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Self-Care Tip #212 – Figure out what you are living for and use it to make your life wonderful.

All of us have at least one thing in life that will undo us.  We all have something(s) that we consider worth living for.  For the most primitive to the most cultured, from the most defended to the most vulnerable, we have this (these) soft spot(s).  For me, it is my family.  Many of us might say the same, but there are others of us who have other beauties, treasures, The Pearl (as described by Steinbeck) that they would unravel over.

Because this is so scary, we might get snared up in where to go banking when we think about this.  We buy more guns, build more storehouses, fill our basement with jugs of water and like Japan, we find ourselves undone by our own preparations.

An interesting statistic is that homes with guns in them have more suicides.  In famine, the rats eat all the grain before we can.  And poor Japan, who had the most amazing defenses against, an unheard of, three simultaneous natural disasters, is leaking cancer.

Pricilla, also, was almost undone.  She’d argued with her husband and she felt fragmented by it.  She felt herself dissolving from the emotional pain and did not even want to recover.  The argument was bad.  The construct of her world precariously balanced moment by moment immobilizing her.  If she moved, she was afraid of which way life would tilt.

Soft spots can be our greatest strengths though.  We can see them as weakening our defense against life’s cruelty, or we can see them otherwise.  When we live defensively, we miss a lot.  Pricilla, I was fortunate enough to witness, chose to go towards her pain, which was in fact going towards what made life valuable to her.  Pricilla wasn’t able to do this until her emotions (what she interpreted her reality with) became more friendly to her.  Her emotions had been awry and she had been a fearful person for a long time.  After working hard on her medical illness through self-care, including medications and other life-style changes, Pricilla became less preoccupied with her ruminating fears.

Pricilla was learning through gene therapy (i.e., medications and lifestyle changes) to use her love for her husband as a strength.  I wonder about those in Japan.  I know we have prayed for them and hurting for them and hoping.

The other day in my children’s Classical Conversations class one of the teachers prayed for the rescue and survival for the citizen’s of Japan.  I prayed for a wonderful death or dying process for those who weren’t going to live.  I don’t think either of us prayed better or braver than the other and I don’t bring this up to qualify prayers.  I say it to highlight how we were holding our soft-spots.  The individual Japanese is at the point in their life’s journey, I imagine, where the life lived till now was a preparation of sorts for how they would hold themselves during this disaster.  How did they defend themselves?  Were their soft-spots their points of vulnerability and weakness, or strength?

Questions:  What do you live for?  Is it empowering to you or does it make you scared?  Please tell me your story.