"But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . ." – The Little Prince
My hardest battles have not been fought on a field or on the concrete blocks of life. My most hard-won battles have been the dark nights I lay in bed and endured the shrieks and cries of the demons taking residency in my mind. Their shameful shouts threatening my light…
The only way I find victory, or rather, transcendence, is by laying down my sword, putting all but my shield down. It’s not so much a battle as it is a refusal to take part. The demons continue to yell and shout, projecting their own fears onto me, repelled back by the Truth I still hold.
From the fierce love in my heart, I breathe a ring of fire around me. Around us. I watch the demons dance around the circle, on the other side of the flames, their shadows cast beyond the light. They can’t touch me here. Inside the flames, in the space of protection my heart created, I tend to the frightened and confused inner child within. Standing my ground, I take hold of her face with my pointer fingers gently pressed against her ears so she can’t hear the lies cast by the shadows. I look deep into her eyes, speaking without words, I let her know that she “is Good”. The only thing that matters is the love that bonds us. The only thing that matters is that we are together. She is fiercely loved, and that is the only protection she will ever need.
I look around and hear the demons now faint screams and watch as the shadows try to cling. I take a deep breath and exhale. The demons fade away on their own.
I am the Love Warrior.
You will never be alone.
In me, inside my flames, you will always be protected.
*********
I wrote this the morning after another battle, knowing the lies my mind were telling me and yet feeling all the intensity of my shadow self. Breathing my way to peace, while trying not to get caught in another round. This is the vision that came to me. And, with that, with these words, I have to pay homage to the other spiritual and Love Warriors that have influenced me, reminding me of this important archetype: Glennon Doyle (who wrote a book entitled “Love Warrior“. I tried to think of another title as not to mimic her work, but nothing better came to me) and Meggan Watterson (I was reading The Girl Who Baptized Herself at the time.)
I’ve often heard this phrase, or some version of it, by fellow dog lovers. I think it’s often said in a way to relate to my absolute, profound love for not just “my” dog, but all dogs, and all animals. In that sense, I appreciate the kind gesture.
But I disagree. And agree.
I agree that dogs, and truly, all animals (especially our farm animal friends) are essentially little gods walking around: energetic beings of pure love and light.
*Domesticated animals can pick up on some human emotion, which is why even unsatisfactory behavior in animals should be treated with curiosity and compassion, as they are often doing exactly what makes sense in their brain at the moment.
Where I disagree is that we don’t deserve them. I actually think animals are here to show us unconditional love. To remind us of our worth. To teach us how to be more like them and bring us back to our root, our truth, of Love.
It’s actually the people the farthest away from this truth- that we are deserving of sacred, divine Love just as we are- and in turn reject Love*, that are most likely to treat animals in inhumane ways.
So, as much as I HATE any action that harms any animal, I don’t believe humans don’t deserve dogs, cats, pigs, cows. What I believe is that we need to learn how to accept Love, and remember it as our Truth.
*I’m not going to dive deep into in this post, but there a many reasons why humans learn to fear love and reject it, due to false beliefs like unworthiness.
**A lot of what I say does feel intuitive to me, or maybe its in part my social science/observational brain. And yet, much of what I say is now being show in research and books. My first recommendation is “One Child” by Torey Hayden, which I first read in undergrad.
I could also say “Grief.” Which really, says the same thing. Both belong to Love.
I was briefly discussing this topic and dogs with my therapist yesterday (even as a therapist myself, it’s good to be seen by someone else)… we concluded with the fact that, “I love deeply.”
It pains me that perfect moments pass so quickly. Adventures end. Loves of our lives grow older. People die. Animals pass. Summer ends. Fall begins. Beauty shifts. Our days together won’t last forever.
One day, “Pacer’s Pack”, won’t have our leader. Or rather, she will be pure Sunshine.
I try to savor. I try to be present. Yet when I hold on, when I cling, the pain is only worse. And so I just let go. I release the waterfall within. Currently, the my own water flow trajectory is at least once a week, sometimes at home on the floor, often in spaces where I know the Sky and Earth will hold me. This pattern has been monthly for more years that others may warrant as necessary. But I will stand strong in my deep empathy, my love. Things are still good, We are still agile, but my mind projects into the fading future, as well as the current breezes.
In the end, it is only Love. It is all Love.
I cry in grief. I cry because I am so goD damn grateful. I cry because I love so deeply.
And if that is the greatest burden of my life, it is also the greatest gift.
…and when I die, may I fade into Love and never know the difference.
When I say grief, what I really mean is Love. When I say pain, what I really mean is my perceived absence of it. When I say fear, what I really mean is that I have forgotten. When I say dog, what I really mean is Love. When I say Love, what I really mean is that I have remembered.
***
Fear was created when we first felt separate from our parents or caregivers. When our needs or emotions weren’t met with care and compassion. To an infant or child, our earliest caregivers represent Love, or God. This is to stay it is during this time we truly felt separated from Love, which created fear in the body. Through developed mental processes, that fear materialized into stories of unworthiness and not enoughness. This created shame in the body, and further perceived separateness from Love.
To remember who were are is to connect back to Oneness, to Love. We have to let go our stories, free (allow) the stuck emotions to be experienced, and surrender back to Love. Which takes Trust, because most of have forgotten a time when it was there. (Dogs and other animals can help remind us.) So ultimately, your trust fall is letting go of fear and falling back into Love.
Today, on what would have been my “older” sister’s 41st birthday, I find myself searching for grief. I find a little, but no tears fall. Part of me feels guilty, like I should feel sad, like I still should be mourning her “too short life”. Guilty, knowing this might be my last post on my sister’s birthday. Like I should continue to feel weird for being physically older than my older sister ever got to be. Yet, I can hear my sister say, “You can’t find me there.”
And in truth, I know what she means. She’s free. She’s expanded. No longer bound by the limitations of human perception. The part of me that clings to grief as a way to connect, the part that tries to hold on to grief… while they served a purpose, those parts aren’t actually me.
So when I search for grief, I must dive so far into the well that at the bottom, I only find love. Then, when I find myself swimming in the joy of that Love, I know I’ll find her. I’ll be reminded that actually, we’ve never not been- we’ve always been- connected.
While my path back to finding her has been nothing short of wayward and wanderlust, she’s always been sending me signs, whispering “You can meet me here. You can be free now, too.” (while still incarnated). Just the other week, I was driving back home and asking for a sign on what to do. Before I could fully comprehend what was happening “Can’t Stop the Feeling” by Justin Timberlake (one of Amanda’s songs) comes on the radio while an RV pulls in from of me that says “T-Align”! The synchronicity of this is that my nickname for my older sister growing was “T” (and for the life of me I can not remember why) and lately I had been playing around the idea “what does it feel like to align with my True Self”?
Somedays, I can almost feel my sister holding my hand, just as I did for her when she was finding her way back Home and letting go of her human identity. She’s guiding me back toward the light, the truth of who I am. Who we are. Knowing that, if you are reading this, you came to earth for self-realization. To remember you are a soul in a human body. Away from the falsities and myths and limitations of the ego. She’s leading me back towards my deepest desire, to be free.
Here, I hear her say, “Yay!”
*Please be respectful of and honor your own journey with grief. There’s no time lifeline and no agenda on your path.
And isn’t freeing to know… …that we are all going to die?
That everything matters… …and nothing matters?
Soon, it will all disappear.
The clothes and cars, yes. The people too. And you, the human. The human with the stories, beliefs, and attachments. The story of you. The limitations. The doubt.
So yes-
Go thrust yourself into the beauty of life. Climb that mountain. Have your adventures. Dance under the stars. No, better yet… dance in front of a crowd a let everyone whisper, “I wish I was more like her.” Become her. You are Her. Free.
Know this too:
The mountain that you didn’t climb, the adventure you never had, the relationship you were never in -those things never really mattered.
Your perception of wrong or right, bad or good, you can’t take those when you go.
So laugh, cry, sing. Release and die into the moment.
While we’re in these physically bodies, it is important we live, but live without the pressure of living and doing “things right” or trying to do “everything”, because then we’re living in fear, not love. Yet love is often a forgotten state for many of us, and it is through the death of our limitations- our beliefs, our stories of not enooughness, our shame, and the continual allowing and surrender of our emotions- that we can return to love. And so, it is through the “death” or our small self, that we can become free while incarnated, then reclaim our small self that is now inspired by Love rather than fear.
***I alway feel like I have to add this too, to cover my therapist basis. It’s never us, unless it’s really our time and then there is no choosing, that wants to die. It is always a PATTERN or a PART. It’s a shame-based belief system that our soul is ready to let go of. That is, essentially, what is asking to be seen, loved, and let go of/die. Our souls want us to experience the joy of being alive.
If you were supposed to be “healed” by now, you would be.
If you were meant to have won that race, you would have.
If you were meant to still be with that person, you would be.
If you were meant to get that job, you would have.
If you were supposed to be father along by now, you would be.
If those plans were supposed to work out, they would have.
If that person was supposed to still be here, they would be.
If you were mean to make a different decision, you would have.
If life were meant to be different than it is right now, it would be.
Breathe.
Everything that has happened was meant to happen.
Everything that didn’t happen wasn’t meant to happen.
Everything that is meant to happen, will happen.
Breathe.
Here is where you will find your peace.
Suffering lies in the shoulds, attachments, and wishes of things being different than they are.
You have power, just not control (of the external).*
This doesn’t meant we stop learning or growing. In fact, this is the catalyst for growth.
Now that we know what happened is what was meant to happen, we CAN grow, as guilt and shame are what block us from blossoming. Acceptance, curiosity, and love become fertilizers.
The mind often likes to try and figure everything out, but really it’s a way to keep us stuck. To the lower mind, having an explanation will appear to give us safety, but this is a false theory.
It’s often better for us to recognize our own emotions and belief systems around the event, feel what we need to feel, and let it go.
For instance, after a breakup with someone we believed to “be the one”, our mind will try to create stories on why it didn’t work. Sometimes we blame it on ourselves, sometimes we blame it on them. We think we’ll feel better if we just had closure. We try to speak to the person and are denied, or we get the same confusing answers and no closure is given. Our mind continues to problem solve, keeps looping in its limited perspective, and we stay in grief, anger, and fear.
This is obviously not helpful. It’s better to simply know that the person, especially at a soul level, does love you, but they were/are stuck in their own wounds, stories, and fears, just as you were at the time, and hence why you were attracted to one another. Now, you get to empathize with your own emotions, uncover your own limiting stories, and let them go. And maybe to, you understand that this was all part of a Divine Plan to bring you back into clarity of your true self and deeper forms of love than what is often seen at the human level.
You don’t need to agree with the voice to validate the emotion.
The “Emotions Wheel” has “ashamed” in the category of sadness. If I sit and feel into it, it’s fear, sadness, and anger combined. Then, there’s usually emotions under that, as the inner shamer is different from the part being shamed.
Honestly, the story you’re living in, the story that you’re broken or not enough, is really hard. And the shamer is just doing what it knows how to do.
We always do our best with the skills we have. If you dig into it just a bit, you’ll most likely realize that your inner shamer sounds a lot like one of your parents, enhanced by some other mean voices you’ve heard on TV.
The experiences and voices of others that gave birth to your inner shamer are most likely not from super memorable situations. It could be a small thing that felt really big and confusing in your little body.
For example, when I was a little kid and I said something “bad”, I would get my mouth washed out with soap. This might sound extreme now, or you might think, “why didn’t your parents just have your brush your teeth or use mouthwash?”, but this was fairly common in the 90s. Now, I was a really good little kid… and I was a kid. I can’t remember what I would have said, it just couldn’t have been that bad. But even if I said a swear word or was mean to one of my sisters, it’s because I didn’t have the skills to regulate my own emotions and the only thing I could to to release some of the anger or frustration or despair in my body was to let it out verbally. Again, I didn’t have any other tools, and this is probably what I saw others do. My parents too, were of course doing the best they could with the parenting and emotional skills they had. Unfortunately, that didn’t prevent my little mind from making up a story that when I mess up or have big emotions, that I’m bad*. Something is wrong with me. Which brings in a huge energy of fear, as I then question if I’m lovable. The story I further create is that I’m only lovable if I’m perfect. And in this fear, I strive to be perfect, but because I’m acting out of fear instead of love, I inevitably make “mistakes” (miss the mark) over and over again (and also, because I’m human). Because the only skill I learned was how to shame myself for making a mistake, I keep doing it over and over and over again. Until I learn about, and start practicing, self-compassion and Love, which my dog has been trying to teach me for over a decade.
*While I used a personal example, this is really how all our little brains work. This is called “egocentric”.
What we can start with is forgiveness. Forgive your shame for being so hard on you. It’s been doing the best it could with what it knows. Forgive yourself for anytime you missed the mark, because you were doing the best you could with the emotions and energy you had stuck inside of you. (We only do “bad” things if we feel bad inside.) And, half the time what you did was probably just fine, you put that “not good enough” story on top of it.
From there, you can practice self-compassion. Find compassion for the perfectionist, the achiever, and other critical parts of you that have been doing the best they could. Allow the inner child, the one that has been shamed, to feel all of his/her/their fear, confusion, frustration, and grief. (This will take time and most likely multiple therapy or journaling sessions.)
Then Love. This is less of a practice than going within and finding the Love within you that’s been buried. It might be breathing into your heart charge, or drawing on your dog’s beingness for inspiration. Ultimately, Love is your most natural state.
A Dog and Her Girl 