Your Whole Blooming Self

Be Yourself

“The flower doesn't dream of the bee.

It blossoms and the bee comes.”

Mark Nepo (The Book of Awakening)

Have you ever wanted love so badly that you would do anything to have it in your life? I have. I changed everything about myself to please 'the other'; I gave up my own interests because he considered them a waste of time. I read the books he told me I should read, I learned to speak the language that pleased him. I ignored the intuitive messages that told me, 'this is not right'. After two years, he left anyway. There was no love involved. I was simply a convenient stop-over on the way to someone else.

I'm not the only one who has stepped to a drum beat not their own. In all intimate relationships we learn to abdicate parts of ourselves in order to live compatibly with another. If the one we love truly dislikes something about us, it is prudent to consider other means of expression. I, however, know far too many people who are in relationships that are at best, constricting, and at worst, abusive; people who have given up the ultimate expressions of themselves, the traits they value most highly, in order to conform to the expectations of a mate. What they end up with, after years of trying to please, is a sense of self so devoid of true identity that even they don't recognize it.

We carry within our own hearts the capacity for love and joy; no one else carries that for us. We are best when we are one-hundred percent ourselves, stepping into the broadest possible expression of our true identity. Our job is to discover all the petals of our being, good and bad, strong and weak, and expose them to the light of consciousness. When we become the truest embodiment of ourselves, love will find us alive and blooming right where we are.

In the spirit,

Jane