Upon Waking Up Today

To Love Or Not To Love
That is the question we face every moment of our lives. Too often we forget that our soul is immortal and the consequence of this forgetting is that we adapt strategies based upon the idea of survival such as dog-eat-dog and only the strong survive .
For me, this morning as I awoke, I came face to face with a demon who told me to give up and that I have no hope. For a long moment, I felt the dullness of depression falling on me. Just sleep, a voice said, give up - don’t try, don’t do anything. I wrestled with this notion. What if I just stopped - what if I just gave up and let myself fall into an abyss of depression and fear.
At this point, another idea came to my mind - what if I just radiate love from my heart. I have to say that I have never had that thought before while wrestling with depression and fear. It was such a different thought that I decided I had to try it. Love and joy, I thought. Immediately I felt a warmth around my heart, a warmth that radiated forth and filled my whole being. This warmth made me feel lighter, brighter, and more loving. And better.
I took my new warmth, my new radiant loving feeling and I once again faced my fear and my depression. They faded away almost instantaneously. When they were gone, I realized that I am immortal (at least my soul part is). I do have a body and this body will age and die but this body is only my vehicle for living on earth. My soul (or me) does not have the concerns that my body does. If I allow concerns of my body to dominate my thoughts and emotions, I develop bad habits for my eternal soul. One such bad habit is chronic worry.
Chronic worry is any worry that lasts longer than an instant. Chronic worry is a slow acting acid that eats away at your concepts of yourself. Say you are driving to the store. A worry comes to you that you have not turned the coffee maker off. You worry that the coffee will cook away until none is left and then the coffee pot might break. At this point, you must choose to do something about this worry. Since you are pulling into the store’s parking lot, you choose to quickly get what you came for and then go home. But once you get into the store, you realize that you will not be able to get in and get out all that quickly. Again you worry what will happen to the coffee pot and again you must make another decision. You decide to keep shopping and hope everything works out. But you worry that things won’t. And do to the law of attraction, everything and everyone seems to be moving in slow motion, everything seems to be taking forever. (Yes, you have attracted this because you have put both thought and emotion into an idea - that of you not getting back home in time). Finally an hour later, you still are not done and you are still worrying and exerting even more emotional energy towards these frustrating people who are making you wait. Why don’t they get more check-out people, you say out loud, what the hell is the matter, and oh that stupid old woman didn’t she realize she didn’t have her credit card with her ?
You get done and you bark bitter tones at everyone in sight. You get to your car and say what else could go wrong and sure enough something else does - something that slows you down even more and all the while you are picturing that very thing that you do not want to happen - the coffee pot breaking. This is chronic worrying. Chronic worrying exists because we think that it does us some good but it does nothing good for us. It only helps create the very thing we do not want to happen.
The end result of our coffee pot worrying can go on for days and even longer if we let it. Yes, the pot did break and then there was a fight between husband and wife because there was no coffee for breakfast and then there was the minor accident in the store’s parking lot and on and on. Worry is a demon beast that once fed always demands more.
Love is the way to tame this beast. Remember that you are an immortal being. You are not here on this earth to get everything right. That is impossible. Acceptance is the miracle of you admitting that you do not always know what is the best way to proceed. Acceptance is admitting that learning comes when we are open to finding answers as opposed to ‘being right from the get-go’.
Yes, I woke this morning worried that I am not doing the right thing. I have had this thought way too many times in my life. But today, I tried something different. Today I tried to be the loving person I know that I truly am and the results astonished me. I felt loving and light and hopeful. I felt full of love for myself and everyone and I felt like I can do what I want to be the right thing - my path.
I was able to put this experience down in words and share it with the world of the internet. And today, when I leave home - I know I will turn the coffee pot off.