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Heart’s Desire

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Heart’s Desire

Greetings!

My family is in the lineage of Artists. We may not all look like artists nor have professions that appear to be in the field of Artists but we are Artists nonetheless. I learned of this many years ago & it took me awhile to see how I fit in. I’d always deeply admired the artists in my family & appreciated their gifts. I think it can be difficult to perceive, accept & appreciate one’s own gifts compared to the gifts of others.

Much of my childhood was spent dabbling in the arts. I was a Jill-of-all-arts so to speak. I took ballet classes & piano lessons. In school, I was in orchestra & choir. This continued throughout my teenage years & I tried guitar & listened to music all the time. I was in plays & musicals, both behind the scenes & on stage. I took every art class I could get my hands on all through both junior & high school. I loved books & read constantly.

However, a funny happened in Junior High & High School. I discovered writing. I’m sure there was writing before then but this began in a creative writing class with an assignment to describe something. I wrote a few pages describing a candle burning down. I. had. so. much. fun. I got an A- on the paper & I have it still to this day. Despite this, it never occurred to me to pursue any sort of career in writing.

I went on in high school to collect poetry that I liked & filled journals with it. At the time, Seventeen magazine was very popular with teenage girls & I was no exception. They had a regular page of poetry & writings from reader submissions. I think this is where I got the idea to try my hand at poetry because I wanted to submit a poem. So this then led to writing poems. Writing poetry for me was easy. I wrote a poem about each of my best friends at the time. I wrote romantic poems about my love interests. I wrote poems of teenage angst. Whenever I got an idea for a poem, I just sat down & wrote it. I even remember waking up in the middle of the night one time with a full-blown poem running through my mind. Of course, my teenage poems were not Maya Angelou quality but decent enough. What I didn’t realize at the time was this was a gift of mine. Unlike all the other artistic endeavors I had undertaken up until then, I was actually good at this one. Not necessarily writing poetry but hearing & writing what I hear. It would be many, many years before I discovered that the words in my mind were words from Spirit. However, I lost interest in writing after high school.

My point in all of this is two-fold. First, I loved so many things, many but not all in arts, that I had difficulty finding my niche. In college, I changed my major five times trying to settle on something that mattered to me, that I was good at, that I was interested in & that would translate into a practical career. When I got out of college with a practical degree, I never used it. College sometimes is wasted on the young. I think it takes real world experience & just some life under your belt to fully realize your interests, your potential & your gifts. Five years out of college, I began to realize what I wish I had gotten a degree in. The rush to go straight to college out of high school doesn’t work for everyone. Some know that they know that they know & others do not.

But second & maybe more importantly, I arrived at the point many, many years down the road realizing that it didn’t really matter that I got the “wrong” degree, that I lost my way, that I forgot my “Artist” lineage, that I left behind all of my childhood joys, what I loved & what I was good at. Somehow, despite all of that, Spirit & the Universe managed to bring me here, exactly where I am meant to be. Exactly where I could have envisioned myself to be when I was a teenager. I am here writing to you. I am here talking to Spirit. I am here ministering as I always wanted to do. So never fear. You will get where you are going even if you make a few mistakes along the way. What matters the most is that you keep going. That you do not lose heart in yourself, your life, your path, your purpose, your desires & moving forward.

Love in the Light of God, Dawn

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Love Thyself

Greetings!

Some time ago, I was applying lotion after a shower. I was doing so hurriedly even though I had no reason to be in a hurry. In the midst of this, a voice interrupted me & asked, “Is this how you put lotion on your grandchildren?” I stopped to think about this & why I was being asked such a question. My answer to the question was “No, I put lotion on my grandchildren with love & patience & energy flows from my hands to them.” For I realized as I thought about the question that NOTHING, not love, not energy, not patience, nor care did I have towards myself as I carelessly slapped lotion on.

I have been thinking about this experience & the meaning of it on a personal & larger scale for awhile now. For myself, I realize that I treat myself mindlessly, carelessly & without love. Over time, this has caused me to feel uncared for, unloved & unworthy of love in all of it’s forms, both from myself & from others. I feel sad about this. I could blame my upbringing & my family but I can remember that I cared for & about myself when I was younger. I reached out to others for love & with love. So, I think this attitude towards myself has developed & worsened over time. It kind of crept up on me when I wasn’t looking. I’m glad Spirit pointed it out. I get a reminder every once in awhile so I know I’m not done working through this issue.

On a larger scale, it occurred to me this morning (as I applied lotion lovingly to myself after my shower) that this may be part of the current problem many have with addiction. One of the causes of addiction can be seen as a compulsion to fill the emptiness within by turning to something outside of yourself.

You can have an addiction to almost literally anything. I know most people think of alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, gambling or sex but this is just the tip of the iceberg. There is shopping, working, collecting, gaming, screens, & the list goes on & on. The idea that there is something outside of you that will make you happy, fill the emptiness, fix your life, solve your problems, heal you, bring you peace, satisfy you or fulfill you are all ideas that can lead to addiction. Love is a big one. The problem with these ideas is they are based on the assumption that you are lacking, broken, wounded, limited, wrong, a victim & you need something or someone outside of you to fix you. Well, I’m here to tell you that you are not lacking. There is nothing outside of you that you truly need that you don’t already have or have the capacity to acquire within yourself in balance.

Not only do you have all the solutions within you or at your fingertips but whatever you have been using as your addiction of choice is not the answer. The alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, gambling, sex, shopping, working, collecting, gaming, screens, etc., are not what you really need or want. They will never be the answer, nor fix the issue. Now, quite possibly you know this but I’m writing about this because you may have more subtle addictions that you are not aware of. You may tell yourself that you don’t have any addictions but I think most of us have developed them. The question becomes what are yours & how disabling are they? Ask yourself this question:

What do I do over & over again expecting a different outcome?

I ask this question because what you do over & over again may reveal what is ultimately unsatisfying, unfulfilling or isn’t permanently fixing anything. These could be addictions. Take some time to rethink your actions & choices. Question their purpose & meaning. Do you really need to do all that you are doing? Are they all necessary? Do all your choices & actions come from the desires of your heart? Or do your choices & actions come from compulsion, habit, anger, fear, grief, guilt, sacrifice, willfulness, loneliness, emptiness, control, manipulation, transactional love, sabotage, keeping up with others, wanting attention, to be accepted or other reasons?

After you identify these actions & choices, comes the tricky part. What is the outcome that you were HOPING to achieve by those actions or decisions? Your answer to THIS question tells you what you REALLY desire. Once you know what your true desire is then you can find a way to meet this Heart’s Desire yourself, directly.

A story from my own life to illustrate this:  In my 30’s, I had myself convinced that I didn’t like color on the walls of my house so all of my walls were white or nearly so. I wore almost all neutral colors in my clothing at the time. Not coincidentally, I compulsively shopped at JoAnn Fabrics for HOURS. Not that I ever bought much of anything because we couldn’t afford it. I just went there to pour over all the beautiful fabrics & colors. To this day my daughter can’t stand to shop there! 😛

It wasn’t until many, many years later that I realized the shopping compulsion went away after I started accepting color into my life, my home & my wardrobe. This is a perfect example of an addiction arising out of not meeting a need directly. My need was for color in my life which I was denying myself so my only other option was to meet the need in another way. You can see that spending hours shopping was a huge time waster & had to be continually repeated weekly, monthly, yearly because it was only a temporary fix. The permanent fix was wearing color & bringing color into my home so that I didn’t need to go out shopping to be exposed to color.

So I hope you find your time, money, energy & life wasters that are pretending to support you. Let them go & replace them with the real thing whatever that may be for you so that you might feel loved, cared for & fulfilled.

May You Find Love in the Light of God, Dawn