CHOICES.

“When I began trusting the intuitive pulls of my soul my life transformed. It wasn’t that my life was necessarily bad before.. it’s just that it started to get really amazing. The more I leaned into uncertainty, and the unknown, the more my heart and soul expanded. Growth and love both require that we move towards people and moments we can’t predict the outcome of. And trusting in that mystery, is trusting in love”

– Mark Groves

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love words. I love collecting them, I love reading them, and I love writing them. Words are how I make sense of this world, and this quote by Mark Groves is no different. It pretty much summarizes the themes of my life over the past month or so: intuition, uncertainty, growth, expansion, and above all trust & love.

It’s interesting how I set my intention at the beginning of the year to focus on the expansion of my heart, and the universe pretty much wasted no time in sending me moments, experiences and people that would do just that. Lately, I’ve been sitting in this space of so much uncertainty: uncertainty with where my life is going to take me, uncertainty with my feelings and emotions about myself, my life, my future, and most especially, uncertainty with how to respond to certain people that have entered my life. The universe has been asking so much of me lately, and if I had to narrow down all the lessons I’ve learned into one word, it would be this: choices.

Life is ALL about the choices you make. I remember hearing this quote from Mark Groves once saying, “Everything in our life got there because you said, “yes” to it”. I love this quote because it allows us to take responsibility for our own lives instead of blaming others for making us “feel” a certain way. No one can make you feel anything. Our emotions, our feelings and our happiness are our responsibility and our responsibility alone. Okay, I do understand that there are certain circumstances that are “beyond our control”: sometimes, people decide to leave and that’s okay too. We can never control how people choose to respond to us, but what we can control is our own response. We ALWAYS have a choice.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response, lies our growth and our freedom”

– Viktor Frankl

Creating that space in between these moments of uncertainty is SO IMPORTANT. It is in this space that the learning occurs, and where the growth and thus the magic happens. We still get to choose how to handle our emotions. We still get to choose our story. And above all, we still get to choose how we want to show up in this world; so in other words, we get to choose and create the world we want to live in.

Something I’ve learned is that we always choose what we believe we are worthy of. If we don’t believe we are worthy of amazing and connected relationships, then we’ll never choose that for ourselves. So ask yourself, what are the things you are saying “yes” to in your life? Are they whole-hearted yes’s? Do your choices honor yourself? Do your choices honor your voice, your truth, and your worth?

One of the most important things I’ve learned under this “theme” or “umbrella” of choices is that with every choice comes a risk, and it’s just a matter of how much of your heart you’re willing to risk. Sometimes we need to make a choice to step towards people, even though we don’t necessarily know what the outcomes will be. But that’s also the thing about life. Sometimes we just don’t know, and sometimes we just HAVE TO TRUST. We just need to trust that everything is unfolding as it should be. That the people who come into our lives will always serve a purpose, and that purpose is always to teach us something about ourselves. We always attract what we are ready for: the universe doesn’t play any games! LOL! Every moment is an opportunity to either make a choice to re-wound ourselves and play into our old stories or to finally make that shift, and re-create a new story. Patterns will ALWAYS repeat themselves until the lesson is finally learned.

Just know that it’s totally and completely okay to not have all the answers: such is the beauty of life. To learn to love without attachment to outcomes, and to give ourselves permission to sit in that space of “not knowing” is just as important. Sometimes you just need to trust your intuition and trust that the universe is ALWAYS working in your favor. I absolutely love these words by Kelsey Grant, “There is this powerful force in the universe that actually wants us to win in life, and that force is LOVE”.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to one thing and that is love. Love is our truth and is the very essence of who we are. Once we shift our perspective and operate from a place of love, we start to experience this life differently. We begin to see our worth, and we begin to live in the integrity of our own hearts. Honoring our truth, and honoring our voice is love, it’s self-love.

To deny our truth is to deny ourselves, and learning to honor my own truth has not been an easy journey. It’s so easy to get caught up in wanting to transform ourselves in order to be accepted; to change what it is we truly want and need in order to avoid the “pain of rejection”. But once we’ve abandoned ourselves to keep anyone in our lives, or to maintain a connection (this goes for friendship, family members, a partner, etc.), then we’ve already lost. One of my favorite explanations of this by Mark Groves is this:

“We make the “relationship of staying together” more important than our feelings and emotional needs, and when we do, we’ve already lost. That’s why when people leave it hurts because (1) the relationship has ended and (2) it’s also a reminder of all the times we left ourselves for them and we feel like they didn’t stay and fight for us.. when really it’s that we’re upset that we’ve never stayed and fought for ourselves” 

And so this is where trust and honoring our truths intersect. Once we start to live in our truth, we start to trust ourselves. And when we start to trust ourselves, we will only allow people into our lives who mirror that truth. So when people leave, we are still safe, because for the first time, WE decided to stay. We decided to stay for ourselves by not abandoning who we truly are.

So how do I honor my truth? Through connecting with my emotions. Emotions = information, and information = growth & expansion. We need to give ourselves permission to just sit in the space of feeling until we figure out what our emotions mean. All our emotions have the right to exist within each and every one of us, and as I said before, our emotions are our own responsibility so it’s up to us to move towards the things that make us feel good. The body doesn’t lie, so when something feels off, it probably is. So how do truth and emotions intersect? Well, the more we communicate our feelings, the more we become present to who we are, and the more we become emotionally resilient. So speak your truth and honor your voice. It’s a process for sure, and not an easy one, and to this day I am still learning and unlearning.

As such, this is how I want to end my blog post, on this note of growth: learning and unlearning, as we navigate through this life we call the human experience. Self-love is not this overnight process when you wake up suddenly and you say to yourself, “Great, I have self-love now!” It’s not some magic pill we can just take to solve all our problems. It’s work and it takes dedication and a commitment to YOURSELF. It takes making yourself your number one priority. Self-love is a constant evaluation of yourself: one day, you love yourself because you made a great choice, and on another, you might do something out of alignment, and you have to choose again and again and again. And that’s okay too, cause it’s growth & it’s learning.

And finally, in the words of Mark Groves, “We are always doing the best we can with what we have. So until we’re ready to shift, we won’t shift”. So in other words, what that quote is saying is to have compassion for ourselves, especially the former versions of ourselves. Nothing is ever static, we are constantly growing and evolving and without the lessons we learned from the past versions of ourselves, we wouldn’t be who we are today. So thank that person and hold gratitude for every life experience that has expanded your heart and made you wiser and more resilient.

So with that being said, let’s learn to love the current version of ourselves TODAY, and always choose to show up in this world for ourselves, with love & kindness. Let’s live our lives knowing that the universe is always working in our favor, and that by trusting in this mystery & uncertainty of life = trusting in yourself, and above all, trusting in love.

From my heart to yours,

Love & light,

Loubelle

– The Phoenix