Where is the sunshine?

I was reminiscing this week. I remembered how I coped - with anything- in the past. I didn't. I told myself I was fine and I carried on. Now I deal. I don't wave my spiritual wand and end up cured of pain but I now let ‘feels’ through. I see them, feel them and release them.....after much work - eventually. Some of it is on a loop and I chip away at it a little more every time.

There is so much advice out there on how to 'deal with feels.' Not all of it works for every one, but we have to try. I frequently catch a glimpse of an emotion in meditation. I feel something in my chest and then my stomach. I choose to sit in it -which can be awful- and eventually I will see it as a colour and then finally be able to name it. On rare occasions I will get a memory or a reason but for the most part I just get to see it for what it is - Negative, destructive and threat to my well being if left unchecked.

The other way I 'deal with feels' is poetry. Overwhelm, chaos and clarity in words. As soon as it is written I begin to feel better. When I read them back, I remember why I wrote them but I am not sucked back in. I can observe. Over the weekend I was going through my personal anthology and related to each entry deeply. As if they are a tiny part of my whole or a stepping stone in my journey. I couldn't help but notice an unsettling theme. Sadness, anger, shame, confusion, loss, death, grief......OMG!!!! 😱

They are beautiful (if I do say so myself) but where is the sunshine? Where is all the new found joy, the epiphanies, love, pleasure, clarity, surrender or peace? WTF? This journey has not been all darkness, so why is that all I express? 🤷🏻‍♀️ I was quite bleak about it. Could it be that I have become so determined to heal that I got lost in my own issues? I have to say no because I feel so much better, I am happier, lighter and joyful. I paged through my journals and was relieved to find that I have in fact documented all of the positive feels in tremendous detail. But those are journals, not to be shared with anyone while I share poems of various shades of grey with the world.

Maybe its because I am still new to the positive vibes, maybe my sunshine is not as creative as my darkness. Two sides of the same coin, I feel like I need to balance them. I'll start...today. We must work on ourselves, but we cannot forget to stop and enjoy the victories and the calm. Sit in the sunshine too, bask in it! ☀️See the colour, name it, savour it, welcome it. I don't want to do all of this work to be named as an accumulation of hurts but rather an absorber of lessons and an experiencer and reflector of joy.

How will I ever let the light shine through if I am defined by my darkness?