Sometimes you might ask yourself, "Just how many wounds can one person tolerate?!?!?" There are times when the pain seems unbearable, the suffering seems interminable, and making it through the day seems like an excrutiating task. Is there any hope?
Hope lies in being with yourself... really being with yourself. Hope lies in allowing yourself to be where you are, which means not rejecting your circumstances or your reactions and at the same time not trying to hold onto your circumstances or reactions, but simply allowing them, putting out a welcome mat for them, offering to witness and honor them for what they are and to witness and honor yourself just as you are.
Maybe you're angry about something that has happened. Maybe you are overcome with sadness about something. Perhaps it's frustration you feel, or annoyance, or possibly resentment, or another feeling altogether. So often we tend to shy away from these painful emotions. We don't want to experience them, so we push them away. Or we want someone else to see us feeling this way, so we embellish the feeling and act it out. In either case, we're not examining the feeling itself, and we're not taking full account of where we are right here and now.
Whatever feeling is there, you can learn to invite it to come out of the shadows and into the light. You would do this in order to come to know your personal experience in its various dimensions more deeply and more truthfully than ever before. When we bring our full attention to what is going on with us, we become present to ourselves, and in doing so, we honor that person who is in pain, is having a bad day, or is feeling whatever we're feeling.
Hope is in the presence we allow ourselves to bring to our lives. Freedom from compulsions lies in that presence as well. Presence is where real life exists.
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