about a month ago i wrote about how words can be given life by the thoughts and energy you put behind the word. in the same way, words can become lifeless by a shift in your thoughts and feelings that change the energy behind a word.

when i wrote the story about the word shame (here it is if you missed it), i mentioned how i would be telling 3 stories about the life of a word. here is the second…

growing up, i spent all my summers and christmases in louisiana with my brother and 3 cousins, all boys. my uncle would take the boys hunting and fishing while i would stay behind with my aunt. at first, because i LOVE my aunt, i was excited that she wanted to spend time with me all to herself buuuuut, eventually i realized what the boys were doing without me.

for years, i begged them to take me with them, but for years i was never invited. i do recall a couple of fishing trips i got to tag along on but no hunting and i was so deeply disappointed about it.

fast forward almost 30 years and i get into a relationship with a guy who hunts and fishes in louisiana, just like my family, but he takes me with him 🙂 dream come true. i absolutely LOVE being a tag along while he hunts and fishes. it’s simply the best.

so i’m with this guy and i hunt with him and i watch his bird dog, Gypsy, hunting with him but mostly hunting FOR him. it’s so effing cool. this dog is hard wired to find the birds for her human to shoot, then find them once they’ve fallen, and retrieve them back to her human. this right here, is what this wildly energetic dog lives for. and she wants to repeat this process for eternity until you interrupt her by forcing her to drink water or by putting her back in the truck to go home.

after watching them do their thing together over and over i just had to have my own dog to do this for me! voodoo was 11 and not interested sooooo i got a puppy! he was an 8 week old english setter. white with a black head and black polka dots all over his body that they call “ticking”.

i hadn’t had a puppy in 11 years. he was perfection. he was sweet and cuddly as can be, showed me as much affection as i showed him, and when the time came, an EXCELLENT bird dog. his name was Hickory. he was brett and i’s first pup we raised together, and he was extremely special to both of us.

Hickory grew up staying on point (literally and figuratively) with his bird dog instincts and was a beauty and a blast to hunt with. not long after Hicks, Brett got a new pup he named Gus. Gus is a bigger dog and has a extra wild streak in him unlike the others.

of the three dogs, there was a clear favorite. Hickory was it. he had grace and spunk and more energy than the energizer bunny. he was great at holding steady points on birds, he was extremely obedient in the field, and he was Brett’s favorite dog to hunt with whether he admits it or not.

both of us had become extremely attached. even though i hate to admit the truth about how Brett did all the training so Hickory really hunted for him and not me, i still insisted that no matter their relationship, he was always MY dog, and brett insisted the opposite.

if you read the first part of this story about shame, you’d know that brett and i went through an extremely rocky and difficult time in our relationship between last year and this one. during this difficult time, thoughts of separating were on our minds but one thing that kept us tied together was that neither of us could bare the pain of losing Hicks. neither of us could stand to be separated from him. when only strings held us together, unknowingly Hickory was one of them.

if i heard the word Hickory, i had an instant smile, if not on the outside, on the inside for sure. only fondness existed when he came to mind. i especially enjoyed observing him move. he would leap around the yard, over fences, over dogs, or mostly over nothing but air like a little gazelle or antelope just really excited and hoppy.

so as you can see, the word hickory was pure light for me—that is, until he unexpectedly died in January. then things shifted, the light dimmed and the energy that existed when i heard the word hickory was dark, heavy, sinking and trying to pull me down with it. the vision that came to mind wasn’t of leaping hickory, it was of how he looked the last time i saw him—dead with his tongue hanging out.

our hickory thread was broken and our hearts were painfully broken, but miraculously, those broken hearts, broke us open and broke us into our relationship. the threads binding us together rerooted themselves as we dug deeper within ourselves. our new roots grew from our courage to get clear and be honest about our own truth and our own pain.

i believe the threads that connect us to others are made up of two strings, one from each of us, that spiral and bind together to make the whole thread. i believe the strongest of the last few threads between Brett and i was made up of all that we had held back from each other, all we didn’t say, all we didn’t do, all we didn’t appreciate and all we took for granted.

i entered into this relationship wearing my past experiences on my sleeve. i’m not saying that was right or wrong, just saying, the closing wounds and thoughts from my last relationships were still at the forefront of my mind and clouding my ability to see clear, to truly be clear and to be honest with myself and him. regardless, we are where we are, i can see more clearly than i could before, and it feels liberating to not hold anything back.

it came to the point where the fear of us separating was less than the fear of my not being my true authentic and honest self with him. ever since then, we’ve both been getting really honest and it has helped nurture the bond between us.

rewind to february—just a couple short weeks after hickory had died, i swooped up another puppy. voodoo had died the previous year, and although “we” had two more dogs, i felt like i didn’t have a dog anymore, and the thought of being dog-less felt unbearable during this tough time in my life.

the new pup’s name is Boggs and he is also an english setter. he is not very loving and cuddly, he does not leap all cute like a gazelle, and even though i adore him, he has very little interest in getting attention from me unless it involves food. he is a completely different kind of dog and a completely different teacher.

when we first got Boggs, and i would think about Hickory, i’d feel guilt and sadness. as much as i liked boggs, i’d compare him to hickory and get even more sad about losing my favorite little buddy. but, many months later, now that boggs is bigger and acting more like an adult setter, he reminds me of Hickory a lot and things have changed. the more Boggs acts like Hicks, barks like Hicks, hops like Hicks and so on, the more i smile remembering my lil buddy.

the more thoughts of Hickory that come to mind and the more i smile remembering him, the more life and vitality the word Hickory has to me.

time, patience, and love change everything. EVERYTHING. the life of “hickory” has been revived for me. in fact, that lil shit Boggs is outside barking right now and he sounds just like Hickory did. only problem now is, i keep wanting to call him Hicks…

V.

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It’s happening and you cannot stop it. Life will challenge you and you cannot escape.

I just sat down to write but I don’t have a plan of what to write. Finding—no scratch that—MAKING the time to sit down and write is by far the hardest part of writing for me.

But now, I’m sitting pretty because the hardest part is out of the way. Ok, what to write… Since I don’t have a clear vision of what i want to write, i’ll explain how i start. I use writing as a way to assess the state I’m in, to figure out what’s going on inside me, or to figure out what’s got my panties in a bunch. Regardless of what I am after, I just start with a simple question. This simple question opens the door for me to explore.

So what will the question be today? I don’t know, but i want to write about my insides, hmmmm. I’ll start with…

Why do you want to write about “your insides”?

Because lately, they’ve been quite interesting. There is a lot going on in my small world, including a lot going on in the lives of people close to me and when I watch people face challenges in their own lives, I become more and more intrigued by mankind.

No two people are the same, but our similarities with each other are everything.

It’s interesting how many people I’ve witnessed wanting so badly to be different, for their lives or circumstances to be unlike anyone else’s, so that they can insist on feeling as if it’s too hard for anyone to understand them.

Yet, at the root of that thought that keeps being repeated for them “I’m unlike any other so it’s too hard for anyone to understand me” is a screaming, crying human begging the world to see and understand them.

I’ve witnessed time and time again people putting up an arm, like a sword, to keep people from getting closer, to keep people from being able to truly see the real person beneath the armor. Many people do this, my friends do this, shit i do this.

I see this as a form of self-destruction, self-sabotage, self-mutilation and self-harm. But I don’t see this as WRONG, i see this as HUMAN and i see it as necessary. Fear convinces us that we are alone, that we are too far out for anyone to understand us, and that it’s better to just keep to ourselves and keep our shit to ourselves.

If you keep to yourself (keep your armor on) you don’t get your shit (your blood) on anybody and nobody gets their shit on you. Except that’s not true. Your shit IS you. It surrounds you. It exudes from you. It gets on everything you touch and seeps into every space you occupy.

If you think it’s better to keep your shit to yourself so that it doesn’t affect other people, you are delusional. Your shit is already affecting other people. YOU affect other people. Until your death, you can’t escape the world or it’s people. No matter how much you keep to yourself, know that your skin does not contain the mess within. You spill out into the world and onto people whether you mean to or not.

Take responsibility for your shit and everything you are going through. Work to heal your wounds by letting them breathe, by sharing your battle stories, by letting people see the real wounded human that you are. We cannot learn to understand the armored soldier who’s ready to fight. We can’t see his face, to see the pain. We never see his eyes, therefore we never see his soul.

The ironic thing about keeping our swords up, and our armor on is that the weight gets exhausting, the wounds stay wrapped up tight festering and the arm holding the sword has no strength left to wield it. Sure the armor keeps you together and the sword protects you from people getting too close but now you are weak, and you can barely defend yourself.

Taking off the armor is like setting down a weight, plus it lets the wounds breathe and heal. Putting our swords down enables us to take a break, to gain some strength back, and to use the arm for other things—like reaching out, instead of keeping everyone out.

My writing all of this started by acknowledging that people all around me are facing some tough situations. Challenging, tough situations stress us, wound us, and reveal the deepest, darkest things within us. Fear and pain thrive in stress, in wounds, and in darkness. It’s the tough and challenging times that bring up the toughest, most challenging things that exist inside us.

So what the cuss do you do when the tough and challenging time is upon you? You accept it. You accept that you are scared, that you are wounded and in pain. The only other thing to do is, deny it, suit up in your armor, and pick up your sword. But why do that? Are you going into battle?

You can battle through this or you can live through this. When you battle through, you fight. When you fight, you fight to win. But what does it mean for you to win here? You cannot win life.

You also cannot win against fear or pain because they are not your contenders. Fear and pain are your teachers. Rather than battle through, live through this and learn from each and every teacher that appears along the way.

Whether you win this battle or live through this hard time, you will not get out of being human alive. And when you die, you go alone, with all that stuff you’ve kept inside you. You can go with fear and pain scaring you all the way to death, or go with love and acceptance for the life you lived and learned from.

all the words you know, have life because you breathe life into them. if a word causes you to feel something, it’s because you give the word a meaning to feel. i want to tell you three stories about three words i’ve had this experience with: shame, hickory and mallard.

I’m using these 3 stories as a way to share with you what i’ve been learning and experiencing over the last year and to make my way back to sharing with you, to connecting with you and to honor the deepest desires of my own heart—to live my human life boldly, out loud, and unapologetically as a perfectly, imperfect human doing the best she can while she’s still here.

all 3 stories end with the same note. this is the first of the three stories…

last year, i started feeling really frustrated, unsettled and uneasy in my relationship with my partner. we both knew it was happening, but neither of us knew how to make a move, make a shift, make a change, we just knew individually that we weren’t happy and thus we sat in the pile of our own mess we didn’t know how to clean up or move out of.

after months of this, i (subconsciously) came up with a way to move things that ended up sweeping our feet out from under us. i went against everything i’ve ever practiced, believed in, or stood for and for an entire month, I engaged in infidelity.

at the time, i truly and selfishly believed that what i was doing was exactly what i needed, exactly what i wanted, and it was pretty much inevitable with the way my relationship was going — but my feeling that way, was me convincing myself that I was owning my behavior and therefore OK with it. the more i convinced myself i deserved this time, the more at ease with it i became.

but underneath it all, i was never ok with it, i just wanted to be ok with it so that’s how i behaved.

when the month was over the storm began. NOTHING was ok. my partner wasn’t ok, i wasn’t ok, and our world was turned upside-down by my actions. i was upside-down with my head neck deep in shame, in disgust and in disbelief of what i had done and how much i had destroyed.

i had shattered his trust in me. i’ve never done anything like that with someone. I’m an honest person. i don’t hurt people. i don’t give people a reason not to trust me. i preach the importance of listening to and living through the truth of our own hearts — but my month of behavior turned against all of this.

i turned against myself — and this is how i gave shame a strong and powerful presence in my life for the months to come. this is how i gave life to the word “shame”.

in case you are unfamiliar with an experience like this (and god i hope you are), when partners decide to stay together and attempt to “work things out” after something like this, there is A LOT of talking.

talking means owning things and at this point, owning even the smallest true bit of my behavior brought on the biggest shame storm cloud. so, every single conversation (and there were waaaay too many to count), every single time i had the courage to own even a spec of this story, i would sit in the downpour of my own shame for days or sometimes weeks at a time.

i’ve never been that sad in all of my life. i was shocked to realize that the person that could make me feel the worst, was me, and me alone.

my extreme sadness and shame was a direct result of the pain i caused my partner. it felt impossible to bare the truth that I — as the honest & authentic person i thought myself to be — made conscious decisions that caused my partner to be unable to trust me. conscious decisions that caused the loss of my own integrity.

living in my own pit of despair, this was a regular conversation i had with myself

“why are you here? what’s keeping you here?”

“ugh, i’m just so, so, so fucking sad, i can’t shake it.”

“why?”

“shame. i am absolutely disgusted with myself. i’ve never felt this ashamed in all my life”

“alright. shame then. if this is me now, what can i learn from all of this shame and sadness?”

AND THE LEARNING BEGAN…

– breaking the trust someone has in me is how my shame is conceived.

– the dishonesty that comes from lying to myself or someone else is shame’s life force.

– shame can arrive the size of a pea, and grow to the size of a boulder.

– shame is a reaction to myself when my behavior doesn’t align with my heart and soul.

– shame cannot coexist with acceptance, understanding and forgiveness.

– if i hide from shame, it attaches to my back and the weight drags me down but if i own my shame, if i pick it up and choose to carry it, it becomes lighter as i become stronger.

– acting out of alignment with my heart & soul causes me physical illness

After about 6 months of apprenticing shame, I had learned all that shame was able to teach me—this time. And after those six months, i had a better understanding of the life of shame. in that time, i actually befriended shame like an imaginary friend. i gave shame life by experiencing it, by feeling it and living it.

But in the end, i also took life away from shame. i became so familiar with how shame lives, all it’s habits, all it’s fears and i began to put myself face-to-face with all the little nuances that gave shame life. Through this process, I began to evict shame from my temple.

Today, shame is just a memory. It’s no longer a living, breathing entity in my life. I breathed life into shame, and then i sucked the life right out of it.

Shame, just like ‘love’, and just like ‘god’, is a word only you can breathe life into. And when you don’t need shame in your life any longer, it’s a word you can suck the life right back out of.

THE END NOTE

i’ve come to realize my life is not for getting better and better and better until i am the best i can be. it’s about learning, it’s about growing, and it’s about perpetuating the process. as i rise to higher levels of consciousness, of awareness, of understanding, no matter how seemingly ugly the experiences that got me there are, i must share what it’s like to be this human.

when i open up and share the truth about my struggles, my challenges, my failures, and my shame accompanied by my lessons, my understanding, my influence, my successes and my aim — those who see me, see themselves in me, see what’s possible in their own lives or come to a better understanding of how it may be for other people they know.

Either way, every single time i connect with you, learn about you, understand or support you, WE become stronger. my life isn’t about ME becoming stronger, my life is about US all rising together.

…and so is yours…

with so much love, and so much truth, i appreciate you being here with me, Veazey

now is real. what’s possible is part of an infinity of maybes. maybes are thoughts in your head — not real, unlike the tangible, sensable experience you’re having right now — which is as real as it gets.

moves that must be made right now, to respond to the current stimuli and situation are you acting in the present. this is you being.

you don’t get to BE in the past or in the future. the only place you get to be is here and now. but in your head, there are infinite possibilities and therefore infinite moves to be made to get from where you are here and now, to the imaginary illusion in your head.

but the imaginary illusion in your head, is part of an infinity of maybes. so if we’re being real, pretty much every maybe, every imaginary situation in your head isn’t even likely at all.

you guide the future, through your actions in the present. but, just like every imaginary situation in your head isn’t even likely at all, your actions control a microscopic amount of what actually occurs in the future.

on one level, you are mighty and powerful, on another level, you’re dust. your thoughts words and actions are extremely significant, yet completely virtually invisible to the beings on earth.

i like to think, your future belongs to what you put your mind to.
within life on earth, beauty surrounds you, because as a living being, the beauty you experience is tied and connected to your life. you cannot separate yourself from this world. as a living being of earth, you sense beauty, observe beautiful things, and feel beauty as an experience in your body.

beauty /ˈbyo͞odē/
noun. a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses or the intellect.

to witness beauty, is to be conscious of this present moment, right now. you might create something beautiful in your mind, but you cannot witness true beauty within the confines of your head.

i think when you are unable to see beauty right in front of you, or have lost sight of it, then there is nothing to keep you here, present, paying attention to right now. if the lenses you see your life through do not detect things that please your senses or intellect, there’s nothing to draw you in. therefore, the thoughts in your mind draw you in as they are infinite, always changing, and many to toss around.

when you spend all your time in your head, attending to illusions, you cannot see what’s actually going on around you, you cannot see the beauty surrounding you. if you cannot see the truth, then your reactions, or responses, to the world around you will not align with what is true. your actions will align with the illusions you pay attention to in your head.

if your thoughts words and actions align better with the infinite possible maybes in your head than they do with the real beautiful world surrounding you, you are headed down a road of sadness, self-sabotage and loneliness.

let the truth and the beauty of this world have you. let what is happening right now guide your thoughts, words and actions. pay closer attention to the true beauty in every little thing and much less attention to the endless delusions in your own mind.

be a human being or you’ll miss out entirely on the beauty of this life.

we’re just about halfway through yoga teacher training. it’s incredible how people change, shift, face their fears and grow. it’s more than incredible, it’s … there are no words … but no doubt this journey is changing my life. i will never forget this moment. guiding 11 people through the transition from yoga students to yoga teachers, is wonderfully illuminating, like beautiful soul magic. they are all so incredible. they blow my mind. they bring me to tears. they are really doing the work—and they are doing it under pressure. this course spans over 15 weeks and we are at the 10-week mark.

needless to say, i feel emotional, empowered, confident, impressed, excited and just plain stoked.

because i spend so much time guiding, coaching and teaching them as they go through all of this work, it feels NECESSARY that i stay on top of my own game, walking the walk as i talk the talk. i’ll be honest with you, i’ve been working through A LOT.

over the last 6 months i’ve been digging so cussing DEEP it pulls the breath out of me. in every aspect of my life, i’m asking myself, “what do you want?” i know that if i don’t like where i am, i get to make new choices about where i’m going, but first, i have to know where i want to go if i want to see whether or not i’m choosing what i want.

some parts of my life feel good and solid and certain while others are unsettled, in motion and not completely in my control. there are things i just don’t know how to address, things left out of sync, and things that still need my attention but i’m ignoring them because i don’t know what to do.

my future is very uncertain but i’m not especially concerned with it. i want to dig into this moment right now. just by taking the time to get more and more familiar with me, with my heart’s desires and what i REALLY want, i’ve been experiencing a lot emotionally, physically and spiritually. i’ve been recoiling, expanding, writing, sharing, hurting, healing, and curiously through it all, nurturing, thriving, and growing.

today, one of the students in my yoga teacher training taught the first half of an hour-long class for the first time. she fucking nailed it. she opened the class with the usual breathing, listening, mind/body connecting like we always do and right before we started to move she said:

“keep an open mind, and be here” — sometimes the universe tells people to say exactly what you need to hear. i needed to hear that as a reminder to set my focus on what’s happening in my body on my mat today and i needed that as a reminder to set my focus on what’s happening in my life right now.

part of the work i’ve been putting into myself has included breaking my habit of dreaming of something better than what i have. i’m constantly bringing myself back to the present moment and digging into emotions, feelings, and things happening right now that make me want to look away and dream of something better. i want to know why i insist on wishing, hoping, and dreaming of something better when i have more than enough power over my life to make different choices to work towards balance in the things i lack.

i want to listen to what my heart has to say, i want to put my finger on what i know to be true and mark it down for me to review. all i really want to do is “keep an open mind, and be here”. this is my work. at times, it seems this work will challenge me forever, but today, when she said that, the never-ending work became infinitely worth every hard lesson and challenge.

when i “keep an open mind, and be here”, the absolute truth is: life is good, life is precious, life is a gift—even when i pretend it’s not.