“The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe’, I’d have been lying!” — René Magritte
It has been a while since I worked on my blog, yet I missed this white box immensely. It feels good to write again for pleasure after several weeks of intense work for school. The last weeks have been pretty challenging and turned out to be a somewhat challenging time to endure.
Since my last post, I have taken two more classes toward my holistic nutritionist degree, studied like crazy, passed all my exams and dealt with rather heavy personal issues as well. How have I been surviving? In a nutshell: incredible support from friends and family and giving myself the time to rest, to cry, to be happy and endless talks with my friend, which all included taking a blogging break.
Slowly crawling out of this insanity I have learned that although my own little universe seemed to stop for some time, the world kept and keeps on spinning. Every single day brings its own beauty and more challenges that I and everybody else has to face. One door closes and another unexpected one opens. What helped me moving forward was spending time with people who remind me of who I am. There are many who actually care about me and want to see me succeed. It is amazing how the environment and the people in it can have such a big influence on how we perceive and feel ourselves. Whenever I spend time with certain people who know the real me, it reminds me of who I am, why I am here and why I should keep going.
Cooking, helping others, creating things and writing are things that make me happy. It takes my mind off my stress and allows me to put my energy into something beautiful. Being able to tap into my inner creator and follow what I am passionate about is great and makes me happy on a daily basis. At the same time, it is important for me to be able to surrender to pain since it has taught me a lot about healing and how it all takes place.
As mentioned, the last two weeks were very stressful so in order for me to move on from a space of exhaustion and emotional stress I had to surrender to the pain. I had to stop trying to control everything and simply to allow it all to pass. Throughout all this, I recognized my potential and capacity to heal. Additionally, I had to respect that potential by allowing myself to feel it all which was okay.
It helps me immensely to think about how far I have already come despite hitting all the low points and to realize my inner strength and find even more strength to carry on. People tell me how I have changed which pushes me again in the right direction since I am prone to forget who I am while still lingering around in the past imagining what could have been and daydreaming; what a ridiculous illusion.
Things did not change overnight but I realized that self-discipline and persistence, as well as daily actions, are most important for me to move on, to make my own decisions and not be influenced anymore via dumb ‘having-power-over-you” games. I had a great conversation with my friend at school today and she told me not say, “I want”, but rather to use “I have” and to be the things that I want to be. It felt silly at first but it does work. She mentioned that if I really really want something deep inside, the universe will make it happen. It sort of works in a visualization but also gratitude kind of way. It makes me visualize where I really want to be but also makes me grateful for where I am already in my life. A good example would be, instead of focusing too much on how sad I am sometimes that my parents live so far away, I rather focus on how grateful I am to have them in my life and how lucky I am to have someone who makes it so hard to be apart.
I focus on those I love and those that love me and kind of disregard the rest. Having people to love is a gift and I don’t take them for granted. I learned that some people are toxic in my life and I am better off without them. I have to put myself and my son first which is not selfish. One day at a time.
