Release self doubts, embrace your truths as they are

 Self doubt is one of the worst diseases of the mind. It devalues a person's potential, her ability to look past her fears, blocks, negative thoughts and so on as one's self doubt keeps all these aspects alive as they all compound to self doubt.

It's a meaningless wandering where there is a never ending dead end and yet no way out of this loop of feeling stuck. How easily, how effortlessly is the submitting oneself to this dark void where the possibility of light is shut out by the individual herself. 

I have gone through 5, 6 years of submitting myself to the fires of truth, inner reflection, journaling, releasing, and so on, and yet have not gotten through the test of such times? The severe pain of emotional numbness is something I have realized over and over again and it leaves me feeling sad, tired at times, and in order to distract myself from this pain I binge watch some series or the other which is again another way to keep being emotionally numb but with a bit of awareness that I can't get too lost in that and need to find my way back home to my heart. 

I need some goals to translate my inner realizations into actionable activities and be true to my energies through the process. 

I have the courage to face my pains repressed through emotional numbing and have been blessed with beautiful divine guidance and intuitions, but now when it comes to holding myself as a sovereign being who's a culmination of all her experiences, good, bad, and everything in between, then why does the impulse, the desperation to get a job for my financial independence become a pressing factor in my mind. 

I take pride for my efforts, sincerity, and perseverance, to work towards self realizations of my inner world as much as possible, but without Lord Muruga's protection, Ramani's support, Amma's support in her own way as well, this wouldn't have been possible. 

I need to stand by this becoming of a new self as the shedding and letting go of the old has happened and is also a work in progress. I can't keep criticizing my past life with the awareness, realizations of today. Looking back at the past was/has been a compulsion, but the more I feel connected is when I stick to the present and be open towards future with hope and not anxiety.

I am okay today for who I am and the meltdown of the past has given way to acknowledging my inner wounds, but to keep ruminating on it or have doubts on how will I go further in life with self doubts, anxiety and so on is not going to help either. Just keep walking until I find a path that would help me stay grounded and also flowing in my consciousness and I believe that path has already opened and I am on it, but with triggers now and then about what will happen in future, how will I manage without this support, and how much can I rely on myself are something that comes and goes. It's ego at play probably, but as much as I learnt to trust myself through my own brokenness while bearing open my emotional wounds and feeling them, grieving them, and slowly finding the strength to let go of them, it's these that I need to remind myself as I have withstood the utter distress, depression, sadness, anger, and so much more of emotional numbing, and it's through the healing of these inner emotional wounds that has given me inner strength gradually, that the same inner strength will help me cross over and be the bridge to a mindful present and a promising future.

It's time for procrastination to go!

 Procrastination has been my placebo so that I can avoid getting sick as being out in the sun has for many a time caused headaches and nausea. But the underlying stress of getting criticized, emotionally abused has weighed far more and made me withdraw so much so that just procrastinating felt like the only way to sustain this want to explore life and come out of my addiction to comfort and getting caught in the need to seek validation from others if they find my health alright enough so that I can proceed with full confidence in working on a job.

In this way I had adapted to loneliness so much that whatever creative energies that could possibly flow on a regular basis got all stuck and stagnant owing to my old habit of procrastinating and self doubts.

It's so boring and so much a dead end when I am being supported nevertheless but there's nothing at this time left for me to stay inspired and dig deep into what I can offer creatively. 

I feel so exhausted for lack of goals, lack of vitality to want to seek out goals if possible, and simply submit to binging tv shows or Netflix series, as if I need to just spend time and not invest wisely on some healthy pursuit of a hobby or an activity that's enriching my mind. I feel equally sorry and sad and also angry and helpless as if the direction that I had set my sails for was so very seeking the shade of safety and not the risk of trying being under the sun.

I tend to give in to my mind's negative chatter without learning to shut it down from time to time. Staying absorbed in tv shows is not going to help silence my inner chatter, but it's just another way of unconsciously interacting with the dialogues, script, and flow of the content on tv or computer. It's absolutely exhausting even if I stay stuck in a spot for a bit longer than needed and not restful. It just gives me another distraction, another excuse to stay away from consciously interacting and creating and getting involved with creative pursuits possibly.

What skill, potential or creative outlet that was unnoticed, and completely neglected almost by my mother, my uncles/aunts and hardly appreciated is the very weakness that I have nurtured negatively in my heart for a long time and the weight of not being validated cannot capsize my creative strengths, no matter how oblivious my parents might have been. 

To see myself truly, fully, with warmth and empathy as I had wanted to just be spontaneous, give my opinions, be vocal about my confusions, fears, health challenges, and so much more has been so silenced by me out of lack of trust, lack of security at the house that I grew up in with so many people that my chest can't hold the overflowing pain and emotional hurts from numbing anymore. A big price to pay in trying to want to fit in with the crowd that I lost my voice, my confidence, and just kept being "nice" and quiet, and easily understanding, flexible, and everything that I maybe not. 

What's painfully real is how much I couldn't live for myself and self prioritize owing to getting caught up in all these programming. As much as it's on them, my parents. their emotional dysfunctionalities and in whose presence I tried to survive, but it's my choice finally to self sacrifice without any reason. For whose sake did I do that? And what did I gain by doing that? Just more trauma to bear, to repress, and stay entangled in them as if I can be as equally invisible as these insidious patterns. I am a product of such patterns anyway and I can't feign ignorance on the level of self sabotage that it has done unconsciously.

To put living to another day is the most disservice I can do to myself and no matter how much I can attribute to my past and getting so warped and deluded by them, the fact that I have let my life go a lot and have managed to live, if at all, is through my impulses, sudden flashes of ideas to cook a dish this way or that, sing thirupugazh, draw sometimes, but it's only when I do some job, some service for another that it feels meaningful. I do try to place others first since I am used to living through the collective conscious way and going with the others flow is what I do best. But the more I try to justify that it's working towards others and putting others before me first is all very ideal but it doesn't always sit well with me. I do this just to escape taking personal responsibility for my individual actions towards building my life and most often than not end up feeling scattered. 

Procrastination is not some safe keep deposit that will yield better results tomorrow - it's just a delayed way to come to terms that nothing will change even then unless some movement, some initiative is taken today. I can offer all the excuses I want, but staying stagnant without much excitement towards my life is pretty pathetic, and I can never expect support from others when I don't brace myself to support and work on self belief as a strong foundation to do so. 

Believe in your inner healing

 My mother put me through a lot of emotional abuse and emotional neglect as if I deserved them for being physically sensitive. Her trauma for being emotionally wounded for her expectations of wanting to stay with her partner, my father, got cut short so suddenly in 2 years time from her marriage and specially when they were pregnant with me, it was a sudden tragedy of losing my father to a massive cardiac arrest while she was 3 months pregnant. 

Her trauma seemed to fill me up from the womb that even if I got separated from her physically as an individual, my inner voice, my mind, my sense of self had gotten so saturated with her repeated outbursts of her trauma at her at each and every episode of my health problems, no matter how small and not so terminal it might be, but she enacted my getting sick as a way of lashing out her frustration at my absent father and being left all by herself to deal with me, that her technical way of taking me to doctors at each and every instance of my health problem was the only glue for me towards her as there was no sense of real love or acceptance from her for me.

 She thrived on sympathy from her brothers and their families and left me all by myself to deal with my repetitive ruminations about my past health issues no matter what be the circumstance for today - whether I do well at a job, whether I decide to change jobs, whether I think of stretching myself more for a particular goal/project etc, it felt like my past trauma of being shouted at by my mother, my emotional numbing at that time, and my unspoken and conflicted emotions had all been so bottled up that I kept repeating them in my head as means to stay stuck in trauma myself which has been so severely self limiting and has robbed me off of my precious self trust and belief in my self. And when my relationship with myself has been compromised, so convoluted with the frustrations of my mother's emotional projections from her tragic past, I internalized the same pattern of staying stuck in trauma as a way of criticizing my self and learning over and over again to adapt to my "limitations" -  adapting here in this case means trying to fit into my mother's super narrow perspectives of me and my life to the point that I got disconnected from my real sense of reality.

I was feeding off off her trauma so much so that I preferred punishing myself with negative inner talks, repetitive ruminative of past illness, and unfavorably bringing them up in my present day as if more and more loneliness, and such dismal inner darkness, and not knowing how to reach out for help and just staying stuck with self neglect, self doubt, abandonment, and continuing to adapt to my mother's sense of power over me which was not physical assault but giving into her emotionally abusing me over and over and shaming me for having weak health and making me feel guilty for the same at each and every health episode even if it be small one. She made my life a tragic reliving of her past and which I believed was true for me which just severely restricted me from knowing what my true sense of reality, choices, facing challenges, and learning to grow.

My mother may have been a recipient of severe emotional neglect and abandonment herself from her parents, her siblings and so on, but what she did to me cannot be taken in casual light, but is not the centre point of my life's concern either. I have healed better and grown better from within to realize that my life completely exists outside of hers and that I am not a subject of her emotional projections, no matter how tragic or sudden it might have been - it's her trauma and hers to handle. She is half foot in the grave now and has lived off my life by absorbing my ideas, objectivity, and even concerns. All that I am not is because of my withdrawing from taking personal responsibility for my life and expecting others to fix it for me. My mother assumed she was fixing it but all she did was break me further from my core. She only knew so much and I was not ready to outgrow my expectations at that time.

Being toxically interconnected through trauma which is mostly projected on me by her is not my moral obligation anymore and it's been made explicitly clear in my own ways. She has asked for a meek sorry for the same but that doesn't change the fact that she's still completely oblivious to the damage she has to me and to my mind. 

Now as I have worked on myself and with my God/Guru's blessings as well that I have realized so much of my inner pain and trauma that it feels like I am on the path of healing but through the suppressed and blocked road of pain which has now been opened and released for ease of navigation and flow of energy for over a few years now.

I may or may not get completely healed, I don't know, but trauma is never more important than one's truth and the truth is that it's never easy to let go pain, to be free from trauma and self doubts, but the more I embrace this truth that self love and genuine kindness towards my self changes my inner landscape as it has already begun to change, my relationship with myself feels different. All the unreleased understanding and blocked love from myself has slowly begun to open up and it makes me want to believe that I too can feel well from inside, I too can really heal, just one day at a time.

The answer to many a prayer

 Lord Muruga is a fierce protector and a kind guardian who makes you feel seen completely under His all encompassing eyes. He knows you better than you do yourself. Knowing Him can be your blessing if you allow your heart and mind open wide and embrace His wisdom to navigate through your pain and attain peace and reconciliation with your life, struggles, sufferings in it is what makes Him the true alchemist of your life experiences. Your willingness to submit your ego and persevere through your life's highs and lows with this newfound equanimity and acceptance is what Lord Muruga's grace feels like.

There's so much beauty in His compassion that it would melt the hardened walls of your heart and make you open to being truly kind to yourself and soften it so that His tests, His ways of letting you get closer to Him or vice versa makes it life changing to say the least. His kindness and acceptance of who we are just as ourselves is what moves us to try to work more towards letting our hurts, fears, anger, judgements, criticisms, revenge and so on go. This release is what is beautiful, unpretentious, raw, and simply authentic to each of our life experiences.

For lost and lonely souls who can do with a bit of support to get through the pains of their past and whose human lives in their human bodies feels unbearably heavy, dense, numb, and dark, His guidance, His different ways of loving and supporting you is like a soothing balm on insidious wounds - His mighty weapon, the victorious Vel, His spear cuts through the chords of all those layers knotted as roots of those wounds. 

My life in all entirety has been His blessing and His many miracles have kept me alive o matter how sudden the health issues. He has been my silent support even if my mind was ridden with so many voices, each dialoguing between one another and making me crave for living outside of this noisy space. Muruga's grace silences even the harshest critics in one's mind and it's a redemption of who you are, just as you are, and that's simply good enough to love Him, to be grateful for His myriad ways of being there for you.

He is the father that I never had, He is the friend I had always wished I had, He is the confidante who holds multi universes within His cosmic domain, He is the answer to many a prayer, and truly unconditional love in all His forms and names.

Don't get cornered but put the distractions in its place

 Distractions are needed to cope up with the stressors of one's life but getting so lost in distractions is leading oneself to the dead end of one's consciousness and mindfulness of reality. 

To experience self denial of one's true awareness of one's reality which is inclusive of goals, challenges, hurdles, and some joyful, healthy detractors that helps not get stuck in the trials of disappointments, delays of manifesting of one's goals and aspirations is in short to say denying the opportunity of opening oneself up fully to living.

Living is how well you experience, endure, learn, let go, and move on in response to life. This learn and play ground has room for all of us students to explore, create, have fun, and just keep trusting ourselves for how best we can do what we can and release what we cannot to get through to the end of our lives exploration as an all inclusive experience.

To continue to lighten up through the myriad dense layers of our past, of what can be changed and what cannot, and true acceptance of being a human through it all is what makes this journey a work in progress. Only when we are okay within ourselves to let go our heavy attachments to our toxic habits, hurtful memories, old habits which all put together are consistently and yet unproductively repeated and which acts itself out in our ways of being, behaviors, life choices is the start to our real transformation.

 Distractions then as means to cope up with the pain of real, deep change from within does not reduce the pain of letting go but to stay under the make believe fear and stickiness to our used to living from the past has to be addressed. Loosening up on the intensity of life transformative changes is important but not to the extent of losing focus of who we are in this process. 

We still continue to remain the core subject of our lives and no amount of objectification of people, places, things and so on as priority over ourselves helps. Therefore discernment with distraction is the need of the hour and the ask ourselves how we feel, what we think about changing situations maybe day to day or periodically is a huge way to bank on ourselves without losing trust in our inner strength, our efforts, and how far we have come so that self prioritization remains the core subject of our lives.

To be absorbed by the other and not have enough space for self is severely limiting and hence adapting to such a self defeating and unproductive habit is something I have been personally working on to let go. Many a distraction takes precedence whether it's social media, the neighbours, friends, family and so on, but to keep reminding myself that I am worth all the inner work in progress puts the distractions in its place. 

Home is where the heart is

 When you don't see your pain the way it needs to be seen and you expect for another's empathy to see your pain face to face, then it's most likely a way of blinding yourself to your own conditioning and trade pity or sympathy from others for acknowledging your pain as it is. 

And there's no better person than you to see and feel your pain with kindness and acceptance possibly and treat it with some level of personalized and truthful commitment. Stop expecting apology from others specially those who hurt you as a quick fix to heal your inner wounds which might have festered and become numb for long. 

To bring yourself to humbly accept your own level of ignorance, innocence, or even arrogance, stubbornness, and denying what's truly painful within yourself is to give away the opportunity to live life to the fullest whereby it's not just the joys and happiness which make memories but those mentioned above as well create some unforgettable memories which leave behind scars.

We tend to express how traumatized, lonely, and sad, not understood we feel when we tend to focus on the scars which is nothing but the shadow side of pain or pains in our heart. Staying stuck on the inner scars wounds us even further and disconnects us from our core inner wounds which we may not have addressed accurately for lack of articulate emotional expressions. But still it's a wound not tended or cared for and the more the wounds, the more the numbness, the more the depression that envelops the clarity of our thinking, feeling side.

The inner wounds need to come into light, into the truth of our awareness and what's repressed, stifled, shoved under the carpet has to come clean and plain without the drama of stagnant ruminations. 

Truth of who we were when we stopped choosing authenticity over collective consciousness needs to come in front of our naked eyes without the influence of rose tinted glasses of our preconceived notions, programming, and habitual perceptions of our reality on a day to day basis. Because reality of how deeply we have been hurt and how harder it is to process, regulate, release, forgive (oneself and the others) is exhausting from a soul level, but the fear of getting hurt by such truthful contemplations either by oneself or as guided by spiritual interventions, therapies and so on is what makes the rising of this unique and spiritually transforming aspect of the self so challenging and yet incredibly rewarding, and not to forget life changing.

To bear the dead weight of who we are not when alive is a bigger block and self sabotaging at the least and hence to resolve to commit to being true to this profound and deep healing within oneself is the most liberating and cleansing. 

The fragile interwovenness between one human to another within a family, community, country and so on are held together by truth which stays unbreakable no matter what the age, era, timeline - truth does not change, but the way we are held together by it as a human and living consciousness in this given time does matter. 

Our souls speak and listen in the language of our inner truths and that home is where the heart is. No shouting from the rooftops needed here, just a warm, simple, honest space where the soul can thrive and speak freely.

  

I give myself permission

 I give myself permission to:

Be true to my feelings whatever it be

Be true to my emotions, highs and lows, and take personal responsibility for how I connect to my life

Let go patterns, habits, heavy energies that bring me down.

To stay away from people and maintain healthy boundaries whenever the "holier than thou", "smarter than thou", more of this and that than thou" attitudes are implied in conversations.

Be kind to myself as I deserve to be in the limelight of attention I give to my body, mind, and soul.

Not ask for another's validation regarding my pain, conflicts, trauma, and inner landscape, whatever it be.

Be an individual who also learns to ask for support wherever required and not expect too much perfection from myself and refrain from staying in inner critic mode.

Be goofy, childlike, naïve, innocent, sincere, unassuming, moody, crazy, witty, adventurous, spiritual, simple, honest, and be a human finally.

Be playful and creative with my imaginations, creativity, and spontaneity. 

Be more forgiving, less harsh towards myself and give myself time, space to heal, grieve, release, rest, and connect with my life not as a numb duty but as a mindful and aware alignment with my mood, feelings, and emotions as a human on a day to day basis.

To snap out of patient mode and healthily embrace being highly sensitive, energy absorbing, intuiting, spiritual, observant, emotional, blocks releasing person. 

To believe that my present is healthy and well and that my future would be healthy and well as well.

To snap out of self doubts and stay true to what I sense, feel, and think about a given situation with openness.

To prioritize my life, my emotional, physical needs, my wellbeing, peace, balance and calm, and to stop making others, be it anyone my priority just to feel "more" useful, productive, and satisfy their expectations and so on.

To not focus on missed opportunities to become the individual that I could have been but put together all the efforts, struggles, brokenness, perseverance, courage, sadness, anxiety, creativity, spirituality, faith in a higher power and finally faith in myself to be the individual that I am today is all that matters.

Move past the pains of who I could have been and focus on who I am and what I need from time to time.

Remind myself every now and then that I am not a mechanical, impersonal, coldly objective, and self neglectful person that I had gotten used to be habitually and that doesn't serve its purpose anymore and that this way of my being has to CHANGE and change is for good, and that I am a beautiful work in progress.