This card says: Shining means being vulnerable. Taking your truth and standing with pain and sorrow. Being willing to be who you are. Being willing to sit with your pain and with the pain of others. Creating the safe space for others and allowing them to create it for you. Being willing.
It’s so hard to be vulnerable. It’s hard to sit with your own pain. It’s hard to feel the pain. It’s so much easier to try to numb the pain. With sleep, with food, with exercise. With whatever your thing is. To do whatever you can to not feel it because feeling it sucks.
But I’ve learned that those feelings don’t go away. Just because you ignore them or numb them or bury them, they don’t actually disappear. Just because you don’t want to feel them it doesn’t mean that you can get rid of them.
They stay there until you work through them. At least that’s what I believe to be true. And as hard as it is to sit with your own pain, sitting with someone else’s pain is even harder. Especially if it’s someone you love.
I always just want to make it better. I want to take their pain and put it on myself. I want to fix it. I want to make it better. I want it to go away. But just like you have to work through yours, they have to work through theirs. All you can do is sit with them. Create the space. Make it safe. And just be there. It’s so hard to just be there.
When I am shining, I can be that space for others. I sit there. I listen. I hold their hands. I sit with them in the pain but I don’t try to solve it or make it go away. This is the gift I can give them when I am the best version of myself.
Shining Means is a Monthly Project for March 2017. You can read more about my projects for 2017 here. You can read about the start of this project here.
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