around the ......watching my own mothers journey and finally being old enough to look at my own. I think what affords me the ability to have this opinion is my experience as an only child to a single mother who was spiritually free and 50 years ahead of her time. She taught me that god is love...and that my journey was mine to take...wherever that took me....that i must stay true to my heart... something i have seen is verbally, physically and emotionally beaten out of children and so very few are even aware of their hearts desire.
In going through this journey my sexuality has been thr most trying of all my behaviours that has tried my own judgements of myself...and this blog has played a significant role in that realization. My role as a woman and my desire to be in a healthy relationship....and ultimately be a mom...
When my mother got cancer she refused to do any sort of traditional treatment...she had heard of 'the new medicine' out of germany where adoctor and his wife had gotten cancer shortly after their son had died...which lead to the hypothesis that physical wellbeing was tied to mental wellbeing. The doctors had subsequently studied 40,000cases world wide and it was gheir conclusion that indeed each cancer was tied to trauma that hadnt been healed....my mother didnt want anyone to interfere with her desire to follow her alternative beliefs...and so i was asked to keep her cancer and impending death to myself.....which in hindsight i can understand but it took an enormous emotional tole on me..alone through the experience.
I remember her saying to me at one point 'i am putting my life on the line for what i believe in'.... now i can see that her life, her beliefs, and her death were in fact the gifts she gave me....and have steared the course of my life to here.. that it was through her sacrifice that i know what i know now. Each layer of my experience exposes itself gradually and the pieces are finally all coming together....but 30 years is difficult to summarize.
5 months after i found out my mother had a lump in her breast...she died in front of me while we sang kumbaya and waited til she breathed her last breath. I sang two other songs for her that day....always self conscious about my voice i knew it made her happy. Leaving on a jet plane and i will remember you. both songs of which i have avoided listening to since that day....it has only been in the past month that i can listen to them again....making peace with my life.
My mother believed her cancer was manifested becase she never dealt with her sister dying when she was a teenager nor had she dealt with the anger around my father not being around.... she believed the spread of bone cancer was the feeling of lack of support and the lung cancer was the breath of life...the fear of death.... and then she died. This year i had to ask myself if i believed what i saw to be true despite the fact that she died....and if her beliefs were true or not. 10 years of inquiry has lead me to believe that what i saw happened and yes, what she believed was atleast mostly true...although there still are questions....i feel i have accumulated enough knowledge....evidence that i can state my support. My mother died at home with no pajn killers.... she meditated herself through her pain. She believed that she had to deal with her shit in order to survive....and to her that required a deep relationship with her internal self. We didnt talk much abou it...but i remember the nurse being confused when she couldnt find any crackling in my mothers lungs and full air entry the week before she died......mum claimed she no longer had pain in her legs of which she had had for almost a year fro the bone cancer and the lump in hrr breast had moved to the surface.....of which the new medicine suggested is what happens when thr body is ridding itself of the disease and toxins it has accumulated....i saw all this....but she still died and so i was put on a course...unconscious to me of whether i trully believed her. A question that if i look back on my wholenlife i was in constant question of because of the criticism i constantly saw, heard and experienced as her daughter.
Abraham Hicks says we need to live in a contrasting environment to know what we want...to know who we are and that it is our choice. To recognize that my journey has been whether i want to embrace the life i was exposed to as a child..i had always had a critical eye ensuring i would be able to defend my stance...
To be exposed to a truth so radical at 20 i have sought knowledge on all fronts.....a journey of self discovery...of letting the fear of judgement go and exposing the very root of myself to myself in order to figure out the truth... and ultimately with the desire to live a long properous life.... and chnge the world. i forget who said itm... i think perhaps Gandi...but that if you want to change the world you have to start with yourself..... which leads me back to finding the poem in the tree.
i didnt look at the poem for the rest of the day...we left it in the tree but had taken a picture of it and my phone was in my friends backpack...looking back on the day i had inadvertantly lived the poem in my own adventures which brought a sort of ceremony to the whole experience. it was a poem inevitably about rebirth and that day i felt reborn.....except of course the money and health but that is the next part of the journey. Running water never dissapointed...crossing water always furthered something ...stepping stones are stations of the soul.
The day was an interesting journey for my feminine self...i came to see that i equate adventure into nature with having the need of a man to feel safe....subtleties in my behaviour slowly exposed myself to this inner fear. I drank from a running brook out of an underground river... the brook flowed into a larger river of which i decided to explore but the boys i was with didnt want to. I felt myself frustrated and scared to do it on my own...but in the self awareness illistened to the desire of my heart to face my fear.. and recognize i could never be whole if i was always following a man. i dont know the word...where the journey is an allusion to the greater plights in life.
i ended up finding a clearing a little firther down the river bank where it opened up nd the sun lit up thebother side as though the flat rock were beckoning me to cross again. this time there were no stepping stones.bthe water was cold nd clear and up to my waist.... i had never crossed water wi thout a man before...or anyone for that matter. i always have had a deep fear of falling... something i think my mother didnt help by being overly concerned when i fell as a kid. I
I debated walking back along the river bank and coming at it from the other side... but i knew it was in crossing it... in doing it despite the fear that would lead to something more... and so i took off my shoes and my socks, rolled up my pants and carefully crossed... recitingbover andbover in my head... i will not fall... i will be fine.I got my friend to take a picture of me standing in the middle... the sun gleaming on me as though it were congratulating me... my facial expression says it all... the humour the universe has in making sure my friend took his sweet ass time...so that i was standing there in the middle...forced to breathe in the moment.
when i arrived at the other side i was barefoot and so i went on my own adventure through the forest.... following my heart. After about an hour and exploring...i finally started to get scared that i was lost. the second i felt concern one of the boys showed up and told me the path was only a short distance a way.... clearly the universe was taking care.
Throughout the day T. was constantly in my psyche. In fact he had been there headily since the night before when i came out of an after party to realize i was 4 houses down from where he lived. Drunk, stoned and alone..having been left by the girl whose house i was going to crash at but who had picked up.... i was vulnerable and my longing was bubbling up.For the past two months when ever he comes up in my head space i constantly tell myself to be my own longing...something i had heard through all my reading... the need for belonging...is the need for yourself... be-your-own-longing.
I had never called anyone to come get me after the bar... i had never really had anyone
to call... but i had made this friend last winter... our relationship had started on our relatability with the opposite sex and he is the only person who knows almost the whole story of T. i texted him to ask if he was awake.... he responded and i called. crying about T. I asked him to please come get me. On his way over i had walked to T's house.... the sidewalk running outside his house... i couldnt even pass the threshold of property... as though even being there was a violation of his space. i stood outside looking at the house... feeling as though he was so close yet he could have been on the opposite side of the world.... for all my heart could feel. That a year of sharing my feelings had pushed him as far away from me as possible.... i had written a letter to him the week before sharing a similar realization... that pushing him further away brought me closer to myself.... i stood therelooking at his house in the light of the street light and said goodbye.I wrote a message to him that night that i chose not to spend... and the next morning i cried at my friend's house about how difficult it os to let someone go and love them anyways.... so in the forest that day he was there... with me... me looking at why i still felt this way after sooo long. I stood under the trees and promised myself that if i ran into him again i would thank him. That it had been his ability to let me share myself with him...without reacting...by creating the space for me to converse with myself and explore myself had brought me tobthis deep point of being able to see my engrained desire to find a man to feel safe. I also vowed to share that my insight had lead me to believe that a story he had told me about getting stuck in the woods at dusk with no food or water and of strangers showing up was not a lesson in being prepared as he had stated but rather a lesson in that thebuniverse provides when you follow your heart.
The end of the day anything that came up that triggered me i let go of... i just allowed the day to happen... and at one point found myself in an apartment looking directly over to the bar i had been at the night before.... i felt my heart telling me to go again.... something i thought was odd considering the night before. as i went to leave my phone hadnt been charged.. so instead of getting upset i stayed longer... finally, 3 hours later everyone parted and i found myself walking to the bar.... only to run into a girl i had met the previous week who had ironically been invited that day but had not been able to go. I told her i had a crazy day and i would like to share it.... she was curious... so i did. i got about half way through the story when she got tired and left... my friend had joined... and so we finally made it over to the bar i had been at thr night before.... as i walked up... two men were leaving and i knew before he even turned around.
I breathed... smiled and as our eyes caught eachothers... i said'of course im seeing you today'. he responded with 'what does that mean'
' i just had the most incredible day in the forest and it would be fitting that i would run into you at the end of it' i laughed.
I looked over to my friend and said 'this is T... T. T.' just to make sure he made the connection.... that he could vouch for the serendipity of it all. They shook hands... this was the first time any of my friends was meeting him... that he was real. I proceeded to tell T about the day...the shortest version... and in the end concluded that i had become accutely aware that I feared nature...that i always had felt like i needed a man to protect me... he was surprised. 'why would you fear nature? its MOTHER nature Amanda.'
"i dont know"
n" so
that you have realized that are you now going to make peace with her?''
yes' i responded. Our conversation was calm...and i finally got the courage to tell him what i had been thinking all day. to thank him. To share my deep gratitude with him. He responded by asking me what else he could have done... and i said'you could have been mean' he said'im not a mean person and i said'i know.. thats why im greatful'. My friend had dissapeared during the conversation and had watched from afar only appearing to show him the picture of me in the middle of the river. perfect. I also told him of what i thought the lesson was about the story he had told me the second night we had met... patience he had interjected and when i told him what his original answer was he was surprised. He finally told me he had to go and i asked if i could hug him good bye. he agreed and while we were finally sharing a real hug i thanked him again. I wanted to say i love you....but the fear was too strong. He hugged my friend and as he walked away i yelled after him. 'T.''yes''you know i love you right?'' yes i do.' he left and we went inside. at the table we sat at my friend found his card. thankful that that wasnt all i got of him that night...satisfied to know that i would have found it regardless... Two days later i fohnd myself driving hone for a night with my family for thnksgiving...i had been non stop thinking about T. the auspicion of it all and the questiom he had posed. almost home i texted the number on the card i found and shared that i think how we are going to change the world is by being able to become whole.... a few moments later i had my answer... i am scared of nature because i grew up in the city... my mother had been my relationship to the city and my step dad had represented nature... that coupled with the loss of trust of my mother as i became a teenager...along with barely being mentioned in the will...i had lost my trust in mothers... and as i drove down our road my heart told me to go to the rock i had spent my childhood going to as a kid when things were difficult at home. a place i hadnt been since probably the age of 16... which prompted an entirely new journey...one to be left for another time.
I made peace with nature that night... reminding myself that the cosmos that had created the day in the woods and of T. of always making surr everything worked out...was also the cosmos of nature...of the animals and the fear i felt was a mirror to the fear that nature feels.
Like everything the emotion needs strengthening and over the past week my ability to trust the universe has dissapated as i get closer and loserto the end of the month.... the lack of sufficient income instills a deep fearthat trumps my trust.... sonething i am working on... but the experience still lives in me.... along with three other nights i have since spent in the moon light. That my mothers death happened for me to learn how to heal myself of the pain in order to become whole.... the journey continues.
As for T. i texted him a few times as strange things were happening to me... and asked him to join me on a couple occasions with no response. I was surprised that his sense of adventure and peace making hadnt prompted his curiosity.... but alas. i guess we are still on different journeys and i cant suppose to know when we will find ourselves in eachothers space again. I still miss him....and there are moments that i long to touch him and hold him and share space with him... but if he is my perfect match... I still have a ways to go until i am completely whole...and so must trust the journey....and if he isn't... well the journey is still the same... knowing that i am fine on my own...and that the universe is constantly supporting me... that my mother died for me to becone accutely aware of how any issues you have about yourself or your life can manifest thrmselves and the only way to avoid the calamity of physical illness is to deal with your shit. T. by being who he is.... has allowed me to explore the attachment i have to being in a relationship... and the parts of my being i still have to work on. By allowing life and learning to not judge it but accept the ebb and flow, the rise and fall...i am allowing life to flow through me... giving it the space to create a masterpiece with my life. i know the destination cannot be guaranteed... but the journey of letting go of what i think'should be' is allowimg far greater happiness and peace... and maybe i had to remain poor so i could prove that happiness always comes from within.My dream now is to have a pink jeep and on one side write'just breathe, just believe, just be'... on the other side say 'keep dreaming' and drive across the country sharing my story of how i had a dream to meet my dad.... and a dream to know myself....and both were coming true.... so here's to hoping. sweet dreams. xoxo
Also to be noted is that the day of the photo and of T was 10•10•13. the day spent making peace in the dark was 10•13•13.... how fitting.
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