Bye Week 10.

You don’t get to ‘peace and ease’ via ‘control and manipulation’.  

You don’t arrive at love if you’re being driven by fear.

​Trust is an all-or-nothing endeavor.  

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That’s what I believe to be true this week. 
Rather, that’s what I have learned to be true over the past several months, all of which seems to have solidified in my heart since my last session with Rachael.

The journey has to feel the way you want to destination to feel. 
If you are eager to live a life of peace and ease, odds are good that you’re not going to get there by clenching and clinging to the things that you believe to be essential for achieving that particular goal.
Likewise, if you long to know true love, you have to open yourself up to it, not the other way around. 
I have spent a lot of time in a lot of relationships waiting for the other person to make me feel ‘safe enough’ before I was willing to show my true colors.  
I believe that both concepts; 'peace and ease' and 'being open to love' are rooted in the ability to trust; to trust the Universe, to trust one-another, and above (or below) all else, the courage to trust one’s SELF.

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"You can’t change your whole life 'just because' somebody dies,
​but you sure can change your priorities."
​

-Me, following the death of my dear friend; Jason.

The morning after Jason's funeral, I began taking stock of my own existence and wondering; if I died tomorrow, would the people I love know how I feel about them?  If my parents were to suddenly die, what would I tell my children about them? 
Have I been living a life worth living? 
Have I been playing it safe? 
What is it that I ACTUALLY care about?

And it struck me; I don't know.  If I died tomorrow, I have no idea what kind of legacy I would leave behind.  I like to think that it is one of love and honesty, but I cannot control what anyone else thinks or chooses to think or acknowledge or feel or anything else for that matter.  If my parents were to die, I do not know what I would tell my children about them, because my children do not exist yet.  I know what I know about them now -in this moment- and that is that my parents are human beings who have done the best they could to love me and give me all of the tools necessary to navigate my own life.  I also know that I love them to the ends of the earth, I will never be ready to say goodbye to them, and I pray that whatever I could ever 'tell' my children about them would pale in comparison to what they will have the opportunity to learn on their own.  
Have I been living a life worth living?  Every life is worth living.  That's why we live.
Have I been playing it safe?  I feel very confident in saying that most of the choices that I've made in my life thus far have been more terrifying than not.  And -also more often than not- they have turned out better than I could imagine.

 
​What is it that I ACTUALLY care about? 
​
Peace, ease, love and trust. 
​
 My mother.  
My father.
My family.
My friends.
Making the important decisions based on what feels good in my heart,
​whether it makes sense or not.  
​Getting to decide what I spend my time and energy on, why it's important to me, and how I wish to show up in the world.

​What I ACTUALLY care about is what already ACTUALLY exists.
Not hypotheticals, not a future that I have yet to create am attached to receiving, 
but about being truthful in the moment, 
and following what feels right in my bones.

Despite all of my attempts and efforts at being an open, spiritually grounded and some-what enlightened individual, Jason’s funeral made it very clear to me that there are more ways than I care to admit in which I have been living life from the outside-in; concerned more with external validation in the forms of money, praise, compliments, contracts etc., than with the quality and depth of my relationships, let alone the quality and the depth of my love for the people I am in those relationships with.
And, as it turns out, what I really care about is just that; love.  Deep and full relationships with the people that I love, living a life that fosters and encourages that love, and finding ways -big or small- to love that life each and every day.

​You don’t get to ‘peace and ease’ via ‘control and manipulation’.
You get there through living every day the way you want to feel every day.
You don’t arrive at love if you’re being driven by fear.
You must be who you wish to receive in the world.
Trust is an all-or-nothing endeavor.  ​
Self explanatory.

​
​I am thankful to my friend Jason for this shift in perception.  
And while his sudden departure felt like a crack in my heart, it is through the cracks that the light gets in.
 
I am grateful for the light, for the ability to see, and the courage to change.
Most of all, I am grateful to have loved a friend so much that I am left with the gifts of his life, even after he is gone.

​Long live the life worth living.