Author: Regina Cates

For many years I thought the odds were stacked against me.  Other people were happy but that was just not my life. I kept telling myself someone else is responsible for my happiness, I can’t do it, I’m not worthy, and that my unhappiness is part of my culture and just who I am. 

One day I realized each of these thoughts was a big fat lie. That day I began freeing myself from a life of shallow pursuits, irresponsibility and dissatisfaction.  I did so by accepting that the limiting thoughts I was allowing to stop me were in fact just the lies and justifications of fear. 

Courageously challenge your limiting, judgmental, fearful and negative thoughts.  Think about what you think and you will find that you, other people and our world are more positive, peaceful and powerful than your thoughts have led you to believe.

Yesterday my almost 90 year old father decided to remove some roots from his front yard. He went out with axe and began chopping. He worked hard all morning had a light lunch and a short rest. Then he went outside and began chopping again. After about an hour in almost 100 degree Texas heat, exhausted and dehydrated, he got very dizzy and almost fainted.  He staggered to a nearby tree and leaned against it. That is where Jonathon Keller found my dad.  He is a young man who just happened to be driving by. 

My dad went inside while Jonathon finished chopping all the roots. My father did not ask him too, he volunteered. And when he was finished Jonathon refused to take money my dad offered. He wanted to give my father, a complete stranger, the gift of finishing the job. 

This afternoon I called Jonathon to thank him for stopping to help my dad.  I was disappointed he was not home. When he returns he will have a message with my phone number and a request to call. I want to speak to the man who not only may have saved my father’s life but who selflessly gave his time to help a complete stranger.  I want Mr. Jonathon Keller of Marshall, Texas to know he is an angel, to me and my dad.

I have always disliked heights. So recently while visiting my parents I was tested. 

They live in the eastern part of Texas where humidity causes mold to grow on the underside of the eves and front porch of their house.  The only thing on my dad’s list of things I could help him with was to rid his painted siding of the mold.  I loaded a pump sprayer with a bleach mixture, carefully placed the ladder against the house, and began to climb. 

Reaching the top I bravely hoisted the sprayer onto the roof and carefully put one foot in front of the other, often crouching down as low as possible, as I slowly made my way to the top. Once at the peak I looked down and felt a flash of fear. Then I saw my father, looking small as he stood on the ground watching me.  Seeing him, my fear was replaced with determination. He needed me to do this.  No matter how stinky the bleach, or how hot the roof, or how my eyes stung when the wind caught the spray and sent it back into my face, I carried on. 

When I was finished I felt a great sense of accomplishment. While I am not ready for a career change to high-rise window washer or roofer, the next time I visit my parents I will climb back on their roof.  Doing so is the way to accept that while it is okay at times to be scared, it is not okay to allow fear to prevent us from doing what needs to be done to create our best life. That means it is necessary to face our fears head on so we learn that YES WE CAN!

I have not had the experience of serving on a jury. I have not been sequestered away from my family for weeks.  I have not been involuntarily thrust into a media and information vacuum. I have not been asked to wade through and make sense of mind-numbing and often contradictory laws and testimony. I have not been faced with having to listen and make sense of heart-wrenching and often contradictory evidence from both sides of a fence. And I have not been forced by judicial mandate to work cooperatively with a set of my peers to come to a decision that must by consensus both disappoint and please. 

No, I have not been asked to endure the psychological and emotional devastation that is the unavoidable fall-out of being a juror selected for a murder trial. 

One truth I have learned is that I do not have to walk in someone else’s shoes to know I do not want to follow in their footsteps. Another truth I have learned is that I would have to walk in their shoes to know for myself what mental and emotional hell going through such an ordeal is like.

 

One of the most challenging things about caring for others is accepting we CANNOT control or change anyone else but ourselves.  Our adult child is being abused in relationship, or faces jail time, or is hooked on drugs, or cannot keep a job, relationship, etc.  Yes, these things are hard to witness. And no, we cannot make their choices or live their life for them.

Each of us has our own journey in life. That means when we reach adulthood and we stumble we must choose to pick ourselves up. We cannot do that if someone is there to soften our fall or always pick us up. We do not learn, grow and make positive permanent changes if other people try to do our work for us.

It’s not easy to watch those we care for collapse under the weight of their negative choices. Sometimes we witness this over and over again. But we cannot “fix” someone. Unless that person wants to fix him/herself, our words will fall on deaf ears and a closed heart. 

What we can do is set boundaries to bring a higher level of awareness to the relationship we have with those who are hurting themselves and others.  We can focus our energy on staying centered and balanced so when the people we love decide to pick themselves up and change we are there to offer support. That is why it is called “tough love.” Yes, it is hard and yes, it is still love. 

Have you noticed when we tell ourselves we “can’t” do something it actually means we don’t want to? Deep down we know we need to leave an abusive relationship, or master ourselves to say in control of our behavior, or to set boundaries out of love for ourselves. Yes, we can do these things but by saying “I can’t” we actually mean we are afraid to take the actions necessary. We are fearful because we are familiar with our current situation, no matter how bad it is. It has become uncomfortably comfortable. We don’t want to change because we are frightened of how the situation will be if we actually go through by taking the action we know we must.

The absurdity of believing the ego-motivated fear “I can’t” is that we are intentionally preventing ourselves from creating the life we say we want. The actions we are fearful of taking are the exact ones that will end our suffering.

Yes, it takes courage, determination and faith. Yes, we must love ourselves more than we fear the unknown. Yet the hard truth is, we must earn our freedom from suffering and fear because a happy, peaceful and fulfilled life does not just happen. We must intentionally create it. We start the moment we stop telling ourselves “I can’t” and began the self-support of “Yes I can and I WILL find a way.”

One of the most important things I learned is that love is not blind. People showed me exactly who they were. Too often I preferred to see who I wanted them to be rather than who they really were, even when they continued to show me the worst of themselves.

Part of loving me was learning to see people’s behavior for the truth of what it really was rather than the fantasy I was creating and clinging to in the name of love. The first step was learning to see my behavior for what it really is too.

Within the first six months of 2001 I had lost my job, my home, my relationship, and the city where I had lived for almost 20 years.  Almost everything I identified with or cared about was taken from me.  This experience taught me that often it takes our being knocked down by life’s challenges for us to recognize there are changes we need to make.

Nothing we experience in life is without purpose. Each trial and tribulation presents an opportunity for us to learn how to be better people and how to do life better. I learned it is choosing to view the challenges of life as opportunities to grow, rather than viewing ourselves as a victim, that leads to our blossoming.

Imagine living in a society where you have no access to education or the internet, no contact with any views other than those of your political or religious oppressors. Without being encouraged to think on your own or to develop your own views based on seeking truth and fact you would simply recite a jumble of pre-programmed jargon that to others would seem madness.

Let’s keep within our heart the fact that there are people in the world who live under such oppression. Although we do not condone or tolerate violence, hate, or abuse as a result of their misguided agendas, we can have compassion for them.  No matter how unconscious we may evaluate their ignorance and hate to be, the truth remains that they can only do better when they know better. Let’s do better by not stooping to their level. Let’s continue to be strong and faithful representatives of love, the only force with the power to illuminate darkness.

When I was 21 I was briefly locked up in a psychiatric hospital. I became severely depressed.  At least that is what I was told I was.  Deep inside I knew that my depression was the result of no longer being able to outrun the personal issues I had struggled with all of my life. Without anyone to confide in and nowhere to turn for help I retreated inward as an act of desperate self-preservation.

At the time I considered life too unbearable to continue. So the answer as professionals saw it was to medicate me and slap a variety of labels on my condition.  But that only served to further distance me from a real solution to my underlying problem – self-acceptance.

While I cannot speak for everyone I have learned many things about the variety of reasons we get lost in the limitations of our mind. With our lives moving at ever faster speeds we are often too quick to reach for a drug, or to give up on ourselves, or to isolate ourselves in an attempt to cope. For me, healing began in earnest when I stopped looking for answers to repair my heart from someone or something outside me.  As long as I continued to give my power away to other people to fix my life, to accept me as I was, or to validate my existence, my life remained broken.

While one size does not fit all when we speak about moving past depression and traumatic issues, I feel it is important to remember that our soul is the force that helps us overcome many challenges that we tell ourselves that we cannot.  While physical and emotional trials are very real, so is our soul’s power to move past them. For me and countless others who have taken our power back we simply want to share our experience of how powerful we truly are when we truly want to be.