After this most recent release, this most recent descent and subsequent climb, I find that I’m finding worthiness.

This sense of self and my right to not only be here, but thrive here, is surfacing. I’m so grateful for this moment as I stretch my arm across the back of the couch and feel good…good in my body. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it feels so sensual. So sexy. So radiant. So fucking strong and beautiful. In these rare moments of clarity of what actually is, I feel alive. I feel amazing. I feel myself wishing that every moment could feel like this.

I feel the fact that wanting to get paid for my efforts isn’t a selfish feeling. I feel the knowledge that the ability to support myself lies in the feelings I put into my work. There’s so much abundance I deserve, and my mindset has everything to do with accepting or rejecting it. My sense of worthiness is directly reflected in my income, in my feelings of freedom and inner and outer wealth. The calm or tension that morphs to form the daily masks I wear, slightly different every day to the discerning eye. To those who know me—who see me. Somedays I think I’m surrounded by more of those than not, and other days, at my worst, I feel like there’s no one who ever truly sees me. Not even myself.

In this moment, right now, I’m capturing the sense of capability I feel, like what I have to say is worth while, worth reading, worth sharing. And those moments that I feel lost, stupid, repetitive, naïve, even ignorant—those are the moments that I find it the most difficult yet necessary to keep writing.

I write through the muck and mire to uncover that brilliant amethyst of truth and revelation.

I write because there’s nothing else that’s ever come so naturally to me. I write because without it, I have no idea who I am. I can’t remember a time before the word, and I certainly can’t fathom a time after it. Without the word, without this ritual of transmitting ideas and thoughts and revelations and heightened messages through my fingertips, I cease to be the better version of me.

It’s become increasingly essential for me to come into my own lately; it’s become nothing short of survival. I’ve always taken risks, the roads less traveled, and I regret nothing about those choices. But with those choices comes immense responsibility and work.

To live the life you know is your right to live—your divine calling, some might call it—you have to be brave and courageous and sometimes sleepless in order to forge your own burning road. And not only do you have to forge it, you have to endure and walk through the flames of death and transformation to become something of what you’ve always seen yourself as…and even that is never certain. That can change day to day, so you have to trust that these flames you’ve created won’t kill you. You have to trust that these flames are lighting the way to something better, and even if you don’t know what that something is, you know deep inside that your heart does.

Listening to and following your heart is choosing the road less traveled. Truly becoming a pioneer of patience and perseverance and surrendering to the muffled calling of your heart is the only way to emerge from the flames as the person you always knew was buried inside, waiting to be born.

The flames are rising all around me, higher than they’ve ever burned. I’ve reached a turning point, a crescendo. My entire being is on fire, vibrating, racing every second…sleep escapes me, thoughts and images flood my tired mind. I feel so alive and so zombified at the same time, and these two polarities are tearing holes in my head. Maybe that’s my brain’s signal to shut it down, give it a rest, to send my attention and tune my hearing to that other organ that lies just south, through the canal of communication, through my megaphone of truth.

When did I lose my heart? A better question still…did I ever truly possess it?

Can a heart be possessed? A mind, absolutely. But a heart? I don’t think so.

The heart could never be a possession. The heart can never be caught, tamed or subdued. The heart burns fiercely, wildly and with abandon. The heart holds all the answers to all of the questions we haven’t even thought to ask. The heart knows…

Where the heart goes, energy flows.

Everything and everyone keeps telling me to give my brain a rest and live through my heart, make decisions through my heart, feel through my heart. This has been the greatest challenge of my life, one that I meet head on, every second.

Every second within every second.

I’m consumed by trying to silence my mind and find my way to my heart.

The flames burn higher, and with every inch they grow, with every breath of oxygen they consume, I race against time and myself to find my heart…

“I fell in to a burning ring of fire

I went down, down, down

and the flames went higher.

And it burns, burns, burns

the ring of fire

the ring of fire.”

~ Johnny Cash

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Ed: Sara Crolick