Fatima, welcome.

I know what you mean about feeling like an idiot. I tell you, every day I continue to use the stick of bitterness to punish myself into some form of right action.

It never works.

You shouldn’t be anything other than exactly what you are, where you are, right now. My experience, though incomplete, tells me that acceptance of my location, my heart’s contents, and the truth of my actions is the only place to begin to grow, or change from. Until I am honest with myself, I am certainly doomed to failure, and suffering.

Here’s to truth, love and progress!

For the past few years, or maybe my whole life, I have been trying to learn to listen to my heart. Growing up, I was taught, and “digested”, that the heart represented weakness. So I learnt to analyze everything and look upon every show of emotion as weakness….
Now, as I am being schooled by the universe that in order to find the love I seek, I must reach within, I see how scary and painful it can be to listen to your heart. It is ironic since it is such a vital part of our life force and when we ignore it or dishonor our emotions, we are in essence, stifling the life inside us. I actually feel it throb in pain, in protest when I try to ignore it.

I really have no overriding deep thing to say…just sharing some thoughts I had from reading the posts above :)
I feel like such a bumbling, clumsy idiot sometimes, yet strangely blessed to be on this journey into myself….

Cheers :)

It’s me all over to fail completely to understand how other people can use their will power, or minds to master their emotions. It is alien to me in the way that a person screaming in Arabic holds no familiar phonemes or plosives I can recognize.

My heart is the ruler of my life.

While I have learned that my first response to things is not the truth, in that a passing feeling, or a reaction, is not always true, even an intuitive thought, or suspicion is not always correct. What remains, following meditation, what endures over time, the truth in my heart, is the last word.

As I have sought and sifted through the world for values, beliefs, faith, and morality, I have never accepted anything at face value. Though it is entertaining for my mind to dissect concepts, social interaction, and culture and values, what sticks, and operates in my life are the beliefs and practices which resonate emotionally for me. The opposite is also true of social and cultural dogma. Where society says,”that’s wrong” and because I feel this way, or do that thing, I feel so terrible about myself on some level. I am never quite comfortable, or happy until I see for myself the pale, flimsy, negative judgement which is not my own, but some orphaned idea I digested years ago, and abandon it in favor of the truth in my heart.

I can not imagine what it must be like to be willing and/or capable of taking an intellectual concept and commandeering the heart, bending it’s virtue to the will of some concept, or set of principles. So I am not in a position to speak to that.

I’m glad your heart wins. So many times I feel that my battles come up a draw but I keep trying. I want my heart to win. If I do not risk injury then I will never know the real glory of love. Always believed that.