There is a VAST difference between 'judging' and exercising judgment with understanding and that of being 'judgmental'. Many folk conflate the two.

Don’t judge! Oh goodness, we are judging all the time. 

And thank God for that- it keeps us from walking down the wrong paths, making unhealthy decisions, destroying our lives. 

Even those who criticize judgment are judging. It's fundamental to the human experience. Perhaps the real question is not IF we are judging or discerning if you prefer, but WHY we are judging? 

Is it benevolently or malevolently intended? 

Are we judging in a forward-moving effort to distinguish unhealthy from healthy, or are we judging as a reflection of an unresolved superiority complex? 

Are we judging because we have a need to call out the madness of the world, or as a direct reflection of it? 

Where are we coming FROM?

I feel startled and infuriated by those who call people who suicide "cowards". It is the heights of arrogance and insensitivity to imagine ourselves judges over a person's decision to stay or to go. 

Only the individual knows what trauma they are carrying, what pain they have known, and what darkness blankets their inner world, what courage it has taken to even stay this long. 

Only the individual soul knows what path it is here to walk and when its time has come. If you are lucky enough to have never considered suicide in this challenging world, then get down on your knees and thank your lucky stars. 

Really, get down and kiss the ground and give thanks. But do not judge those who have made a different choice. 

But for the grace of God there go you...

If someone dies from heart disease, we don't blame them and call them cowards. "They should have exercised more.""They should have eaten better."

If someone dies from skin cancer, we don't blame them and call them cowards. "They should have worn sunscreen.""They should have gone to the dermatologist."

If someone dies from depression, we blame them and call them cowards. "They should have picked themselves up and gotten over it" "They should have stopped being so selfish."

We have a long, long road towards ending the stigma of "mental" illness. Until we see all illness as an illness, without qualifiers or distinctions like this is physical and this is mental, then there won't be insurance, funding, compassion, empathy, or an end to the crisis of severe depression.

We lose so many people every day to an unresolved pain that overwhelms their consciousness. More than 800,000 people suicide each year worldwide and around one person every 40 seconds. Few are well-known. 

Most live anonymous lives. 

We must prioritize authentic revealing and emotional release in our world. We must slow down to see each other deeply and to share our inner worlds so that no one feels alone with their pain. 

We must find a way to bring our compassion to bare with others. 

There are so many of us here, yet so many suffer in isolation. We have to keep peeling the masks away. We have to keep sharing our truths. We have to. 

Our survival depends on it.

love light and peace

ps/smoh

If you want to change your thinking, heal your heart...

"To arrive at this place in my life, I had to overcome so very much. I had to overcome crippling abandonment issues, internalized shame, and self-doubt. I had to punch my way through endless challenges as I worked to become the person I am and to surrender to writing as a path. 

I had to fight for my right to the light, time and time again, for more than 5 decades.

If there is one thing that distinguishes those who are able to move on from crazy families, from those who remain dysfunctionally trapped within them, it is that the former were able to disidentify with where they came from and seek their identity elsewhere. At some point, they made the courageous, bold decision that they were not them and that they had to look elsewhere for direction and family. This is often a very difficult thing to do because crazy families don’t usually give us the love that grows us capable of taking flight, but it is the only possibility if you wish to break the cycle. Someone has to step out and craft a new path home. Some realities are worth running from…

We all want to manifest our callings, but timing is everything. I learned this the hard way. I always knew I would write, but I didn’t understand that I needed to build the foundation first.

 So, I sat down to write, time and again, and I couldn’t quite find it. I knew there was a writer living in there somewhere, but I couldn’t find her. I needed a little more time, a little more suffering, a lot more lessons. I hadn’t lived enough to manifest her.

In this driven world, we are often pushed too early. We are shamed for our uncertainty, insulted for our confusion, called lazy and selfish. But some callings need time to be cultivated. Some gifts cannot be opened too quickly. We have to craft them first, over time, in the fires of lived experience.

If you have a calling living inside of you, don’t rush to manifest it. Trust your own instincts as to the steps you need to take. Build the inner foundation you will need to see it through. Better to offer this ailing world one remarkable thing, than a hundred fragments of possibility.
We need what you have to offer desperately.

We must not give up. It takes so much time to heal because we are not just healing our own wounds we are healing the world’s wounds, too. We think we are alone with our ‘stuff’, but we aren’t. With every clearing of our emotional debris, with every foray into a healthier way of being, with every excavation and release of old material, we heal the collective heart. So many of our familial and karmic ancestors had little opportunity to heal their pains. When we heal, their spirits breathe a sigh of relief. We heal them backwards while healing ourselves forward.
We heal in unison.

When people ask me how and why I did it, I only have one answer- Soul. Not ego, not masochism, not the need to be acknowledged but, instead, the deep need to fully excavate and actualize my soul’s voice- my reasons for being, my entelechy, what James Hillman called the ‘innate image’. It was like a desperate longing to be who I was called to become in this lifetime. And as difficult as it was to find and live that voice, it was easier than the uncomfortable alternative. It was easier than living a lie.

Wherever you are at on your journey through time, be assured that there is a soul path somewhere at the heart of it. And, as difficult as it may be to see it, as overwhelming as it may seem to embody it, it is well worth the effort. Once you catch a glimpse of it, it will beckon you home, like a fire of divine possibility with your name on it. And that fire… will not only show you the direction to walk, it will fuel you as you overcome the obstacles in the way. It will warm and inspire your every step.

When you walk through the gateway of your sacred purpose, you walk into yourself. Blessing buffered from the madness of the world, your purpose filters out those relationships and energies that undermine your expansion. Infused with vitality and a clarified focus, new pathways of possibility appear where before there were obstacles. Life still has its challenges, but you interface with them differently, coated in an authenticity of purpose that sees through the veils to what really matters."

Don’t lose the faith, wherever you are on the path.
Keep going…

Sometimes we forget how far we have travelled while we are looking ahead to the next steps. Good to lie down and remember what it took to get this far, all those karmic hoops we had to jump through, all those overcomings. Good to stroke our face with love and to remind ourselves how much courage it took and who we would have become if we hadn’t braved the journey. Good to say ‘thank you’ to the inner spirit that walks within and beside us, whispering sweet somethings in our inner ear, reminding us that we are simply and utterly worth fighting for. We ARE simply
and utterly worth fighting for.

Growing is all about leaps into the seeming unknown...

Presence is a whole being experience..

ps/smoh
love light and peace