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| Happy Sarah, who lives on my bedroom bulletin board |
I am healthy.
I am happy.
I love my life.
Trying to really resonate with it, feel it in my cells, let my body choose this.
Because I've been struggling with old feelings of depression and anxiety lately, since we came back from New Zealand. It's probably related to the dearth of sunshine here. Or all the household worries piling back on all at once. For whatever reason, I've been struggling.
As I practice this affirmation, I realize that loving my life is really more about an active nurturing, tending, being gentle with, taking care of. It occurred to me that when I was 20, I thought that loving life was something we had no control over, I either woke up loving what was laid out in front of me or I didn't, and then went on to blame, resent, despair, etc.
Come to think of it, I practiced that a lot, those feelings of ultimately feeling like I had no power to change my outlook. If I saw the glass half-empty, I assumed I always would.
Not too long ago my husband forwarded me a link to an online essay, where the author said something like, "It doesn't really matter so much whether the glass is half full, or half empty, it's that there is a glass, and it's ours to do with as we choose ." I can't remember where I read this... Whoever you are who wrote this, I thank you for your inspiration, because it's along those lines I want to move forward now.
I'm realizing more and more it isn't so much about those changeable moods, wherein I find myself agonizing over fill-in-the-blank aspect of my life that isn't measuring up to what I expected... It really is about an active choice to love this opportunity to explore being me here, to love this "glass," actively, even as I might a stray kitty I want to befriend, choosing to pause and feel love for it even when I'm disappointed or stressed or frustrated or whatever.
I'm reassured to find they're not mutually exclusive, love and despair, love and stress, love and frustration. And the more I practice just loving my life, whatever it looks like, letting my cells align to that feeling of love, the easier it feels to trust that if I can just keep putting one foot in front of the other, things do work out. If I can just let them, stop trying so hard to do it all by myself. Let Love in.
