HappyStarfishes

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

~ Albert Einstein

As much as I love writing, as therapeutic as it feels, I’ve been running away from it for so long.  I finally realized today that I have to apply the same thinking to this area of my life, in order to transform it, as I have with everything else.  See quote above. 🙂

Four years ago, I realized that I was commitment-phobic.  I craved so much to be in a relationship but feared intimacy above most anything else.  I started to dig underneath my fear, coaching and healing myself along the way.   I became my own best friend.  I stumbled my way through the first few months of my first relationship.  I dropped much judgment and began to alter my self-view from “broken” to “healing” to ‘naturally powerful”.  I came onto my own when I realized the relationship no longer mirrored what I now deeply desired to have – a soulful connection with someone who set my heart, mind, body and soul aflame.

I experienced my first rebirth when I finally, finally listened to my intuition and heart’s calling above my fear and decided to move on from the relationship.  It was one of the hardest decisions I had ever made.  I was still in love with him.  He was a great guy.  Before me lay a land of nothing but change, which was so scary at the time.  I didn’t know who I was becoming.

But my gut wouldn’t let it go, this need for more, and I took the biggest leap of faith ever.  And then I soared.  For the next three-five months I experienced deep heartache coupled with the relief of knowing I was doing the right thing.  I spent a year healing myself and figuring out what I really wanted.

I knew I no longer wanted to be with someone just to be with someone. Now that I had become my own best friend, my idea for what I would be willing to accept as a relationship drastically transformed.  I learned how to say “no”.  I learned how to let myself experiment with relating.  I learned how to envision and feel what I really wanted.

What did it mean to have a soulful connection with someone on a body, mind, heart, and spirit level?  What did it mean to be compatible with someone on all those levels?  What were the things I needed in a relationship?  And what did I really mean by “need”, anyway?

I made a vision board to help me answer these questions, to help me solidify what type of man and relationship I was looking for.  I posted it on my wall right in front of my bed, so I could look at it every day and smile and be happy.

I became hopeful.  Then, as I filled my brain with real stories of relationships like the one I sought, hope became knowing. I knew “he” was out there, many times over.  I knew what it would feel like.  I knew what it would taste like.  I knew how happy I would I feel… because I was already feeling those things.  I was cultivating those feelings so I would know what a relationship unlike it felt, too.  I wondered how I would know once I had found that type of relationship. I was told, “you’ll just know’.

And I did.  After a year of shedding beliefs about my self-worth, about what the world could provide, about what a relationship could and should look like.. I found it. He found me. We found it.  It found us.  I created it.  We created it.  All of it.

This is unlike anything I have ever experienced.

I marveled at how similar it felt to those feelings I had been cultivating in my search to answer the questions, “What type of relationship does my heart really want?  What would it feel like?”  Nine months later, I’m still in awe at how abso-fucking-lutely amazing it feels.  He’s my partner in love and in growth.

🙂

Like the miracle I experienced during the summer of 14, during which I woke up to find my lazy eye of 12 years now straight sans surgery, it served to illustrate the power and possibility of what can be.

I applied the same principles to my career.

Somewhere during the course of this year, I began to question where I wanted to go next in life and why. The “why’ is extremely important for me with most everything.  I wanted to ensure fear was not the driving force behind the route I wanted to take next in life.  It was. Or rather, its cousin was: limiting beliefs.  I had to expand what I thought was possible and what I felt I could have.

Possibility proceeds reality.

I applied the framework I use in my relationship to my career, “My job has two purposes: to have fun and to help me grow”.  In a week’s span, this mentality helped to transform uncomfortable relationships and pangs of fear of imperfection.  Within a month, I no longer mirrored the Amparo that had first stepped into the office.  I had shed many, many layers of limiting and weighty beliefs.  I felt lighter, happier, and much, much more powerful and sure of myself.  My job now had purpose.  And each day, I woke up so happy to face myself at work, to befriend myself at work, to conquer myself at work.

Holy moly, the transformations.  The possibilities.  The rewards.  Bountiful and flowing.

About 1.5 months after this initial mental shift, a situation of deep instability solidified into pure gold.  I was offered a more permanent position for a department with a reputation that deeply excites me.  Not because it’s “famous” but because of how similar the people and worklife are to what my dreamjob is.

It’s AWESOME.

All of it, all of it catalyzed by love and a shedding of skins.  And I just shed one, again, about what my writing should be like, what it should be about.  I aim to free myself of “should’s”.  When I said I plan on living an amazing life… I meant it.  This is how.

I have become my own best friend.  And the world?  It’s holding my hands, too.

I Love You,

Amparo