Backstage with Dr. Laurie Johnson, LPC
Want and need are real and sometimes intense and critical.
In this blog, I am not discussing poverty, hunger, starvation and suffering.
Not of the body, anyway.
Thankfully, we can reduce low grade "emotional fevers" by examining what we are in angst about.
That takes guts, though. We have to dig down below the easy answers to get to the heart of our attachments. That is, if we want to identify our personal attachments.
Having attachments distracts and depletes us from fully embracing the moment, the now, the what is.
Until we realize that we have attachments, they have us.
On a short leash.
With a choke collar.
Having attachments is like having beautiful bracelets...of barbed wire.
Having attachments is like driving a gleaming sports car...down a highway of glass shards.
It is stunning how much we foster fear.
It is detrimental how much we deny being driven by pride.
How many times a day do you compare yourself to others?
Three aren't enough sands in the hour glass to represent the seconds and minutes and hours and days we lose, pondering how we measure up.
To others.
To who we were supposed to be.
We measure ourselves according to an invisible, uniquely personal measuring stick.
Constant comparison.
It is like a cage to which we sentence ourselves. Our selves.
Once in that cage, we lose sight of ourselves.
We lose focus.
We stare.
Once we succumb to the quest to be special enough or special at all, we lose sight of our own beauty. We lose sight of others' beauty. We fixate on thorns. Fear fills in our thoughts like mortar.
It is tragic how much we focus on thorns instead of blossoms.
Especially when a rose is growing in unexpected and unlikely places.
Unexpected and unlikely
are two of my favorite places
to find respite.
We create such unnecessary drama and trauma by fearing.
Fear we won't have enough.
Fearing we won't get enough.
Fearing we won't be enough.
It causes us to suffer the minutes instead of embracing the moments.
I wish I'd learned this a lot earlier in life.
Similar to true guilt vs. false guilt that can double the baggage in our lives... We need to tame want and need to know whether they stem from fear and pride or from healthy personhood
See? I'm afraid if I don't leave my name you won't know it is me and feel that I've offered you something of value.
Fear.
It limits and distracts and derails us so much from freeling being our best unfettered self.
I want to live with abandon.
I'm tired of living in ruby shackles.
There's no place like me.
There's no one like me.
But I've got to be the better me.
The notable me.
Good grief.
The Dorothy syndrome is exhausting.
Fear.
It has such a terrible R.O.I.
If fear were a substance, we'd rarely go near it.
We certainly wouln't bring it into our home and heart and head
and feed it all the little dreams that might have otherwise grown to fruition.
Fear, is like a gar fish hidden in a beautiful koi pond.
Why do we put it there?
Why do we tolerate its presence?
Let's identify those "needs and wants" that plague us.
Let's identify the attachments we have, that grip us so tightly yet offer so little.
Let's stop counting thorns and savor more blossoms.
Let's take time to smell the courage of someone to plant a rosebush and to leave it behind.
Let's celebrate the rose undaunted by rock and wall, sidewalk and rubble.
Better yet.
Let's be those roses.
www.drlauriejohnson.com
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