An Ah-Ha! About Guilt

I awaken in the mornings frustrated because I feel anger, sadness, stuck, not present. Waves of melancholy flow through sporadically throughout the day--and it's actually a release when tears manage to flow a bit. For someone who used to cry at the drop of a hat, this emotional dismantling is a bit strange, new.

And I look at Max and I second-guess my choice of trusting that all is well with him—that he doesn’t have to eat in order to be a healthy, abundantly life-filled being. That under the layers of hypnotic overlay, at the core of him lies a perfectly healthy being. I recognize this easily for myself, but it is hard to do the same with my loved ones.

I stop from time to time and just breathe alongside him. I take walks just to breathe and center myself and try to keep from hovering over him, suffocating him with my waffling, self-distrusting ways. He's always better and more present when we just breathe together, and I let go of the story. I released him when he was in the most distressing state, but he's chosen to stay--and we're both walking that journey of what it's like to be alive in this world without having to accept the mass conscious belief that we have to eat in order to be joyfully alive and well. Old habits are hard to chuck aside.

I tell myself I should be living my life with joy and making choices, but instead I find I've been playing a waiting game, still just trying to make it through each moment and this steady bombardment of feelings that's painful and relentless. It's mentally and physically exhausting.

The book by Kate Morton, The House in Riverton, haunts me and I wish I’d never read it because I read to uplift myself. This just left me feeling bereft; and no amount of compassion, justification, and understanding of the characters’ choices at each point along the way that led to such painful, death-filled conclusions, took away the fact that it happened. Guilt permeated the story—it was the foundation of the plot. I couldn’t handle the feelings it evoked in me.

*Note: I need to clarify here that I absolutely love the novels written by Kate Morton. They are epic masterpieces with authentic characters whose stories span continents and time. Her writing touches me like no other--I just feel myself more energetically invested in the stories than is sometimes comfortable for me. And I refuse to analyze it any further. I just highly recommend her work.

Finally, this morning, as I sat with Max sipping my cappuccino, I asked for clarity—and I breathed and got it. I remembered that every book I read carries a personal insight for me in its pages—they’ve always helped me recognize perceptions and aspects of myself that I’m not aware of. It’s that sense of not being able to see the forest for the trees. The universe has been pointing out that particular aspect to me in nearly every moment and interaction in a myriad of forms, but it’s been so long a part of me that I have difficulty separating it out from myself right away in order to see it clearly.  In this case—it was GUILT.

Guilt is responsible for me distrusting my ability to make sound choices. I’m afraid that no matter how benevolent my intentions, someone is going to get hurt because of me. That, in turn, results in my waffling and second-guessing myself—which leads to my stopping of making conscious choices, thus, stagnation of my life, and that awful waiting game, that just getting through life, moment by moment, stuck.

I’ve been trying to mentally handle and control the guilt—telling myself not to feel that way. But that is a load of mental and spiritual bullshit—I can’t control or avoid how I feel, no matter how awful or painful it is. And trying not to be or feel actually intensifies that pain and draws the suffering of it out longer.

I’ve tried to mentally rescript the past, but it doesn’t work that way—I can’t “figure my out” of a painful experience even by trying to put a positive spin on it. I just have to let it be an experience (some which I hate)—to not judge my choices leading to it as bad or good, as mistakes, or wrong or right. It was ultimately just an experience I immersed myself in, which my soul squeezed the wisdom essence from, discarding the pain-filled human details in the process. I’ve just been hanging onto the human details, not realizing they were unnecessary, that they were clogging up the flow of my life.

And all I have to do to release myself from the GUILT thing is simply acknowledge that I'm aware of it: "Hey! Now I see you..." And breathe...No more struggling, trying to figure out what to do with it--struggling entangles me more. Just simply see it and know that all is truly well...

"What does it mean to be truly free?"

This was one of the most important and profound questions I was ever asked. I'm thinking it is so important to our journey in this country which was created out of this tenet, that our schools should ask the question of all our children and adults of all ages (in fact, it would be a great topic of discussion at any gathering), at least once a year or more, so the thought stays uppermost in our consciousness.

I love the first sentence of our Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Note that it does NOT guarantee every single person's happiness (an impossibility), but does recognize everyone's freedom to pursue it however they desire. For myself, I add in the words "and DO NO HARM."

For me, freedom means to accept responsibility for every aspect of my life--past, present and future. 

And that means that I'm not to point my finger at some other person and say, "He's got too much abundance--I could use some of his abundance. Let's make a law and make him share because poor, pitiful me.......or I have this cause.......or these poor, pitiful people need it more than he does......." 

If I choose to help someone out, I choose to do so from my own abundance--I'm not going soliciting, nor is it any business of mine to tell another what to do with his/her flow of abundance.

Nor should I enslave another in order to manifest my abundance. I worked for a family owned business that went corporate, was bought out and merged with successively larger corporations until they had cost-cutting (an abundance of lack of abundance consciousness) down to such an art that they didn't fix our machinery, yet increased our output orders. Then one day, they basically said, "You people aren't working hard enough for the wage we pay you, so we're shipping the entire plant down to Mexico where people are willing to work for less." In all fairness, we'd been working our asses off, looking at their little This company cares about you/OSHA-enforced safety posters, knowing and experiencing that they really didn't give a damn. I'm sorry, people of Mexico--you didn't deserve enslavement either and that's an atrociously horrid representation of what my country stands for. Corporations such as those are NOT my ambassadors.

And by the term, abundance, I don't mean just money. Abundance comes in all forms: health, joyful being, wealth, etc.

I was born into one of the most amazing gifts of our planet--the United States of America. We've been on a journey of exploration of what true freedom means and how to live that to our utmost while living alongside our FELLOW SOVEREIGNS in harmony. Yes, we've had our growing pains, trials along the way, but considering that most humans (myself included) don't really know or can grasp fully what true freedom means and is, well, we're moving through it moment by moment, concept by concept, breath at a time................and I think and, most importantly, feel that we should celebrate and remember that.

It's easy to point out everything that's wrong in the world--it's pretty much a default setting in our mass consciousness. Maybe we should consider shifting perspective and look around and within ourselves with gratitude instead?

This is just a start to what living freely means to me.

Now I pose the question, "What does it mean to be truly free for you, SOVEREIGN?"