Accepting Real Life - February

Quotes from Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life by Sarah Ban Breathnach

Day 29:  Accepting Real Life

"Accepting and blessing our circumstances is a powerful tool for transformation....Before we can change anything in our life, we have to recognize that this is the way it is meant to be right now....Over the years I have discovered that much of my struggle to be content has arisen when I stubbornly resisted what was happening in my life now.  But I also learned that when I surrender to the reality of a situation...a softening in my soul occurs.  Suddenly I can open to receive all the goodness and abundance available to me because acceptance brings with it so much relief and release....We relax..we change our vibration, our energy pattern, and the rate of our heartbeat....Acceptance also illuminates reality so that we're better able to see the next step....Today, let go of the struggle.  Allow the healing process of change to begin.  You're ready to move on.  To begin again."

Sarah's meditation today was a harbinger of what was to come for me this past week with my new puppy who has been more than I bargained for.  The phrases that stood out to me and helped me a great deal were "acceptance brings with it so much relief and release" and "Acceptance also illuminates reality so that we're better able to see the next step" and "To begin again".  The latter was emphasized when the old computer I use to watch dog training videos on YouTube while exercising started up one morning with a warning message to use Time Machine to restore the operating system.  I kept my cool, ignored the message, and instead, using the drop-down menu clicked on "Restart."  The computer shut down, restarted, and everything came back on as it should be!  I took this as a message to "restart" and not give up--every time there is a failure in training my puppy, begin again.  And wouldn't you know it, things have dramatically improved with my puppy's behavior!

Day 30:  Blessing Our Circumstances

                       

"Bless a thing and it will bless you.  Curse it and it will curse you....If you bless a situation, it has no power to hurt you, and even if it is troublesome for a time, it will gradually fade out, if you sincerely bless it."  -Emmet Fox (1886-1950), New Thought Spiritual Leader

"Since ancient times, a blessing has been considered an invisible cloak of Divine protection, good fortune, health and wealth.  'Traditionally in Ireland, the act of blessing was not separate from daily life,' the Celtic poet and mystic John O'Donohue tells us in To Bless the Space Between Us...What is a blessing?  A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen...We could say that a blessing 'fore-brightens' the way.  When a blessing is invoked, a window opens in eternal time'....The first step in any blessing is always first accepting my circumstances, no matter how difficult or unfair the situation seems.  Then I must bless the misery facing me....Blessing the circumstances in our lives also teaches us to trust....If you're sick and tired of learning life's lessons through pain and struggle, blessing your difficulties will show you there's a better way....Start to count your blessings....Writing [our blessing] down focuses our attention on the abundance already within our grasp and makes it real."

It is hard to accept let alone bless difficult circumstances.  I've had plenty in my long life.  I've learned to accept them at the time, and later see them as a gift, once I've gotten enough distance from them and can see how in the long run there was something good gained.  But to bless them in the midst is a new thought for me.  I can see how it would take away much of the struggle.  I hope I can remember to do this the next time.

Day 31:  Working With What You've Got

                       

"If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place."  -Rainer Maria Rilke (1873-1926) German Poet

"Up until now many of us have secretly believed that we had to wait until things calmed down a bit before we started to get our acts together.  Tomorrow we'll begin discovering authentic pleasures.  Tomorrow we'll treat ourselves better.  Tomorrow we'll take the time to enjoy ourselves.  Tomorrow, when everything calms down.  Well, this I can report from the trenches of the front lines:  Life never calms down long enough for us to wait until tomorrow to start living the lives we deserve."

"So what are we going to do about it?....We can accept, bless, give thanks, and get going....Today, we can begin to call forth the riches from our everyday life....Think of one thing that would give you a genuine moment of pleasure today and do it....'

"Life begets life.  Energy creates energy.  It is by spending oneself that we become rich."  -Sarah Bernhardt, Victorian French actress

Has Sarah Ban Breathnach been reading my journal?!  Since childhood I've been one to live in Tomorrow Land.  You may have visited there and maybe even reside there.  I'm surprised I haven't run into you.  I think it's because we are so busy looking ahead we don't notice what or who is right there.  In my defense, though, it's because it's a way to cope with things you can't seem to fix--and there's so much of that, especially right now in the world.  It's part of having access to too much information that we never before had to deal with on a day-to-day basis.  If you care, it can be overwhelming!  As I type this I find myself taking a deep breath.  As soon as I did my smart phone buzzed--it's 3:00 one of several reminders throughout the day to breathe.  It seems my body is one step ahead--that's good.  I need to remember, though, all the time--deep, cleansing breaths that will restore my equilibrium and bring me back into the moment, meeting whatever challenges lay at my feet in a way that utilizes all the resources available to me--including those within me.

Sarah encourages us to call forth the riches from our everyday life.  She asks us to think of one thing that would give us a genuine moment of pleasure today and do it.  This meditation fell on the same day as Judith Orloff's Thriving as an Empath meditation that I am sharing on my Another Perfect Day 365 blog.  She suggests we look at the different areas of our life to assess if we are making choices that align with our soul.  You can read that HERE.

Day 32:  The Authentic Self is the Soul Made Visible

"I remember the day that this ⤴ spiritual truth pushed through my creative resistance.  Up until then I was under the impression that Simple Abundance was a book about eliminating clutter from our lives.  I'd casually glanced at the page currently coming from the printer and was jolted by a sentence I hadn't remembered writing.  I felt a shock, like static electricity, which I now call creative energy.  To put it simply, the Great Creator and the work in progress, which became Simple Abundance, were having an editorial meeting without me.

The Authentic Self is the Soul Made Visible

As I began to ponder this unexpected detour, I realized that the clutter isn't only the objects that no longer serve us, but the clutter of people's opinions:  about our lives, our jobs, our partners, our wardrobes, our weight, our children, our decorating style.  All the usual riff-raff we wade through every day just to get to a level playing field to find space for our own thoughts.  And you wonder why you're tired?  Don't try to remake yourself into something you are not.  Just try making the best of what the Great Creator made in you.  The sacred art of nurturing our soul is the artisanal craft of Simple Abundance.  Begin today by flipping the switch to turn on the light."

I had an occasion this week to tell my five-year-old granddaughter that she doesn't have to try to be better than anyone else--just to be a better person than she was yesterday--to be her best self.  I'm sure those words came to me because Sarah's meditation was fresh in my mind.  The statement that stands out to me is Don't try to remake yourself into something you are not.  For far too long I tried to emulate people I admired.  No wonder I've struggled with feeling inauthentic!  I still feel I haven't discovered who I really am yet.  But I have begun by flipping on the light switch.

Day 33:  Beginning to See the Light

                       

"Since the Middle Ages, February 2 has been known as Candlemas Day, an ancient European feast day when candles were blessed and sent home with parishioners so that Divine Light could guide their earthly steps.  Prudent country women would also do a mid-winter inventory of their caution closets, which included the pantry and larder where the preserved [food and remedies] were stored [as well as] the beeswax candles because it was still dark...and everyone dressed by candlelight....'The great crises of life are not, I think, necessarily those which are in themselves the hardest to bear, but those for which we are least prepared,' Mary Adams wrote in her 1902 self-help manual Confessions of a Wife....Yes, the world is frightening and seems to become so each day.  Our emotional equilibrium is continually in free fall.  But could our lack of emergency preparedness skills also explain why we awaken exhausted, remaining on edge and are more prone to imagine difficulties than before?  I think so.  And it's because we know we are not prepared....That's why this year, we're going to create a 'Caution Closet,' calmly and methodically, with everything we might need 'just in case.'"

My "alert" system went off when I read this.  I'm ALWAYS preparing for "just in case" to a fault, and I can tell you it keeps your cortisol level too high.  So I'm reserving judgment until I find out just what Sarah wants me to do in creating a Caution Closet.  However, there are some things I do that I think are helpful and do alleviate finding myself in a pinch.....things like making sure my pantry is well-stocked with staples so that I don't have to run out to the store at the last minute for a common ingredient.  It also keeps me from getting in a dither if one of my kids calls to say they're coming home after I've already done my shopping for the week.

Day 34:  The World is Too Much With Us

                       

"....despite all the doom and gloom that constantly assaults our senses there is a way for us to ransom our lives and claim our futures.  It consists in turning away from the world in order to recognize what in life makes us truly happy.  'You can live a lifetime and at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself,' the pioneering aviatrix, race-horse trainer, adventuress, and author Beryl Markam (1902-1986) confessed in her stunning memoir, West with the Night.  Even though she was the first person to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west in 1936, Markham didn't give herself much credit for her astonishing achievement. 

"What about you?  Do you rack up savvy accomplishments without acknowledging your wins as you pursue your next triumph?  I know a woman like that...she gives her personal best to everything and everyone....but her self-confidence never registers any of her remarkable feats, and then she continually wonders why she feels so unfulfilled.  I don't suppose any one has called you self-centered recently.  Why would they?  Most women like ourselves, recoil from the thought of personal descriptions that even include the word self, which is too bad because this self-effacing and self-defeating modesty eliminates a lot of flattering adjectives:  self-poised, self-assured, self-accomplished.  All the traits that we marvel at in other women.  So why do we self-consciously shrink from self-admiration?

"Today, I am going to ask you to deliberately turn away from the world....but only for a week.  Shun the glossy magazines, websites, and media outlets.  Wean yourself from the opinions of others--however, talented, creative, and celebrated they may be--including your favorite blogs [me: except this one, of course 😉] or Instagram influencers.  There's a fine line between those becoming corrosive intravenous drips and their being sources of renewal and inspiration.....be willing to absorb the shock that comes after you realize that many of your preferences and opinions aren't really your own."

"Begin to listen for the whispers of your Authentic Self.  What do you really want to be doing?.....For only when the clamor of the outside world is silenced will you be able to hear the Deeper Vibration.  Listen carefully.  Spirit's playing your song."

This is all well and good to do what you really want to be doing, but if you have responsibilities that come first, this is next to impossible to achieve.  BUT, there is no reason on earth why you can't start acknowledging your accomplishments to yourself and feel better about who you are behind all what you do.  You may be surprised by how fulfilled you may start feelings.  You may even be able to let go of things that aren't really your responsibility--things that aren't really YOU.  In the process you may just find some extra time for yourself to do what your soul is crying out to do.

Day 35:  Becoming Mrs. Miniver

                       

"Have you ever lost yourself so completely in a book or movie that you become part of it?....The 1942 Oscar-winning English wartime saga Mrs. Miniver starring Greer Garson is such a Divine inspiration for me.  It depicts an English middle-class family's heroic efforts to preserve what was precious in their daily life as they learn to cope during wartime."

Sarah writes that she found Mrs. Miniver after 9/11.  She was living in New York City at the time and needed help to remember what mattered most:

"...making a safe haven in a scary and tumultuous world for my daughter and myself.  Mrs. Miniver....has inspired me to create a Caution Closet for emergency preparedness....At the end of every month you'll find a meditation called 'Do Try This at Home' which will focus on one aspect of our Caution Closets' preparation.....Start by watching the movie....However, before Greer Garson so beautifully embodied Mrs. Miniver on the screen, she was the figment of English journalist Jan Struther's domestic reveries, written anonymously and featured in the London Times between 1937 and 1939....Jan had been asked by her editor to write about an ordinary sort of woman who leads an ordinary sort of life--rather like yourself.'....during this time, threats of war were daily headlines in Britain....As one reader said, Mrs. Miniver was the only cheerful and right bit in the papers.  Nothing in Mrs. Miniver's life was too insignificant that it couldn't  become an uplifting source of reflection revelation, or renewal, and she reminded readers how much they had to be grateful for in the small particulars of their (and our) everyday epiphanies....[in the movie]  Mrs. Miniver is preparing to evacuate what's left of her beautiful home so that her children would be out of danger.  As Mrs. Miniver thought to herself: "Another thing they had gained was an appreciation of the value of dullness.  As a rule, one tended to long for more drama, to feel that the level stretches of life between it, a waste of time.  Well, there had been enough drama lately.  They had lived through seven years in as many days; and Mrs. Miniver, at any rate, felt as though she had been wrung out....and nothing in the world seemed more desirable than a long, wet afternoon at a country vicarage with a rather boring aunt."

Oh how I can identify with this last statement.  There have been too many times when I've complained of being bored with my life or with my home and then have a whirlwind of activity, lots of guests, lots of changes that has left me wanting to go back to the quieter times.  Believe me, I no longer complain that not enough is going on in my life!  If I want drama now, I rent a movie or read a book.

I hope you are finding something useful in my musings on Sarah's book.  Please drop me a line in the comments to let me know.