When Life Doesn't Look Like Tripping Through the Daisies

You know, life doesn’t always look like happiness and light, and “wow, I’m so glad I’m alive”. Life can look like "failing" a lot at whatever expectations we have set for ourselves. Then it can look like shaming / trying not to shame ourselves for that perception of "failing."

When life doesn't look like happiness and light and "wow, I'm so glad I'm alive," it's often, I'm noticing, because I'm perceiving something in my life as wrong or bad or not as it should be. Coloring my life with this filter also leads to compulsive behaviors. I’ve figured out, I think, that nearly all my compulsive behaviors have an emotional trigger.

Emotional triggers can stem from all sorts of things. They can be in response to not having enough or in response to suddenly having after a long period of not-having. We can feel triggered from a conversation we have with someone in a connection which has a lot of emotional weight or history. We can feel triggered by the feelings we have based on the stories we tell ourselves about a situation, (which may be what's really going on, or may be wildly inaccurate.) Like when we text someone and don't hear back - do we tell ourselves they probably got busy, really care, and want to return our text when they have space? or do we tell ourselves it's because they don't value us and don't want to hear what we have to say?

Sometimes, as a friend of mine pointed out a few days ago, an emotional trigger can stem from things like speaking up for ourselves when we're not accustomed to doing so. It's a positive new behavior we want to encourage and nurture in ourselves, but it's such new, uncertain territory, we're triggered. And sometimes, an emotional trigger has nothing to do with the present moment. It may stem from an emotional attachment we hold to a memory that we brought into the present moment. The stories we tell ourselves about that memory can trigger a compulsive behavior or coping mechanism in response. And you know what, they are fine. They are fine every time they are triggered. Everything about us is fine. All the choices we make - they're just choices. They're just things that we choose to do or say. We're all doing the best we can, at every moment. Our choices don't define us. We're actually much bigger than our choices. Choices have natural consequences in this manifestation of existence, but holding onto our choices or onto our pasts or onto our perceived mistakes or anything like that actually blocks us from opening up to all the good that is yet to come. We learn, we grow, we move on. We do what we can to stay open, to open our hearts, to trust - even after all the heartache and hurt and pain and trauma we've experienced. Otherwise, we are the judge and jury, convicting ourselves to a life sentence of self-imposed suffering. No one deserves that. I could go into how I've arrived at a position of seeing our every choice as almost inevitable. Our DNA, our past traumas, our childhoods, our parents, our grandparents, our experiences at school, what we eat, what we watch - everything feeds into who we are, who we become. And the best thing we can do for ourselves is to give ourselves the grace and space to learn to make the choices we prefer moving forward. Sometimes that requires making choices that we can clearly see we do not prefer first, in order to experience what those choices bring into our lives. Then we can more clearly see see what choices we do want. When we see ourselves from the Higher Perspective, from the perspective of unconditional love, we open ourselves up to the option of making choices based upon knowing that at our core, love isn't only what we deserve, it's what we are.


I've done and said things in my life that ... man, it is sometimes still on and off difficult for me to not judge as completely f***** up. But I gotta tell you, it is not helpful to frame it like, "Jen, you are so f***** up. Look at what you did. Look at how you hurt that person. Look at what you said." Do you remember how some people used to think rubbing their dogs' noses in their own poop was an effective way to get the dogs not to poop in the house? Doing what I just said is like the eternal rubbing your nose in your own poop. And, I gotta say, that's not a humane (or generally effective) way to house train your dog. And it's not the way to train yourself. The long bout of depression I fought, the one that lead to my dramatic "Spiritual Awakening," was triggered essentially by continually rubbing my nose in past mistakes.

So what is my point here? Well, by sharing authentically and transparently about my own - very human - experience, I want to show you that your own - very human - experience is more than okay, it's exactly what you're here to do. Consciousness is just doing what consciousness does, at all levels. When we're children, we make the kinds of choices children make. When we're taller, bigger, older children, we still make similar choices, just with bigger stakes. Obviously, we don't really want to hurt others or ourselves, and when we figure out that pain can result from a specific choice, we know better. We can choose differently. We call our choices that result in such pain "mistakes". But without pain, we wouldn't grow quite the same way. In fact, growth seems to almost require pain.

It's all good. It's all beautiful, even when it looks really ugly. It's all part of this life. It's part of us becoming ourselves. So love yourself. Really. Give yourself permission to value yourself, right now, just like you are. With all your "I should have said this," "I shouldn't have done that," - go right on ahead and wipe all that "should" off your shoulders. It doesn't belong to you. "Should" speaks about the past or the future. The past is gone. The future never arrives. In essence, it's all an illusion. All we have is right now, this moment.