As we willingly enter each place of fear, each place of deficiency and insecurity in ourselves, we will discover that its walls are made of untruths, of old images of ourselves, of ancient fears, of false ideas of what is pure and what is not.
A problem shared is a problem cut in half. That goes for our fears too. If I leave things in my head, they become magnified and monstrous. I was always amazed that when I shared what my fears were, my fears always sounded so silly and insignificant.
There was a time in my life when I felt dirty and spoiled. I felt that I deserved to die and I waited for that to happen. I was a young woman who had so much to live for. It took a long time, years, for me to accept my humanness and to see that I am essentially a good person. It helped me to view myself as a separate person from myself because I knew that I would not treat another person the way I treated myself.
I have also felt insecure in my relationships and felt somehow that I didn't deserve what I had. Because my life had seen so much change, I expected that the life I wanted to hold on to would be taken from me in one fell swoop. I craved continuity but have since come to accept that change is a fact of life. I have decided that I would live my life one day at a time and enjoy the people in my life today and I wouldn't worry about the tomorrow that hasn't arrived. Nothing would be worse than a self-fulfilling prophecy where I create the one thing that I want to avoid.
I still rail against my deficiencies. I have so many habits that I feel powerless to overcome. I am the worst procrastinator in the book. I always push things to the side that I don't want to deal with. I call it the Ostrich Syndrome. I could be more outspoken at times instead of being a chicken. I can be the messiest person in the world which goes hand in hand with my being the Queen of Procrastination. I will keep trying tomorrow.
In the meantime, I will keep plugging along and keep doing my best and that is all that I can do. In spite of myself, I have come a long way.
"Clear away the forests of craving
I feel like a mass ball of craving much of the time. I quit drinking over 8 years ago after drinking had wreaked so much havoc in my life. That was a period of intense suffering both before and after but dealing with all the consequences made me determined to change my life. It was difficult to get through with each day but I was determined not to continue living the type of life I had been living. It was one step at a time in the first few months and now I live a much better life.
Unfortunately the ghost of craving has not left me. It has only changed forms. I continue to smoke and now that I have a horrible chest cold, I am very conscious of the negative impact smoking has on my health. I have also developed an intense craving for sugar which I mostly feel at work. I want to improve my health which isn't all that bad considering the things that I do to my body. However, I don't want to go through any suffering, necessary or not, to get to the other side. Right now it seems easier to put up with constant low-grade suffering rather than face short term intense suffering with the promise of great rewards on the other side. Somehow I naively hope that all my bad habits will just fall away magically and all will be ok. It hasn't happened like that yet.
The place in the photo is in a park close to where I used to live. When I had first quit drinking and was suffering the consequences of my drinking years, I used to go to that spot and sit in peace by the water. That place represented a pocket of peace in my life, a place where I felt "God", whatever God is. I liked the peacefulness evoked by water and I would seek out places where I could sit by the river or a creak. I could use a place like that now.
