Only You Can Hurt Yourself - Only You Can Heal Your Life

As I mentioned in my post about my third day of this fasting experiment, the emotional detox has been much greater than I anticipated. I almost felt too insecure to share my experience, but that's what this blog is about. I want people to feel safe enough to be completely honest, not to put on a fake smile when inside they're hurting. It feels right to be real, even if only in my blog. For some people this may be too much information, but maybe some of you have gone through similar experiences and are ready to go back there and question your stressful thoughts. Pretending everything is ok doesn't work. I've been running from my past for a long time and it only hurts more.
The memories I am going to talk about here are very personal, and I hope that anyone who was a part of them doesn't mind. I hold no blame for anyone, and I have no regrets whatsoever. I mean no guilt here. I wasn't sure if I wanted to share this information, but it feels important that I let it out as part of my story that I am moving through with everyone who reads this.

For days now, bad memories have been coming up, and I've gone through times of feeling like I was a victim, feeling safe there. In the middle of the night my mind goes back to things that have happened. I'm remembering things and feelings from my childhood which have caused me a lot of pain. I can feel so much fear from when I was a little girl, so much screaming, so much anger and confusion. I felt so small, and so incapable of stopping the war that was going on in my own home. I thought I was suppossed to feel safe there, but I didn't, not ever. My stomach was sick since I was born and I just cried and cried, praying for the screaming to stop, for the hateful energy to subside. I was forced to be a grown up by the time I was five years old, trying so hard to please everyone, especially my parents, and feeling like I never succeeded. My sense of stability was gone, and I felt like a plastic bag, blowing around in the wind, not being able to stop anything bad from happening to me. When my parents separated it was good for me in many ways because I felt like my mom was safer, and I didn't need to watch out for her, at least for a little while. The man she was with left a terrible feeling in me, and I often worried for my mother's life with him too. So many times I can think of how sick my stomach would be, thinking my mom was being killed. I have a very bad feeling about the cottage where we stayed when my mother first left my father. I'm unable to mentally go back there, it makes me feel really sick, but like a year ago, when I was going through a very hard time and decided to end my life, I got in my car with some pills, not knowing where I was going, driving for hours until I ended up at that cottage. I stopped my car and just sat there, unable to move, completely petrified, starting to shake. In the end I didn't take the pills, but I haven't forgotten how I felt there, and it still haunts me.

Sometimes I feel like I've lived more than my share of nightmares in the short amount of time I've been alive. I think back to all these things that brought me pain, and sometimes it feels like I don't have a happy story of my life to share with people. That's why I don't often tell anyone about my past, and if I do it is just a surface outline of places I've been, never really getting into the truth. I want to say it's because I just want to live in the present, and release my past, but to be honest, I just feel like I can't get it out of me. I've felt this tightness, this heavy thing, strangling me, all across my throat and chest, for a very long time and it is words and feelings that I can't get out. There is so much I want to say, I just want to scream sometimes, but nothing comes out. I'm so afraid that if I start with one honest, real thing about me, I will fall apart and lose everything. When I went to see psychologists they became fed up with me because I couldn't tell them anything. It wasn't that I didn't want to. I needed to speak, to cry, to scream, and I would feel like such a failure when I couldn't let it out.

I'm coming to terms with something I have believed to be true for a long time, but haven't truly observed in myself until now; that all my suffering is self caused. Think of something, the worst thing you can imagine happening to you. Right now, this thinking, that's the worst that can happen. The situation is never as bad as what the mind can come up with. And for any of you who have seen "The Secret", you have learned that when you go through something in the mind, the body doesn't know the difference between what you imagine and what is actually happening to you. That's why it is great to imagine beautiful things. It helps put you into alignment with more good. But when you think about negative past experiences your body is reliving them. I've watched my mind relive the most terrible things that I have ever experienced. My mom getting beaten up with me standing there unable to do anything, daily terrible screaming fights, trying to take care of everyone while neglecting myself, helping to kill my own grandmother, watching my baby brother die, being sexually abused, trying to starve myself to death, cutting and trying to destroy my own body, being so trapped in fear and confusion that I couldn't breathe. Everyone has their stories, their pasts which they use to identify themselves. That is what I have done. And as I relive these pains I see that the memory is always worse than what happened. Think of it, you have someone over you, hurting you, and the entire time you're thinking about what's next. If you were present you might be able to deal with it, but instead your mind projects itself so completely that you later imagine things to be much worse than they were. Every moment that you are truly here, truly at peace with the moment, you can not experience suffering. And that doesn't mean you want what is happening to be happening or that you can't change it. You can ask yourself if this feels good and if it is what you want. If it isn't then you can do everything in your power to change it without starting a war within yourself. This is where true power lies.

"This shouldn't have happened to me." Can you absolutely know that to be true? for me the answer is always no. I don't regret anything that happened to me in that past. I've pretty much stopped looking for a "Why did this happen?" and come to terms with the fact that it did, knowing that God doesn't make mistakes. Look to nature, everything happens so perfectly, no mistakes. All of life is like that. If we could only stop, and really experience life, we would begin to flow like the water in a river, without resistance, effortlessly, beautifully.

All of this pain you hold onto isn't even real. I know it can hurt to admit that because for so long we have used these memories to keep ourselves trapped as victims, waiting for someone to save us and make everything ok. I've done that my whole life, and I can tell you that it only gets worse when you have beliefs that someone or something will be your salvation. You wait, holding your breath, praying for the thing you think you need, and then you get it and the hurt doesn't stop. It intensifies because you begin to realize that no one and no thing will ever make the pain stop. Only you can cause it and only you can take it away. This is a good thing, but it might take a long time for you to embrace it. Isn't it freeing to know that no one can ever hurt you? My biggest fear for most of my life was that someone was going to molest me, and I came to realize that by living in this fear I not only attracted it, but through it I was molesting myself every day with these thoughts. The mind is a very powerful thing, capable of doing more good than you can imagine, but when you're out of balance, as the human race is, all that power is being used to do some very serious damage. We are all walking around abusing ourselves, and we are blaming the world. There is no separate "I" and "them". When you hurt another you hurt yourself. When you hurt yourself, you hurt the world. It is all within.

All of this has been very painful to admit and allow, but through fasting I am letting truth into my life, even when it really hurts to let go of old beliefs. In the end what you give yourself is freedom. How scary, intimidating, and painful is it to think that you need the world to be different, for other people to be what you need, for them to fix you? How powerless do you feel when you think of all the pain in the world, the vastness of it and know that you can't stop it all? What you want is peace, for everyone. But look how you are going about it. "I am going to suffer and feel guilty and fight until the world is a better place." That doesn't make any sense. Give yourself what you want to give to the world, be the person you want other people to be, love everyone as if they were you. LOVE YOURSELF. If you can truly do that, then there is nothing you can't do. Love really can heal the whole world. I've been so closed to it, seeing so much pain and injustice, looking at all the ways in which people hurt one another. But I never gave myself this love that I wanted to feel. I always thought someone else needed to love me, and everytime they did or didn't I would feel intense pain inside. All I ever wanted was to feel safe and loved and when I found out that I couldn't feel anyone's love for me I thought I was broken. The truth is, we weren't made to feel the love of other's. That isn't possible. When you're in a loving relationship with someone, you feel love and you think it is coming from them, but look closer, it is your own love. Love is what you are. There is nothing to seek. Isn't that amazing?