Time To Smile

It's been a long year. It's been one of those years. Remembering back to New Year's Eve, remembering how positive I felt, how good I felt, about the upcoming year. And four days later I thought I was dying when I had that Kundalini awakening thing, and I remember thinking 'well I got that one wrong' about my positive feelings for the year ahead.

And in all honesty it's been what feels like one life shake-up after another. Which I now understand is what happens with an awakening like I experienced. Change, not matter how beneficial in the long run, can be so very uncomfortable at the time. Big changes that can be so unsettling, can shake the core of who you think you are and what you believe about yourself. Small changes that seem so minor at the time, yet the reverberations can be the most profound.

A big part of my lesson this year has been finding peace within myself, when all around me seemed so uncertain, so scary, so unknown and so very much not what I wanted to be dealing with. Finding the place within, where the breath is easy, where I am centred and grounded, where in this moment I am ok, even if nothing around me feels ok. And I know those lessons were needed. Still, I was very keen to release that phase and move on.

And true colours were shown so clearly, both my own and those closest to me. And I didn't very much like what I saw. An awakening to my own nature, and to the reasons behind that, again offering me a chance to acknowledge things as they were, and make changes. Deep, painful, fundamental changes. And man it hurts at the time, it all bloody hurts. Knowing there are parts of you that are not what you thought, and wanting to change but not quite knowing how. Those are murky waters to wade through. But still, to get to the clear waters, is there any other way?

My reiki teacher used this wonderful analogy about healing. He said think of yourself as being like a jar of water, with mud settled at the bottom. When you start to shake things up, when you start to clear the mud, remove it from the jar, what happens? Is it plain sailing, you just pull it out? Or does the mud move, swirl, merge with the water, make the jar cloudy. Make it feel like you're not getting anywhere, when actually you're on the way to clearer places. When you're wading through that mud, it's not a very comfy place to be. And then you reach a place where you have cleared some mud, but perhaps not all the mud, and it settles to the bottom once again. Less, but still there. And then the next thing comes along to shake it up, swirl it all around, and you can remove some more mud from the jar. And it is uncomfortable again, for a while. And it settles again, for a while. And throughout it all, you find a place of peace within, or try your hardest to.

I wonder just how many shake-ups it takes to clear all the mud from the jar.

And meanwhile, it's nearly summer; the longest winter is over. The past is what it is, nothing will change it. The future is not yet written, and my thoughts now will change it. So I'm making my thoughts what I want them to be, where I want them to be, and trusting in the flow of positive change. It's time to smile.