Month: November 2014

Avoidance

November 27, 2014

There are so many things we anxiously avoid because we do not really want to know. We do not want to know the answers to our questions, so we do not ask, we do not search, we do not try. When we do search, we many times find that what we were fearing is not real. Other times, we find that our fears are well-founded and then the job is to overcome the fear by facing it. Either way, we must move toward the stress, toward the details, toward that which evokes anxiety. We must figure it out, see it, examine it, admire it, accept it. Read More

Being Here and There

November 18, 2014

As we become adults, most of us gain the ability to have self-awareness – being able to look at ourselves from the outside, the equivalent of seeing ourselves from another’s perspective. And many of us know that when you do this sort of self-analysis ad infinitum, you can get lost inside yourself. This is partly because when you are doing your own self-analysis, you don’t need the perspective of others. It causes a serious drag on our processing, though, and it fatigues us from over-thinking (also called anxiety). Read More

Grieving

November 11, 2014

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In order to love and accept our life and those around us as they are, we must learn to grieve what we thought they would be. Without doing that, we will always love our ideals more than we love the actual thing. This does not mean we have to stop wishing for things, for hope is a good thing. In fact, if we do not do this sort of grieving, we will not be able to hope. We will only have depression – the kind that follows when we do not get what we thought we should have. Everyone goes through this kind of disillusionment – mostly in our adulthood (there is a normal developmental idealism that carries us through our youth). Our marriages, our careers and our lives in general undergo this disillusionment and it is totally normal! Maturity is the consistent “surrendering” of our ideals to attempt to love what is, rather than what we hoped would be. Again, the hope is good. Our demands for what we hope are what are dangerous. Read More

Archetypes

November 4, 2014

In order to truly love someone else, you must surrender your rigid beliefs about what you yourself “should be”. Most of us travel around with these inner archetypes by which we judge ourselves and others lovable or unlovable. As long as you are holding onto yours and hoping that you measure up, you will also use it to deem others valuable or not. Our deepest fear and dilemma is that we do not even measure up  to our own created archetypes. The gift is to know that although we do not measure up, the measure is not needed. We do not even need to judge ourselves. We are valuable only because we belong and we are loved. Read More