When it feels TOO BIG

There are moments, hours, days, weeks, and sometimes years, when it simply feels too big.  All of our judgement and pain and heartache stick themselves in the center of our chest and we want to give up.  Our mind races with stories of what it all means.  We try to think of what the other person is thinking, what they are feeling, and how we can get ahead of the pain, the pain we imagine we will always feel.  There are times and there will be times, when it hurts so bad we imagine it will always hurt, the way it does right now.   But it won’t.  It never does.

Growing hurts.  Emotional growth really hurts.  Spiritual growth really really hurts.  Until it doesn’t and then, FREEDOM.  If we really grow what must be grown inside of us, we will never have to re-grow it.  We might have to grow something new, but we won’t have to re-grow the thing we have already grown.

And so it is, I have come to this sort of growing many times over the last 20 years.

 Never once has it been easy, but it has always been worth it.

Some of the pain that has lodged it’s self in my chest shows up like this:

Why am I so misunderstood.  I’m doing the best that I can and I still screw up.  I’m afraid I’ll be left.  Everybody leaves.  If I say it in just the right way, then ‘they’ will get it, then I will be understood.  

And on and on the mind goes.  In all of it, this staying in the pain, it has always required another person to change for me to feel peace.  It never occurred to me what it might feel like to be on the receiving end of the story my mind attached to…. the story that… ‘you have to change for me to be ok.’

That’s a big story, from a little girl.   The little girl that lives inside of me and believes a million lies about ‘what happened’.

The messages we take from our childhood, become belief systems.

Those beliefs become our religion.  (I know that one is hard.  But, listening to Byron Katie, when referring to worry, she said,  ‘what is your religion?’ ‘worry is your religion’, I thought, “Oh my word, how many times has WORRY been my religion.”  Yikes. ) How many times had ‘being right’ been my religion?  How many times has ‘being wrong’ been my religion?  How many times has ‘being hurt’ been my religion?

Today I’m looking at it all, that big giant story that a sweet little girl made up and carried around for 30 plus years.  Bless my heart, for staying so attached to the story.  And bless everyone else’s heart who has been on the receiving end of my story.

There is Grace and more grace.  Love and more love.  Truth and more truth.  No matter what story I have acted out of, wether it’s the one where I am worthless or the one where I might be wonderful, I can come back to the place where neither are true.  I am not good or bad, right or wrong.  I just am.  It is not too big or too small.  It just is.

When all is said and done, we are all just sitting in a chair holding our story.  When we let our story go, we simply are.

—–sending you love wherever you are in the world.

Tyler

For more from Tyler visit: tylerhayes.net