Living With The Choices We Make #48
Following your impulses. Nurturing your nature.
Dear Lovely You,
this week I have been thinking about the choices we make and where they lead us.
How we accept the mistakes we have made or beat ourselves up about them. Carrying shame and guilt in the dark recesses of our being. Often unaware of what we’re doing.
How our choices are often a result of what others think is best or normal or right rather than what we intuitively know is right for us. How we ignore our own compass to please, to fit in.
How people pleasing is really about us not them. How we do it to keep ourselves safe. To avoid rejection and judgement, or even worse, abandonement. How it’s understandable to want to be liked, loved, needed, useful. And how we abandon ourselves to achieve those things.
I wonder what it would be like to love ouselves enough to honour our own needs fully and consistently?
And as adults how we have much more choice even if it doesn’t necessarily feel like it. Even though it often still doesn’t feel safe to make the choices we would like to make, assuming of course we know what we really want.
But every single choice we make leads us in one direction or another. Even refusing to make a decision is a decision.
I came across this poem I wrote some years ago and it speaks to me.
Choice
In every moment
we make
a choice.
To stay.
To leave.
To be happy.
To accept.
To fight.
To be miserable.
To surrender.
To Love.
Or not.
It matters not what's going on outside.
It is simply,
our perception.
Go in.
Go in deep.
Reach inside.
Rest there.
Rest there longer.
Listen.
Listen more.
Know what really matters.
The truth.
Nourish that core sense.
Honour it like a new lover.
And when your mind says,
'but, what if, what about this?"
Shush it.
And go deeper,
so that you may know the truth of who you really are.
Of how everything that exists,
is a reflection of you.
Sink deeper.
Immerse.
Into Knowing.
The flow that wants to come through you,
Honour that.
It's time to make way
for peace.
For flow.
And choose the path that is your essence.
This week I have chosen peace and quiet and more time in nature.
I have gardened even though there’s too much to do and I know I will never get on top of it all on my own, I can hear the birds, I can breathe fresh air. I can smell the soil and that grounds me. I know I will not get everything done that needs to get done before spring takes off and weeds and plants mingle together in complete chaotic harmony. Messy to the human eye but in perfect relatoinship to each other.
Plants communicate with each other above and below ground. Some plants can’t grow near others, so I know the ones that are thriving like each other and collaborate to ensure they survive, whethere they are weeds or chosen specimens.
I am avoiding the oughts and shoulds and following my impulses. Nurturing my nature.
There is a change happening and I don’t know where it’s going but that feels okay for once. Maybe it’s just an hiatus. A rest. A pause.
What would you do differently if you could choose you?
With Love
from my True Self to Yours
Karen xx
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I love the poem Karen, and you are right that we forget that we always have choices, not necessarily about the circumstances we find ourselves in, but in how we respond and react to them.