Grateful Heart Monday

Welcome to another Grateful Heart Monday where I begin my week with inspiration by writing about a single piece of gratitude, which for today is for someone named Jeff Foster, who I only recently came to know his name through my friend David when he sent me something Jeff wrote that truly connected with my soul.

While I normally would talk about what it was that precisely inspired and filled my soul with plenty of gratitude, I decided it would be better to just re-share Jeff’s words and simply say this. For once, I read something from someone else that made me feel like maybe I truly was on the right path with all this pain suffering that I’ve been going through…

Here are the words from Jeff Foster:

One of the most dangerous spiritual myths we have inherited is that healing is supposed to ‘feel good’. 

No. Sometimes our discomfort actually intensifies as darkness emerges into light, as unconscious material makes its way into present awareness, as our old illusions burn up in a fever of healing. 

Perhaps our discomfort is not wrong, a mistake, or a sign that we have lost our healing path. Remember, the presence of pain today may actually indicate that our healing process is intensifying, not stalling; that we are actually more awake and sensitive than ever now, less numb, less willing to turn away, more in touch with our sacred vulnerability. 

There is such a tendency in our culture to avoid discomfort of any kind, distract ourselves from it, label it as ‘wrong’ or ‘negative’ or even ‘unspiritual’, meditate or medicate it away. Much of our Western medicine is geared towards the removal of symptoms, the silencing of disruption, the numbing of chaos and the journey towards some socially acceptable ‘normality’.

But sometimes, friends, we no longer have any interest in ‘returning to normal’! The ‘normal’ was the problem, not the solution! The status quo needed to shift. It was unstable and false. Our old conception of reality was keeping us trapped and we needed to break free! Sometimes a deadening and soul-destroying ‘normality’ needs to shatter into chaos and crisis; our pain and sorrow, frustration, exhaustion, fear and doubts need to be felt more fully than ever before, and the heart needs to break open more completely. 

So, let the winds blow, let the tempests rage, let all that is false be purified, let all that is dead remain dead, let life explode where you are! You are only being invited now to a deeper healing, friend, even though it feels like you’re getting ‘worse’, even though the heart is tender and raw, even though you cannot yet feel your tomorrows! 

Soon you will rise like a phoenix!

Thank you, Jeff, I’m truly grateful for you and your words today, as they gave me an immense amount of hope to continue on for yet another day, as I trudge this road to a joy-filled destiny with God…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson