Faith

I don’t tend to be very religious, however i feel that my life is lead by a spiritual entity. A God? I’m not sure that I can accept the existence just yet that there is a religious being that controls everything. I do know that there are very few unhappy people who have faith in the God that they believe exists. Over my lifetime having faith in anything else other than the things that were in front of me and the events that were actually happening to me was all I had to go on. during this period of time my life seemed to be in shambles, it was very confused and displaced. I contributed it to being depressed, having a troubled childhood, others around me who didn’t understand and just plain old bad luck. I was living out of control and had no boundaries. When I was younger this lifestyle fit my personality as I was a young man being shot out into the world to make it… I learned many things that didn’t work, but didn’t get those lessons until it was too late and they just didn’t work for the last time. Finances, relationships, Jobs, anything I came into contact with was complete chaos. It was only recently that I came to a very high wall and my insane way of living came to a screeching halt. A mental breakdown if you will, maybe not as far down as it needed to be to put me on any course other than the one I was on, but it was enough to assist me in searching for a different way to do things. Over the course of the past 2 years I have discovered a lot about myself and what I am capable of doing, believing and accomplishing. I have faith in the system that I have found. It may not be perfect for everyone but I believe it has worked for me. I want to believe that there is something out there, a higher power or a holy spirit that can take these horrible things from me that I have experienced. In a rational sense I need to just let go of these things and believe they will work them selves out for the best. I don’t really have any control over anything except the way I perceive and think about the events. It kinda feels like I’m passing the buck on to someone else, but If it works I’m going to do it. In the logical side of it to me I guess its just releasing the things that are bad for you and if you can hand them off to something else it seems more real in your mind instead of just letting them fall off into a darkness somewhere. Having the faith that something else can take these pains, hurts, away from you is a bit freeing. I’m all for feeling peaceful and free. For so long I tried to get over many things on my own and tried to rationalize through them so that they worked for me, the issue was that they didn’t really work for me nor for anyone else. They just got worse because I didn’t understand exactly how to deal with them. I don’t believe any of us know how to deal with what we perceive of as our problems, if we could it would be done and over with and we wouldn’t have the issues that we currently have with them. I’m learning to have a little faith in something outside of me, something that can for no other reason take my pain away and for a little while feel normal. I already know the power of changing my thoughts and turning things around in my head for the better, I guess its not a far stretch to have faith that there is something out there that can be above my thoughts. It feels good to have good thoughts and bad to have bad thoughts, so something is to this. I really don’t want to think that I am on my own doing this anymore and it would be nice to have something to turn to to take a lot of the pain and hurt away. I have faith that there is good in the world and I have faith that it will follow me from these days forward. I will make a special effort to create the place in my thoughts for this other thing’s plan for me. Allow myself to just drift along with the good in this world and let the overwhelming, stressful go for this higher power to take on. Its a definite solution to my current issues, if it works it can only build my faith and create a world around me that is worthy to live in. if not than I guess I’ll have to search elsewhere. So far so good, I guess I’ll just keep the faith.

Letting go

I can remember as a boy climbing a tree and getting about halfway up before I realized how high i had climbed. I became afraid of falling so I started to climb back down… I got to the last branch that I had used to pull myself up and looked down, it seemed so far up… how did I get to that lower branch, about 6 feet off the ground. I had obviously been able to get to it by jumping up but coming down was a different story, it looked so far away and i didn’t want to hurt myself. My choices were to jump and limp back home or stay there and hope someone would hear me yelling for help. Well I jumped, landed on my feet and realized it wasn’t as far up as I had thought. My fear from being too high early on had followed me down and had created a perception of everything being too high. In my youth I took many leaps like this, I tried not to allow many things to scare me… Today my fear manifests itself into other emotions like anger, rage, and jealousy. At this point in life I am afraid to just let go and jump out of the life I feel can be good for me. I have been in it and have felt the safety in it and now I am afraid to let go because its unknown what I may fall into. I have always believed that I was a free spirit, someone who followed the wind where ever it blew and just went with that flow. I guess I have had this “plan” of how my life should be and I tried to follow it. I’m afraid to let go of what it could be because It would mean I am a failure. I am learning to change my thoughts so that these perceived failures can actually be small miracles that just take my journey in life a new and different direction. I don’t know if my life has already been mapped out and destiny will take me where I belong, but I do believe that things happen to create choices in our lives. Those choices are the foundation to our futures and those choices are made in the present moment. A choice isn’t something you can physically change or move, it is a feeling… an emotion that the mind must rationalize and make a decision on what is right for you in that moment. We control our feelings and emotions, therefore we control our choices. Happiness and peace is always within our grasps… we just have to believe and have faith that we will make the right choices to get there. Everyone… of an adult age knows exactly what is right and what is wrong for them. They know in the moment of a choice the outcome that will come from their decision. We must make that decision and be willing to live with the result. Since we already know that result it shouldn’t be so difficult… right? But even though we know what will happen we still make the decision that causes pain in our lives. Many times we feel that it destroys what we have worked so hard to manufacture in our world. This is where I am right now, I have built this terrific life up within my mind and have seen, with my emotional eyes, how it will work out to the point that I am scared of letting it go… fearing that the perfect life I see in my minds eye will be destroyed. I have to just let go…. its only in my mind that these things will work out, I have the power to change the outcome… but I don’t. Even writing this right now I feel as if I can magically conjure up feelings from the other party that will align themselves up with my own feelings. I can only see what my blinders allow me to see. Exploring my whole mind helps me to realize that I need to just escape from these thoughts… just take that leap from the bottom branch and know that I can walk away from it with no injuries. I will be able to look at the distance I had to fall and see that it really wasn’t that far away. I just need to have the faith to take the leap. Letting go is the hardest thing to do, but its the right thing to do in the moment. Nothing can be gained in reality when you deal with fantasy. Fantasy is nice and can bring up those nice and cuddly feelings that give the perception of happiness, but all fantasies must end and reality is always left there to deal with. Why not just seek out happiness in reality? Let go of all of the thoughts that dissolve the happiness within you and build up the thoughts that create a strong and confident you. It helps to write these things down, both the fantasy and the reality. Put them down on paper and cross off the fantasies that your able to let go and add to the reality list of things that will truly make you happy. We all know what real happiness is for us, at this moment… so all we have to do it record it for those moments where doubt seems to roll in and destroy the happiness we try to create. Right now my happiness lies with a little 3 year old girl who wants to play castle with daddy… I’m going to be the best damn castle player for the next few minutes or hours that I can be and create a little joy in my life as well as hers. Letting go of what is wrong for us should be easier than it is, however it can be done and once we finally allow our fingers to unwrap and just drop the realities that follow us can be amazing.

Love Born… Fear Taught

I was inspired by something I read this morning, it comes from a book that Marianne Williamson Wrote in “A return to Love”

“Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us.”

I actually haven’t read her book, but I am going through the Course in Miracles from her exerts on Oprah.com… yeah Oprah.com, I have found that her sight is a little easier to understand with it comes to concepts that change the soul… anyhow, the quote above is something that I have Thought a lot about throughout my life. I have believed from an early age that most of my behaviors were learned or taught to me by the environment I grew up in. Rather they were right or wrong, its just how it was for me. I do not blame anyone for my actions but myself, however I do not believe I was just born with those things. After the birth of my daughter I started to pay a lot of attention to her development and to her reactions to things. At first she would just cry when she wanted things or smile when she was happy or just lie there a stare when things seemed content for her… and sleep of course. As she has aged I have noticed that her fear of things has been defined by what people around her have taught her. She was standing at a pretty early age and, I believe walking early… Hell she started really standing and walking before she actually completed learning how to crawl. I’d like to think that these simple things happened because we encouraged her to do them, therefore teaching her that these things shouldn’t produce fear. If you ask my wife and I we will tell you that at this point in her life she is fearless… of just about anything, is that good or bad? Well I guess fear does hold us back from things that can cause danger in our lives, and sometimes we just need to figure out what that danger for us really is. I’m not saying that i ever want her hurt or injured because she didn’t know what was safe or not… What I am saying is that I want to be there to teach her what is safe or not, so I let her do her stunts under a watchful eye and I catch her and I show her the proper way to do things so that there is only confidence in what she is doing and so she learns how to do things in a safe way. Now I know that the statement above isn’t really talking about doing stunts as a child, but I believe it is saying that we learn to fear things that shouldn’t be feared. At 3 my daughter is afraid of the dark, I live in a very small home, one level… very few closets, windows enough to light up the rooms and a lot of open space… the living room and kitchen are completely open, basically one room, when the sun goes down she is afraid to cross the barrier between the kitchen and the living room which is just the separation of tile and carpet. She can stand at the edge of the carpet when I am sitting in the living room and not want to go into the kitchen, by take a simple step from the carpet to the tile, without a light on… even though the light from the living room clearly illuminates the kitchen. Is this a learned behavior? It must be, something must have happened in the dark to her or she saw on television where the dark is a scary place to be or someone told her she shouldn’t go there in the dark. when she first started walking and her mom and I were separated, she would stay with me at nights… during this time she was sleeping in her own room and almost every morning she would get out of her bed, walk through the dark into my bedroom and stand in the dark calling my name, wanting to get in the bed with me. Sometimes I would wake to her crying, this was after we put a gate up to keep her from being hurt in the dark, the crying, I believe, wasn’t because she was in the dark but rather she feared she would be able to get to me or that her freedom to roam was taken away. Long story short I believe she has learned to fear things, be it good or not its how it has happened in my mind.

In our lives there are many things we are afraid of, many we can admit to… many we don’t… and some I believe we don’t even understand our fear of it. A religious person would say that it is the love of God that can extinguish all fear, put it in his hands and let him handle the burden, all you have to do is love. I don’t know if I would define it exactly as that, but I do believe that there is some validity to it. I do not believe we are alone in this world, just as my daughter is not alone when she is practicing her stunts, I know that I am always there to watch her and to try and keep her safe and teach her the safe way of doing things. In the same way I believe there is a force that keeps us safe… as long as we acknowledge it, understand that it is there and allow it to watch over us. As a child we really don’t have a choice, its the parent or adult figure around you that “shows you the ropes” if you will. These people are the ones who also can show you how to love as a child. They can also show you how to hate, and judge, and ridicule and so many other things that create fear in the environment. I am not sure if I believe that anyone can truly love 24/7 their entire lives, I do believe that over a lifetime you can learn what love is and can apply to things in your life as you move through your journey. Going through the Course in Miracles I am starting to see what I have read and studied in many other pieces that speak on happiness, is that we are our own happiness, we are our own love and once we understand that and grasp it in our core everything else becomes love. Love is how we are born, happy… content and having what we need… its the minutes, days, years after our birth living in our environments that teach us what love isn’t and we begin to fear it. Love comes from within and can never be manifested by some boy or girl or pet or name or race or gender, it is who we are born to be. Fear is what we live if we do not understand the real meaning of love, you only fear that which you don’t understand. Understanding Love is so easy, yet we make is so complicated. In my case 42 years of being scared to love or be loved has played its part in my relationships, my happiness and my ability to function happily in this world. I am tired of being scared, I want to learn to love again and I want to pass that down to my daughter. My hope is that through this part of my journey I come to the understanding of what love is for me and that I take it and internalize it enough to allow me to see that light in the distance leading to happiness. I may have gotten off on a tangent this morning, it was actually one of those mornings that I just wrote things as they popped into my head and as I was learning myself. these posts are only my constant ramblings of where my head and heart are in the moment. I’m not trying to change any other lives, just my own. If someone can read this and take away anything evil or negative than its your fear not mine, I am on a mission to find love within myself and to pass that on to my beautiful daughter and trying to be the best person and father I can be. I do not want to fear anymore, I want to love.

Sometimes you just have to say “STOP”!

I’ve been worrying and stressing over my life for some time, I’ve tried meditation… music… therapy… hobbies… nothing really seems to work. Last night after a pretty decent conversation on the phone I began to think about all of the stuff I have been worrying about, going through the course in miracles at the moment I believed helped in the situation. It seems that things are beginning to line up for me and in a crazy way I see a light at the end of this tunnel. I can just say stop! I can make it all go away. Accepting what has happened and move on, its really a lot harder than it sounds.. especially when you have deep emotions involved. Moving on has been the hardest thing I have had to do, yet the most thought provoking event in my life. I have never taken the opportunity to look so heavily at myself and find my faults and mistakes and dissect them down into understandable parts. I have my faults, and I know what they are… the first step to making a change, yet they still tend to make a difference… I realized last night that I can just say stop… all the emotion doesn’t have to play a part, all of the history can be forgotten and everything left is what is real in that moment. In the particular moment this came to me all I needed to do was just take on a responsibility in order to relieve someone else of that responsibility who really could use the help. Making my life more fulfilling. If I am allowed to do it or not, the revelation of stopping my emotional roller coaster with the simple thought of stop is amazing to me. I have the power to stop everything that effects me in a negative way in my life. Its my thoughts that catapult the emotions into an unbelievable place sometimes. My only objection is that with this knowledge will I ever say go ahead with love again. Stopping it feels so good at this point, how do I get it started again. Maybe its not for me, maybe I’m one of those people who just are not meant to be in love. I’m not meant to have someone with me, I’m just to be on my own to figure it out that way. Maybe that’s my plan… I don’t know, I still have feelings inside that rumble a bit as I’m typing this, but I don’t believe at this point love will find me. Its been my motivating factor throughout my painful breakup over the past 2 years, I just wanted to feel loved. I wasn’t able to love myself and I wasn’t able to feel the love from my wife… I was so unloved, I didn’t even know if I felt love from my daughter or not. Those feelings have changed, my daughter exudes love when ever she is around, I am learning to love the person I am becoming every minute and I am certain that what ever the universe has in store for me, I’ll survive it. So I say Stop to all the negativity around me, all the thoughts that drive my jealousy, my anger, my pride, my ego, and my other emotions. I’m taking control of them and become the man I know I am.

Wednesday Morning!

I woke this morning with some energy, yesterday my sinuses kept me home and a lost phone kept me on the edge. For some reason being without my phone made me feel empty and so excluded from life. Yesterday also brought a new life into my world. A small new life who came into my arms with no fear, he was handed to me and he snuggled up against my chest I knew he was the one. This morning this little creature woke up from sleeping beside my bed and followed me into the bathroom, his litter box was located there so as I revealed my self… he did the same. As I left the room he followed me and wanted to play, such a curious little fellow. I have yet to name him… I want to leave that to my daughter. She has been talking about wanting a cat for a while now. She asked me Sunday if we could go to grand daddy’s house so she could see the kittens he had. Her eyes lit up even brighter than christmas morning when she said this. I told her that we couldn’t go today but maybe we could get a kitten of our own. She was so excited, and wanted to go get the kitten right away. I too am excited about getting this kitten. Its a new life that has not been spoiled by my past and the history I have with my wife. Its something that I can care for and it takes the pain away I feel for this empty space in my heart. I have always enjoyed having animals around, even as a boy they seemed to be my only friends at the time. This time is no different, I have a need to be a father… a caring father on a daily basis… At this point I can’t be that for my little girl, as much as I want to, her mothers personality and belief system will keep me from that daily duty. For the past 11 years I have been a father to a great pooch, his name is Bruce… I rescued him from a shelter I volunteered and later worked at… he has truly been my friend through the roughest of times, and he has never left my side. Years ago I also had a kitten that wandered into my life and I took him in, and kept him with me for years until he disappeared a few years ago. This little fellow is giving me a new look at the life I have in front of me. Taking care of both of these little ones and my daughter should be enough to satisfy my need give. I really want to learn to give in a healthy way. I know I can cultivate plants, and a garden and give it the love and attention it needs to thrive. I know i can raise and love a pet in the proper way that they are able to live happily and content. My Bruce has been with me for over 10 years and even though he is showing signs of age, he is still by my side through everything. This new kitten should give me some release from my current state of nothingness and will give my daughter and introduction to caring from life. I woke up this morning with a little bit more energy than normal… Maybe its because I have my daughter tonight and I have a special little friend to introduce to her.

Writer’s Block

I’ve been pretty clear minded for the past few days, haven’t really had anything to write about… so to keep my writing going I’m just going to go to a old standby and type what ever is in my mind at the time and try to at least do this for 10 mins. I use this method in my journaling… I was taught that it helps remove all the shit in your head so that you can think more clearly. When you have a mind like I do, things just seem to run a muck and take over many of the decent things I would rather think about. Lately there hasn’t been much to set my mind off. I have tried to take things moment by moment and I have been training myself to stay out of past ideas and issues. I was finding that all of my overwhelming emotions, my anger, my stress, my illnesses… have stemmed from my need to go back to the way things should have been. The way I wanted things to turn out and the mistakes I made that created them to fail. My mind has been pretty clear, for the most part… if things pop into my head I have been able to just take a quick look at them and hand them off to something more than I am. I say it in this way because I don’t know exactly what it is I am handing it off to. Some want to believe its God, a Holy Spirit… A universal power. I’m not quite sure where I am with that yet. What I do know is that there is something, there has to be or I’m really shit out of luck in my life. Something has to be there to capture the things I can not handle and allow me to handle the things I can while I need to have faith that whatever this entity is can take care of the pain, misery, stress and just overwhelming issues that have plagued me in the past. At first I had such a empty feeling like I was just letting these thing manifest into larger problems, but after a while they seemed to decrease in intensity and most have disappeared all together. The mind is a wonderful thing, I mean the brain really has an unlimited capacity when it come to knowledge… I believe we as humans just refuse to use any of it. I am learning that I can control everything around me just by controlling the way I think about it. Its an amazing concept, yet one that is so hard to grasp. For me I always feel like I’m allowing something to go undone or I’ll fail if it isn’t completed in some way. I am realizing that this is just my ego telling me I have to succeed in everything I do, that I can change the world and if I fail I have to keep going until I drive myself insane. Having drive and determination isn’t a bad thing, but you really need to be able to have all of the components of what your driving or determining. You can not make decisions on what you “think” the problem or elements are you need to fully understand what is before you. I used to think that my intuition was the best thing I had going for me. I thought I could tell you what someone was thinking, what they had done in life and what they were about to do… just by looking at them. I was taking from my past experiences and projecting those experiences onto others. I mean this is how I saw the world at one point in my life. Everything happened because it happened before and I have prepared myself for it. If you look at history things to come and go in cycles… War… recession… depression… hatred… control… all of these things happen because of, and one of my favorite sayings, the fact that we keep doing the same thing in the same way believing that something will change. We have to change the way we do anything if we expect to get a different outcome. I tried for a long time to believe I was doing something different… all along I still knew what I was doing and thinking was right and that I could help others by that knowledge. No one was really helped, I fell deeper into a depressed lifestyle, my surroundings never changed… my way of thinking would never change. I’m finding it to be one of the hardest things I am having to do right now is to change the way I live my life. Trying to leave the past in the past and take things for what they are in the moment given. People, experiences, things, feelings… all of these things for me have been set in stone and have been unchangeable and therefore have created the same outcomes for me throughout my life. Right now I’m wanting to experience the other side of the fence. I want to believe in something greater than I am, I want to believe that there is good in every person, I want to believe that i can succeed and that my ideas are worth pursuing. I can only get up each morning, take my shower, get dressed, eat a decent breakfast, and go out into the world and experience things as they come to me. My joy will be found in the things I discover in this part of my journey. My eyes, my mind and my soul are all open and scoping the environment to discover new ways to live and conduct my actions. It is very difficult to make a change, but very necessary… I’m not sure if what I have said today follows any real convention, hell I don’t know if I ever follow any convention… I just know that writing helps me to rejuvenate my mind for what is to come and that I feel good getting things out and on paper… and most of the time I am able to just forget those thoughts until I come back and read over them again. Changing one’s self is difficult but not impossible… you see I thought I had writers block a few minutes ago….

who am I…. Really?

I have known who I am for a while, but it seems that the person I want to be, the person I have been and the person I am now all have a connection of sorts. Even though all of these different perspectives of myself are different in my mind they all intersect and react with one another and create the person I am at this very moment. The person I have turned into today is mostly from the person I was in the past. All of those little things that have been told to me, shown to me and experienced by me has shaped and molded my mind into this person I have become today. I do not like this person, so I guess you could say I do not like who I am… Really. I am a product of years of negativity brought on my my willingness to accept and internalize the things that others have thrown out to me. I have caught every little comment, gesture, accusation, definition, and reflection that has been thrown at me, its been tucked away inside of my mind and they have enclosed the reality of who I really should be. I have allowed my past to dictate the person I am and by doing that I have wasted the majority of my life trying to change something that has already completed and moved on. I could not grasp the concept that I wouldn’t be able to change the past, but I could create a miracle and cause the things that I had done and had experienced and I would be a better person because of it. The better person can only come from who I am at this moment. Not sure if I totally grasp the concept right now, but its starting to sink in. Once it sinks to my core I will be able to digest most of what I believe to be the current state of my being. Its been said that to do something over and over in the same manner and to expect it to change is insanity… I guess I have been insane for quite some time. I have tried to change the past over and over again in my mind, seeing things as they should have been instead of accepting them as they were and moving one to the way things will be. life will always be in the present, regardless of how much I want to change what has happened in the many years of my life, it will only matter what will happen in the next moment. I have control of that moment, I have control over how I interpret this moment and how I react to it. I have the control over how I feel about it so to blame anyone or anything else for what I feel in this moment is absurd to me right now. Who am I? I am who I believe myself to be! That is the only answer that makes sense. I’m not the angry, crazy, diseased husband I am accused of being. I’m not the troubled, lazy, no good son I was accused of being. I’m not the scared, addicted, and weak individual I have been accused of being. I’m not the fat, undetermined, piece of crap I have accused myself of being. Just yesterday I had a conversation with some co workers about things I had planned to do, goals I had made in the past. These plans weren’t just in the past they are still available in my mind and are very attainable by me. I question myself all the time and doubt my instincts, but as I listened to myself explain my lapsed goals… I began to feel the passion I had for them before. Now as I type this I realize that the feeling I had wasn’t in the present, but was based from a feeling I had in the past. It made me, in that moment, feel energized and motivated and the things I had planned out before seemed so complete, all I had to do was…. just do it. For about 10 minutes as I walked back to my office, these old ideas started to churn in my brain and became new again, for those few minutes I experienced who I was before my current state of being. Before my marriage, before I started to feel like a victim again, before I walked into the hurricane that totally destroyed me…. see there I go again, living in the past, putting emphasis on the things I can’t change, the things that have passed and gone. I catch myself all the time now and start to realize that its not who I am… really. I am who I believe I am at this moment. When I am this person in the moment I can feel the energy exuding from my body, I can see the reactions from those around me… they are also energized and want to interact with my ideas. Its such a strange feeling for me, to actually see the work I have been doing for so long actually begin to work and manifest itself into the person I am becoming. You see the person I want to become also has influence on my current state. The person I wanted to become was based on the individual I was in the past, as that perception changes the person I strive to become also changes. I had someone say to me the other day, that they are making the smallest of changes in their life and they can feel it as they do. Just getting up in the morning, taking care to dress nice and complete their appearance, taking small steps towards large goals. The smallest of changes in our thinking and behavior can result in huge differences in who we start to become. You can’t just sit around and think yourself well, happy, content… you have to get up and make it happen… you have to just do it! So I am just living in the moment right now, I forget constantly who I was in my past… who the people were in the past… what things have meant to me in the past… and I put a new meaning to them here in the present. Its definitely a work in progress, but every small step I take in the right direction is a step not wasted going the wrong way. Who am I… really? I am who I am right now and that is who I will be for good.