Flour + sugar + quantities + alcohol = very bad boyfriend.
Always expecting love and happiness and instead feeling like an idiot over and over again.
It wasn’t love. It was infatuation and intoxication with a side of remorse and weight gain.
It’s hard to quit a cute guy, but this prince is really just a frog in disguise.
Going back would mean a lifetime of fear, doubt and insecurity.
Thanks for your service, old buddy. Time for me to grow up and move on.
Love & Light,
Valerie
Just for today I will happily agree to being comfortable with being somewhat uncomfortable. And I’ll know that my resilience is growing stronger.
Love & Light,
Valerie
I want to keep growing and becoming a happier more loving person.
Recently I was spiraling down into a place where I was feeling very badly about my self as a person. I was even criticizing my Inner Critic.
It’s begun to dawn on me that I could be in a better relationship to pieces of my heart that I’ve rejected, criticized, suppressed, and tried to control, due to my fear, doubt, insecurity, delusion, denial, resentment, and ignorance.
Roses have thorns and so do I.
I want to welcome all my thorns to the party. I want offer them unconditional love. I want to be in relationship with them in a mature way. I want to see them for what they are, listen to them for what they have to say, validate their existence and points of view, affirm their right to exist, and empathize with their pain. I want to request forgiveness.
So here are the aspects of my self that I will begin praying to restore with integrity to my whole self.
The aspects of my self that I want to welcome and love unconditionally include:
• The one who criticizes my self
• The one who has an addictive relationship to food
• The one who wears masks
• The one who sometimes lies, is thoughtless, and hurtful
• The one who says I’m not good enough, I’m flawed, I’m too sensitive, I have poor discernment for the character of other people
• The one who says I put myself in harm’s way, I’ve left myself unprotected, I haven’t paid attention to warning signals.
• The one who is all about fixing systems, situations, and people
• The one who says I deprive myself of emotional security and peace of mind
• The one whose heart hurts when I’m corrected
• The one who is distressed over situations and people that I can’t do anything about
I’m going to go for the goodness, for healing and compassion – towards my self first.
And when I find that I’m in fear, doubt, insecurity, delusion, denial, resentment, and/or ignorance, I hope I will remember to love those aspects of my self.
As a practice, I will develop an energy field at a depth of two feet all around me. I will pat it into place and fill it with rainbow glitter. I’ll root to the center of the earth through my belly button. And I’ll choose to be in situations where kindness is more likely to persist.
Love and Light,
Valerie
I received a message during Quaker Meeting for Worship today. About 20 minutes into the Meeting, a door opened and someone walked in late and, in my mind, I heard “Radical consistency.” I sat with that phrase for another 10 minutes and then thought, “That’s what I’m moving towards.”
It’s not about white knuckling. It’s about noticing a door open and surrendering to what Deeper Wisdom, Inner Light, Creative Force really wants for me. Radical consistency is about when and how I wake up, walk the dog, meditate, cook, sit for meals, and how I am in relationship to my self, others, and Basic Goodness.
After the Meeting, a Friend approached me and said that her Bhuddist teacher would call “radical consistency” Nibbana (Nirvana in Sanskrit). My understanding of Nibbana is freedom. Yes! For me, radical consistency is freedom.
This evening, my sponsor said to me, “I was trying to think how that might translate into other traditions, and found it interesting that your Buddhist friend so readily saw the transcendental meaning in it. A door opens … who knows what it brings. Maybe the prophet is coming to sit at the table, since you laid a place for him… I am considering the concept of order in our Recovery life. Not just weighing and measuring our food, but allowing ourselves to be aligned with the benign order that weighing and measuring represents. Maybe it is a matter of alignment – surrender, if you will – just removing resistance. In tai chi class, we learn to just let go and find our balance with every movement. No exertion, just ‘going with the flow.’ As a martial art, it means letting the other forces coming at you do their thing as you effortlessly let them lose their balance. Well, something like that.”
Yes, something like that.
Love & Light,
Valerie
Photo: From a visit today to Schleppinghurst, a Japanese Zen garden in Lincolnville, Maine.