I am participating in December Views. Although I won’t be posting pictures everyday, I will be posting when I can. If you want to do it as well, here is the link with the information. I think it will be fun to see the your world in December through images and to take the time to be silent and still enough to capture the world around you.

So far it feels really calming and pleasant to be in the moment more and notice, really notice the beauty in my neighborhood.

You can post your pics on your facebook page, or on your blog. Be sure to comment and let me know you are participating, so I can see your photos as well.

Here are the pics I took yesterday and today.

I love that I am brave, brave in the places that count most to me. I am brave in the feeling place, the place that scares the shit out of most people I know.  The place we try to medicate and numb or stuff.  I can facilitate a scream, hold space for sobbing, make room for rage and even contribute a prop or two.  Most people I know try to shush cries, tell others to suck it up, be strong, and a scream, well… there is no place for a SCREAM.  And then there is RAGE.. which sends most people into a panic, fearing for their lives. So yes, I am brave and can stand in the face of the emotions of others and I really love that about myself.  All that Shalom Mountain training.

I love that lately I can hold space for all of my own feeling places too and yes, sometimes I want to jump out of my own skin, because I cannot stand the feeling, because I do not understand the feeling, because I am angry at the feeling, because why now, why here, what brought it on, and what the hell? I love that I know this about myself. I love that I know when I am stuffing, numbing and medicating, resisting, dragging, kicking, screaming, cause I don’t want to FEEL THIS. And I must hold space for those feelings too. 

So I will add self awareness to what I love about myself. I am brave enough to be self aware and brave enough to witness you in your bravery to feel.

It takes guts to be with feelings.

Keeping it real.   

Oh, boy, what a way to start. Well first, I have to confess to how much fear has come up in the last twenty four hours, about not only doing 30 days of truth, but sharing it! Perhaps that is the most scary part, exposure, and yet that is what I do, what I’ve been doing for the past five years, ever since I creating www.myvoiceoftruth.com and exposing the sexual, physical and emotional abuse I suffered as a child.

So I will sit with the feelings, the fear of judgement, the line of being a coach and being human. I guess somehow I thought I needed to keep the truth of my humanity, my pain, under wraps and yet it is the fact that I am wounded healer, that resonates with you all.

So, here I go, imperfect, twisted up at times, happy and grounded at others. This is me and I suspect you too.

Something I hate about myself is that I am inconsistent. I get really excited about things, and then let them go. I get the fever for things, I get high off of it, whatever “it” is and then I am tired, done and want to check out. Perhaps I hit a bump in the road, something gets too hard, or the joy gets sucked out of it somehow. And then…The Voice comes in. The voice inside my head, says, “Here you again, are you going to finish it this time? You know you are not going to do 30 days of truth, so stop lying to yourself. You know you are not going to keep up with a blog, you know you are not going to keep up with anything.”

What a meanie my critic is, makes me want to kick him in the teeth, if he wasn’t so right, most of the time.

The truth I fall hard for things, like my latest love affair is with art journaling and I just want to sit there and do it forever, and not do anything else. I’ve had a love affair with screenwriting since I was eleven, I loved scrapbooking for about a minute, but I loved it hard. I fell in love with journaling, with decorating, with poetry, for another minute.

The undeniable fever makes me feel alive…I like being obssessed. It feels like a rush of the life force coming in, penetrating all my cells, it feels like I have purpose, value, worth in the moment of the doing, of the creating. Without my obsessions I feel bored, restless, in a state of chronic fuzziness.

So perhaps I hate that I leave obsessions for so long before I allow another to come in, as we often do with lovers. To be so intimate with something, someone, is scary and exhilirating and when we totally surrender to it and the plug is pulled, it came be extremely painful, even if we were the ones who pulled the plug.

I am inconsistent with my joy, with allowing the life force in, with my embrace of all that is me.

I don’t really know if I hate it as much as I am saddened by it. And yet, I am acutely aware that phases are okay, that loving something for months and then moving on from it because it does not serve, because it is done, is a part of life.

Affirmation: delight in the phases, enjoy them, fall in love with them, always keep them coming, grow with them and out of them.

What is something you hate about yourself?

Lovingly,

Stephanie