In Spirit = Inspiration

“What is necessary to change one’s self is to change the awareness of one’s self” – A. Maslow

The world, the universe, the divine, always has a way of sneeking up on me and giving me exactly what I need at the very moment I need it. It’s so comforting to me to know that I’m okay, that this will always happen, always has. I’m fully taken care of. The lessons find me.

I woke up this morning feeling task oriented. A bit anxious. A mental “to do” list and a carload of self doubt was swallowing my heart. I forced myself to go for a walk, have hot tea with Roxanna and Becky at my favorite tea cafe and tried very hard to relax. But I just couldn’t shake that annoying, hard to explain, feeling of not quite being settled. Here I am, with 7 days off from work, and why can’t I relax? My brain seems miswired sometimes.

During tea with the girls, it occurred to me that we all seem to have a similar theme going on in our lives. We’re all at a crossroads and trying to figure out what our real, true direction right now should be. Should I pursue art? How about writing? Is nursing/socialwork/etc what I should be doing? And so on.

For awhile now, I’ve been in the process of unlearning many things, mainly beliefs that I’ve bought into throughout my life that gave me limitations. We’ve all got them. Anyways, I’ve been on my little quest to unlearn them and find my way back to myself, the divine self from that which I was created. Not that I wasn’t myself before, but this feels like an enhanced version. A more inspired and passionate version. Inspired and passionate about creating. About learning to create. About daydreaming about creating. About running that half marathon when I never believed I was a “runner.” About finding my own way through the muck, but beautifully. I now understand what it means to be truly inspired, caught by something that has a hold on you and it’s taking you where you were intended to go. But the questions and doubts still find me in the middle of the nite. In my dreams. When I wake up. Questions like “what if nobody likes what I create?” “what if I’m not good enough?” “I don’t have the background.” “I don’t have the talent or the luck.”

Then later today, I uncharacteristically turned on the TV for a Sunday afternoon, and there on PBS was Dr. Wayne Dyer talking about Inspiration. At first I listened with hesitation, but before I knew it, I was getting out my journal and writing down some food for thought. Basically the message was what I already knew but needed to be reminded of. That you are what your thoughts consist of. And that you must shift your perspective and change your awareness of yourself if you’re ever going to get where you’d like to go. That you find your calling in life by listening to the whispers. That when you find your inspiration, you must surrender yourself to it, that it becomes bigger than you, and in it lies your divine purpose. Afterall, he says, we are just spiritual beings living the human experience, and to be inspired takes you on your journey back to your divine self. In order to get there, you have to think of yourself as limitless, without boundaries and bonds. That you must take off the layers of learned beliefs and expose your essence, your raw and sweetly divine self. Your thoughts are your reality. They attract to your life exactly what they represent. So keep em’ positive.

It’s a familiar message, a basic one, but aren’t they all, and isn’t that interesting? But it was what I needed. Why do I shy away from my inspiration? Why does it cause me some internal turmoil?That’s a big question for me, but each day, I’m learning to go with it, feel my way around it, invite it into my reality, because it feels good. And pretty soon I’ll be showing the self doubt to the door.

None of this is to say that I’m not living the life I’ve always imagined, because I am and I’m quite happy and still consider myself one of the luckiest girls on the planet. But there’s always something nudging me towards personal growth. I suppose it will always be. Life lessons are constant and everywhere.