Hello and welcome to day 20 of my experiment of living from a place of love rather than fear.
My name is Liz Scott and for 30 days I am experimenting with bringing my awareness back to love rather than living from fear and every day I share what I've learnt.
One of the things I'm seeing is the variety and the difference of how love shows up day to day.
Yesterday I felt like I was in a warm bath of love and compassion for a friend that I met up to say thank you to.
Today it's completely different.
I feel as though I've been lost in a whirlwind of thought.
It's like I've been clinging on with my fingertips trying not to fall into the abyss of despair and unsettled thinking.
Love has shown up in a very different way today.
It's shown up by preventing me from falling into that abyss.
Let me explain a little bit more.
I have spent the weekend looking after my mum and don't forget I hurt my back and my back still hurts and is aching and it means that the work we're doing in the house to decorate and move around our house and move furniture has been put on hold because I've got a bad back.
So I've been away,
I've been looking after my mum,
My back is hurting,
I can't get on with the things I want to do.
Tomorrow we've got some friends coming over for lunch which means I've got to cook and be present for them and then at the end of the week we're going away in our camper van.
And the way it feels is that life is just rushing away.
The things that I had wanted to do and engage with like the work I wanted to do and the things I feel I want to get on with for one reason or another whether it's because I'm physically incapacitated or whether just there isn't enough time it just feels as though life is galloping away.
I wrote in my diary about today it feels as though I'm on top of a galloping horse trying to sip a cup of tea out of a china teacup.
That's how it feels.
It just feels as though it's rushing away,
It's the galloping pace and I can't keep up.
So bearing all that in mind that I'm not doing what I want to do,
That I'm not able to physically,
That there's lots of things I want to get on with but I can't because I've been caring and then I've got friends coming around and then we're going away camping so I've got to organize myself for that.
Despite all of this and the huge temptation to fall and wallow in that sense of oh woe is me and isn't life hard,
I have been aware of these unsettled thoughts and feelings and have brought my awareness back to love.
Bringing my awareness back to love has shown me a few things.
One of the things it's shown me is that rather than maybe falling into the rushed up revved up thinking where I'm a bit short-tempered or make snidey comments to people because they don't understand how difficult life is at the moment for me and how stressed I feel.
So rather than doing that I've just managed to zip up my mouth and that in a sense is love showing up in my world.
I know from previous experience and I know because I understand the nature of thought is that when I get lost in unsettled thinking and I believe my thinking and I blame others for my thinking and then I communicate from this sense of unsettledness and blame that I say things that I later regret saying.
So in the moment what sometimes is the only thing I've got is that I don't say anything.
I resist the urge to communicate or make my point known.
When I'm in a space of overwhelm and rushed up and revved up thinking I know it's not a good idea to say anything.
So that in essence that knowing,
Knowing what not to do is love showing up in my life.
That's what it felt like today.
And love also has shown up by reminding me that these negative thought storms and thought loops that seem to be whirring and whizzing around my head at the moment,
Love has reminded me not to believe them,
Not to get drawn into them,
Not to start living my life from them.
When I believe the stories I tell myself and these stories are usually negative and they let me know how much I'm put upon and not respected and unloved.
When I live from those stories I feel hugely unsettled.
It's like my unsettledness is magnified.
When love reminds me that I'm lost in a story I don't change the story but what I do is I don't fuel it and as I bring my awareness back to love I notice that those stories subside in time.
So that's really important is bringing my awareness back and noticing those stories calm down and settle down.
So it feels as though the way that love has shown up today is that it's kept me on the edge and rather than falling down a hole,
That hole of stories of how life is and how unkind people are and poor old me,
Rather than falling down that hole and wallowing in those stories I've stayed on the edge and for me that is such an important role of love in my life and I want to recognise it now.
Because it can seem as though love is all about the lovely,
Glowy,
Compassion,
Gratitude,
Enlightened feelings that you float around in.
The truth is I see that being human is experiencing a whole spectrum of feelings and love is the part of you that knows that you are not your stories,
You are not your thinking,
You are not your beliefs,
You are not your past.
Love brings you to an awareness that you are connected to and are part of the energy of life itself.
So that's what I've learned today,
Love is a bit like an umbrella.
When the storm is raging around me I just put up my love umbrella and it just protects me from the rain and sometimes that's as good as I've got but that is good enough and that is love showing up in my life.
So let me know how things are going for you,
How are you getting on with this experiment of living from a place of love rather than fear?
It would be so good to hear how you're getting on.
