I am Me Own

"I am the living, loving, joyous expression of life. I am my own person!"

This is my positive affirmation for the next while and one I borrowed from Louise Hay.

Isn't it fascinating how just when we think we have done enough growing and have conquered a milestone of challenges, emerging victorious, we seem to get hit with another scourge of the same challenge, but perhaps at a deeper level? It's almost as though we are required to peel back a few more layers of the onion and get deeper to weed out the core issue.

How often do we take on other people's stuff? Do we do it knowingly or just because we think it is our duty?  We must feel really inadequate  to voluntarily take on another's anger, hostility, fear, low-self esteem, etc. Don't we have enough of our own challenges to tackle without taking on those of our peers? Or do we feel that we have greater coping skills and therefore rush to help put out the self-inflicted fires induced by our fellow passengers in life?

Perhaps we feel it is our way of earning treasures for ourselves for another plane or improving our karma.

One thing I know for sure is this: we came into this world alone and we are going out alone. No matter how many people wash across our paths in the period between those two events, no one will be able to hold our hands as we cross the barrier between this material world and the other realm to which we belong.

My mother loves to tell the story of when I was only two and a half years old, snuggled in between my parents in bed one morning. My mom asks me:"Nicolette, are you mommy's girl or daddy's girl?" to which I reply:"I love me mommy and I love me daddy, but I me own".

So, I ask myself, why is it, when I had such a clear insight into knowing this truth, at the age of two and a half, that I find myself letting people get in under my skin?

"I am my own person!" I shout just to remind myself yet again.

How often do we find ourselves trying to help people along the way, attempting to solve their problems for them and offering them baskets full of advice? Or worse, we try and act like a scape goat and accept their fears and inadequacies as though they belonged to us, and literally carry their burdens which weigh us down causing us illness and bottled frustration and anger?

We all know the story of the butterfly, trying to free itself from its chrysalis, when a well meaning passerby compassionately helps it to untangle its wings and break free. Unfortunately that butterfly never flew, because the struggle required of the butterfly to break free, was the magic key to building the strength to fly.

Why do we want to tell everyone around us how to navigate the path of least obstacles, with no suffering or lessons.? Isn't it these very lessons that make us strong and wise? Don't each and every one of us deserve to find out for ourselves, create our own paths and fight our own battles?

We always seem to feel that unless we are doing something, making something happen, saving the world, that we are not becoming more spiritual?

But isn't the lesson: "To become spiritual I simply need to become myself"?
I quote John Perkins in 'Shapeshifting': "Just be, don't try and become anything....
happiness is not about production and consumption but simply a matter of feeling our connectedness, experiencing the euphoria of being. It seemed to me that such a realisation allows us to break through a barrier that has oppressed modern, industrial cultures for a long time, opening us up to the possibility of defining ourselves and our relationships outside the centuries-old limitations that have locked us into the shackles of fear, uncertainty, and the need to take control."

There isn't a single ingredient we need to add to ourselves to make us more spiritual. We are spiritual beings. All we need do is reach within to our own Divine Nature and follow the life lessons from the path of our hearts and our spirits will be joyful and free.

So, let's love ourselves
Let's be ourselves
Let's be living, loving, joyous expressions of ourselves
and let's stop trying to fix the world and fix the one we can, ourselves!

until next week

Nicolette