"Miss January"
I want to try and make a Pin-up for each month of this year and perhaps write some prose about women, life and how we survive the unsurvivable and be the badass of our own lives.
January is the first month of the year, the new year. Where often hope is planted.
It is also the darkest, and usually the coldest month of the year.
A time for self-reflection and solitude.
When I look back at the darkest time of my life, I also see it as the place where I had the most insights. Which seem odd, that I could see more in the darker times.
What I have learned by hanging out with badass women who have suffered great losses, is that we are stronger than we want to be. Our hearts grow deeper with loss and pain. And, we become free to be ourselves. We lose the ability to pretend to pretend to pretend.
Wisdom comes with suffering.
I have heard about radical acceptance. Where we are to accept what is, no matter what the IS is.
It is easy to accept the sunshine, cozy fires and birds.
But, it takes herculean efforts to accept the unacceptable.
We are made stronger by accepting that which we don't want to accept.
It was in accepting the darkest of the darks in my life, that I was able to truly accept all its beauty. The dark cold harsh realities can't be pushed aside, or covered with positive cute speak. They have to be brought in and held - accepted.
Oddly, you don't have to like something to accept it.
Acceptance, joy, and enthusiasm are the three keys to happiness according to Eckhart Tolle. Consciousness has to flow through these three paths. Everything that doesn’t come from them comes from our ego and may become destructive.
If you can't be joy or enthusiasm, you can accept.
Be with what is.
What I never truly understood, was our ability or reflex for non-acceptance.
How we will try harder to deny, than to accept.
We un-naturally work against reality.
In hopes that our wishes will somehow overthrow reality.
We want so bad, what isn't to be.
I think, in my case, it was too hard to deny, so I had to bring it in.
I had to find peace with accepting everything I didn't want to accept.
And, there truly is peace and even happiness in accepting what is.
Perhaps peace is the absence of war with what is.
I simply didn't have the strength to fight the harsh reality of what was.
I didn't have to do anything, but ride the wave of reality. Accepting each new reveal of truth.
I was actually then given choices of how I wanted to dance with what is.
You simply can't respond IF you don't accept it first.
In the radical acceptance, you can't solve or work with anything, UNTIL you accept it.
Miss January, the first month, is about accepting.
Become a badass acceptor!
