ownedgirlie
Posts: 9184
Joined: 2/5/2006 Status: offline
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Hi Julia, funny, I was just talking with an s-type on the phone yesterday about the same thing First, your "All is Well" comment is something I hold onto, also. It may be a cool thread of its own, but for me, "All is Well" means, basically, that all is right with the spiritual sense of the universe. Richard Rohr, a Jesuit Priest (not that I affiliate my spiritual views with Christianity, currently) wrote a book called "Everything Belongs" of the same concept. Whatever happens is exactly what is supposed to happen. It belongs as it is. But I digress... Many of my struggles had to do with finding my inner self, inner happiness, inner love, and inner peace. I began my slavery in an unenviable (or enviable, depending on how one looks at it) place, in that I had little idea of who I was. I spent a lifetime being dictated to (in the most dictatorship sense of the word) how I should think, feel, believe, speak, express myself, etc., that I did not know what I liked, what I held dear, or even what values worked for me. The cool thing about this, is, at the age of 40, the world was a complete blank canvass for me. So yes, there were lots of struggles. These struggles became a part of my slavery because of my Master's high demands on me. He saw my potential and pushed me to discover it for myself and then develop it. Through the course of self analysis, spiritual journeying, travels on my own, therapy, some very good friends (including family members) and some very good books, I came to discover who I am, and in that discovery, I learned that to be true to myself, I must submit as a slave, as I define a slave to be. It was a struggle to get to that place, because many internal walls had to come down, and many internal hurdles had to be toppled over (as opposed to jumped, because jumping a hurdle still leaves the hurdle there). Internal problems and baggage had to be resolved so that it would not return to need dealing with again, and some really toxic energy I had been hanging onto needed to be purged. It became so frighteningly exciting to work through these struggles that I stopped fighting them and starting lunging for them head-on. I would beg my Master to put me through some awful things, just so I could delve deeper into myself and find out what I'm made of, what I'm capable of, and what I'm not capable of. And it seemed the more negative crap I purged from myself, the more room there was to let him in, and to let me in, and the bigger my capacity grew to love and submit. I should also add that my Master has very closely monitored these struggles of mine, and helped me to balance them with some very serious life struggles that came at me unexpectedly throughout this past year. But even these life struggles have played a key part in discovering what I'm made of, who I am and who I must be, and how that fits in with the slave I need to be to him. I'm a better person because of all of it. Oh and to the comment about struggles of victims of Rwanda, Darfur, the Holocaust, etc...the most amazing things can come from even those horrific catastrophes of man, as relayed in Victor Frankle's "Man's Search for Meaning", David Faber's "Because of Ramek", among other fascinating and life changing books. Mind you, that is not the kind of struggle I would actively seek...
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