Today I am grateful for clearing the past.  This is something I have worked on for decades now.  I see now that it wasn’t all just me holding on to crap—there was trauma there, legitimate damage and hurt and mistrust that couldn’t be undone.  I learned early on at the foundational level that I had to prove, that I wasn’t good enough, that I couldn’t trust those I was supposed to trust (except my parents).  And now I know I need to heal that.  There are people around me who I constantly vacillate between trusting and not trusting, both personally and professionally.  There are some I know my instinct is right on but there are others that I know I need to relax.  Just because my senses of mistrust and fear are heightened doesn’t mean I’m picking up on it for the right reasons.  As we heal, the same situations come up and we eventually learn to process them differently.  Each time I make a different decision, I feel better.  Each time I face the same thing over and over again, I do feel frustrated because I feel like my boundaries haven’t been respected.  It took me a long time to figure out which boundaries were ego and which needed to be held.  The more I heal, the clearer that is. 

Today I am grateful for love.  I have had a confusing relationship with love for a long time.  Going back to foundational issues, I really never understood love.  I favored a particular style of romance filled with drama or glamor or both and it was a long time until I understood how to accept a relationship for what it is.  I grew up watching a lot of movies…what can I say.  All that aside, I never understood that relationships don’t need to be dramatic or extreme—there is real value in stability and predictability, in building things together, in knowing the other person is there. There is nothing more disheartening in thinking you have a partner and discovering that they don’t want the same things.  Who we choose to be around, who we listen to, and who we build things with impacts us in so many ways.  When we learn to love ourselves we learn who can love us and who we can love.  We see what our real match is.  I am grateful to be supported by people (some surprising) who remind me that I need to take care of myself, that I need to love myself.  And then I can love them. 

Today I am grateful for releasing.  Following up on clearing the past and building healthy love, I see the limiting patterns that I need to release.  Maybe more than seeing, I feel them.  When I repeat a pattern I can physically feel my body behaving differently.  It doesn’t feel right, kind of like, “Hey, this isn’t fitting.”  Whereas before I would agree with the negative feeling.  In releasing these things and finding foundational change and learning appropriate relationships, I’m learning to trust myself and know that I am capable of doing the things I want to do.  Yes, it takes work, but it is something I am capable of.  When people doubt me, I have transmuted from feeling I need to prove that I can do it to simply doing it.  Similarly, I understand that if I shouldn’t be doing it (like if it’s legitimately someone else’s responsibility) that I won’t do it regardless of who tells me to do it.  That one is still tough, especially in work environments where I do have a reporting structure—but I’m sticking with it.  Part of releasing is letting go of the need to be approved of by anyone.  I’m not a child looking for a parent’s approval, or a teacher’s approval.  I’m an adult and my wishes and boundaries need to be respected as well—and just because I’ve been nice doesn’t mean I need to be compliant to your every whim to the detriment of my own needs.  I’m also grateful to go for things that I wouldn’t have normally because I didn’t feel like I qualified.  For opening my mouth and expressing the truth—because people who understand don’t just listen, they hear.  Those are the ones that matter.

Today I am grateful for understanding my body. There is a Buddhist saying about love pertaining to how we feel.  It’s along the lines of if you feel nervous or jittery or pounding heart when you meet someone, they aren’t the one, true love is calm.  I recently experienced this in relation to success.  I mentioned last week that I had met Loren Ridinger.  Normally when I meet well-known people or people in power (I’m only talking about events like when I’ve attended comedy shows and stayed after to meet people, or when I’ve worked/met with the president of my company etc.—I’m not inflating my ego here lol) I get really nervous and I find myself trying way too hard.  When I met Loren, my heart beat was steady, I wasn’t nervous in the slightest.  I recently went for an interview and it was simply a conversation—no nerves, no trying to prove.  I listened and responded instead of trying to plan my answers.  I’m not saying that anything in particular is going to come of this (I can’t see the future) but I 100% understand that saying.  When something feels right, that knowing takes over us and there is an ease to it rather than an impulse.  The body often tells us what we need to know through what we feel instead of what we think.  It feels even better when we lean into it—it’s a different type of flow.  Allowing is an amazing experience.

Today I am grateful for releasing.  Yes, I’m talking about releasing again but this is different.  I’m talking about releasing control.  When it came to my day to day or even planning the future, I was always on the defense.  It always felt like I was behind the ball, running to catch up, like I wasn’t good enough so I had to prove.  The little moves I’ve made to bolster my confidence have shown me that I don’t need to have people think a certain way about me to be successful or to move forward.  Freedom comes when we forget about controlling anything and we just do what is right for us.  We will never have a way to control the opinions of the world—all we can do is be authentic and know that the right people will find us.  No matter what the wrong people say, that doesn’t invalidate our message, who we are, or what we are capable of.  There are some cases where that is easier said than done, but I will tell you, since switching to that focus, doing the things I need to do, the need to control anything outside is diminishing and it feels good.  Instead of looking at the steps someone else needs to take to fulfill our needs, we simply take the steps to fulfill those needs ourselves—and no one can take away that work we do on ourselves. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.