2d • Resources
Emotional Breakthroughs
Woke this morning at 4:30am and was rested. The feeling is a bit of an oddity as my body for over decade had become accustomed to 3-4 hours of restless sleep plagued by nightmares of the worst kind. Nightly relieving the traumas of the past. Each morning was a genuine battle to just pull myself from bed and move. No longer. I wake and am excited to start my days to pursue what lies ahead. Schedule, goals, routine all are blessings that just call out to me. I don’t start super fast mind you like some. But I start. I read, pray or seek inspiration.
This morning it was inspiration. As I opened a reel that caught my eyes of a young girl who had cancer and was living out of a car with her family. Instantly I could feel the tears welling up inside me, and then… a moment of epiphany. My gut reaction after 41 years of life when my body’s response to the feeling of tears is to hold them back and bottle them up. Not to let them flow freely. In that moment I audibly had to speak it out loud, ITS OKAY TO CRY. For some this may sound insane, for others I am sure you could empathize all too well that the permission to cry is something that has to be given.
To realize how many tears I have held back, pulled back, walled off. Every dam breaks. The more surprising thing for me is now that those tears have started to flow the valve isnt turning off, they continue to flow. Its been an hour and a half now and my body continues to weep. Its not a wailing outpouring but a constant drip of tears rolling down my cheeks and I am committed to one thing and one thing only, let them run.
There is nobody here but me, there is nowhere to be. No work that must be done in this moment, no face that must be put on for work or those around me to numb my pain for their comfort. Instead their is a place of permission to just let it happen. To simply be what it will be. And right now its leaking.
That’s not to say I am sitting here in sadness, this is not me hurting in this moment. There is no recurring pain that is being wrestled with. The permission that I have given though seems to have simply opened the flood gates and I am committed to letting the reservoir drain out entirely. The amazing thing is as the tears drain I can feel my heart lighten. The weight lifting and when I say weight I mean real physical weight coming off my shoulders, I mean heavy stones chained to my heart being shattered. If freedom were a symbol it should be this the rolling of a tear from eye to cheek.
The past few months the work that I have had to do with my therapy, somatic training, nervous system rewiring all of it. Its BEEN HARD. Now I want to be clear that hard does not mean bad. It has been weight lifting for the mind and soul. The ability to understand what I am feeling and why. To understand the legitimacy of those feelings and thoughts that laid buried because of the influence of the world around me. That burying falls squarely on me, that I thought I needed to hide my heart because to share it leaves it open to trampling and wounding. What I failed to realize though that if you box your heart it simply withers and wains. It needs to be seen, to be shared in order to become what it really is.
Shared without compromise of self. Without thought of the feelings, concerns, criticisms and preferences of others. Your heart perhaps is the one thing that is truly your own. Your loves, your hates, your passions your pains. They are yours. They are not negotiable. The saying of “A heart wants what a heart wants” could not be more true. The most beautiful thing is hearing things from your heart that you haven’t heard in 20-30 years. Like a faint whisper that echoes through you as you allow the heart to speak beauty starts to pour out of it.
Reminders of the great love you have carried, the burdens you have shouldered, the trials you have overcome. Perhaps most beautiful of all is looking back over it all and God whispering to you “I was there, I am here, I will be there.” I’ve loved deeper then most men would dare, I have fought harder in a battle that constantly seems against impossible odds, I have felt pain that rends the soul in two and leaves you a shattered husk on the floor. Most beautiful of all I have survived.
Each morning when I wake its with the realization that today is gifted. I have evaded death no less than 6 times in my life. I very realistically could have and by all accounts should have been dead. Instead, the Lord had other plans. There is purpose to my presence. I am not gone yet because my race is not yet run and every day presents the opportunity and the privilege to pursue that purpose.
What is seemingly underwhelming however is the pursuit of purpose. Film and fiction would have us believe the heroes story where the unlikely becomes something greater then we could have imagined. Unfortunately, through most of the make believe the reality of the journey is consumed through the means of a montage. We like to see the broken man to understand where he has come from, his humble beginnings. We like to see the hero stand tall in victory at the end of his tale. We like to see the major battles that must be fought along the way. But as to the mundane that makes it all possible? We montage.
Our daily purpose is in the montage, only we live every single moment. I think to Rocky where we watch him quickly scroll from being a bum to running, pushups, catching chickens and slamming refrigerated slabs of meat. Pack it into one 7 minute song. The reality? MONTHS. That would have been months of painstaking mornings drinking raw eggs. Day after day of painful grueling and repetitive tasks. Its in the mundane that montage is made and the moment of success is derived.
I will make a list at the start of my day. 10 things I must accomplish before heading to sleep at night. These are non negotiable. THEY MUST BE DONE. They do not seem lofty things. Watching certain videos to learn, do a certain amount of college lessons, pray, make phone calls, manage legal needs. Each task in and of itself is no more than 30 minutes of a day. And yet, when you pull back and examine the magnitude that the small tasks can produce it is staggering. Since April 17th, 10 tasks a day. Each one a step forward towards the life I want and am choosing to build. That’s 117 days. That’s 1170 tasks. On their own irrelevant but together piled one on the other a foundation is laid. The foundation is firm because each small task fills in a crack. It cements the purpose and person I am striving for.
I know it can be daunting. So many of us live facing what seems an impossible day or life ahead. But when you stare at the impossible you simply resign yourself to being a spectator to your own life. Instead trying things, even small things can be an amazing process. This is not to say effort is always met with success, there are things that are always going to be outside of your control and trying hard doesn’t always win the day. But what does win the day is the simple mindset of there is no failure. There is success or learning. And truly when that idea becomes a part of your O/S. When its ingrained in you that there is no win or lose but rather succeed or learn nothing is out of reach.
The image of family trying to solve those little metal ring puzzles comes to mind. Each of us one by one trying to unwind and unravel puzzles. Some would persist until the puzzle was solved. Others would watch and observe. Some would try to force the puzzle and up even more frustrated that sheer force and will couldn’t solve it. What the puzzles required was the patience and poise to try 10s, 100s, 1000s of different twists, turns, pulls and tugs to disassemble the problem. What was most remarkable to me was not the solving of one puzzle or the other but the speed at which that process escalated. For those that solved first one puzzle, then another, they started to become familiar with the process and accept it. They become more and more proficient with each success in understanding how not just the puzzle in their hands but puzzles as a whole are meant to be solved.
Life is no different. If you have monumental problems standing in front of you, they may simply be too big for you right now. That is not to say they are too big forever. Do what you can do. Overweight and need to lose 50,80,100 lbs or more? Its not going to happen today. It took years of building that bulk and it will take time to repair it. But what can you do today? Eat less. Walk more.
Working backwards from the solution is something I used to be able to do proficiently. I remember sitting down to write a math exam in Grade 10 and the last question on the exam required a full page of work to show steps. I remember needing to explain to the teachers afterwards what I had written on my exam. Rather then a sequence of work showing each step I took to eventually arrive at the solution my page almost looked backwards. It had the answer right at the top and then the rest of my page was me working backwards from the solution to the question.
When they asked why it was like that all I could respond was I had done the work in my head and couldn’t even really explain what I did or why but that I could see the answer. The work for me wasn’t the outcome but the time I had to spent reasoning how I arrived at the answer. I find pursuit of goals is very much the same for me. See where I want to go and understand its the solution. Then map out how to get there. Working backwards all the way to today. Then do those small actions daily with the confidence that they are simply the next step in a solution.
There is the impossible in this world. There are things outside of our grasp. However, we often quit far to easily and far to early in the process because we overwhelm ourselves with ALL the MUST be done instead of ALL that CAN be done. Do what you can. Have forgiveness, patience and mercy for yourself in what you can’t. Keep moving forward.
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Emotional Breakthroughs
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