Cazitudes

Reflections - JQ3

Q: Do your fears live up to your expectations?

I was, at one time in my life, dominated by fear.  I can remember at the height of my childhood anxiety and fears of the bullies on the playground, I had a nightmare dream of the bush-lot behind my house being ablaze and threatening to destroy everything around it.  I watched it burn, afraid, from my bedroom window.  I watched my dream-self watch one of those fiery trees uproot itself, walk over to the house and fall against my bedroom window.  I woke up, blazing with terror.  As a child, I didn't understand that my unconscious self was simply reflecting my conscious fears of my everyday reality.

I endured bullying for several more years, relentless as it came.  

It wasn't until I was entering high school - and the removal of my braces! - that I decided I did not wish to be bullied any more.  I began to face up to the bullies.  I learned that my pounding fear of their reprisals and revolts was unwarranted - as I found my voice and confidence to deflect them, they backed away.  Actually, they faded into the background of my life.  I began my journey back to personal empowerment.

Becoming an adult, I still had fears.  Fears of speaking in front of crowds, fears of speaking my opinion when it mattered most, fear of stepping out on my own.  Fear of making my own way in life.  Fear of being alone.  Fear of losing my children to calamity.  Many typical fears others bear.  Some of them were debilitating, though.  

Like the fear of what everyone else thought of me.

That one was spirit-crushing.

I have discovered, however, over the course of my life that facing my fears head-on eradicates their hold on me!  I have learned that my fears, in their inkling ways and their full-bloomed exaggerations, really are illusions and misplaced energies.  They never reach expected peak, they never manifest into the magnitudes of expression or execution that my mind builds them up to deliver.  They are dusted and dealt death-blows the moment I decide to acknowledge them.  They are blown away the moment I exercise the power of my voice and choice.

And that is the secret ingredient to eradicating our fears: exercising our voice and choice.  As the Les Brown quote to the left notes, our fears actually are powerful motivators to prompt us to embrace capacities to rise up empowered to craft our own way, carve our own path, deliver our own dreams and successes.  

 

Reflections - JQ2

Q: How do I/we bring to the Planet the transformative and spiritual energy of the mystic within each of us?

Intuitively,
understanding belonging
is a choice of heart.

With a choice of heart,
expressing full compassion
for those not as us.

For those not as us
beat hearts with the same life-blood
in this lifetime, now.

In this lifetime, now,
all that matters in being -
love, fully expressed.

Love, fully expressed
in transformative spirit;
life's way, shown divine.

Life's way, shown divine
reveals the mystical heart
intuitively.

 

 

Reflections - JQ1

Q:  How long will you leave it until you live life to the full?

I have been sitting with this question now for about 3 weeks, pondering its prompting and wondering how I am going to answer that question in a fulscap page's worth.  When I roll the question around in my cranial space, I self-prompt with a question in reply -- what exactly does 'life to the full' look like?  What does that even mean?  Full as in pushing my personal comfort zone boundaries, full as in the day's activity line-up eats up every waking minute?  Full as in meeting as many people as possible, traveling as far as one's body can stand?  Is 'life to the full' about not squandering time?

I'm thinking that last question is maybe a good starting point for personal reflection.  How much time, on a day-to-day basis, do I let sift through my fingers, in idle distraction and unconscious meander?  Answer: far too much.  I think about the list of things I do that add little value to my life and my contribution to living my life to the full.  Things like mindlessly scrolling through the Facebook feed, looking for updates on those who intersect my life, finding banal snippets but scrolling again and again just the same.  Of watching home renovation shows because if I start with the 'before', I must endure the during to see the 'after.'  The amount of driving I do, to and from the job.  The equivalent - at minimum - of a part-time job just to get to and from my full-time job.  When I stop and consider that time, invested in those idlings and millings, I am ... rueful, bemused.  At myself.

In many other ways, though, I have become much more mindful, more mystic-searching.  I read, I study, I learn, I go and experience life.  I travel.  I eat and drink new things.  I talk to friends and strangers alike in intimate "namaste - I see you" conversations.  I am moved by those in trial and grief.  I collect art, support artists.  I sketch and write and create constructs that are soul-soothing.  I live in the moment as much as I can mindfully remember to do so.

I savour life in small moments.  Moreso now with each passing year... the older I become, the more precious time is, the mindful I dive, the fuller life experience I desire.

How long will I leave until I live life to the full?  Or rather, how long did I wait until I started to do so?  Too long.  Decades too long.  Only in this last decade have I understood and started.  And I am started.  Now... now, it's time to claim back those idling moments I still tarry in or am required to endure for vocation's sake.  I can claim them all with mindful now awareness and reflection.

Life to the full is only found moment by moment, anyhow.  So.  Cheers to the moment of now.  As life in its fulness...