The Power of Relationships

May 4, 2017 5:38 PM

Every relationship you develop, from the most casual to the most intimate, serves to help you become more conscious.

You are taught to honour others, yet often this is one of the most difficult acts you can perform. For not only does it require you, first and foremost, to honour yourself, it also requires you to come to know yourself. In a larger sense, your relationships are spiritual messengers, they bring into your life revelations about your own strengths and weaknesses.

Some of your relationships may be particularly painful (and necessarily so) as they’re here to help you to learn about yourself and your limitations. You may not be so enthusiastic to explore these “less attractive” aspects of self, yet recognizing your power to make choices and how they affect your world is the power of relationships. Your painful relationships help you to understand that every choice you make contributes to what you create. Choice is the process of creation itself.

Every choice you make is a creative act of spiritual power for which you are held responsible. Managing this power of choice, with all its spiritual and creative implications, is the essence of human experience. Yet you can’t know the full outcome of any choice you make, and so you may find yourself trying to control your life, and the life of others. Disappointment inevitably ensues since, try as you might, the physical world (and the people you are in relationship with) cannot be controlled. Your desires and whims are not for life to serve you on a silver platter.

Which returns you to the place where the greatest power you have is how you choose to behave in your relationships. Your relationships (especially the painful ones) help you to master your inner responses to the external world. They teach that you get to choose your thoughts and emotions.

The power and challenge of your relationships is to learn what motivates you to make the choices you do. In learning about what motivates you, you learn about the essence of your Self. Sex, power, and money are the currencies of relationships and your fear and/or faith is the energy you put behind this currency. This dynamic of choice, of fear and faith, guarantees you cannot run away from yourself or your decisions. For every outcome in some extent reflects this faith and/or fear.

To discover your personal motivations and your “false gods,” how you use and misuse the currencies of the physical world, you need relationships. So much of the way you respond to external challenges is how you respond to yourself. To guide you in developing a healthy and loving relationship with yourself, you have your relationships as a mirror. They are awakening you to your true personal power.

photo credit: Toa Heftiba

Tara Joyce

Hello! I’m Tara, a wizard of less obvious things. I love hearing from you, so please feel free to connect with me.

I deeply appreciate your support of my work—through allowing it to grow in your imagination, through sharing it with others, and through your financial support.

http://elasticmind.ca

What Icarus Can Teach Us

March 31, 2017 6:00 PM

Do you know the Greek myth of Icarus? Icarus is the son of Daedalus who dared to fly too near the sun on wings of feathers and wax. His father cautioned him that flying too near the Sun would cause the wax to melt. But Icarus became enthralled with his ability to fly and forgot his father’s warning. The feathers came loose and Icarus plunged to his death in the sea.

As I see it, this myth is a lesson about balance, about finding balance with your ego and with your gifts. It was Icarus’ choice not accept his gift as it was and to see it as enough. Instead, he chose to push it further, to a place where his gift was destroyed, and he destroyed himself in the process.

We all have, and are given, wings to fly on and it is our choice what we do with them. Do we not use them and never take flight? Do we accept them as they are and fly proudly on them to new destinations? Or do we misuse them, flying too high, too close to the Sun, destroying our gift and ourselves in the process?

If you don’t fly—or you try to fly too high like Icarus, the myth teaches you’ll find yourself falling into the depths of emotional despair, drowning in your egoic feelings (as represented by the sea Icarus drowned in).

To make the most of your gifts, you don’t need to make yourself into more than you are, you don’t need to fly higher than you can and burn yourself, but you also don’t need to stay down on earth, denying your own wings to fly. You are enough. Icarus teaches you have power over what you do with your gifts, and to what heights and destinations they take you.

photo credit: Benjamin Carnevale

Tara Joyce

Hello! I’m Tara, a wizard of less obvious things. I love hearing from you, so please feel free to connect with me.

I deeply appreciate your support of my work—through allowing it to grow in your imagination, through sharing it with others, and through your financial support.

http://elasticmind.ca

Vulnerable

December 16, 2016 3:46 PM

It’s a risk. I’m afraid. What will you think of me? What will I think of me? If I tell my hidden truth?

I feel so ashamed. How could I show you that? I can not take the chance of showing my true face to you.

The idea of bearing it is terrifying. In fact, it is more than that, it is life threatening. My neediness threatens my life. It terrifies me. I don’t want to feel it.

I must protect from it. I can not need love. I can not show how I need you. I must protect who I truly am behind my performance of independence.

Why do I feel the truth in my heart is so ugly? So shameful? Why do I feel I must cover it up?

If you knew what was in me, if I showed it to you, I’d be under threat. From me. From you. From the weight of my unbearably inconvenient truth.

Yet if I can break through my fear and allow myself to be vulnerable, what lies on the other side? Could the very thing I fear so much be the very thing to set me free?

But of course. My life is not threatened by my vulnerability. Not anymore, at least. I’m now an adult, in charge of my life. I have the ability to unlearn the faux-protection granted by aloofness and lack-of-care, and allow myself to re-access the wholeness within me. With courage, I have what it takes to face the truth in my heart. I can be me. Vulnerable. Truthful. Completely me.

photo credit: emily mucha

Tara Joyce

Hello! I’m Tara, a wizard of less obvious things. I love hearing from you, so please feel free to connect with me.

I deeply appreciate your support of my work—through allowing it to grow in your imagination, through sharing it with others, and through your financial support.

http://elasticmind.ca

Telling Yourself The Story

September 29, 2016 5:39 PM

It all depends on how long you keep telling yourself the story that is feeding your anger. Your emotional reaction, your anger, it is a result of your conditioning. By nature, it only lasts a few moments. But if you feed the reaction, through your thoughts, it keeps going. And growing.

What was once an momentary emotion grows into something bigger. A story begins to build. An emotion can become a mood. The mood becomes a temperament. The temperament transforms your personality. Your day/year/life is now “ruined” not because of X occurrence, but because of what you are still telling yourself about X.

It’s the story that’s hurting you.

Oh yes, the emotion may be painful, but if you can experience it fully, in the moment as children do allowing it to pass without a story and without attachment, you can have your experience and be over it in a matter of moments. You can be over it not because you got what you wanted and not because it wasn’t painful, but because you know how to experience your emotions and discipline your thoughts. You know their importance and their place in your life.

While not a simple thing, not needing to create a story to spur your emotions on leaves you free to fully feel them and to thoughtfully express them. Finding yourself unattached to your emotional reactions and the stories they may arise, you allow them to pass, rightfully returning to your default state: happiness. Authentic happiness, which likely isn’t the storybook kind.

photo credit: Robyn Budlender

Tara Joyce

Hello! I’m Tara, a wizard of less obvious things. I love hearing from you, so please feel free to connect with me.

I deeply appreciate your support of my work—through allowing it to grow in your imagination, through sharing it with others, and through your financial support.

http://elasticmind.ca

We Don’t Know What We Are

September 23, 2016 4:04 PM

Our true nature, who we inherently are, is expressed in all that we do. Yet most of us live without an awareness of this truth, and the practice of expressing who we naturally are becomes difficult to realize.

Instead, we find our selves striving, pushing, giving up; actions driven by our confusion over who we naturally are.

When we express our true nature, we are human beings — we are what we are. When we do not express our nature, we don’t know what we are. We are confused. Deluded.

We don’t know what to call ourselves. In our minds, we are something else other than what we are. We do not exist. We’re ghosts of our self.

We live in this ghost-like state, our true nature eluding us, until we find the courage to know our self (again). Open to being what we are, our true nature resumes itself.

We are found once again, through our own awareness of our self. Now, we know the true value of allowing ourselves to be what we inherently are.

photo credit: Laurent Henschen

Tara Joyce

Hello! I’m Tara, a wizard of less obvious things. I love hearing from you, so please feel free to connect with me.

I deeply appreciate your support of my work—through allowing it to grow in your imagination, through sharing it with others, and through your financial support.

http://elasticmind.ca