Choosing to Live

        I’ve come to a deeply sobering realization in my life. My addiction? Seeking the love, acceptance, and approval of others to fill the hole I had there inside myself.

I realized I’ve been waiting all this time for permission to live my life the way I want to. Waiting for someone else to see me, REALLY see me and go “Hey you! You’re awesome! Go out and be happy prosperous and free now! You deserve it! It’s your turn!” And that would be like my green light, and I’d be off!

But the problem is, no matter how many people would tell me that, no matter how much positive feedback I got, it was never enough. It never satiated that deep longing for acceptance, for love, that I was looking for before I could move forward and feel safe enough and worthy enough to live my dreams.

And then situations would come along where I got the opposite of what I wanted – rejection, blame, and judgment thrown my way, and it crushed me and scared me to death. I was too afraid to face life if there was a chance I’d have to go through that, walk through other people’s stone throwing, because it would confirm how worthless and bad I already felt inside.

Somehow in my childhood I internalized this insecurity that I was bad, fundamentally flawed somehow, and I needed to earn the approval of others before I could feel free to just relax and be myself.

But I’ve come to realize now that the reason I never felt unconditionally loved and accepted, and continue to fail at finding it, is because no one can ever really know me. And if no one can ever really know me, know what it’s like to be me, to walk in my shoes, to see through my eyes, then how can they truly, truly love me?

I know my parents and family love me, I know my husband and friends love me, but the feeling is incomplete, because I keep waiting for them to really SEE me, really KNOW who I am on the inside, and THEN tell me they love me. Until then, there’s always this thought like “yeah, you say you love me, but if you really knew me, would you still?”

People don’t really love you, they love what you mean to them. They don’t accept you, the real You, they accept that you meet their expectations, needs, and desires, and are pleasing to them in some way. And as soon as you aren’t anymore, they reject you.

That sounds really depressing, but it’s the truth, we all know it deep down, though we don’t usually want to face it. We find too much security in the assurance of other peoples love to really face it.

But the fact is, no one will ever love and accept us the way we want them to. And we have to stop holding out, putting our life on hold for that to happen.

The only person who can love us truly and deeply, the only person who can fill the emptiness we feel inside, the only person who will ever, ever accept us for who we are is Us.

How could it be any other way? We are the only ones who really know ourselves. We are the only ones who can look through our own eyes and see the world in exactly the way only we can see it.

We are alone in that way. Alone on the inside. And that’s okay. When that is seen and accepted as the sobering truth that it is, it’s extremely liberating.

It’s as if we associate rejection and aloneness with death. Like if I’m rejected, I’ll be left alone, and then I’ll die. Or some part of us thinks the worst-case scenario will happen if we make someone upset, like they’ll come beet us up and try to kill us, or we’ll be severely prosecuted against. These aren’t usually realistic fears, but they feel very real to that survival based part of us.

Ask yourself, if you didn't need another person’s love and acceptance, and if you weren't afraid of rejection or prosecution, what would your life be like?

What If you where no longer concerned about fitting in and measuring up? 

What if being abandoned and left alone wasn't the worst thing that could happen to you, because you acknowledge that you are, fundamentally, already alone?

What if even Death wasn't an ending, and you knew that no matter what happened to you, you'd still be free in your Soul?

It's one thing to say that, and it's another thing to walk through it, and face the fear of death, aloneness, and prosecution. But in choosing to do so, in choosing not to hide from life, and to stand up and be who you are anyway, for your own sake, because it's what you where put on this planet to do, even though you are scared to death, you can break free.

You can break free from the fear by realizing what survives the fire. You survive. You come out the other side, one way or another. So you are Free, and now you can just live your life!

We all face that fire in a different way. It could be having the courage to stand up to your boss, and risk losing your job and reputation, because the way he or she treats you isn't right. It could be choosing to leave an abusive situation you are living in. It could be having the courage to come out of the closet as a LGBT person, or as any person who feels different from the norm, stepping out and choosing to be who you are, regardless of what people think about it. 

Eventually we all get tired of hiding, of waiting, of seeking and grasping, of settling for less then we are worth, of sacrificing our dreams and values. Our hope and our fear keep us prisoners at a certain point.

Eventually you just have to let go and say "if rejection, exile, or death should come upon me as I step forward in the way I am guided to today, then so be it." And take that step. Take just that one next step.

Every time we do, every time we choose to live, choose to love ourselves, choose to be the ones to accept ourselves completely, and release all others from the responsibility of doing that for us (and our responsibility to do that for others), we take a step into freedom, into total spiritual empowerment.

Then we can really enter the heart of Intimacy. When we are really seeing and embracing ourselves, it allows us to for the first time see and embrace others for who they are, even if they don’t see themselves yet.

We can have transcendent moments of Oneness with a flower, with our cat, and with our spouse. That’s the irony! When we stop chasing it and find it within, we see it reflected all around us.
This is the dance. This is how Life brings us home to ourselves. This is how we become the Free beings we actually are, choosing to live our lives based on whats really true in our heart, for no other reason then the pure joy of it.