Desires

"What do you desire right now?"

Ohhhh how I just love this question (please note the sarcasm).  My initial response is always, "I don't know." But I must. Let's break it down. I want to know what I want. How's that for starters? Gotta start somewhere right? That statement makes me smile, brings joy into my heart. What do I desire? Makes me want to ask, in what aspect of my life? It's simple. Things are always much more simpler than we believe they are, it is our experiences, fears, & egos that make it all so much more than it is.  What do I desire right now? At this moment? Mexican food. My classmate said it earlier, and I've wanted it ever since. I want get full and come home and go to sleep so I can get up at 4am to take the Uncle to the airport.. okay seriously. I'm going off on a tangent distracted myself, like so many of us so easily do when we wish to avoid the truth. Am I afraid of what I really want? Do I fear that if I admit to myself what I want, then I'm opening myself up for disappointment if I don't get it? I don't know. An unacceptable answer. We always know. Somewhere inside of us, we know.  We know the best action to take, we know there is a resolution, we KNOW that WE KNOW.  So what do I want? What are my hearts true desires. It's simple. I keep hearing that in my head, it's so simple. To feel joy, freedom, & Love. To connect with others. To be in the moment. Ah I remember now, I want to live more in the moment. To be in the moment. To stop wanting to dig so deep, looking for something that may or may not be there. Some pain, that I've yet to discover. As if I'm confused. So used to going down within the depths of my soul and coming out with arm fulls of pain & suffering that I need to sift through. Beliefs that aren't true & experiences that never happened. That's what I'm used to. I've been coming up empty handed lately, and I"m not so sure what to do about that. Like that weird feeling when you clean out your purse, and it just feels like something is missing, but everything is there. My eye itches, lol ;) -- just a side note, lol. I've been asking myself what it feels like, whatever it is that I'm feeling. Where in my body to I feel it, and what does it feel like. Approaching whatever feeling I'm feeling with what Geneen Roth calls, "Curiosity & kindness."

I sat with myself today, as is. No special reason. Not because I was hurting, or angry and needed to explore that, but simply to sit with myself as I was in that moment. Which was, calm, curious, & open. I prayed that if there were something that needed to come into my awareness that it come and I accept it with grace. If not, I prayed that I knew when it was time to come out of my quiet space and accept that too, with grace. I simply made myself available to the universe; I sat with stillness, I sat with God.

Just now I realize just before I took my seat  I was standing in front of the refrigerator picking at cucumber salad, I asked myself what I really wanted in that moment, because it wasn't the cucumber salad. I know this because when I took a deep breath with it in my mouth, I became a tad nauseated. I shut the door and thought, "I want to stop wanting." That thought was so far from my mind until I typed "I sat with God" in sitting with myself as I was, my desires were fulfilled. Desires I was barely even aware of & almost quieted with food.

"Because when you evoke curiosity and openness with a lack of judgement, you align yourself with beauty & delight & love-- for their own sake. You become the benevolence of God in action." - Geneen Roth

Love & Light
Dottie

Pulling It Together

"Why am I doing the things I'm doing?"

Fear. Excitement. Moments of peace. Moments of knowing. Scattered thoughts of envy, greed, bitterness. Control. Surrender. Breath. Meditation. Feelings. Questions. Reflections. Love. Lust. Discernment. Distractions, from what? From whom? Which one? Which parts of me are enacted right now? How okay am I with it? What now? Sit with it, allow it to swell, consume me so I surrender in exhaustion at my attempts to make sense of it all? Take a step back. I've been here before. I wasn't ready then. I'm praying for the willingness to be ready now. Breathe. Pray that I find some reprieve in my fight to figure it all out. A letting go. It's like I forget how to do it sometimes. I've done it before, but with no explanation to "how" so "how" do I do it again? Wait. Patience. Nothing has ever been, or ever will be black & white. There is the balance. Some situations call for a fight from deep within you that calls upon parts of yourself you didn't know existed, others are in need of your total and complete surrender, acceptance. Sometimes give, sometimes we take. Ah sweet discernment. Breathe. Stillness. Silence. What am I doing? What am I hiding from? What is rising to the surface like an infection which has laid dormant for sometime, but now coming to the surface to be freed, cleansed, and no longer affecting the those parts of me I cannot see? My question to myself... let it fester? Grow? Slowly seep from the depths of my soul only to be cleansed and no longer inside of me? or do I walk away. Do I call it quits, knowing much of this is of my own creation, and thus up to me to disperse? Until I find out... I'm just going to breathe. Slow, deep, cleansing breathes. With a knowing that all is just as it should be, and really my only job is to hold onto the faith that all will end in Love & healing.

Love & Light
Dottie

My Mother's Footsteps

I've learned more about love & relationships since January of this year, than I've learned in my entire life. A life accumulation of various lessons where now put to good use.  Since I was 12, I watched my mother fall in love with men who didn't want to be with her, who only came to her when it was convienant for them, while they had freedom to do, come, and go as they pleased. It was acceptable to bring men home from the bar, and send them home the next day. It was normal to talk about your sex life around the grill with Aunts, Uncles, cousins, and friends. The first time I followed in my mother's footsteps I was 13. I loved him as much as a 13 yr old could love someone. With a feverish passion that edged on obsession. I wanted to be his girlfriend more than anything in the entire world, but when he didn't want that, I took whatever I could get. That's what I was taught to do. I spent the next 10 years of my life loving him as much as a 13 yr old girl could love someone, even though I was 22. I open this blog with that, because I believe that relatinship to be of the most significant of them all. The dynamics had changed a handful of times, yet always ended the same. Us not talking. I've spent the last 12 making repeated mistakes, trying to hard, clinging, pushing away, crying, humiliating myself.

So this is what I've learned... being honest with mysef & not supressing my urges to be who I am is the absolute best thing for me to do. Men, relationships, love, lust... it's all going to come and go. It is exciting & fun if I don't cling to that which is already right here, right now. Something better is always on it's way. My attempts at pushing for something somone is not willing to give me rob me of my serenity, and ignite addict tendencies. I control nothing. Attempting to do so wrecks havoc on my serenity.

-I do not owe any man, any thing. I'm not obligated to do shit.
-It's okay to get angry, and it's okay to tell them you're angry. I'm a woman, and I get hormonal.
-Trying to find out what they want/are looking for and being THAT, or revealing only my qualities that support that while supressing the others will get me nowhere.
-I have wants & needs. I have every right to express those, and if he (whoever that is at the moment) cannot or does not fulfill those, there is someone else who will.
-Patience is powerful. They almost always come back somewhere down the line.

It has taken me 13 years to unlearn so much of what I was taught in my young adolesence in regards to relationships. It has been a marvelous un-raveling of pain, denial, control, & fear. For me, the best thing I can do is

Pain & Suffering

    I awoke about 45min ago, and laid there. Maybe it was the pain. The soreness had begun to set in. I hurt from armpit to armpit. I smiled, and turned over. I couldn't go back to sleep though. I thought of the gym & running. I reflected upon the workout with Burkey the day before & conversations with a new friend. People who share in, what I perceive to be a very unique outlook on fitness, I don't even want to call it fitness. But what the hell else would I call it? So, here I am, 5:44am. I kept hearing myself ask the question, "What do I want?" & the answer was always, "More." It made me nervous. A typical addict statement. More. More is never enough. I relentless pursuit of that which will never satiate. I spent almost two hours at the gym yesterday. Training for an hour, then decided it wasn't enough so I hoped on the treadmill & ran. I came home and showered only to find myself wanting a "leisurely barefooted walk" about 3 hours later, which turned into a barefooted run. When I woke up this morning, all I thought about was bench pressing. Yesterday was the first time we did real bench pressing stuff and several times I wasn't sure if I was gonna get that bar up, and told Burkey through gritted teeth not to touch it. A "safety net" if you will, somehow has a way of making people not push themselves as hard as they could. Fuck that safety net, I didn't want him to touch my bar. I was going to get it up. Believe it or not, weight lifting is never an isolated muscle exercise, if it is your doing it wrong & cheating yourself. I did fail at getting that weight up at least 3 times. I wanted to push myself into & through failure. The thing that finally got that bar up had nothing to do with strength, but a change in my breathing. It made all the difference. Utilization of the energetic life force. A deep breathe along with a pause as I held the bar above my chest, holding the breath on the way down, and breathing out while pushing the weight away from my body. Where I had failed  to get it up even a second time, I got it up three times. And I laughed. A joy. I loved it. As if I was pushing back against every emotion that had pushed on me for the last 10 years. It was payback. I fought back against whatever it was that had so often fueled those days & nights of self-destruction. Breathing & pushing that hard make you go places inside yourself you haven't been in years. I don't mind going there these days, in fact I welcome it. I've built a positive relationship with pain & suffering... in that way, in eradicates itself. If the relationship is positive, and I find joy within it; then where is the pain & suffering?

Love & Light
Dottie