Easy isn’t always easier…

After selling my home more than two years ago and getting rid of all but a few physical possessions in order to go away and write my memoir, I returned to Kansas City last year and told my daughter I wasn’t going to buy any Christmas decor for my little studio apartment. My little lover of all things Christmas, who is now 29 years old, wasn’t going to let me get away with making it easy on myself. It sounded blasphemous to her not to have at least some holiday decor, so she bought me a Christmas tree sized for my tiny space and knowing there was nothing I could do to dissuade her since we were talking about Christmas, I accepted her gift. She hadn’t let me give away all my Christmas decor when I sold the house, so she also gave me back some other items to help brighten up my little space.

My self-compassion coach is also very adept at calling me out when I try to punish myself, so when I told her the story, she said she was quite glad my daughter had stepped in. And that comment led me to ask myself, “Why was I really saying I didn’t want any Christmas decor because I had always loved the color and lights of the season?”

With questions, come answers, eventually….

“We are the architects of our situation.” Simon Sinek

And yet, we do not have control of everything.

Somewhere in between these two extremes, I believe, is the sweet spot where life can be accepted and understood.

We humans want it to be one way. We want security. We want an answer. We want to believe we have control.

But we do not.

We want a black and white life, not one that has shades of gray that confuse us, that make us ponder things that make us uncomfortable to acknowledge.

We want everything to be easy.

But life…is…hard.

And the easier we try to make it, the more complicated, difficult, and just plain hard it gets.

We not only avoid pain these days, we run like hell to get away from it. And we’ve raised generations of children who don’t have a clue how to handle discomfort, let alone pain, because their parents tried to create perfect lives for them. Perfect lives without any pain.

There is so much to be learned through pain, though. So much growth in the mire and mess of life. So much awareness and gratitude for the joy when we’ve actually felt the pain.

Beginning with the Industrial Revolution which brought a focus on increasing productivity and quality control (i.e. perfection) through machines and strict processes, we lost our creativity, the parts of us that feel free to explore and to see what could be, rather than only what is. We lost the ability to be truly with people and with ourselves. We got too busy to be human, there simply was no time for that in our quest to be perfect. How we appeared, hiding any imperfections, became the new normal. And there are so many imperfections in this hard life, so instead of expressing within our family and community, we began repressing and isolating and lost our ability to be real with ourselves and real with each other.

And when we lose touch with our humanity, when we try too hard to be perfect and productive at all times, we get stuck in our minds where we try to control everything instead of living in our hearts and souls where life actually becomes worth living. Without connecting to our hearts and souls, it’s very difficult to feel spiritually connected so we lost touch with any attempt to think about or figure out why we are all even here, why we are alive, what meaning there is in living this hard life.

And when there’s no meaning to life, it becomes much easier to minimize the value of any life sometimes including one’s own. We became selfish not caring about the pain going on within the people, within the communities, within the country, within the world around us. We thought more about ourselves than each other and we began to fear one another because who has trust in those they don’t care about. And where there is fear, the resulting behavior will be control. What we feared, we needed to control because that was the only way we could keep our fear of potential pain from making us uncomfortable. Others who were different than us, didn’t believe the same things we did, who had a different perspective and saw the world differently than we did became not only different, they became an enemy. And because we lived in our minds, we could justify our behavior without feeling things like morals and values that used to be the foundation of this country. We focused on preserving our perceived safety by taking out the enemy in one way or another. Social media created a virtual mob mentality. Kill or be killed, in a sense.

So, what are we to do now? How can we begin to save ourselves and each other? A first step, I believe, is to return to feeling, to caring, to knowing ourselves so we can begin to know each other from a place of kindness and love. To begin believing the best of each other instead of hating the worst. To begin understanding that living in our hurt and scared minds takes us away from the parts of us that can liberate us from the depths of despair. To open our hearts and souls and learn to truly live and love seeing peace and unity instead of hatred and divide.

Every single moment we are alive affords us the opportunity to learn something new, to begin to behave differently, to become truly human again and actually care about humanity.

Shame Needs Three Things To Survive

I wrote a memoir exposing all my secrets to make it easier for others to realize how their shame is negatively affecting their relationships and provide hope for healing from whatever or whomever has hurt them. Shame dissipates when spoken, when we realize we are not alone and others struggle too. I went first, exposing all my shame and expressing all my compassion as my gift to the world, so other humans could learn the freedom and joy that follows becoming GB Real.

I am Healing -- Sia

#braveenoughtobebliss #gbreal #selfcompassion #compassion #depression #hope #humanity #healing