Creating Life...
May 6th 2009 03:37
Creating life…
Creating life is not as easy as many people would have us think – Just do it - is a catch phrase that we all know about but how do you put that into practice. We can’t just do things that we don’t have the skills for, no matter how much we want it and we can’t just pick up and walk out of a job if we don’t have any other income, we have rent to pay and food to buy. How come, then, so many are out there now saying – just do it, you can take control of your life, you can overcome anything…
I don’t know… it takes time to build up a sense of resilience and optimism. Most of us haven’t been taught our whole lives that we are worthy or that we are hopeful or that we can have what we want from life (I do believe that we can ultimately). Instead we are told that we should just accept our place in life, accept what’s presented to us. Can we really change what we attract into our lives?
I’m not so sure that it’s that easy… The Secret and all those other books/films/ etc out there at the moment telling us how to take control of our thought processes are kind of wrong to my mind. We can’t really deny what’s in front of us and we can’t accept it all the time either. There’s some serious confusion here about what we can and can’t do with this “Life” thing that we are all living.
I do know that most people want more – in some way or another, they want to experience more from life – a better relationship, more respect, better pay, more connections with people or deeper connections, understanding about God… all these things are lying in people, just under the surface where they don’t have to consciously take part in the feeling, but letting it cause a great deal of distress and anxiety in their lives. These things that we want are all perfectly reasonable. Why do we deny them? Because we don’t think we deserve them, we just can’t have this because nobody has ever told me that I deserve it… So, the question, perhaps, is how to we feel deserving of all the things we want from life if no one has told us that we do deserve? Many people would say here that we just need to take control of our lives, that we need to know more about ourselves, to dig a little deeper and see what’s stopping us from achieving our dreams, or even just obtain our basic needs. But, how? How do we actually just stop feeling a particular way?
I don’t think we do. I think it’s a long process of recovery and anyone who tells you that you can turn your life around in a week, a month or even a year is a liar!!
You simply can’t change what you feel. You can give yourself other things to think about though – which will, hopefully, help you feel that there is more to life. Suicide is such a common thing in our society these days because people feel no hope. I can understand this entirely – I have been through 2 years of trying to build a business and move away from feelings of hopelessness, of anxiety, of feeling that I’m not worthy of all the success that I want. I keep blaming other people for not teaching me the right things and I can blame society too, because they just aren’t putting up the right structures for people like me to take control of life and turn it around so that I’m successful, happy and in control. I even feel like taking my own life at times because I can see what I want and I “know” that there’s just no way to get it – I “know” that I’m not worthy of it. It’s very hard to change these feelings – in fact I’ve discover that you simply can’t. All you can do is listen to them – ask yourself to learn from them and ask yourself to give yourself something new and enlightening to think about for a change(!).
There’s been periods in my life – 3 to be exact where I contemplated (but never attempted to follow through with) taking my own life. Why? Because I didn’t think that there was anything else to my life. There was nothing. There was no-one. There was no point.
I can see how vicious these thoughts are and I can see how they were born – a complete lack of respect for my needs, thoughts, actions, desires – by those who taught me as I grew up. I’m not attempting to blame anyone here (at this point in time!) but I can see that our society 20-30 years ago didn’t bother much with psychological insights – not in the way it does now (and there is still a long way to go). The media promotes wellbeing, families have therapy options, relationships are allowed to fall apart – no-one is going to ex-communicate you from general society if you divorce (depending of course on your religious affiliations).
The point I want to make here is that people have more options now than they did before, but how do you change 30 years of living in a society that doesn’t allow you to see your own worth? The way forward seems to be that we just need to allow ourselves to search a little deeper into society to find all the wonderful things that people are actually doing to help us see the way, the light, so to speak. There are a million people going through similar feelings that you are going through right now, and some of them have written about it and given their insights so that you don’t have to feel so bad about your own life. Let them be there for you. Let them ride the storm with you and let them show you the light – so that you can discover your own.
Don’t try to change life – you can’t really – only try to change your mind about what life is all about. Often times that hardship, but when that door closes and another opens you’ll find that that hardship has led the way to greater insights than you thought possible.
Now for those who do consider and even attempt suicide, there’s only one way for you to think about life now. That each and every corner you reach is an opening to a new way of thinking, feeling about and living life. So let it be, let each corner show you something new – this is what I have discovered and this is what I have learnt along the way. It doesn’t get easier to face each corner but the light does get brighter each time you take a corner and see that there is life on the other side of it…
Take control by letting go – Let go by taking control – take control… there’s so much advice out there! It’s confusing. All I know is that taking control is really just following your inner-thoughts (“I want more than this relationship/job/etc”) and letting them play out – discover why you have this thought and you’re half way to resurrecting your life. Suicidal thought isn’t really an inner-thought, it’s an outcome of societies limited thinking (at least the “society” that’s immediately obvious to us), from my experience anyway. We each walk our own path and take our own observations of life in our own way.
I can see that many people will find all this hard to bear – that life is supposed to be easy – but it’s not always easy, and we need to accept that before we can really discover what our life is all about. And that play out that purpose in such a way that we have peace, light and joy in our lives (because this helps us understand the hardships that we sometimes have to bear).
And if you’re wondering, no I’m not there yet – I can see the light and the peace and I can see how to build it, but that may take another couple of years yet – and, strangely, I’m ok with that now.
Creating life is not as easy as many people would have us think – Just do it - is a catch phrase that we all know about but how do you put that into practice. We can’t just do things that we don’t have the skills for, no matter how much we want it and we can’t just pick up and walk out of a job if we don’t have any other income, we have rent to pay and food to buy. How come, then, so many are out there now saying – just do it, you can take control of your life, you can overcome anything…
I don’t know… it takes time to build up a sense of resilience and optimism. Most of us haven’t been taught our whole lives that we are worthy or that we are hopeful or that we can have what we want from life (I do believe that we can ultimately). Instead we are told that we should just accept our place in life, accept what’s presented to us. Can we really change what we attract into our lives?
I’m not so sure that it’s that easy… The Secret and all those other books/films/ etc out there at the moment telling us how to take control of our thought processes are kind of wrong to my mind. We can’t really deny what’s in front of us and we can’t accept it all the time either. There’s some serious confusion here about what we can and can’t do with this “Life” thing that we are all living.
I do know that most people want more – in some way or another, they want to experience more from life – a better relationship, more respect, better pay, more connections with people or deeper connections, understanding about God… all these things are lying in people, just under the surface where they don’t have to consciously take part in the feeling, but letting it cause a great deal of distress and anxiety in their lives. These things that we want are all perfectly reasonable. Why do we deny them? Because we don’t think we deserve them, we just can’t have this because nobody has ever told me that I deserve it… So, the question, perhaps, is how to we feel deserving of all the things we want from life if no one has told us that we do deserve? Many people would say here that we just need to take control of our lives, that we need to know more about ourselves, to dig a little deeper and see what’s stopping us from achieving our dreams, or even just obtain our basic needs. But, how? How do we actually just stop feeling a particular way?
I don’t think we do. I think it’s a long process of recovery and anyone who tells you that you can turn your life around in a week, a month or even a year is a liar!!
You simply can’t change what you feel. You can give yourself other things to think about though – which will, hopefully, help you feel that there is more to life. Suicide is such a common thing in our society these days because people feel no hope. I can understand this entirely – I have been through 2 years of trying to build a business and move away from feelings of hopelessness, of anxiety, of feeling that I’m not worthy of all the success that I want. I keep blaming other people for not teaching me the right things and I can blame society too, because they just aren’t putting up the right structures for people like me to take control of life and turn it around so that I’m successful, happy and in control. I even feel like taking my own life at times because I can see what I want and I “know” that there’s just no way to get it – I “know” that I’m not worthy of it. It’s very hard to change these feelings – in fact I’ve discover that you simply can’t. All you can do is listen to them – ask yourself to learn from them and ask yourself to give yourself something new and enlightening to think about for a change(!).
There’s been periods in my life – 3 to be exact where I contemplated (but never attempted to follow through with) taking my own life. Why? Because I didn’t think that there was anything else to my life. There was nothing. There was no-one. There was no point.
I can see how vicious these thoughts are and I can see how they were born – a complete lack of respect for my needs, thoughts, actions, desires – by those who taught me as I grew up. I’m not attempting to blame anyone here (at this point in time!) but I can see that our society 20-30 years ago didn’t bother much with psychological insights – not in the way it does now (and there is still a long way to go). The media promotes wellbeing, families have therapy options, relationships are allowed to fall apart – no-one is going to ex-communicate you from general society if you divorce (depending of course on your religious affiliations).
The point I want to make here is that people have more options now than they did before, but how do you change 30 years of living in a society that doesn’t allow you to see your own worth? The way forward seems to be that we just need to allow ourselves to search a little deeper into society to find all the wonderful things that people are actually doing to help us see the way, the light, so to speak. There are a million people going through similar feelings that you are going through right now, and some of them have written about it and given their insights so that you don’t have to feel so bad about your own life. Let them be there for you. Let them ride the storm with you and let them show you the light – so that you can discover your own.
Don’t try to change life – you can’t really – only try to change your mind about what life is all about. Often times that hardship, but when that door closes and another opens you’ll find that that hardship has led the way to greater insights than you thought possible.
Now for those who do consider and even attempt suicide, there’s only one way for you to think about life now. That each and every corner you reach is an opening to a new way of thinking, feeling about and living life. So let it be, let each corner show you something new – this is what I have discovered and this is what I have learnt along the way. It doesn’t get easier to face each corner but the light does get brighter each time you take a corner and see that there is life on the other side of it…
Take control by letting go – Let go by taking control – take control… there’s so much advice out there! It’s confusing. All I know is that taking control is really just following your inner-thoughts (“I want more than this relationship/job/etc”) and letting them play out – discover why you have this thought and you’re half way to resurrecting your life. Suicidal thought isn’t really an inner-thought, it’s an outcome of societies limited thinking (at least the “society” that’s immediately obvious to us), from my experience anyway. We each walk our own path and take our own observations of life in our own way.
I can see that many people will find all this hard to bear – that life is supposed to be easy – but it’s not always easy, and we need to accept that before we can really discover what our life is all about. And that play out that purpose in such a way that we have peace, light and joy in our lives (because this helps us understand the hardships that we sometimes have to bear).
And if you’re wondering, no I’m not there yet – I can see the light and the peace and I can see how to build it, but that may take another couple of years yet – and, strangely, I’m ok with that now.
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Comment by Lily
Ars Poetica
I see this barrage as a band aid to the real underlying problem, not having NURTURE, by way of family, friends & teachers believing in you, encouraging you, and not having great mentors in these confusing times -- in turn creating the lie that sits and festers in ones soul, that one is not 'good enough'.
This is not something you can just shrug off. Just a few thoughts from the trenches, no where near the core of the problem. Thanks for sharing yours Theresa.
~lily
Comment by Nevar
Is Why
I got free by leaving all that was familiar to me, in little steps.
God spared me from the ignorance of my loving friends who would continue to pigeon hole and typecast me in roles that didn't fit; I am neither square, round, triangular.
I applaud your candor and wish you well.