On My Power, Lost & Found (take II)

Sweet Boy

And, I just bailed on all of them - Power, my ex and the second black lab we adopted together, Sweet Pea.  That was 2.5 years ago and, truth be told, I haven't been the greatest mother.  I just left - hoping and praying that life has a way of working out for the best and that we'd be together again when the time was meant to be.

I recognize that I write a lot about words like Love, Compassion & Loyalty, yet how do I truly embody this language in my day-to-day?  This week, then, I've spent quite a bit of time with my ex.  He's newly engaged, and he's still running around like a chicken with his head cut off.  In our conversations, I've had to be honest with the both of us that I allow myself to harbor pain and sadness over the four years that we spent together.  As a result, he's been encouraging me to look at our shared journey through the lens of positivity and learning.  Thus, as I have been scratching the surface of me deeper, I sense that laying below these more topical feelings is the heaviness of shame and guilt.  As I so boldly proclaim on my website, can I release my own tension, fear and pent-up emotion?

I don't know, 
but I'm willing to try. 

I also found myself projecting - very heavily - onto my ex.  I felt upset and angry when he told me that his fiance may be pregnant.  "What?!?!" I exclaimed.  He may have misinterpreted my feelings, which I immediately recognized was pure self-projection.  In my ex, I experience this profoundly powerful man who is the 21st century embodiment of Bruce Lee.  Deeply intuitive and intelligent, I want him to run, run, run with this power of his!  I don't want him to fall into the "trap" of marriage and kids before he gives himself a fightin' chance.  Ouch.  Yeah, I'll come back to that statement in a bit.


When I allowed myself to fall in love (especially with someone who did not look, speak or think like me) it was the hardest thing I had ever done, because I was finally forced to see that my shit did not smell like the delusional roses I was sniffing.  Hell, my shit stank so bad!  Meanwhile, he embodied all that I wasn't - creative genius, bold action, common sense, courageous valor (he illegally made that southern border crossing alone as a scared 15-year-old and has managed to create his own thriving businesses for himself since!) - where as I was (and still am, in a lot of ways), a spoiled and pampered American, mama's girl.  Double ouch.

Yet, for four years, I had the privilege of watching him in action and learning his tricks of the trade.  Now, I find myself in a role reversal where I am having to embody common sense and outside-the-box thinking, among other things, to my peers on a regular basis.  In the recent past, I worried that I would make the same mistake and be too hard on these others, just as my ex was on me.  True to form, this did happen with Shakti. Yet, I don't want to merely perpetuate the past.  Rather, I SEEK TO EMBODY A MESSAGE OF LOVE & COMPASSION.  
So, how does One do this?!?!