The Protection of Tears

Healing, Letting Go, Trials 0

There are times in a woman’s life when she cries and cries and cries, and even though she has the succor and support of her loved ones, still and yet she cries. Something in this crying keeps the predator away, keeps away unhealthy desire or gain that will ruin her. Tears are part of the mending of rips in the psyche where energy has leaked and leaked away. The matter is serious, but the worst does not occur — our light is not stolen — for tears make us conscious. There is no chance to go back to sleep when one is weeping. Whatever sleep comes then is only rest for the physical body.

Sometimes a woman says, “I am sick of crying, I am tired of it, I want it to stop.” But it is her soul that is making tears, and they are her protection. So she must keep on till the time of need is over. Some women marvel at all the water their bodies can produce when they weep. This will not last forever, only till the soul is done with its wise expression.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, Women Who Run With the Wolves, p. 437

God’s Agenda

God, Growth, Letting Go, Life, Trials, Waiting 0

It is one of the ironies of the spiritual life that so much can be seen in retrospect as having been designed in our own best interest. When something finally does come to pass, it is often all we can do to manage it. “Why, if this had happened any sooner, I wouldn’t have been ready,” we catch ourselves thinking. “I needed every instant of preparation for this that I have had.” Many times we ask God for help with securing a certain agenda, then rage because God does not cooperate, only to have God’s agenda revealed later as far better.

It is in seeking to cooperate with God’s agenda for our life that we come to some sense of peace. Is it too much to think that God has an agenda for each of us? I don’t think so. Again, a look at the natural world tells us of the exquisite particularity of God’s care. The daffodil is given just what it needs to grow and we are asked only to cooperate. We must be willing to be either the daffodil or the violet, according to God’s will for us. We so often do not see the lineaments of our own character being formed. We have an idea of ourselves that may be counter to what God’s idea for our self is. I am in the midst of discovering this for myself right now.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 23-24

The Highest Vibration in the Universe

Healing, Joy, Life, Love, Trials 0

Dogs and cats can love you. Nature can love you. Music that sounds like you’ve heard it your whole life can love you. Art can love you. Beauty can love you. Whenever you deliver yourself to the experiences, sights, and sounds that make you feel loved, your experience will change. Your problems won’t be instantly solved, but in the arms of love, they will start to feel different. You will feel different. Instead of being in the foreground, your difficulties will recede into the background and your experience of your catastrophe will be transformed. That’s because Love is the highest vibration in the universe, and when you can feel it for even a nanosecond, everything else in your life will fall into its proper — and lesser — place.

Of course, we don’t want love just in the abstract and in general. We want it to be personal and particular. That is, we want to feel and share love with real people in our lives. As you’re going through this extremely difficult time, therefore, lean on the people who love you. Run, walk, or hopscotch, take a train, a plane, or a bus, to the people who can give you some love. They are your family, your friends, your neighbors and colleagues. Sometimes they’re even strangers. Whoever they are, you’ll know them by how they make you feel. With them, you feel happy and whole. They are the people who recognize your spirit, who touch your sensivity, who nourish and enliven your body, who make you laugh, who “speak your language,” who share your interests, who ask how you’re doing, who call to see if you got the job, won the case, could get the car fixed for less than six thousand dollars.

They are the ones who will say the words that will carry you through.

— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, p. 175-176

What Crisis Is All About

Healing, Love, Trials 0

When we’re beset by crisis, we also begin to recognize our own vulnerability. We see that in one realm or another we, ourselves, could use some assistance. And so, from the chalice of our own need, we start reaching out for help. That’s because once we’ve been taken apart by life, we are more humble, more open, more willing to both give and receive. We take bigger chances. We speak up. We reveal ourselves. We ask. We break down. We accept comfort. Words. A blanket. A meal. In time, we realize that something amazing has happened: that the more we reach out to others, the less lonely we feel ourselves. Somehow, even in the midst of our chaos, we are actually feeling loved. And the beautiful thing is that, the more love we need, suddenly the more we have to give.

Learning to love, loving more, that’s the bottom line of what a crisis is really all about. Through it, we are being asked to expand beyond the inordinate focus on ourselves — our obsession with what we need, want, and desire — to notice what we can share, how we can serve and be of help to one another. In short, we are being asked to enlarge the circle of our love. Of course, it’s not always easy to do this. It may be unfamiliar. But when we do engage, when we see and hear and respond to one another, life starts to seem less scary. The more you get and give help, the more it seems that you will actually make it through your own unbelievably painful passage. You sense that there really is a new future. Even in the heartbreaking present you realize that you’re not alone. Not only that, but instead of wearing out your biceps holding up a thousand-pound iron defense shield in front of your heart, you can let down your guard, let down your hair, give up your pride, have a good cry, and, in gratitude, receive the love that’s coming toward you.

— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, p. 169-171

The Silver Lining

God, Growth, Trials, Trust 0

So many of our catastrophes never come to pass. We project disaster and we do not allow for the working out of solutions that will happen as the days tick forward. We think that the worst will happen, only to find out, living through it, that what happens actually may be far closer to the best.

What I am talking about here is the silver lining. We may get tired of trying to look for one, but the truth is that one is always there. Inside every adversity lies opportunity. Take the dicey matter of finances. We always think that what we want is more money, when what we may really want is a gut-level assurance that God will provide — and this is something that often comes to us not in periods of abundance but in times of shortfall. It is when we do not know where the rent money is coming from that we notice the “miracle” that puts the cash into our hands. This is not to say that we need to manufacture misery in order for God to rescue us, merely to say that when we are rescued, we have a tendency to know the face of our rescuer and that face is God.

It is during hard times that we come to rely on God and that is a reliance that we can encourage in ourselves at all times. We do not need to be broke to ask God to help us with our money. Consider the flow of the natural world. Supply comes just where it is needed. We can ask God to be for us such a source of supply. We can ask God to make us attuned to our financial seasons, to cue us when we are free to spend and when we should curtail our spending. We can ask God to take away our fear of financial insecurity and to direct us as to where, from what corner, our prosperity might best come from.

We live in an abundant universe. Our share of that abundance comes to us as we rely upon God. Whenever we make our employer into our source — in other words, when we make our employer into God — we enter a period of fear, for our reliance is not squarely where it belongs. We are intended to rely upon God. God intends us good, and we are tutored by God daily in how that good can come to us. God moves in mysterious ways, but his ways become less mysterious as we try to draw closer to him. When we believe that we will be cared for, we fixate less upon exactly how.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 20-21

The Process of Integration

Growth, Healing, Life, Trials 0

Crisis cajoles us to move toward integration, to expand, to accept more. This process of acceptance is not incidental to a challenging time; it is one of its intended purposes. That is because, while our human nature prefers distinction, separation, and confusion, our spiritual nature seeks wholeness, inclusion, and union. Since we are ultimately spiritual in nature, life keeps pointing us in the direction of this growth. Like the kaleidoscope, it keeps offering us the pieces that we must put together.

Integration can arrive in an instant, when, through the free fall of surrender, you finally accept each one of the parts of your existence, even the ugly ones, even the irritating ones, even the ones you want to negate, destroy, and disown. Or it can come more slowly, as day by day, episode by episode, you gradually come to accept what has happened. When you do, you become whole. You become whole not because you have finally gotten rid of the painful or offensive item, not because you have escaped, but because you have embraced it. This is the process of integration in ourselves, in others, in the world. When we have achieved full integration, we know that there is only wholeness, which is enlightenment itself.

Moving toward integration, to the space in yourself where you can see the wholeness of life, gives you a sense of hope. It also brings great peace because you know that your life, even in this crisis, and your soul, for all eternity, are nestled in the blanket of wholeness where everything, even this very difficult time, has its perfect place.

— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, p. 138-139

Making Peace

Growth, Guidance, Letting Go, Trials 0

After forty-eight hours of writing about my problems, praying about my problems, and meditating about my problems, I remembered something a friend had said to me.

“What are you doing?” he had asked.

“I’m trying to surrender to God’s will.”

“No you’re not; you’re trying to figure it out.”

Within six months, each of the problems I was wrestling with worked themselves out. I was either guided into an action that naturally felt right at the time, or a solution came to me. The immediate solution to each problem was the same: let go. Just surrender to the situation taking place.

Sometimes, what we need to do next is surrender.

If you don’t like the word surrender, try calling it making peace.

— Melody Beattie, More Language of Letting Go, p. 194-195

Freedom Abounds

Growth, Healing, Letting Go, Trials 0

We need to let go because whatever we’re holding on to is keeping us attached to the problem. Hanging on is fear; letting go is hope. Holding on is believing that there’s only a past; letting go is knowing that there’s a future. In letting go, we surrender the weight of our burdens and find the lightness of being with which to begin once again. We open a door for the intervention of the divine….

New lands await, freedom abounds. Opportunities hide like rain in the clouds waiting for the moment to reveal themselves. The white canvas, crying out for paint, is alive with possibility. The freed man is free to fall in love again; the freed woman to claim her strength, find her true work, begin again at a deeper and more satisfying level.

— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, p. 74, 75

An Opportunity

Growth, Life, Trials 0

A crisis is always a chance not only to scrape away the film of your defaults but to see that life is inviting you to develop, to move in the direction of your own creative aliveness, to become more of who you are. In this way, pain is the initiator of great change, and crisis is definitely an opportunity. Indeed, it is an unsolicited chance to become more of yourself, more than you ever have been.

— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, p. 41