love

What you think you want, is not what you actually want

/ amytelsey / Leave a comment

Why can’t life just work out the way it’s “supposed to”? Why no matter how hard I try, why can’t I make __(fill in the blank) work? It is so easy for other people, why does it have to be so hard for me? It is not supposed to be this difficult.

Life is not bending to your will because what you think you want, is not what you actually want. Life has all the time in the world to let you bang your head against a wall until you start to question, “Is this going to lead to happiness, because it certainly feels unbearable right now.”

What we want deep down more than having control over our environment, other people, or our bodies, is having mastery over ourselves. The mastery we crave is how we FEEL about our lives. Everything we do is driven by a desire to experience certain feelings. 

We get hung up on needing our lives to be a certain way in order to experience the feelings we want. For instance, getting someone we love to love us back.  Most of us at times get caught up in thinking we need our life to be a particular way in order to experience happiness. This can be a very confusing pursuit because we live in a culture that constantly bombards us with ideas that we can only feel good about ourselves if our life looks a certain way, or if we achieve what we want we can finally be happy. This is a lie. 

Life is actually working with you when you are not able to force it to your will, because there is a deeper, richer, and more infinitly satisfying way to be. Let your circumstances change you into the person you truly desire to become.Not someone who is trying to get the approval of another, in order to feel ok.  You may think you need to be thin or get that unrequited love returned to you.  Instead of using up your energy trying to get life to look the way you want it, quiet yourself down and ask yourself, “who is life asking me to be?” Is there some kind of plan at work that is leading me toward growth and change I could not have imagined was possible for myself? Could l actually dare to accept myself just the way l am? What a fierce act of rebellion that is! That makes you a true bad ass! That is the ultimate triumph because no one can ever give that to you or take it from you. You no longer need to be at the mercy of another person, they cannot give you what you have already taken for yourself, self acceptance and peace with yourself.

No matter how excellent the parenting was you received, we all have a certain amount of arrested development. These places of arrest show up where we feel most stuck in our lives. This is the signal, so listen closely. It’s not life that needs to change, the change needs to happen inside of you.  Most pointedly, the change needs to be in your perspective. You will never achieve happiness by forcing life into what you want because what you actually want most is a reconciliation with yourself. Hate your body? Question why, go really broad,  question if this culture’s messages about how you should look can be trusted or if they are bullshit and arbitrary.  Choose to stop turning against yourself, question everything you have learned if it is leading to unhappiness. A big clue on areas most in need of questioning are any areas of obsession. That is a big signpost that your wheel spinning is in need of a paradigm shift. Move the frame you are looking through and you will see a different picture.  There is something inside of ourselves that is driven to reconcile with ourselves. Don’t worry you can’t miss it, because life will make sure you become increasingly uncomfortable until you pay attention.

Thankfully when life is not “working out” it is because you are putting your energy in the wrong direction and investing against yourself.  Our unconscious desire for self reconciliation will not accept any substitute.  Even when you “get what you want” it will gnaw at you until you listen to it. It wants self-acceptance above all else. It wants a feeling of integrity (or “inner gritty” as my spell check just said). It wants you to own your life, not live someone else’s or the culture’s “ideal” version of it. It wants you to be your own hero and to rescue yourself from your old outdated, fucked up ideas. Live your life as a person you can admire, someone who allows life to change them into who they didn’t realize they actually wanted to be and self acceptance is the key.

Love is a bait and switch

/ amytelsey / Leave a comment

A wonderful NYT article titled “Why you will marry the wrong person” beautifully articulated a topic l have given considerable thought to.  The title of this article seems to be inescapablely true. In all relationships there is always a moment when you will have a thought about your partner that is a version of this title. Even when you make the very best choice and thoughtfully choose your partner, it’s still true!  Don’t despair this is not a flawed design. It was pointed out in the article that this fate is cannot be dodged because how we experience love is imprinted on us from our earliest relationships. We all have a flavor of love and our palate developed with the first person we loved and they had their own baggage. Okay, that’s the not so great news. The great news is the purpose of our most attached relationships is to finish our growing up. We are all experiencing arrested development on a certain level and this is impossible to change in a vacuum. We need a special someone to make us feel insane to finish the business of growing up (this doesn’t end, but you a knock some BIG chunks out.) Feeling driven to losing our minds is the beautifully crafted work of our unconscious. Just like you cannot control a dream, yet your mind is creating it, we are still in a type of dream in our waking life. “Oh, shit!” you say, don’t worry, it gets better. You need to be driven nuts to realize you are in a dream and unbenost to you these moments of insanity are your alerts that you need to WAKE UP.  Right here, right now you are no longer in the present as an adult, you have been transported back in time. You are now in a relationship with one of the first people you loved and you feel as helpless now as you did then. This is your opportunity to become the hero of your own life and finish some unfinished business. You will be furious and scared. Be kind, but strong with your partner they are in a dream too. This is a ripe moment for change.  During these moments of peak intensity you are both playing roles in each other’s scripts and don’t know it.  In your mind you will be reliving your past and you now have a chance to change and grow yourself up.  Take this great moment to become someone you would admire. How does this moment call on you to be brave and authentic? If you were to summon the most respect for yourself possible, what would that look like? Sometimes being vulnerable and tender is what is called for, sometimes it is to stand our ground. These two positions are often not mutually exclusive. It takes two to tango and when you change the steps you and your partner know so well, they will likely stumble. Allow them to find their footing and grow themselves up too.

Why not getting what you want is just what you need

/ amytelsey / 2 Comments

We all make wishes on fallen eyelashes or wishbones. We always wish for what we want, the ideal lover or a windfall of money. We have these images in our mind of how life “should” be to make us happy.  No one wishes to NOT get what they want, but what if not getting what you want in the way you want it, leads to exactly what you need. The end goal of all wishes….to be free.

We all have goals and desires based on our values and our perceptions of the “right” way to do things that maintain our identity. When something happens in our lives that is a major deviation from what we saw for ourselves, our identity can be shaken to it’s core. Who am l now that this did not work out as l had planned it? What do l make of my life and sense of myself now that l have not achieved this cherished goal?

Count yourself lucky if after a terrible disappointment you have begun to ask yourself these questions because you are on the road to getting what may be greater than your deeply longed for wish. Freedom.

What kind of freedom am l talking about and how could that possibly make up for a broken heart? Well, maybe “make up for”is not exactly how it is experienced. When the door closes in a shockingly gut wrenching way to what you wanted, you will probably find yourself staring at that door for a long time in disbelief.  You will go over in your mind the events that lead to this disappointment and desperately try to scramble to make sense of what happened, who is to blame or how to do it better next time to make sure that NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN! Your identity is pretty much bargaining on how to escape changing and what can feel a bit like dying.

As strange as it may sound thinking you NEEDED that wish to come through was the trap. That wish trapped you in conditional happiness along with a huge heaping of self judgement and judgement of others too. After mustering all the compassion you have access to, allow yourself to grieve your loss.  You can then begin to embrace the transformation of who you are now becoming. You have lightened your load of perfectionism and maybe the wall between us and them has come down. You feel a greater sense of your own humanity and are more connected to all those other humans who don’t get what they want either. Which is all of them.