Month: February 2012

The Ending Is The Beginning

by Manuela, posted in Being Present, Emotions, Love, Relationships, Uncategorized, Understanding

“Let me give my love to you.
Let me take your hand.
And as we walk in the dimming light
Oh darling understand
That everything ends…” ― Death Cab for Cutie

The most unthinkable thing happened to me today.  It’s so tragic.  I feel like crying.  I’m not sure how it happened, as I thought I had planned it so well, but obviously I didn’t.  I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to go on, as I feel this huge sense of loss within me.  I ran out of Black & Gold Dark Chocolate Covered Licorice.  Yes, this is horrible!  You see, you can’t find Black & Gold in Toronto.  Recently I received four packages of this yummy confectionary, and I paced myself, trying to let it last for a very long time.  But I miscalculated, and when I finished the package today, I thought I had one more left, but I don’t.  It’s all gone.  I don’t know when I will get some more.  When I received the licorice, I knew that one day there would be no more, but when something like this sneaks up on you, it sucks big time. And because I’m a thinker, I started doing just that….I began thinking about endings.

Through my enjoyment of Black & Gold, I knew that eventually the day would come when there would be no more.  My stash would end.  I began thinking about my relationship with this yummy substance, this love affair.  As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and so I wanted to know what was so sad about this ending?  Sure, I can’t enjoy them anymore, but I sure am happy that I had the chance to.  What exactly was making me sad?  I used to think that there were two types of endings – either happy ones or sad ones, but really, there are more.  What I now think to be the opposite of a happy ending is an unsatisfying ending, as sad endings can be happy ones too.  It’s the unsatisfying ones that really cut like a knife, and this is why I’m so distraught.

I must admit, that despite my unhappiness about not having any more Black & Gold, I do like endings.  Don’t get me wrong, I love beginnings too, such as a new job, a new love, new home, but nothing has the satisfaction of an ending, whether it be happy or sad.  It’s the rawness of the emotions felt which I think people shy away from, or rather, run away from, such as a heart wrenching goodbye, an irreversible fight, and end to a good time.  I don’t see endings as being bad.  I look at them to mean that something else is about to begin.  Room is being made in my life for something else, which could be equally as good, if not better.  If you look at it, many things in our life do not really end, they just begin again in a new way, shape or form.  For example, I knew for a while that my marriage had to end. It was hard for me to see it, to acknowledge it, and I never thought that I’d be the one to end it.  But the relationship with my ex as husband and wife did end, but our relationship has also begun again in a new form, we just play different roles now. I was extremely sad, hurt, angry and distraught when our relationship as husband and wife ended, even though I knew that there was something to look forward to on the other side, a new life for the both of us. I had thought that perhaps we could get along better as non-spouses, and one day we will get there, it will just take time. And when we do, the relationship we have now will also end in order to allow for a new cooperative relationship to begin.  But between the beginning and end is the journey.  The middle part is where it feels like we are sometimes walking on eggshells, or on tightrope above a flaming wild fire.  The middle part is the most important part, where you can grow.

Another thing I noticed is that endings, although they can sneak up on us, we can also see them from a mile away if we allow ourselves to really look at them.  For example, we hang onto friendships because of the past, because of the memories, instead of letting them go. We sometimes feel obligated to spend time with these people even though we’d rather spend the night tweezing out leg hairs one by one than go out with them.  That relationship should have ended long ago, but we blind ourselves from it.  If we allow ourselves to see when something needs to end, there is a great deal of satisfaction to be felt in the ending of it.  There is some type of weight which is lifted off of our shoulders, a sense of freedom, such as resigning from an unsatisfactory job.

Ending can also be bitter sweet.  An example is when my father was dying.  I knew that the day would come when the cancer would take over.  I tried to prepare myself the best I could, but you never really can prepare for something like this.  As I held his hand while he was in his hospital bed, I can still see clearly in my mind’s eye him taking his last breath.  I was distraught at the thought of my father leaving this world, the ending of our physical relationship together.  But when I saw him take his last exhale, I remember how beautiful it was to see his spirit soar.  The beauty I saw in my father all of his life was not that of his physical body, but rather the presence of his beautiful spirit within him.  This ending is what I call a bitter sweet ending, the beauty and sadness all meshed into one; a happy sad ending.

Endings can be seen as closing chapters in your life, in order to begin a new chapter.  However, I see it also as a finishing of one of the books of your life.  You see, chapters are part of the same story, but new books can be new adventures, new lives.  I believe that there is an opportunity to make life the way you want it.  Not every ending needs to be sad and heart wrenching.  It’s all in how you look at it.  Your perception becomes your reality.

Love…Oh Love….

by Manuela, posted in Love, Relationships

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity. ~ Henry Van Dyke

I’ve received a lot of feedback from my previous post about being fearful to live and love.  Some have questioned if something has happened recently to make me feel that way, and others have said I’ve taken a ‘step back.’ I’d like to assure you that something has happened.  I have indeed taken a step, not backward, but forward.  I have finally gained enough courage to admit to myself that I need to change things if I truly want to live.  I need to learn how to love; to love the real way, unconditionally.

I believe that I am afraid to love; I’m not ashamed to admit this.  I’ve given this a lot of thought, and have spent many therapy sessions discussing this very thing.  And I will bet all the treasures in this world that you are afraid as well.  It would be foolish not to be afraid and you’d be lying if you said otherwise.  I’d call you a BSer strait to your face. Loving someone and being in love leaves you vulnerable.  It leaves you open.  It leaves you in a position where you put your life in another person’s hands and you are at their mercy; hoping that they will treat you the way you deserve to be treated, and not any less.  Having been in a position of loving someone many times, only to be hurt, abandoned and left raw, I had taken on the attitude that I just would not let anyone ‘in’, meaning into my heart.  I was still able to form successful relationships with people, but as soon as I found that someone started to make their way into my heart, I would sound the alarms and the iron clad doors would slam shut.  No way was I going to go through that torture all over again.  I decided to put a stop to it before it would even begin, before they could even get close.

But I was wrong.  Boy was I wrong. That wasn’t the right thing to do, because I  jeopardized many friendships and placed myself in solitary isolation.  How was it possible to truly develop close friendships and relationships, be truly intimate with anyone if I don’t allow them in?  How could they get to know me?  And of course I was lonely; stupid me.  I needed to have a breakdown before I decided that I wanted out, before I would finally own up to the idea that I hated the way I was feeling but I didn’t know how to do this, how to get out of it.  I found out that loving fully means for you to reach rock bottom first.  And man is it ever hard on the knees.

Over the last few years, I slowly began taking baby steps in opening up my heart and begin loving again. This was hard for me because I wasn’t used to all this emotion.  What a ride this became!  And through those years I also learned a lot.  I learned that everyone needs to love and be loved.  A baby is born with the need to be loved, but at what point do they outgrow that need?  They don’t. No one ever does.  Even the crustiest person in the world has a need to be loved. No one can survive without it. And with this, I began watching people, one of my favorite past times.  I noticed that a lot fear we feel is directly related to the fear of not being loved.  That love and fear are a mirror image of each other.  Most of the fears with face have to do with abandonment, rejection, judgment, criticism etc.  And all of these are items which live in the absence of love.  What an awful place to be in.  And the worst of it is we do this to ourselves.  We are our worst critic.

Once I began to love again, strange things began to happen.  I saw bright colors in a gloomy world, almost like Technicolor.  I also noticed that love unlocked doors and opened windows that I didn’t even know where there.   The world started to become a happier place, despite all the troubles I was facing.

I also fell in love, twice and I still am madly in love with these two people.  I fell in love with my daughter, and myself.  It tears my heart apart every time my daughter is away with her father.  I won’t deny that it hurts, but I sit with the pain.  The fact that I love her so much and she has to be away from me every other weekend is very much a good reason to bring down the iron doors and not love, but now I’ve learned that the pain I feel is part of love.  It astonishes me how alone you can feel when you allow yourself to love.  But love IS the missing of someone whenever you are not with them, but it also means somehow feeling warm inside because even though you aren’t physically together, you are still close in heart.  How many times have you sat next to a person but your hearts were so distant from each other that they may as well have been on the other end of the earth?  That’s what happens when love isn’t there.

I also learned that there are different kinds of love.  Love for a child, love for a lover, love for a friend, love for a parent, and love for oneself.  At the end of the day, it still boils down to it being love.  We hear often, “I sure don’t know what she sees in him” or “why does he love her so much?” The heart has its reasons, which I believe reason knows nothing of.  I believe that someone in love is able to live anywhere in the world, so long as the person they love is with them.  As the saying goes “Love me and the world in mine.”

Happy Love Day to you all.

To Fear or Not To Fear?

by Manuela, posted in Uncategorized

Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express what we really are – Don Miguel Ruiz

There are times when I feel like as if I’m a marionette puppet.  I’m being stringed along,  doing the daily grind and many times in my life I have wondered, is this what life is supposed to be all about?  Really? Because if it is, this really sucks.  I appreciate the people and things I have in my life, but I feel as if something is missing.  I look at around me, and everyone seems happy, content at where they are in life, and I say to myself “Smarite, are you sure there isn’t something wrong with YOU!?!”

You know, there IS something wrong with me.  I can feel it inside my chest most times. No, I’m not having a heart attack and I don’t have indigestion.  I’m talking about that painful, heart-twisting, hollow feeling in my chest.  You know what I’m talking about.  It’s the one that when you quietly sit alone long enough, and truly listen to what your inner voice is trying to say to you, you start to get so scared at what you might hear that you want to cover your ears and yell “LA, LA, LA, LA.”  I’m working up the courage to hear THAT voice right now.

I want to hear what is being said to me, and I know it won’t be easy to do so.  This requires me to look deep into my soul and truly face that fear I’m so desperately trying to run away from.  It means that I have to finally allow myself to see the horrible things in MY world, and literally scare myself to death.  It means letting the old me die, in order to become the new me, and essentially have phoenix processes over and over again.  I’ve done that before, but looking back, those were mini ones.  This time it’s going to be big.

This means that I will have to dig deep inside and face the things that keep me up at night.  Confront the ‘boogey men’ and the ‘wolves’ which frightened me.  I need to find out what paralyzes me at night; so much so that I am afraid to set my tiny toes to the ground for fear that something from under the bed will grab hold of me, and suck me underneath.

But before I can face these items terror, I feel that I need to learn a bit more about fear.  When I think of fear, I feel alone, shaken, desperate and out of control.  I think fear is something that we learn over time, something that is instilled in us.  I remember my daughter when she was first born, and going through all her ‘firsts’ – crawling, walking, running etc.  She would fall and pick herself up again and try again.  She didn’t cry, she wasn’t scared, and mostly because I didn’t react with fear.  But when she would try things that I found to be fearful, she would act in a certain way because I would project my feelings onto her.  She learned to be scared, frightened. Over time she would become paralysed with fear herself and not try new things.  Looking back at those things she didn’t try, I robbed her from new experiences which would have allowed her to grow.  Now, with encouragement she is building her esteem up and becoming confident in herself and the things she can do. So to me, I don’t think fear is present with us at birth, but something we learn over time.  Fear really stands for “False Evidence Appearing Real.”

So I know there is something I’m fearful of in taking this journey of self-discovery.  I know that I have a choice in this matter, I can either face my fears and weaknesses, or I can continue stopping myself, really, from living.  There is nothing else stopping me but me.  I know that even though I’m frightened, life is sending to me people and circumstances which support and enable me to face my fears.  It keeps giving me opportunities to transcend.  I see the signs, but why am I stopping myself?

I don’t know.

I’m lying.  I do know.  I’m afraid of what I may find out.  Actually, I just lied again.  I know what I will find out, and what I’m afraid of is the confirmation of that I am right – that I have been right all along.  My fear is not of the boogey men or the wolves.  My fear isn’t of discovering some big family secret.  My fear is in the knowing that the answer has been in me all along, and that what I have been searching for boils down to is love.  Yes, one word: LOVE.

The one and only answer is love.  I’m afraid to love, accept and forgive myself.  I see that there is a huge disjoint with the level I love myself and others.  The level to which I can give love, acceptance and forgiveness to others should be a mirror of how much I can give myself.  But I’m afraid to love myself.  And I know that whenever anything other than love shows up to my doorstep, I know it’s the universe mirroring back to me what I’m putting out there because I’m not loving myself unconditionally.  I need to ask myself at those times “why do I feel like this?” rather than pointing to the other person saying “you did this, you’re wrong, life is unfair or the world is a big, bad, scary place.”

But I don’t want to ask myself why I’m feeling that way, because it means to look into myself and find out why I’m not loving myself.  It means looking to find out why I’m feeling inadequate.  My fear is in the realisation that I am NOT inadequate, I AM powerful, I AM capable, I AM beautiful, I AM smart, I AM talented.  I just don’t understand why I don’t give myself permission to be.  Why am I afraid to love?  Why am I afraid to live?