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May 18 - June 25, 2025
“Don’t open your heart to men. Men steal hearts. You can only trust yourself to take care of yourself.”
Woven throughout our experiences is a connecting thread that pulls the beliefs we formed from our past into the very present moments of today.
I believe some people are safe. But lots of people have issues I don’t know anything about. Unresolved issues and undealt-with wounds make people say and do things that can hurt. I try not to personalize what other people say or do, but it’s really hard when I’m a deep feeler. I
collect the dots, connect the dots, and then correct the dots.
What we experience all throughout life impacts the perceptions we
carry. The longer we carry those perceptions, the more they become the truths we believe, live by, operate under, and use to help us navigate life today.
It’s important to start making these connections between what happened in our growing-up years and the reasons we do some of the things we do, say some of the things we say, and believe some of the things we believe right now. And it’s not just processing for the sake of understanding ourselves better. It’s processing what still needs to be forgiven so we can truly move forw...
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To verbalize forgiveness, we have to verbalize what we are forgiving.
Being taught to stuff feelings early in life can sometimes mean you never learn how to properly understand feelings later in life. Feelings serve a purpose. Feelings inform us of issues that need to be addressed.
They also help us empathize with others, bond with others, and know when we need to give and receive emotional support.
Love needs depth to live. Love needs honesty to grow. Love needs trust to survive. When starved of depth, it flounders. When deprived of honesty, it shrivels. And when trust is broken, love is paralyzed.
Loving words should land in your heart like a pocketful of feathers fluttering about but then settle you as the truth of love settles in. But when words land with more of a thud, you wonder, Is this true? Do you mean what you’re saying? Over time that confusion made me wonder, Am I sane? Are you sane? What I’m hearing from you should make me feel so loved and safe. But what I’m feeling on the inside
feels more like fear. A strange, strangling fear like what you might feel when walking too close to the edge of a terrifying cliff. Why is that?
fine. I never made the connection that people who are quiet are sometimes the ones in the most pain. It’s just that their screams are silent. Or, they are acting out in secret. My pain was never undercover, so it was easier to attach the issues to me than to try and question things I didn’t understand.
We’ve been stripped bare for all the world to see. And, as horrific as the truth was that came out, for the first time in a long while we were both forced below the surface where our love found oxygen.
Even as a small child I felt the unfair sting of loss and how awful it is when people’s actions cost us deep emotion. I never knew how much this made me afraid of people taking advantage of me.
If we risk being open, we risk being hurt. We risk the other person taking something from us. And we know to fear this pain, because, unlike Adam and Eve, we’ve experienced this pain. So we pull back and we get bitter and we become more and more easily offended and less and less willing to be vulnerable. I understand this.
Her circumstances had dramatically changed. But her thought processes around sunrises and sunsets never changed as she grew, matured, and went on with her life. So, as she connected these dots, she realized she needed to correct her belief about sunrises and sunsets.
Art’s and Colette’s, I realize there’s more to every story. There are hurts and losses we’ve experienced in our past that feed wrong beliefs and unhealthy tendencies, holding us back in the present.
we become more self-aware of how we are processing our thoughts and perceptions and redirect those in more life-giving ways, then inside every loss, a more wise, empathetic, understanding, discerning, compassionate person of strength and humility has the potential to arise within us.
Based on the experiences we have, when we see something, our brains fill in details that we might not even realize. In our physical sight, it’s not just what we see—it’s what we perceive we are seeing that determines how we define our current reality. This is true not just with our physical perceptions but with our emotional perceptions as well.
