Breathe In, Breathe Out And Let Go

When I was at work today I felt there was old emotions swimming around in my body that I needed to be let go of.  Old emotions from the past that I had stored in my body over the years.  I took a breathe in and as I released that breathe I pictured my shoulders opening and old, stagnant air coming out of my shoulders.  Normally I wouldn’t do this at work.  I would wait til I was at  home where it is quiet and I am alone, but I couldn’t.  The feelings keep pushing at my shoulders as if to tell me they needed to be released.

When I have this feeling and I’m at home, I lay on my back on my bed, close my eyes and ask what part of my body needs to let go of something.  I visualize that part of my body opening and whatever needs to come out comes out.  For example:  in the past I have visualized  thick chains and bowling balls coming out from around my heart and briefcases have come out of the top of my head.  I believe the chains are from past relationships and the bowling ball is from the bowling alley where my first love and I hung around at while we were dating.  I have no idea what the briefcases mean, but that’s ok.  I don’t worry about what comes out.  If it’s ready to come out then I am more than happy to let it out whatever it is.  I may remember the significance of the item later on in my daily activities.  I may not.

Today I felt old, stagnant air coming out of my shoulders.  This doesn’t surprise me.  The air coming out of my shoulders was probably the aftermath of remembering my past hurts.  Last week I was thinking about creating a menopause calendar and over the weekend I was working on a drawing for the month of February.   When I think of February I think of Valentine’s Day, love and hearts.  Usually I think of a big, red heart.  Not over the weekend.  Instead of drawing a happy heart, I wanted to put on paper what sad events happened in my life and how my damaged heart might look like at this point in my life.   My heart was bigger on one side than the other and it wasn’t perfect in shape.  Fat and skinny black lines made up the outer wall of my heart.  My heart had a jagged gap from the top left corner of my heart almost to the bottom of the other side from the death of my dad.  About half of the gap had grey duct tape holding it together.  A small section at the bottom of the gap had healed and was a light pink.  In the left hand corner there was a light, brownish mark with red dots poking through that was left from when my mom had breast cancer.  My mom’s cancer was caught early and she is fine, but it still left a stain on my heart.  The pink dots show that the stain is fading and parts of my heart are poking thru.  Part of my heart is gone on the bottom right side from when my first love broke up with me.  There’s a band aid in another area from all of the times I was bullied.  There’s five or six areas on my heart that are black x’s that look like stitches for all of the times I was hurt and didn’t fully recover.

I was thinking about a serious theme for the calendar.  The menopause calendars I have seen in the past were humorous.  I don’t want to create a humorous calendar.  I want it to be a thought provoking calendar that has a different theme every month.  I think one of the main themes of menopause is that makes us look at the places in our lives that are not working and that need healing.  We need to remember the events that happened in our lives that we may have forgotten about and heal these areas because we probably still carry around the pain.    I wanted to draw my heart to see what areas came up for me that need to be healed/dealt with.  The two areas were: being bullied as a kid and the death of my dad.  I have dealt with being bullied a little bit.  A couple of years ago my neice was being bullied and I cried as I shared my story with her.  I know I just hit the tip of the iceburg and there are still issues that I need to deal with.   I know I have self esteem issues that stem from being bullied that hinder certain areas of my life.  And my dad’s death.  That’s something I will deal with every day for the rest of my life.  It’s not a bad thing.  It just is. It doesn’t get easier.  I still cry.  I think I am used to my dad being gone.  Will I ever heal completely?  I doubt it.

I know to some people visualizing emotions/things coming out of my body may seem odd.   It was at first to me, too.  I do it because I believe my body knows when it needs to let something go and this is the only way I know how to let it go.  I want/have to keep moving forward and growing and in order to do this I need to let those feelings go.  I believe that we hold our past in both in material things outside of our bodies and emotionally on the inside of our bodies.  We store past memories, good and bad, in certain areas of our bodies.  Just as we need to purge our homes of things we no longer have room for or no longer need or want, we need to do the same for our emotional selves.  We need to release those old hurts and negative feelings so that we can move forward.   I think the more healed we are the more good things, people and experiences we are able to let in.

One of my goals for 2018 is to work on my self-esteem issues and let all of that old crap out of my body so I’m not dragging it out around anymore.

Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Let.

I think this should be one of my mantras for 2018 because a girl can’t be on fire if she’s dragging all of that stuff from the past around can she?