Fear

“I Do Not Need You To Protect Me” – A Sequel to the Love Letter

May 20, 2017 by lyra777 Leave a Comment

To my dearest beloved

I wanted you to know

That I do not need you

To protect me

I do not need you

To protect me from your sadness

Because your grief lets me know

You’re a beautiful human too

I do not need you

To protect me from your turmoil

As a woman, turmoil is something that I AM

So let me embrace it all

I do not need you

To protect me from your anger

It’s only a burst of energy

I’ll help you scream it out

I do not need you

To protect me from your fear

Because seeing you be present with it

Actually gives me strength

I do not need you

To protect me from your vulnerability

You are never weak in my eyes

You are the strongest man to me

I do not need you

To protect me from your mortality

Because our love surpasses time and space

Our connection lasts eternity

So let me not need your protection

As it will set you free

You may be surprised at the results

If you just let emotions be

Afterword

This is a sequel to a poem I wrote on Valentine’s Day called “I Don’t Need You”.

Men have so much pressure to be “strong”. When boys are taught to “man-up”, “not be a sissy” or “not be a girl”, this can have seriously damaging effects on their emotional well-being. The biggest shame is that vulnerability is man’s greatest strength.

A lot of men feel emotions just as strongly as women do. Yet they feel like they shouldn’t have them, let alone express them. There are also men who pressure themselves to be the “tough” one in the relationship, to be the protector of the two. This may lead them to hide their emotions from their partners because they feel they must shield them from pain. This can make them hold in much anguish. The emotions are there, and they need to be let out. I tried to convey in my letter that my loved ones’ vulnerability only serves to make us both become stronger, deepening our love.

Disliking People Who Are Like Us: On a Japanese Four-Character Idiom That Teaches You A Lot About People

February 9, 2017 by lyra777 Leave a Comment

In Japan we have a great thing called yo-ji-jyuku-go (四字熟語). These are idiomatic phrases made out of four kanji characters. For those who aren’t familiar with the Japanese language, kanji characters are logographic characters. Instead of each character having just a sound, it also has a specific meaning. Throughout the ages Japanese scholars have put together four different kanji characters to express profound life truths. A great one I came across recently was dou-zoku-ken-o（同族嫌悪). Literally translated this idiom consists of the characters, “same”, “family”, “hate”, and “bad”. It means that we dislike people who are like us.

This may sound strange, because your first instinct may be to think that conversely we are drawn to people who are like us. This is still true. When we encounter people who are like us we feel strong love and affection. On the other hand, if these people do not resemble us at all, we feel indifference. But what if these people are just like us, but resemble aspects of ourselves that we don’t like? That’s when hate rumbles from within. We really don’t like it when other people mirror aspects of ourselves that we don’t want to accept.

A frequently portrayed example of this is the school bully who beats up homosexuals, only to discover later that he is gay himself. Him beating up other poor boys is an outer manifestation of what he does internally to himself daily. We resent people for bringing up feelings that we try so hard to suppress and push down. We hate them because we are just like them. This is what this idiom succinctly teaches.

We only accept in others what we accept within ourselves. The school bully who finally embraces his sexuality will stop hurting his colleagues. This is why people who piss us off are actually our greatest teachers. The anger that wells us from inside tells us that there are parts of ourselves we haven’t accepted and integrated into our being.

Now, you may be thinking that perhaps we suppress things for good reasons. You don’t like Trump for example, because you don’t like how misogynistic he is. And sure, according to what I’ve been saying this would mean that you don’t accept misogynistic thoughts within yourself, but isn’t this a good thing? If you accepted misogyny you would think it’s ok to be horrible to women.

Well no. If you thought this then you have fallen into one of the big misunderstandings about acceptance. Acceptance of thoughts does not equate directly to any form of action (or non-action for that matter). Put it this way, if everyone who accepted their misogynistic thoughts were a misogynist, by the same logic all crime writers would be serial killers. They spend their days unapologetically exploring some of the darkest of ideas, but they are very much normal citizens of society.

To accept is to simply confront and observe various thoughts and emotions as they arise, without judgment. If a misogynistic thought arises, for example, you can simply look at it. You don’t have to act on it. All you have to do is let it bubble up inside yourself and let it go. In fact, the only way such thoughts are released is through acceptance. However, most of us are afraid to peek at the darker ideas that come out of ourselves. We push the thoughts down, build strong walls around them hoping they will never crop up again. That is, until we bump into someone who embodies the very thoughts and emotions we’ve been suppressing. Then suddenly the barriers we tried so hard to build come crashing down, and we hate it. The irony is, you never would have had your walls fall down if you hadn’t built them in the first place.

When you don’t like someone, it’s an invitation to look within to see what exactly it is that you don’t like about them, and then in turn understand what it is you don’t like about yourself. It’s a golden opportunity to shine the light of acceptance on this trait that exists within you. You hate it when people are childish? That’s because you don’t accept the child within you. But ask yourself — what is really “wrong” with being childish?

This even applies to so-called negative traits. If you don’t like someone because they are rude, that’s because you don’t accept the rude person within you. But if you can learn to accept this aspect of yourself, you can then approach this person with calm and love, rather than hate. This isn’t to say you let them get away with their rudeness. You can still say softly to this person that being rude does not help solve the situation. If anything, your calm and composed energy is likely to deflate any tension there was in the first place.

Hate yourself, hate others. Love yourself, love others.

The Man Who Was Afraid of His Shadow

August 9, 2016 by lyra777 1 Comment

Once upon a time, there was a man who was afraid of his own shadow.

He didn’t know what it was, but he knew that there was a dark, scary monster that would sometimes be behind him, and he was terrified.

He tried everything he could to get rid of it.

He ignored it

He yelled at it

He despaired at it.

But he was so scared, that the one thing he never did was to turn around and look at it.

The shadow would sometimes come out when he was with his friends, and all he could do was apologise for the black monster that followed him.

But the shadow didn’t go away. He ran and ran, but not matter how far he went, the shadow was right behind him.

He ran and ran, until he could run no more.

Now out of options, he decided to do something different.

Something he had never done his whole life.

He was going to stop, turn around and look at the shadow for what it was.

Slowly he approached it.

He stared at the very shadow he was afraid of straight in the face.

Suddenly, he came to a life-changing realisation.

The shadow came from him.

The shadow was him.

He didn’t want to accept it. That big black monster that followed him all his life, was an extension of him?

But as time went past, he decided to look more closely at the shadow. He started to get to know it better.

And as he did, he started to realise it wasn’t so scary after all. It may be black and gloomy but it couldn’t actually hurt him.

It was only a shadow after all.

He realised that what was hurting him was his fear of the shadow. The way he had spent his whole life running had drained him for years.

After finally seeing the shadow for what it truly was, he decided to try something new.

Why not love, instead of fear the shadow?

Instead of running from it, why not embrace it?

The man decided to shine the bright light of his attention to the shadow, enveloping it with love and warmth.

It was a part of him after all.

And then the unexpected happened.

The shadow disappeared.

Because to transmute darkness, all you need is light.

This was the lesson that he learnt from the shadow.

To this day, sometimes when the sun sets, the shadow reappears behind the man.

But the man no longer runs. He is no longer scared.

He simply turns around, smiles and lovingly shines his light on it.

Afterword

Probably the first thing people may think when reading this story is that the shadow represents something like depression. But actually, your shadow is any side of you that you don’t like. Like anger, jealousy, arrogance, anxiety, grief or longing.

We often feel that those emotions are there, but we don’t like them. So we push them away instead of fully embracing them.

In fact, we often reject them as part of our identity completely. If we get angry at someone we may later say, “Sorry, I wasn’t myself”, or if we’re depressed we may think, “I want to be myself again”.

This, on a certain level, is true – you are not ‘yourself’. But only because you are rejecting something that is fundamentally a part of you.

Remember, these shadows aren’t separate from you. They are a projection of you. In pushing them a way, you are actually making yourself feel worse.

We are raised by society to believe that we must be happy all the time. Being positive should be our baseline, and if it’s not, there is something wrong with us. We must ‘fix’ ourselves, and ‘fix’ our lives.

But there is nothing to fix. You are perfect just the way you are, emotions galore.

We are here on this Earth to experience. We subjectively add labels such as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ to the emotions that we feel. But at the end of the day all emotions are just another way in which we experience being a human.

It’s just that some emotions are just harder to accept within ourselves than others.

The first step towards healing your shadow is to acknowledge that it is a part of you. Take responsibility for your shadows. This is not saying if you get angry/sad/depressed/[insert emotion] it’s your fault. I’m saying simply acknowledge that it is an emotion that is part of your experiential being.

The next step is to lovingly accept it. When you relax and fully accept the emotion that you are feeling in the present, it is actually released. The light that you shine on it will conversely make the shadow dissipate. This is because you are allowing yourself to be who you are. You let the emotion run it’s natural course, rather than pushing it deeper and deeper inside yourself.

“But I do acknowledge my tough emotions but they don’t go away!’, you may be thinking.

Perhaps ask yourself, are you just feeling the surface of the emotion? Are you like the man who knew his shadow was there but didn’t look at it? Are you wishing that you weren’t feeling the emotion that you are now? Do you want to get rid of that emotion?

If you are, consider instead saying to yourself:

“I am feeling angry/sad/etc. and I love and accept myself just the way I am”

That very emotion you’re feeling is wanting to be a part of you too.

When you finally embrace the emotions that you have fully, you will soon discover that the very thing you fear inside yourself the most is actually your best friend and greatest teacher.

Writing From a Place of Serenity

July 14, 2016 by lyra777 Leave a Comment

Now that I’ve vowed to myself that I will write about anything I want, suddenly I want to post about everything.

I do feel like this is not some random burst of excitement that might die down just as quickly. Even when I wasn’t blogging I was always thinking about things I wanted to write about. I would construct the blog in my mind and happily think about how I would convey my thoughts to the reader. But I never actually did it.

Now that I’m finally putting these daydreams into practice I can’t describe how much better I feel. I am bringing some much needed flow back into my life. I understand it’s going to be a wobbly start because I’m still trying to find my voice. When I read my own writing I can significantly feel which bits I wrote from the heart, and bits that I didn’t so much. The difficultly is that growing up we are taught by various people how to write. Our parents first teach us what is right or wrong, and then at school a certain style is demanded of us. We soon start to adapt our writing into something that we think will get that A grade or will be applauded by others. Often in the back of our minds the question isn’t “I am expressing in writing what I truly feel?” but “I am writing in a way that other people will approve of?”.

In other words, we write from a place of fear.

Fear that other people won’t accept what and how we communicate. We desperately try to avoid the sinking feeling of rejection and ridicule. When we do avoid it, and people give us a positive stamp of approval, we get a rush of excitement. Positive reinforcement. This can become almost addictive. The trouble with having this sort of relationship with writing is that while the highs can be ecstatic, the lows can really bum you out. Instead of being content with the beautiful act of creativity, your happiness is defined by the reactions of other people.

I want to get to a place where I’m consistently writing from a place of calm, loving presence, which in turn will cultivate creativity. A place where I am writing what I want, how I want to, without worrying what people think. A place where I am constantly enjoying the mere act of writing, regardless of the consequences it brings. A place of serenity.