Warning: naughty language ahead.

Honor yourself. Honor your light.

Honor your love. Honor your sex. Honor your body. Honor your integrity. Honor your magic. Honor your power.

I’ve been neglecting myself, my spirit. I’ve been honoring and worshipping what is without rather than what is within. I’ve been spreading myself too thin.

When what we perceive as love hits, it hits. It hits like a sledgehammer and smashes our current reality to pieces. It throws blinders over reason and clear thought, most especially, clear choice.

It puts things on the back burner, simmering away center stage with the potential to either illuminate our souls or burn us alive, reducing us to ashes.

Real, true love is what’s inside. What comes to us from the outer experience is a reflection of what’s going on within. Everyone we attract into our lives is a mirror, which prompts the question: what have I attracted—what does that say about what I think I deserve?

Are these energies and cycles all meant to be reset buttons for me?

Guiding lights that lead me by misleading me? If I’ve learned anything, it’s that people don’t make sense. We’re complete contradictions. We can’t expect things from others or rationalize their actions because there is no rationalization.

We’re humans—we do crazy shit.

Shit that can’t be explained. We go crazy with fear and lust and love and hope and back to fear—we let these emotions rule and guide our actions. We become base animals, completely out of touch with our truths, and in that process, take ourselves and the ones we love down with us.

Sometimes. But sometimes we actually rise to the occasion, and even though we’re bruised and battered and beaten down, we get back up. We get back up and hope the next time we see clearer, hear clearer and act with more integrity; more integrity for ourselves. Because until we feel that respect and love for ourselves and deem ourselves worthy of those energies, we can’t extend them to anyone else, and we certainly can’t expect anyone else to extend them to us.

We accept the love we think we deserve. ~ Stephen Chbosky

We must only allow the behavior and treatment that we deserve, and to get there, we need to actually know and feel that we deserve those better energies.

That comes from our core first, and we’ve got some pretty dank, dark soil to sift through in order to get to our own pearls of acceptance and love. We need to plug back in, spent some quality time with our base material. We need to acknowledge that base material for what it is—clay that needs some TLC; the matter that’s there, waiting to be lovingly handled and nurtured. The stuff of our souls that already possesses everything we need and is waiting patiently to be found.

This is our home. This is what we work our entire lives to get to, which is intensely infuriating as we spend our entire lives looking outward for fulfillment and this mythical sense of home that we try to create, over and over and over again.

But how easy is it to get distracted by outside forces? Those that seem to provide the “missing link” to what we feel is missing in our lives? We all do that, in one form or another. We tell our inner voice to shut up so we can pursue what we think that missing link is—the person or job or place that we think will tie everything together, make us whole.

But that doesn’t exist—we’re what makes us whole.

This point is crucial—this time is like no other. I’m on the verge. I’m en route to those shrouded inside realms, and now I’m stopping myself. I’m fucking terrified. So instead, I’m dragging my feet and sleepwalking through it. I don’t feel here, I feel like I’m falling into the dredge of mindlessness. And I know why.

It comes back to acceptance.

Surprise, surprise—that word, notion, concept that I’ve been grappling with for months. Acceptance of my power, my gifts, my place here. My time here. My purpose here. Acceptance of everything I’ve been given but haven’t felt worthy of claiming.

Acceptance that it’s going to take work and diligence and perseverance to do what I need to do and create the life I want, but that’s everything there is. Acceptance that I’ve got lifetimes of healing to do and that I’ll never reach this mystical “ready” point when I feel confident enough to take everything on and run with it, full throttle.

Acceptance of the fact that I’ve gotta put my big girl pants on and just fucking go for it, whether I feel ready or not.

Because I’m ready. Ready for every single individual step that’s leading towards something bigger. There’s no use in being paralyzed by fear of failure or rejection, because all that’s required of us is one baby step after another. We don’t have to figure shit out this second or in the next 24 hours or even in the next year. All we need to do is keep walking, keep moving and keep our heads up and eyes fixed straight ahead.

I was running the other day and realized how much I look down. The simple shift in looking up, seeing the trail ahead and my place on it radically changed my head space. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by the distance, I felt like I was aware of how much further I had to go and that it really wasn’t as far as it felt when my gaze was so fixated on the dirt and rubble.

The smallest shift in the way we look at situations completely changes the way we perceive them, which transforms our approach. It somehow eases the burden and turns a seemingly insurmountable undertaking into one that is now somehow completely approachable. All I can see is Rosie flexing her guns, running behind me and coaching me through the most grueling stretches of distance at those exact moments when I want to give up and walk.

You Can Do It.

This is what we need to hear at those exact moments that we’re faced with situations that challenge us to grow – those circumstances and people that waltz into our lives at the most ironic times; those synchronistic events and faces and words that grab our attention long enough to lead us off the track we’ve beaten down with laps of comfort and repetition.

The tracks we’ve lost ourselves in because the grooves we’ve cut while running away by running in circles have started to swallow us in their depths.

That is life trying to get our attention.

That is life trying to literally shake us awake. And rather than trying to figure out why these changes and challenges and shake-ups are happening, which is always the pitfall we stumble into, it would benefit us more to really be present in the situation and feel out what all of this is evoking from us. What is this person, right now, bringing up? What is this situation making me face that I’ve been trying my fucking damndest to bury? What still needs resolution so I can step off this hamster wheel and actually start living and thriving, eyes looking ahead rather than down at my bleeding, blistered feet?

Look up. Flex those guns. Don’t look back. Fixate on the road ahead rather than the mileage you’ve already covered. Give thanks and drown in gratitude over everything that’s brought you this far, because you know what? You’ve still got a universe ahead of you to blaze, which points to one simple truth:

The best is yet to come.

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Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: Thomas Rousing/Flickr