Vulnerable and Willing

Here I am, hot tears again, and feeling the need to let it out through my words.

I don't know if my feelings are right, but I'm feeling not liked by a group of people I've embraced. It might be right. I am no stranger to people not taking to me. I'm trying to stay calm and figure out what is really happening here.

First, I'm feeling a bit vulnerable lately. I've been acting out a lot of new behaviors and having great results. But even so, the result is that I'm feeling a bit out on a limb with all of the newness. And there is my revelation yesterday, and I'm not going to recover that ground now.

Second, these people are all busy with their own lives. The small actions/inactions that I'm taking as slights are small things, and from people who are busy. Their actions are much more about them than about me. I know that in my head, of course.

Third, I haven't really learned how to be warm and cozy with people, so some of what is going on could really be feedback to me about how I'm coming off. I'm intense and impulsive, not the best combination, I know. I have been guilty of trying too hard in the past. Maybe I am just hearing that message again, and need to make some smallish adjustments.

But the largest thing in all of this is that I just want to be loved and appreciated. I really don't care who loves me or appreciates me. I mean that in the right way. I don't have any hoped pinned on any one of these people. I don't care if any one of them likes me or doesn't like me. I just want to find the ones who do like me. And this ties back beautifully to the first point... my vulnerability.

My gawd, this feels like high school where I was always trying to figure out how to be less intense and be just enough to pull in people. Some things never seem to change in my life. I wonder about that. I wonder if that is because I realized early who I am, or if this is an entire pattern of behavior that should just be released.

OK, here's what I'm going to do.

First, I'm going to just feel all of this emotion running through me. Of course I'm feeling vulnerable. Of course I want to be loved and appreciated. Nothing wrong with feeling all of this.

Second, I'm not feeling people warm up to me, so I'm going to take this as feedback. I have no way right now to know on a case by case basis if this is because it's a wrong match for me, or if I'm just too intense. Either way, the feedback seems to be that my energy in these directions is misplaced for right now. I need to be quiet and watch what happens. I may get a chance to ask some of them directly, but I'm not counting on that. I will be direct if I get the opportunity.

Third, the real heart of this issue is inside of me. I know that as long as I am feeling unloved and unappreciated, that is the kind of energy that is going to come right back to me. I need some time and space to process this by myself. More than anything else right now, I want to learn how to balance my energy in a stronger way. I want to learn how to feel the love and appreciation of the universe for me, and my own love and appreciation for myself. This is the antidote to what I'm feeling.

Oh Great Spirit, I see the road opening up before me, and I willingly commit to walking this road. I take this first step in faith, and I face the unknown, the mystery that will be revealed to me as I travel this land. I intend to explore this territory and learn what I can, and to apply myself to mastering the gate that will give me access to the next challenge before me in life. I offer my vulnerable heartscape, and the fallow ground it still contains, to hold the beauty of the world and of myself that I will encounter here. It is so.

Emptying the Gaps

It has been an interesting few months. I've gotten more done, seen more dreams realized, and had more projects going at the same time than any other time in my life. The cost of this uberproductivity? Sleep. The ability to fall asleep, to be more specific. Once I'm asleep, I usually can stay asleep until I'm rested, except for the fact that I've set an alarm to keep myself at least close to my normal working schedule. Which means most days, I get between 3 and 5 hours of sleep, not nearly enough for days and weeks at a time.

I realized this morning that my uberproductivity has shoehorned productive time into all of the normal gaps in my day, from the time I wake up until I'm laying in bed to fall asleep, with a pen in my hand while I envision the future I want to create for myself with the DVD of The Secret playing in the background. What ever happened to just going to bed in the dark without any noise in the background?

Somehow, I've lost the gaps in my timeline. They've been filled in, mostly I think through the 1) excitement of what is going on, and 2) the stress of so much going on has pushed me to find more time to address things. But it isn't good. The gaps are also essential to living my life. The gaps are where I just hang out with myself, where I face the void, and where I anchor myself in the stillness of everything greater than myself.

I used to keep myself frenetically busy because I couldn't endure the gaps and the stillness. Over the years, I've embraced the gaps and found myself in the stillness. They have been vital parts of my life and awareness. They have been the places next to my places for reflection. I sit in stillness and then emerge to reflect on my life, my thoughts, my journey. But now the gaps are filled, flooded with words and thoughts and motion that overflows from my cup. But not the good kind of overflowing, the kind that comes naturally when I tap into a spring of life-giving energy. No, this is more like a clogged sink that fills up and overflows onto the floor. It's not caused by tapping into a source, it's caused by the blockage of a flow. It's a negative direction flow instead of a positive direction flow. It's a symptom of a problem that needs to be fixed.

I need to drain the gaps. But more than that, I realized yesterday that I've been filling the space around me with excess words. In a fews days time, two different people told me that I've been quite talkative. Well, of course I have been talkative. My life is very quiet, no one around to listen to me, and the world has been dropping the most amazing things at my feet. I've gotten ideas for new things I want, and they have started showing up fast and thick. It would seem miraculous, except that I know exactly what caused this to happen. The only miracle is that I've somehow managed to get out of my own way so these things could come straight to me instead of hovering around me for a time until I remember to let them in.

When the second person told me I was talkative, I realized I needed to get quiet again. Not because I need to conform to some behavior standard imposed on my from the outside, but because I had failed to observe my behavior myself. I have realized that I've been talking more than usual before this, and I understood what was going on, and I thought it was just a phase so I didn't think any more about it. But now I see that it is a sign of something out of balance in my world. I'm excited. I'm happy. I have so many new things going on in my life. It's not like I need to talk about what is going on to process it for myself, or to see it clearly. I'm wanting so much to share the new and overflowing joys of my life with the people around me.

It's really too bad that I don't have a better support system in place around me yet. I would love to have people who know what is up with me, people who can hear a sentence or two and be up-to-speed on what is going on with me. That is the challenge of living alone and working alone. No one knows what is going on with me, and the stories lately are so big and so plentiful, it takes more words to share them. Too bad no one really wants to hear them. That is my conclusion. These people are busy with their own lives and stories and just don't have room to take mine in, or the time to hear me lay them down.

Yesterday, I came to the conclusion that I need to return to this journal for a time to help myself process the events of my life. I need a place to reflect on what is happening. Perhaps then I will not have the same desire to tell the world about my life, and if I do have some desire, perhaps having reflected on it, I can tell a more succint and elegant story than I can without the reflection. At any rate, the solution seems to be for me to sit with myself and my thoughts and process them alone. The usual. Isn't this the path of the mystic? Isn't this the reality of every person's journey -- we all travel alone even if we don't realize it. Isn't this the way I've lived my life for decades? I'm not sure why I thought this thing had changed. I have the tools I need, I understand what is happening, and I can manage this process.

Expect to hear more from me.