stories

"Knowing that we are made up, not of atoms, but of love and stories is also vital. When we die what is left is love in the form of stories"



Love can be such a tangled up thing, the unsaid, the over talked, the misconstrued.

Love can be so trusting, so open, so closed, so fleeting.

Love can just be a part of our cells, a knowing that is so deeply a part of us that we never have to question, sometimes take for granted, treat badly and then when the truth of it is blindingly obvious, we scrabble for its repair.

But all love has a story.

Some of those stories are sad.
Some of them are simple.
Some of them are only revealed after they have passed.
Some of them are so blindingly beautiful that even if they are short they nourish us beyond our days - into the days of our children, and their children...

We all carry stories about love. About how love shaped us, built us up, or carved us out...

It is the way we treat those stories - the compassion with which we recount the stories in our heart, with which we allow our versions of the actions of ourselves and others to change over time - it is this compassion that shapes our lives...

Do we see ourselves as deserving of the kind of love we got?

Do we see ourselves as requiring more? Less?

Because as the wonderful Patty Digh says at the end of it all we are just stories...

the hard stuff

the hard stuff is the stuff that makes us squeeze tighter

the stuff that makes us tighten our jaw,

or our gut

or our sphincters.

The hard stuff is the stuff that makes us run into the dark corner of our minds and recite the mean stuff we have learned to say to ourselves,

the not enoughnesses,

the uselesses,

the uglinesses.

The hard stuff is the stuff that makes us deliver a little peice of our succulent soul on a plate to those who deserve it the least

makes us craven,

makes us self sabotage,

makes us resolveless.

The hard stuff makes us take our dreams and push them far out to sea in the worst weather,

without a captain

without an anchor

and without a bilgepump.


The hard stuff is where our treasure lies.

self compassion inventory

Finding out how kind you are to yourself can prove to be enlightening in more ways than one...

i recently filled out this inventory and it turns out i am mean to myself like Miss Trunchbull is mean to Matilda

but secretly as i was filling out the scores i found myself gloating just a little - feeling like i was self righteous because i was so damn self abnegating

the moral of the story is martyrdom runs so damned deep in my veins

and my first instinct is to wage war on it

but because it is so deep within me i would just be waging war on my self

so i am choosing the self loving option

i am noticing

and i am making a different habit grow....

one kind step at a time

want to fill out the test too??

http://www.self-compassion.org/ then look on the list down the side to find self compassion inventory