Have you ever worked a full-time job? Maybe you’re working in one now. You commit your energy to a relationship with a given employer, trusting that employer to pay you an agreed upon wage for your time and effort. The foundation of working for other people is that if we commit time and effort to somebody else’s cause, they will pay us for that effort and time.
What happens when you start working for yourself? Potentially you put a lot of time and effort into it and make very little or no money for that time and effort. What you put into it, especially at first, doesn’t always balance with what you get of it. The foundation of a job is to be paid for our time. When we work for ourselves we have to accept the risk that it may not work out that way.
I found another old wound today. What else is new right?
I generally share these with you in case they help somebody else who may have the same wound. So, let’s get into it.
The wound is simply that everything I do in life has to have some sort of practical purpose. I enjoy crochet for example, but I’ll only do it when I’m making something necessary. I won’t crochet a blanket just because I enjoy crochet. I will crochet a blanket if somebody needs one though. My interest in computers served a purpose as well. Yes, I love computers, but I use those skills to help myself and those around me. There is a practical application there. I don’t read romance novels because they serve no purpose, but I will read a self-help book or some kind of non-fiction book that teaches something or offers a skill. I don’t even make the bed because it serves no practical purpose. The only time the bed gets made by me is when I wash the sheets. Making the bed has no sanitary practical application. #sorrynotsorry
Have you ever gone in one direction and realized somewhere along the way you should have gone a completely different route?
That’s how life works sometimes. It’s not a bad thing because it means you’re learning, you’re growing, you’re changing, and you’re understanding what you need in order to be happy and balanced in your life. These kinds of changes are really good, but not always the easiest to do.
When I started my internal healing journey, my goal was to stop worrying about everything while not being afraid of simply existing anymore. To that end I was intuitively guided through a process of self-mastery, which taught me how to better manage myself in the experience.
Ultimately I learned how to stop worrying about things and not to be afraid of what was going to happen next. I learned how to trust myself to handle my life more than anything. This work completely changed my life.
So, I’m working on a project behind the scenes and the writing I just did for it this morning offered me something I didn’t expect to get today.
We all know I get the vast majority of my clarity through writing and tarot. I use writing to clarify the tarot frequently. I’m never surprised when clarity comes through this way because I expect it. I’m just sometimes surprised by the content of that clarity. Today was one of those days.
I’ve been missing in action. Don’t worry, I didn’t run out of things to say. I ran out of the motivation to say it. Let me explain.
My motivation up until now has been based on external goals. Some of you may know that I was able to pay off the debt that I had and we were gifted a new to us truck. Things have calmed down significantly and that means that the external motivations I had are also, well, gone.
That left me in a bit of a void. If I’m no longer motivated by the external world, then what? That’s the question I’ve been asking for a while now. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.
Yes. If I could pick a word that describes the theme this year it would be balance.
Why? Because I’m seeing both the balance and the imbalance within myself and the in the world around me. I see the crazy around me. I also see where I haven’t fully balanced within myself. I’m slowly shifting the balance. I’m creating a new balance in my life that makes more sense to me.
You’ve probably noticed I haven’t been around for a while. I haven’t been posting very much. I haven’t been writing blogs. I haven’t been working on anything in the background. I literally walked away because I needed to.
Accepting the past and co-existing with our memories are different things. Co-existing with our memories is just learning to get okay with the memory so that when our memories upset us we don’t end up down a rabbit hole of emotion we have trouble getting out of.
Accepting the past takes that process one step further. Now we have to get okay with the whole thing, not just the memories but also the people involved and the experiences we’ve had. We have to learn to co-exist with our own previous life experience.
Sometimes when we talk about accepting the past it turns into inner child work, but the truth is that the past is not limited to everything that happened before you were 13. Accepting the past includes your teenage years, your young adult years, maybe your thirties, forties, and fifties as well. Accepting the past includes accepting what happened yesterday and 5 minutes ago. Accepting the past includes everything right up until the very present moment of our experience. That means it’s not just inner child work, it’s inner adult work and inner teenager work too.
Acceptance is our ability to co-exist with our memories, whether the memory happened 5 minutes ago, 5o years ago, or anywhere in between. Being able to co-exist with our memories offers peace in the present and allows us to heal from the past.
How do we do that?
First, let’s get our thinking right. Accepting past experience does not mean that we’re allowing that experience to repeat again. It doesn’t mean we’re okay with what happened. It doesn’t mean we forgive anybody for anything. It doesn’t mean anything in the outside world at all. It’s not about the outside world. Acceptance of memories is strictly about allowing ourselves to be okay in the present.
