Originally I wasn’t planning to post this month. For the past year I’ve posted something every month. When I decided to use this platform to share some of my thoughts I made a promise to myself that for a year I’ll share a post once a month. When the 12 months were over, I wasn’t sure how often I will be able to post and in what form. Different projects are in working progress. 🙂

Then why did I change my mind and wrote this short post? Because 30th April is my birthday and I felt this pull to share one of the many things I learnt in the past year. 

Today was completely different from the day a year ago. Last year when I woke up on my birthday I felt utterly lost and tears were welling up in my eyes. Little then I knew that I had entered into one of the most demanding and most rewarding and most profound period in my life. I’ve been facing challenges that emotionally were draining, and I had to ‘be reborn’ on a regular basis. The transformation I’ve been going through since brought along clarity and I had to say goodbye to parts of me that didn’t serve me anymore.

It is scary and painful when you see what you have to let go off. More often we don’t see or rather we don’t want to see it. I met with people who helped me to see that my fear of loss (loss of someone’s love and attention, loss of being left behind, loss of being part of group…) is not protecting me anymore. This was a strategy that the 2-3 year old me picked up believing that you aren’t loved unless ….. – and here comes the condition.

Conditional love is a business. It comes from the mind. I love you because you are …. On the other hand, unconditional love comes from the heart. And I finally can say that I know what it is to love unconditionally. To be more precise I can feel the power of unconditional love. First and foremost toward myself and from here I am able to expand it to the people around me. As Dr Wayne Dyer said it many times:

Who taught me this lesson? 

Life and this one year behind me. And my wonderful little niece (who is also my god-daughter). When I look into her beautiful blue eyes and hear her giggle my heart is overflowing by the warmth of love I feel. She looks just the way I looked when I was in her age. 🙂 Whenever I look at her I can see my inner child and can feel the love toward my inner child, just as much as toward my niece.

We all have this little child within us. All he or she wants is a little attention and love. Be kind to yourself and don’t be afraid of facing your shadows. The ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ is a necessary process for us to see what behaviours of ours we need to let go in order to rise up tall again and smile towards what life is bringing us next.

The only place you can do this is in the NOW. So don’t be too much in a rush; take time off your life to stop. Look back at the journey you have made so far. Look at the person who you were and who you are now. Whether you made good or wrong decisions, they were the decision you were able to make at the time. And NOW you can make different decisions.

So, today morning I woke up feeling grounded and with the sense of knowing that I am on the right path. I am utterly grateful for the people I have met so far – for those who are still with me, for those who have left, those who returned, those who are keeping me in their mind and heart. All of them have contributed to becoming the person I am today. 

And I look forward to helping more people with EFT and family/systemic constellations going forward. 

Why is this birthday different from the last one? Because I have stopped and connected the dots and what I could see made sense to me. This gives me strength and courage to carry on following my heart.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you that confidence to follow your heart even when it leads  you off the well worn path; and that will make all the difference.”

Steve Jobs

What about you? What can you see when you connect the dots of your journey so far?

Written by Petra J.

Date: April 2020