I'm Still Alive

Boy! It's been two months almost since I last posted. I want to let everyone know that I'm still following an Ayurvedic lifestyle and diet, and things are still going well.

My personal life has been such a challenge of late, it's been distracting me from most of the fun and good in my life. But recently I had to remember to bring it back around to the positive, and enjoy (gasp!) living in the unknown and with uncertainty.

There is true beauty in not knowing what lies ahead of you from one day to the next. We are so conditioned to plan out each day, month, year of our life, always planning for that day in the future. Plan for college, plan for a house, plan for retirement, plan for illness and your funeral!

What happened to planning a family dinner--tonight! Or planning a vacation this weekend, or a surprise birthday party for a friend? We do those things, but if we did those things with HALF the intensity we do when planning to buy a house, how much richer each experience would be? It's counter intuitive to consider a birthday party for a friend as important an event as the purchase of a home, but consider the value in sitting down and giving yourself a full afternoon or weekend to decide how best to honor someone you love. You don't have to spend the same amount of money--I'm just talking about giving it the same level of THOUGHT.

So after going through the upheaval of not being able to plan my life, and watching my financial status crumble around me, I had to throw up my hands--not in defeat, but in SURRENDER! Surrender to the fact that you do not know where your next blessing is going to come from. Lifting your arms up ready to receive whatever the universe is going to put in your path is so much better than walking around with your arms locked in worry about what you will do next.

But you all know me--I needed to maintain even the smallest level of control. So I did what I could to change my situation, but prayer, meditation, and sharing my story with others and ASKING FOR HELP WHEN I TRULY NEEDED IT, were what got me through the situation more than anything else I could have done. I will never be afraid to ask for help again. It makes life so much easier when you let others in.

Then one day last week for a completely inexplicable reason, I woke up from a nap, ready to go to work for the night, but feeling like it was the last day of school! For a day and a half I walked around, as if on a cloud, feeling as though I had nothing but the rest of my life in front of me with endless possibilities! (And that is the true reality for us all if we'd open our eyes to it!) It reminded me of the last day of school. You know, not the day after or the morning before you go into school for the last time, but the moment the last bell has rang, you are leaving this building and know that you need not be accountable to anyone or anything academic for the next three months. When you're young, that's an eternity.

Every decision you make that summer is based on how you feel at the moment. Stay up late for that old movie? Why not? You don't have to be anywhere. Stay on the phone with a friend for another hour. Go have that late dinner, sleep the day away with no regret--we should live every day with this fluidity! I'm not advocating throwing away responsibility and control of your life, I'm just suggesting opening yourself up to getting rid of so many deadlines and responsibility, and allowing more FLOW. Find the beauty in the unexpected.

In a moment of panic, I woke up in the middle of the night trying to "control" my environment. There was nothing I could do to fix a particular problem at 5am, but I couldn't let go of it enough to fall back to sleep. So I got up, paced the floor, talked out loud, prayed, called my mother, listened to gospel music, yoga and meditation mantras and nothing. Finally I sat down at my computer, turned the music down a little, and started writing my thoughts. Those thoughts turned into an exciting project that I'll share in the coming months. But that project was born out of NOTHING short of the panic and dread that came from the experiences I had over the past seven years, but especially over the past seven months.

Beautiful, inexplicable results, out of a place where nothing good should grow. Surrender to the struggle and the rat race, open yourself up to the possibility that you may not be bound to the path of others around you and before you. The freedom in that, my friends, is so so WORTH it!