October 2023 – The Emotional Alchemist

Lap one: My head is full and distracted. My body groans and rebels. I am preoccupied, filled also with all that isn’t mine.

Lap two: I begin to feel free. My muscles lubricate and begin to remember their innate abilities, outside of the domestication.

Lap three: the emotions, truth, and calm surface.

Lap four: at this point beyond my threshold so things begin to groan and grind.

I listen better to my body now. I listen better to you.

I’ll never scream my needs again, over and over making my throat raw.

Running ragged in bloody circles.

Out of my own bounds.

I can love you better like this.

When I meet my own needs.

For me being whole is a full time job. That’s not forever. It will settle into a natural rhythm, just as the tides and the seasons.

I’m enjoying my Dj feature on Spotify.

Posting the songs that resonate with my heart at this time.

Bliss

I won’t make promises I can’t know if I can keep. A promise to myself. Not selling some version of myself or seeking some magic panacea.

I have everything I need to live simply the rest of my life. I don’t need all I began to complicate my life, with when I got excited about abundance.

I am paring down to the essentials….

My idea of it now is simplicity, not being able to buy or do anything I want. That’s a perk of a hustle I call a passion, and it’s a natural side effect, not the compelling why.

Alignment

That’s what I’m focused on.

Me focused ?! Did you hear that right. Ha. I laugh at myself.

I used to take myself too seriously and everything felt like life and death. I’m happy to no longer be burning through the years I have like that.

No matter the feeling, if something is incongruent or you have to cross your own boundaries, it won’t work.

Real or unreal is an unnecessary question. The distracting one. The scaffolding. The illusion.

It’s all real and all part of my story. That’s what it is.

Now claim it Christina

Only reality is king, and when we argue with it we suffer tremendously.

I am devoutly interested in reality as it is. Not distracted with grandiose fantasies, thousands running through my brain to distract it from the pain in there.

I hold pain differently now. On my good days. On the bad ones I pray and I walk and I rest.

This is the first time I’ve done the third lap in a long time. Will there be a cost?! Who interested in a but I enjoy defying my own gravity when it’s not too harmful.

Walk the talk.

Working at staying humble.

That’s what works for me.

While still getting a little excited at the strength of my own voice.

I don’t want to be a star. I want to be a servant.

I realize it’s been too long since I’ve written in here. Beginning again requires no grand gesture, except to splay my words upon the page.

Life is so different now than it’s ever been for me.

The kitchen window is open. I can hear the cars splashing through the wet pavement on High st. There’s a bathroom window open, and it’s making a door creak slightly every so often.

I’m reading Stephen King’s Needful Things. Marveling at how he takes a concept and a belief of his, sets it to quirky characters. Creates a setting based on a place he loves, and takes his shot. His art. How small town washed up people become prone to obsession over items that bring them nostalgia or comfort. What they are willing to do to anyone, to be able to feel better.

In the movie, a young Ed Harris plays Alan Pangborn, the town sheriff. The book is better of course.

I marvel at how I can read a chilling description of two women killing each other and not be kept up at night. Perhaps my ability to find the art in this fiction stays my traumatized mind from its post. I typical do not like to fill it with horror. I have enough reels of my own, should I want a chill during spooky season.

I’m mostly focused on being present. And realizing how much I wasn’t. How unwell and dissociated I had been a lot of my life, without really being aware of it. That has been a slow burn. Burning off shame. Shedding self-consciousness ,and seeing what lies under all of that.

That’s where I am.

It’s a process that requires time and cultivating, and I’m committed.

I’m still figuring out balance with that regard.

Since I’m forty I moved wrong the other day. I am now on steroids and doing physical therapy two times weekly. Lol. So that’s happening. I used to freak at the smallest setback physically. So now I just allow life to pause me when needed.

I began working with a new client last night. They work in a profession I’m intrigued with. The person was very solid and grounded, and my energy matched suit during the session. The person is in their 60’s so that makes sense. Of course that’s not the only factor. But I really enjoyed holding space for their story, and having the privilege of them entrusting their heart and pain to me upon our first meeting.

People’s beautiful resilience and heart captivate me in such a way. I am starting to be able to believe I could be captivating too.

Without being constantly pushed by any force to get out into the world, I now believe it is beginning to happen naturally. And I believe those that have told me the world needs to hear what I have to say.

So I’m working on gaining security behind my voice. Peeling back layers of shame and trauma that attempt to sabotage my goals and dreams.

I read, I walk, I write, I counsel, I love, and therefore I am.

My relationships with my children are healing nicely. It’s still a lot to be with the ways I’ve caused them pain from my own ignorance and my own traumas. I have to continue to make amends and forgive myself, and that’s no easy feat.

I love my clients past and present. I think about them in my daily life and send them love and light.

I think about my life experiences and those I have loved deeply. With every part of me, and how those experiences have shaped me.

I’m doing a course in miracles.

I’m about to go on a cruise to Bermuda. Only slightly nervous about the possibility of motion sickness, as my body likes to feel firmly planted and in control. Ha, what an illusion. I don’t know if that, or the fact I won’t work for 8 ish days is the more frightening prospect. Both are uncharted territory.

Which is a theme lately in my personal counseling. I am in uncharted territory my counselor said to me the other day. Mostly outside my pattern in most way, maybe some days slipping inside it a little.

What can I say I’m a work in progress.

I’m really happy I wrote this post and I’m hopeful I’m ready to make this a weekly if not a daily practice.

Oh and I’m obsessed with learning Spanish on Duolingo. I marvel at how my brain can recall so much and it’s just there without even trying. I often struggled at age normative times to learn another language. And it’s thrilling to realize that was likely because so much space was taken in my brain by hyper vigilance.

I marvel at the gift of being able to be understanding of myself now, and to be able to communicate in a way I feel understood, which is the real magic.

My heart is continuing to open. I’m more consistent with so many things, and that’s a path I’m very grateful to be walking. No longer beating myself into submission. Less remissions, sparsely placed omissions. Oh there I go rhyming. Can’t help it.

All my love,

Month: October 2023

Saturday Morning Conversations with God and Myself.

Stephen King October’s and Writer’s Who Keep Getting Back up and Trying…..