by Tara Joyce | Feb 6, 2017 | Cultural Creativity
No matter what you do or don’t do, I always have a choice in how I communicate with you. You can’t make me do or feel anything.
If I choose to not consciously communicate, I am choosing to give away my power. Whether I am attempting to feel small or big in front of you, my unconscious words are reducing me to less than I am.
If you can stay steady in you, I can’t claim your power. Despite my anger-filled desire, my words can’t possibly do this. Nothing external can.
Only you can allow something external to reduce or deflate you. Even my careless words.
If I am not being anything but respectful and loving towards you, know it’s not about you, it’s about me. It just happens to appear to be directed at you.
It’s an optical illusion I like to perform. It helps the weight of my responsibility to magically disappear for a moment and appear on you.
photo credit: Chris Devers
by Tara Joyce | Dec 16, 2016 | Self/Business Growth
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
by Tara Joyce | Oct 19, 2016 | Cultural Creativity
Note to Self: Don’t be concerned about what you do.
This does not mean what you do does not matter. To say it doesn’t matter is to veil my concern with apathy. What I mean is, do not be attached to any particular thing or way. Let you be enough. Know you are enough.
Good and bad. Accept you as you are. There is no one better that you need to be.
photo credit: Syahmir
by Tara Joyce | Aug 5, 2016 | Self/Business Growth
Not wanting to feel it. Apathy towards the whole thing.
Why bother?
Isn’t it curious how we can love something. Someone. So much.
And feel so completely rejected and disappointed by them.
Two sides of a coin.
Love and pain.
How can I care so much, and yet desire to care so little?
Apathy. An easy option filled with complications.
Eventually, the truth will catch up with me.
Apathy. A dangerous act to perform.
It’s hard to keep up. It takes its toll.
Especially when masking the pain of rejection and disappointment.
How long can I pretend before I forget, and the mask falls from my face?
Can I trust myself? Am I that good of an actor?
What if I wore my rejection, my disappointment, without shame?
How might that change things? If you and I were to know the truth?
No reason to hide.
The love and pain, revealed.
Vulnerable. Exposed.
It is what it is. Equanimity. Towards my disappointment and my rejection.
I can learn to love them, as I do you. You’re intertwined, one. Ever present.
All of what I feel deserves to be felt.
Equally acceptable is my love and my pain.
photo credit: Karla Cantu
by Tara Joyce | Jun 1, 2016 | My Journey | What's On My Mind
So good at the act that you forget what’s true.
So good at pretending that the unreal becomes real.
What you feel is under your control.
You can simply act it away.
A mask of neutrality.
Leads you to believe you might actually feel it.
You can ignore your feelings.
You can act forever.
Yet at some point, the inevitable curtain comes down, and the performance ends.
You are left with you; and the feelings you’re pretending aren’t there.
If only for a moment.
The act is over.
What then?
Who are you when your truth has space to be?
The question, terrifying.
Its answer even more so.
It lies in love and the shape of it.
What does your love and care look like when there is no performance to mask it?
photo credit: Ania
