I AM Lost and Found

I've been on a melancholic streak these past weeks, and was for the most part feeling quite despondent, impatient, and almost detached from everyone and everything. I felt an emptiness in my days, which I filled with busyness at work and outside of that, with endless watching of online videos of almost everything that my algorithm presented until the wee hours. I avoided people, as they felt like knives poking at my skin when I go near them, so preferred staying on my couch whenever I can, covered with my favorite blanket watching mindless you tube videos. These felt like the only way I could forget the frightful darkness that knocked at the door, which I ignored but which kept me awake.

In all of this turmoil, I finally completed a painting that I started and stopped for over half a year now, and I felt the image respond to my situation. The image told me to allow what I feared to enter, and to embrace what it brought. I needed to let it drown me in the dark river called sorrow, because it was the only way to learn what it needed to teach me.

And so today, I embraced the part of myself that was sad and afraid, that part of me that felt anxious, nervous, unable to sleep. It did not feel right to feel these "negative" emotions when I thought myself a student of spirituality which I thought meant I was supposed to be immune to negativity - but here I was denying that I was swimming in negative thoughts and imaginings. Ah, the ego of identifying oneself with a label, spiritual indeed, what baloney.

So I walk into the dark forest of my thoughts and dive in to the dark river of my emotions and embraced the labels I abhorred: I am the sad, I am the lost, I am the sorrowful, I am the fearful, I am the anxious and the nervous. I am the scared child that needed to be allowed into this aging body. I am the irresponsible, I am the unhealthy, I am the lazy, I am the waster of time, I am the stupid, I am the careless, I am the guilty. I am the full range of sorrows and emotions that I dare not admit to, but ah, it is all of me, and I needed to allow them, swim in them, and merge with them and claim them as myself and as my own.

Here as I explored the forest and finally swim in the river of my emotions, it felt like a bombardment of sorts, of all things I detested about myself and yet...I found they were the only way to find my heart again. I needed to love my darkness, so that I can be whole.

The greatest love story is the love story with ourselves, how could I forget that? My darkness reminded me that I am loved without conditions, and that the labels are not real. For the I Am could never be broken, but sometimes indeed, we forget who we are. I come out of the river, still feeling broken, still feeling the fear, but choosing to love myself despite these labels that stayed with me.

And so Beloved, I pray for all of us to remember to love ourselves truly and without conditions. To close this, I open the Course in Miracles and on page 278 it says:

19. Whenever you are in doubt what you should do, think of His Presence in you, and tell yourself this, and only this,

He leadeth me and knows the way, which I know not.

Yet He will never keep from me what He would have me learn.

And so I trust Him to communicate to me all that He knows for me.

I send you love.

• Amen