giving thanks to your scars

That scar on your face that everyone notices is more beautiful than your otherwise flawless skin.

It says more about where you've been and less about where you're going.

It's written all over your imperfect truth.

It's a trail.

The trail where no one wants to know where you're headed.

They are in awe of where you've been.

How you've survived.

No one looks ahead on a map without first looking at where they've come from.

So, the next time you feel ashamed of your mistakes, 

remember to be proud that you're still standing.

Be thankful that you are aged another day in your life and that you are better than yesterday.

Still coming from somewhere to get somewhere else.

Entering healing from an exit wound.

Maybe you got shot down.

Maybe you fell.

Either way, the beautiful scar is yours.

Own it.

There's always beauty in that kind of thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving.
I'm thankful for all of you who follow me at Soul Inspiration.

~ L ~

lesson on vulnerability

"Real isn't how you are made, said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you.  When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes, said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.  "When you are Real, you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse.  "You become.  It takes a long time.  That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.  

But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

~ excerpt from the children's story, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

this word in my dictionary III

ca-pac-i-ty: noun;    the maximum amount that something can contain.

~ ~ ~

Every public building has a known maximum capacity for it's occupants at any given point in time.

But do you know the capacity for your own inner private space?

Do you know when you've had enough, when you're about to burst?

Do you know where the exit is and what's in the way of it?

The final maximum occupancy ordered by the fire marshall will include all these types of considerations, making sure there is never too many people or obstacles in the room that getting out of the space in an emergency would prove impossible.  

But that's only known because somehow, somewhere at some point in time

someone couldn't get out.

It was a learned lesson. The space had to test itself to determine what it's capacity was.

By now you know one of my favorite intellectuals of all time is Eckhart Tolle.
On this matter, he says we have the most capacity for growth through the empty space that we allow to be.

Empty space has the capacity to be filled, displaced or ignored.

Less stuff in the space makes for more capacity inside.

Less is more.

You can learn your limits only through trial and error.

Someone once asked me,
"How do you exit discomfort?"

Frustration can come out of my seams
when the glue called 'defense mechanism' fails to do its job.

Time to review the maximum capacity limits within,
especially as the EXIT sign of 2013 is right around the corner.

~L~