Stories about Love: Episode 4

 Episode Four of my stories on love is about animals.  Some people will relate easily to love for animals, while others will not relate at all.  Loving animals is real love and should be talked about. In this Episode of my stories on love, I will tell you the stories of two special animals that changed my heart.

Animals, such as those that we have as common house pets:  dogs, cats, bird or fish:  can have an impact on us that is profound.  I bet you have never even given thought to the possibility that an animal can be a human's soulmate or Twin Flame.  Some people have trouble even accepting that humans often feel such a deep connection with their animals that they consider them just like family!  Remember the Disney cartoon Aristocats?  The cats were to inherit the fortune from their owner.  The Animals would  then become Masters of their house and the servants were jealous.  

I never had a pet that I was attached to until I got Lucy.  She was the greatest cat a person could have.  I was so sensitive to Lucy that when she passed away, I felt completely empty for months.  Our house was so quiet.  She was a simple animal...she was not particularly impressive as a cat.  She was scared of people and would hide a lot.  But sometimes she cuddled with me and purred loudly.  She played, and it was adorable.  There was just something so satisfying about her.  When she died, I was offered a replacement cat right away.  This didn't feel right to me, and so I chose to NOT replace Lucy.  Eventually, other animals replaced her, but I REALLY GRIEVED when we lost her.  I allowed myself to feel things I had not felt for people or animals before...I let myself be sad.  Was this the whole reason that Lucy had come into my life in the first place?

Another animal that changed my views on love was a dog.  Her name was Cadence.  Cadence was a beautiful and active dog, who found trouble everywhere she went.  I had significant difficulty understanding her.  She was problematic, caused many moments of absolutely life altering frustrations, and nearly tore my family apart!  Cadence started to fail due to age...but it happened slowly enough that our anger and frustration at her constant troublemaking, turned to pity and then sorrow as we watched her life change dramatically.  Suddenly, she was slow and unable to get into her usual troubles.  She began to mellow out due to no longer having that same amount of fight in her.  When it was time to say goodbye, it was utterly heartbreaking for all of us.

Some people will be able to relate to this having had a pet of their own that they lost.

So what do we learn from this type of love?

1.    Deep love can exist between a person and an animal the same as it can between two adults romantically or a parent and a child.  Animals have a soul and a spirit, and that essence causes a bond to grow.  Just like any other feelings of love, they can deepen over time. But Love is not just the feelings of affection and desire.  Love is a bond.

2.    An Animal CAN be your Soulmate or Twin Flame.  One must first understand what a Twin Flame is before understanding how an animal can be that to a person.  I would venture that it is rare but not unheard-of. A TF comes to your life to teach you to see your truth, live your purpose.  A TF awakens you!  Why can't an animal be one?

3.    Love is NOT just a feeling of affection.  It is a deep desire to serve.  A pet or an animal, energetically needs a human to provide for it (if it is a domesticated animal).  The needs to care for this animal can be truly healing.  It is not to be underestimated!

I hope that this will resonate with some people out there.

Namaste~

Lilac

Stories about Love: Episode 3

 Episode Three in my written series about Love and how love has changed me, is about my husband.  I cannot hide that it is my husband so hopefully I can do justice to the relationship.

In every person's life there comes a time to make a choice on one person and to make a life together.  Actually...is that even true?  Maybe it's not this way for EVERY person...but for those who seek and find love and want marriage and families, then it is definitely a part of their journey.

My marriage journey began in 2016 when against all odds, I married my best friend Jamie.  I won't be changing his name for privacy because, well...there is no privacy!  

Of all of my Episodes of Love, the Marriage relationship is by far the most important one.  You see, before and then during a marriage, there is work.  This is the part that most romantics will not enjoy...and I spent my life as a hopeless romantic...chasing people, chasing feelings, being swayed every which way.  Facing disappointments and sadness all the time.  In an ironic twist, at the tail end of a year of life-coaching, I concluded with marrying Jamie.  We had gone around and around on it for years.  We finally tied the knot.

Episode three has a fairly simple message: 

1.    FEAR of allowing another person to love you and truly know you and really be there for you, will prevent you from experiencing Real Love.  At some point, you take the leap and you trust that your partner means what they say and that they act out their truth.  In short, you have to trust that your Lover, loves themselves!

2.    I knew that I needed to marry Jamie and so I did.  We were both certain that this was our destiny.  Together we form a complete protein!  Neither one of us is somehow incomplete without the other.  We are both capable of taking care of our own selves with or without the other person.  But together, we saw that we were stronger.

3.    Learning and Growth happen within a marriage.  It was not entirely clear at the time that we married one another, what we would grow to learn together as a couple and as a family...but those lessons most assuredly presented themselves.  Some of those lessons nearly destroyed us as a couple.  But it didn't.  We got stronger as we learned to overcome and push through and find our ways back to one another.

4.    Love endures.  If you think you cannot go through the worst of the worst with a partner and survive, I think it's not true.  I think you can.  You can exercise love like a muscle.  It is alive after all.  Give people room to show you what is in their hearts.  Give it time to grow.

I hope Episode Three's lesson on marriage gives you hope if yours is in a dark place.  Not everyone should stay married, but everyone should recognize what kind of a marriage they are in and check in with themselves about how they are doing.

~Namaste

Lilac

Stories about Love: Episode 2

 I really enjoyed writing my first Episode in the Series about Love.  I am excited to tell you the next story because it changed me so much.  This story is about my Twin Flame (I think).  I say that because learning about Twin connections came from my relationship with this person.  

Episode Two

I never believed in the idea of One perfect Soul Match in love.  I came to discover this idea first when I was in high school.  I was an avid reader back then and I discovered Plato's theory of Split-Aparts.  New Age Spiritualists call this "Twin Flames".  Whatever it is called, I never believed in it, until I experienced it.

I met Beck when I was very young- I think I was about 18 years old.  I remember him being mysterious and interesting.  He was plenty handsome.  I think a lot of my friends were into him.  He was not my type (I thought back then)...I did not see us as having anything in common.  We never dated, just had the same circle of friends.

Many years later, I reconnected with Beck when he reached out to me to discuss a business opportunity.  Maybe I was flattered to be remembered, or maybe I was just interested in learning something new, but I responded affirmatively and so our two families made a connection.  I enjoyed his wife's company and our children would play together.  The only thing that I felt that was different from many years having passed, was that I felt a connection to him that I did not feel to his wife nor to other people in the organization.  It wasn't like I felt attraction, because it wasn't actually attraction (not at first anyway).  It was something more but I could not place it.

A year or more passed before the revelation of what I was feeling made itself very clear to me.  I was working on a project for our group collaboration.  I was working alongside Beck's wife, and I was sitting at his desk in his office when I felt if hit me like lightning.  A sudden flash of information seemed to download into my mind (through my crown chakra).  At the time that this happened, I could not have told you what a Crown Chakra was, or an Awakening, or a Spiritual Download.  In fact, I did not know what was happening or why I suddenly knew what I knew...I just did.

So what I suddenly knew was that this man Beck was my twin.  What did it mean though?  I saw that he reflected back to me all that I am (was)... and that we were the same.  I was so completely confused because up until that point, I did not even feel an attraction to him beyond friendship.  So what is a Twin Flame?  And more importantly...was Beck REALLY my Twin Flame?  and also...Beck is married so why would someone married be my Twin Flame?

I had no idea at the time, why I was drawn to this person.  Later I watched him transform his situation, allowing himself to grow into a different and more spiritually free person.  He eventually broke away from the marriage that he was in, later remarrying.  We never did get into a relationship with one another, but we talked about the spiritual awakening and what it had meant to us, how it changed us, what the value of that kind of a transformation was.

What did I learn from my Twin Flame Awakening about Love?

1.     Love doesn't care what time it is- who is married or single-if you are gay or straight...Love is Timeless.  Love is fluid.  I had no idea that I was even attracted to Beck until the download.  Suddenly I saw how similar we were.  We were both experiencing a free flow of love and were being swept up in a wave that was about to propel us both forward.

2.    My relationship with my Twin Flame was going to be the catalyst that would bring huge change into my world and bring me alive again.  That is the purpose of a Twin Flame Love.  

3.    I was going to learn everything I needed to know about love now because this doorway to spirit was now open.  The funny part is, the journey was not a journey of duality, or of unification.  The journey is to greater love for your own self, which deepens the love your Twin experiences with or without you.

4.    Beck may or may not have been my true Twin Flame.  He may have just been the first of many people who would come into my life and show me that love has very few defined borders.  Like water, love wants to flow freely.

Episode Two Lesson on love:

Give love freely.  

Love has it's own energy, it's own direction.  

It cannot be easily tamed nor defined.  

It does not play by the rules of society.  

Love just exists.

~Namaste

Lilac

Stories about LOVE. Episode one

 I have decided to tell my stories about Love...one by one.  Each story will have a goal and that goal is to teach whomever is reading it, a lesson about love.

Episode One

Sometimes falling in love happens at inconvenient times...like when you are already in a relationship, but you meet someone that turns your world on its side.  For example, when I met Daniel.  Daniel and I hit it off right away.  We both had other relationships and obligations to focus on in life but were at the same place emotionally and mentally and also physically (meaning that we were together on a regular basis).  There is something to be said about being in a person's day to day life.  It seems to always lead to strong personal relationships...unless you really do not like one another at all!  But Daniel and I were both very focused on why we were there.  We both had goals and many things happening in our lives, and yet...there was a connection made between us, and it felt stronger than just friendship.

Neither Daniel nor myself had given any thought to changing our direction in life at the time that we met...nor the years that followed.  But after several years of a peaceful coexistence, it started to become clear that Daniel and I had an easiness about being around each other.  We had similar views and opinions.  We never argued.  We had the same sort of temperment as one another- neither of us particularly extrovert nor introvert.  We enjoyed the same foods and could sit quietly in each other's presence without feeling the need to break the silence.  We both had a gentleness and a way of getting people to talk to us about themselves and then genuinely caring about the other person's story.

Daniel had been married for a long time,  I suppose from a very young age.  From the outside, his marriage looked perfect.  Nothing can interfere with a healthy marriage, right?  My relationship was at a point where it could end or not end and I had lost feelings there for what would happen.  I started to form an attachment to Daniel because of all of the things I described above.  I felt that he was worthy of admiration and was very pleasant.  He was also very handsome.  I felt strongly attracted to Daniel physically.  I felt like I knew him...from the moment we had first met I had the feeling of knowing him deeply.  Over the years, I gave it very little thought.  However, in the looming ending of my existing love relationship, Daniel came to mind more and more.  I found myself comparing other potential partners to him, and they did not measure up.  I had him on a pedestal.

I was afraid of how Daniel would respond if I ever brought up the idea that I was attracted to him...or the idea that I thought it might be mutual!  After all, he seemed (to anyone who was watching)to be a happily married man.  I decided one day that I just needed to tell him how I felt and ask him if it was just me alone feeling like there was something between us.  His answer came in a long passionate kiss that he planted on me suddenly.  The kiss went on and on, unapologetically.  It was not just me that felt this attraction.  Anyone could suggest that this was just infatuation but we were not teenagers.  This was not some puppy love.  We knew each other well- we knew nearly everything of importance there was to know about one another.  This was love.

Alas, it was not meant to be.  

Daniel was not going to disrupt his life, his marriage and his home.  He acknowledged that the feelings of connectedness were real, and that he had felt them for probably as long as I had- also maybe from the first time we met also.  But none of these similarities in our situations were going to cause Daniel to take action toward any type of partnership with me. In fact, he decided that his behavior had been inappropriate, and he stopped talking to me at all for years.  He cut me off completely.  The emptiness was so painful that it felt like he had died, and I was left to grieve that loss.

So was this actually love then?  I guess I was wrong about what love was. I had decided that it was not just attraction or infatuation.  It was also not just friendship.  So what happened between Daniel and me? After a while, Daniel reached out and tried to see if I might stay in his life, but secretly.  Perhaps our relationship would be about secret meetings to kiss or be more physical...but nothing of substance, because he was married after all.  His wife could not know.  To make it even worse, the affect I had on Daniel was so dramatic that although we did meet secretly a few times, he cut it off yet again because his wife could sense him being different and he was afraid we would be discovered.  If we were, he would lose everything he had built in his life that was so important to him.

So...were Daniel and I ever actually in love?  If it was not love, then what was it?  I cannot speak for Daniel, but I know that when I realized what HE meant to me...how HE made me feel...I was forever changed and altered by it.  I believe he was too, but I have no way of knowing because Daniel could never truly open up and be real with me about what he felt or wanted.  I had believed that we were in love, maybe star crossed lovers.  But what did he think of us?

I may never know what Daniel truly felt.  But let's examine what this story taught me about love.

1.     Love is NOT about what you feel.  Feelings are an important part of Love.  But they do NOT define what IS love and what is not love.  In the case of Daniel and I, there were certainly feelings on both sides of the aisle.  What was missing was not feelings.  It was the ability to act on them.  Daniel needed to follow his heart.  His heart was with his marriage.  it was not for me to decide whether or not it SHOULD be with his marriage...only Daniel could decide that.

2.    When you love someone, there WILL be powerful feelings.  Does this mean that what I said in number one is wrong?  I said that love is not ABOUT what you feel...we are capable of choosing our feelings.  We cannot be led around by our emotional responses on matters, or we will suffer constantly!  Learning to manage our emotions is an act of maturity.  If I stepped back far enough...and I did...I could see that my attachment to Daniel was causing me to suffer tremendously.  I was CHOOSING to suffer.  I was not accepting the situations as they were, but rather insisting that I stay in the emotions of a possible future with Daniel.  In my mind, somewhere in time, there existed a scenario where Daniel and I could be lovers, partners...be together always.  But this place of fantasy caused me a lot of sorrow because I was SO attached to that outcome.  I was giving away ALL of my happiness in the here and now, to linger in the possibility of an uncertain future.  This happens to a lot of people at some point in their lives.

3.    You cannot truly love another person, unless you love yourself first.  Don't you absolutely hate hearing this?  Me too.  Unfortunately, it's the truth.  You can absolutely FEEL love for another person...you can want them, desire them, even crave them.  But LOVE is not about any of those things.  You see, love is perfection.  It is not lacking anything at all.  It is pure.  TRUE love doesn't want or need anything from the other person at all.  It just exists.  So when people tell you that you need to love yourself first, before you can love another person, this is what they mean:  PUT yourself first (your needs, your health, your happiness).  When you live a life that reflects that you can do these things, then you have learned to LOVE YOU enough to then bring another person into that relationship.  Your first priority in love..my dear friend...is to love yourself.

Episode One's lesson:  NOT loving yourself first, will break your heart every time.

~Namaste

Lilac

GlamSimple speaks...about Love

 Love.

The greatest power on earth, right?

The perfect experience.

A feeling.

A while back I used to write about love.  It was the thing that brought me back to life and back from darkness, and brought me back to the world.  The writing about love...not the love itself.  I know that sounds weird because one would likely believe that being in love or finding love is what brings a person out of darkness...but this was not to be, in my case.  It was most definitely the idea of love that saved my life.

In time, the writing about love caused within me, an awakening- an evolution.  It was a "call to action".  You see, when you deeply believe in something, you are moved to act on it and to change what you are doing with your life, in terms of your overall direction and focus.  In my story, this equated to living a life of love, for love, with love, in love.  In order to become that person, I would need to leave behind what I was at the time.  I had to try something new.  I needed to trust in the possibility of a completely different future.

You see, I had learned the truth about love and relationships.  I learned it by studying love, by studying scholars and poetry and by receiving divine wisdom about soulmates and karmic relationships and Twin Flames and so many other types of relationships.  I discovered the "connectedness" that the ideals of love and relationships share even when they cross boundaries of cultures and religions. People in all religions and all parts of the world, accept that love exists and they experience it, speak of it, teach it and even have it as a center of their most important values. I discovered the Oneness of all beings.  I found the answer to the ages-old question:  What is love?

So love.  Do I have any right to talk about it?  Do I have any right to hope that others might care what I have to say on the topic?  Who am I to speak on this topic of love?  What can I say that will have any impact to anyone who might be reading my blog?  I am FULL of insecurities about it.  I really am.  But then again...I am also very certain about love...certain about what I know of love and what it is (and what it isn't!)...confident.  I am not falsely modest or humble when I say I am full of insecurities about it, but also I am confident.  The reason that both of these are true at the same time is that Love IS a paradox.  Love is both happy and sad- good and bad- right and wrong- perfect and flawed.

Where My Journey Began (with Love)

My journey with love began- well at the beginning, of course.  Children are full of love.  But somewhere along the path we get tainted and then we must find our way BACK to love.  So my journey began in 2009 when I read a book that changed the direction of my life.  Now seriously... I had read a few life changing books leading up to this particular book...and those set the groundwork, making my mind a fertile place to grow new seeds of love.  For example, I had read the book "The Four Agreements", and that small but important book planted the seed of consciousness that later developed into a fully awakened person.  But the book that changed it all, was "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne.  

I recall that a very dear friend of mine, Jeanne Amadon, had been telling me for years to read the book.  I was resisting reading it then.  I think I KNEW it was going to be more then I could handle then...and I would have been entirely correct about that.  So fast forward many years down the line and I am heading to the gym with my friend Danielle Christy, and I hop into her car and nearly sit on this tiny book..."The Secret".  It is at this time, that I say out loud that I have been seriously thinking about reading this book. Just then, Danielle has to stop at  family member's house for something...causing me to be in her car with said book for just about an hour:  long enough to read 4 chapters.  Trust me, the first 4 chapters are really all you need of this very important information.

I hung onto that book...and I read it all.  I read it many times.  In fact, I read it and I accepted and believed it with all my heart.  I loved that book.  I found that the Secret of the universe is that we attract everything to us. This newfound understanding meant, that ALL the power to change was inside of me.  This information enlightened me, delighted me.  It restored HOPE to my very soul.  Anything I wanted, hoped for and needed was within my grasp at all times, and always had been!  I did not even know my own self!  What did I want?  What made me happy?  What did I want MORE of?  What would I hope to eliminate from my life?  How strong was my faith?

The book would lead me down other paths...paths that enlightened and elevated me spiritually and mentally on a variety of topics, such as yoga, meditation, kabbalah, earth sciences, environmentalism, and above all else...love.  My view of what love is, was altered and distorted by years of childhood abuse and neglect; the deaths of many important people in my life, the abandonment from key people in my life; the  cruelty committed against me by people who were jealous or hateful, but in whose web of deceit I had found myself entangled...and many other disempowering experiences in my life up to that point. 

I answered the question about what made me happy...and the answer was "Writing".  

When I asked myself what I wanted to write about...the answer was "Love".  

Well, maybe initially it was just about Spiritual things in general, and how to become more spiritually elevated.  But writing about THAT ended up bringing about an awakening which then began my writings on love.  So I began "The True Love Blog I and II". 

After many years of writing the blog, I had to stop writing the blog in order to pursue the ACTS of love.  But now I feel a calling once again to write about it. But what to write...where to begin?  

I'll tell a story.  I have so MANY stories.  And I think that by telling the stories, I can help others understand how I discovered the most real love of all.  I hope you will read on...

namaste~

Lilac

I LOVE MY CAT

 I love...

Gilmore Girls

Cats

Coffee

Cheesecake

Children

Good Music

This is my cat

These are other things that make me happy...Wildflowers and veggies:

 

I created a space that made me happy downstairs.  My husband recommended it.

Some other things I love

Bringing the Homestead to the outside world

 I have been asking myself a lot lately, this one question:

How will I bring my inner life to my outer world?

I mean to ask, should I be bringing my inner life out to the world as an expression of art?  As a Business?  What is my Legacy?  What is my purpose?  What is my destiny?

In 2009, or thereabouts, I began searching for an answer to this very question.  Prior to that, I did not know this question.  My son was about a year old.  I was 34 years old.  I am about to turn 46 this year.  

In 2009, I was still living with/partnered with, my children's father David.  David was not a very committed family-man.  He never married me, drank often, gambled and let us fall into a very low place with money.  He treated me like an object and not a partner and further, he limited what I was "able" to do.  So I began to read, research, study and grow.  This journey was PAINFUL, dramatic and turned my world inside out.  I faced some dark times, and mostly I faced them alone.  My daughter was about 10 years old and my son nearly 3, when I decided we needed to leave that life behind.

In 2012, after planning and waiting for the best possible moment to change my life, I jumped.  It got ugly again, but only for a few years.  I say that like, "no sweat"...but those years was full of moments that TESTED me to my BREAKING POINT and beyond.  I felt during these years that there were many moments where I felt my whole being breakdown into pieces and get built back up again...slowly of course.

In 2016 I married a man who turned his life upside down to set me free.  He is my best friend.  He and we are not perfect.  But we are married, we are a team and we are building a life, late in our lives.

So I bring forward my question again...

What is my legacy?  

Am I survivor?  Am I something else?  

Expressing myself as Art alone does not feel like enough...but getting older, I don't have the same ambition I once had to be as assertive, aggressive and driven as I would need to be in order to make a business of my own.  That would involve 60-80 hrs a week of hard work etc.  

I want to help people heal...but as I encounter them...not by going out to look for them.  Does that make sense?  I want to give what I can and what I have when I have it and as I have it...not by going out to look for it.

I feel like the over-arching words that describe me is, "I can relate".  But when I take it further...I also healed.  

So many people that I meet are going through something but they are not healing through it, healing from it...they have experienced a thing and then they got stuck.

I did not get stuck...even though I am very set in my ways and fixed (fixed Sun Sign Leo).  I kept heeding my inner urging to keep moving forward, keep doing new things.  Why am I so driven?  Why are others not?  

Then there is this depression...that I battle.

I will come back to this...for now I must go.  There are people who need me.  So many half-completed thoughts I have, writings that deserved further review...but I am needed by Aunt Jean.

~namaste