Week 2, Day 5 – Life as It Is

The assignments for today were:

1. Listmake all you can easily accept in your life: the garden, the changes of weather, your child, your friend. Listmake the challenges you’re facing today. Make a third list of how the things on your easily acceptable list can help with your list of challenges. Use the technique of streaming and explore how what is strong and good in your life and attitude can help you with your challenges.
2.  Leaf through a magazine and cut out the pictures to which you are drawn. Arts and pictures of all kinds hold clues for us to learn about our spiritual life. We respond to one image and not another because of who we are. Compile a list of what attracts you to each image. From this list do the technique of streaming.

Easily Accepted	Challenges Faced	Strengths Conquer
Love	Not being able to drive	Accepting the services that are offered and advocating for myself will help make sure I have services. once I have a job with a salary, then this challenge will be able to be overcome, as I will be able to afford a minivan and have it hand controlled. J
Peace	People who speak negatively about me	I think the thing that helps me with this is love. I know that when people speak negatively about me, it is really about them and I remember the agreement that I have made with myself not to take things personally. It goes back to the acceptance thing. I do not have to eat their poison. I can spit it out. I cannot eat my own or other’s poison. Must respect that I have a severe allergy to all things poisonous and toxic in my life.
Joy	Missing my parents	I hold on to the knowledge that they are still with me in my heart. Much of whom and what I am today is because of the love and the positive values they shared with me. Were they perfect no, but they were the best parents they could be and they loved me so much that they gave me a home and a family. That was the greatest gift of all. I cannot even envision what my life would have been like had they not opened their hearts and their doors to me.
Grace	Not having the money to visit my son	I know that the day will come that I will have a full time income again and will know how to drive a hand controlled car. Then I will be better able to travel to Georgia to see him or perhaps he will evolve to a place where he will feel safe traveling up here to see me.
My friends	Not having a full time job	I know that I am creating a job for me and in the meantime, I am looking for a job in the workforce that can make use of my gifts.
Strangers	Walking	I have to accept that with each step I will become stronger. It may be harder to use my walker at times, but it will become easier with each step I teach myself to take.
New experiences	Releasing expectations	It is through my grace and love for others and for myself that I learn to release expectations. I am beginning to become aware of when I have them. I feel my body tense and I want to scream. It manifests in my throat. So I can recognize, it release it and remind myself that those expectations are not of love. Then I am at a greater place of peace.

I think what is strong and good in my life is what sees me through most things. I think one of my strengths is my patience with me and others. I know that I and others am works in progress. I do not expect myself or others to be transformed over night. Nor do I expect others to be as committed to their evolution as I am. I tend to be positive. I allowed myself to get hurt pretty deeply and went through this time of intensive healing and transformation.  Ever since I removed myself from the cave in which I had been living, thank you Aristotle, I have become increasingly used to living in the light. 

It is an amazing thing that happens when you take the shackles off your soul and begin loving yourself and cleansing yourself of all the lies that you had internalized. It is as if I learned how to breathe again. If I can teach myself how to do that. If I could find the courage within to leave the cave, to face my fears and press through them then

I know that I can find the courage again to take my evolution to the next level. if I can be disciplined enough to take time everyday for me to write in this journal, then I know that I can develop the discipline to exercise or to improve my eating habits or to do anything else I want to work on transforming in my life. If I could find the courage to work through the fears that were still living in me from past abuse, then I know that I have the courage to work through any other fear that rears its head in my life. I used to be afraid of the fire-breathing dragons in my life. Now, I just hand them the remote and something to drink and leave. They have no more control over my life. 

I realized that what kept me enslaved in the cave was me. The shackles had been on for so long that even when they were off, I still felt as if they were on. It was not until I decided there had to be something more then the shadows I saw in the light, that I was able to really walk towards the light. when I began to experience the fullness of the light, there were parts of me that wanted to put on sunglasses because the light hurt, but my eyes quickly adjusted to the beauty and splendor and love that was washing over me in this new world. 

I know that my faith will see me through. I think about how it was my patience and my faith that saw me through the six-month journey with hydrops when I could not see at all out of my right eye. And now my vision is back and better then it was before the hydrops. I know if I have faith and if I believe and am persistent to working towards my evolution that all fears and chains will melt away.