Empathy and Affirmations

I'm not really sure what today is about.  I came across this image, and I needed it.  Truthfully, there is no other word to describe it.  I completely, and wholly needed it. I need to remind myself so that I don't attempt to minister with an empty cup.  My child needs me.  This is no time to fall apart.  I need to gather everything that I know and believe in.  Everything that I hold dear to me.  The writings, the teachings, the poetry... the lessons...

I am strong.  I have to be.  I have a child who is currently facing the hardest trial of his life. There is no choice in the matter. You never know how strong you are until strong is the only choice you have.

I am resilient. I have recovered from every situation I have faced in my life, so I am certain that life will eventually right itself again. (fingers crossed!)  "If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." -Dr. Wayne Dyer

I try my best.  I try to be my best self with every breath.  Especially with my children.  My son needs me, and I will strive to be all I can be for him right now. After all, I'm not the best, but I'm trying my best.  And that, right now, means everything.  "Bread and water can so easily be toast and tea."

I know the value of life.  With every breath, I am aware of the fragility of life.  I am aware that people are taken without warning, and choose to leave without warning.  You really never know when you're going to have to give them back.
     
I am not perfect, but I am the perfect me.  I strive to be true to myself.  This is more and more evident with every passing day.  We need trials in our lives to strengthen us.  To prove to us that we are strong and capable.  The Bhagavad Gita states, "It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection."

I never give up.  How can I, when my child needs me?  I cannot fall apart.  I cannot afford to fall short on this one.  I need to be his strength when he is weak.

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."
                        -Robert Frost
                        from Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening


I am empathetic.  I am very empathetic.  I'm an empath... kind of hard not to be empathetic.  It is truly traumatizing to feel a child's pain as they feel it.  Most parents want to take their child's pain from them...if only they knew...if they had the opportunity to climb into their hearts and heads...as the poem by ee cummings says, "i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)"

I am a warrior, ready to conquer.  If I can do anything to fight this good fight, I will.  I am not afraid.  I am sympathetic and understanding to everyone's plight, but I will defend you to the death if I believe you are being treated unjustly.  Don't piss off the faeries!!!


I'm not broken.  I sometimes feel shattered.  Battered.  Busted.  Bruised and bleeding.  I need to feel those things to prove to myself that I am not broken, but, in fact, the very opposite.  It is when I'm bloody and battered that I am the most strong.  “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” ― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

I am loving.  I derive my strength and fortitude from my love.  The love I receive, as well as the love I share.  For what we do "for good or for ill, shall be returned to us threefold."  Therefore, I make an attempt to fully love each and every person I come into contact with.

I take things one day at a time.  This was one of the hardest lessons of my life.  I am attempting to teach this to my far-sighted son.  Every breath is a choice.  Choose happy.  Choose positive.  Much like a twelve-step program, you have to learn that even one day at a time sometimes isn't enough.  Sometimes you have to go minute by minute...breath by breath...

 New Every Morning
Every day is a fresh beginning,
Listen my soul to the glad refrain.
And, in spite of old sorrows
         And older sinning,
         Troubles forecasted
         And possible pain,
Take heart with the day and begin again.
                             --Susan Coolidge

I'm independent.  I've learned to rely on myself.  I am capable.  I am in control of my thoughts, actions, and feelings about them.  Fate controls who walks into your life, but you decide who you let walk out, who you let stay, and who you refuse to let go.

I'm human.  I make mistakes.  I sometimes need affirmations much like this to get me through; to show me that no one is better that I am capable of becoming. I am a human being, not a human doing.

I'm a survivor.  Every day, I manage to come out alive.  It's not always fun.  It's never easy, but I do it.  I am a survivor.  And I will teach my son to be one, as well.
It matters not how strait the gait,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
                               --W.E. Henley
                               from Invictus         


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"Life will break you.  Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.   You have to love.  You have to feel.  It is the reason you are here on earth.  You are here to risk your heart.  You are here to be swallowed up.  And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.  Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."
                               --Louise Erdrich
                               The Painted Drum


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Lost

Stand still.  The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost.  Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it like a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes.  Listen.  It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost.  Stand still.  The forest knows
Where you are.  You must let it find you.

                                        --David Wagoner