Author: sophiaclaire

Faith, as in a leap of faith à la Kierkegaard: you have no supporting evidence at all whatsoever, but chose, against all odds and rational or sensory proof, to trust, to believe and to keep going.

1. a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen.
2. a person or thing that may help or save someone.

The heart must have a mind of its own, when it loves who it loves regardless of whether reciprocation is in the stars. But this need not be the death of two. Love them anyway.

Projection—the number one killer in love?

A direct image projects on a screen of our own making. Might as well be a white sheet, but more often it’s a person we’d so want to be “for us”. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. But without checking the mind against the heart for answers, the “other” is nothing but a canvas for our own shit.

star-dame takes you on a journey. where did her heart go?

We all see ghosts, on one level or other. Yes, me and you too.

one:

Yesterday, a combination of a sleepless night and a potentially fucked-OMG-nowhere-to-live-as-of-November situation, sent me into a cortisol induced emotional shit storm, the likes of which I haven’t experienced in over a year. Yes, of course my situation is stressful (#forfuckingrealsbitches,) but the way I react is all I have control over! Right?

Today, though nothing’s changed, I have my feet firmly planted back on the ground. I was forced to confront the ghastly reflection of myself on how I deal with stress. Totally, thought didn’t exist anymore. (#goodtoknow)

two:

Where I see ghosts best and where you might too, is when I sneak a peek at others, like This One Guy I’ve known over fifteen years. Not to single him out (#weallhaveourshit) but just another spooky example.

So This One Guy keeps copy pasting the exact relationship model over and over again. He thinks it’s different each time (they are in fact different women), but from the outside it’s hauntingly similar, seriously copy paste. In this way he appears to be using a template of how things were and recreating an eternal loop of how things are and will be. Is he aware of it? Nope. Can we be aware of it? Yep.

“Hi, my name is Sophia, and I’m a recovering user of a (scary) version of my past self as a template for how I’ll act in the future.” Newsflash: in every now that past self doesn’t exist anymore. Not really. We could actually recreate ourselves daily. (#workingonit) People in our lives come to expect us to be a certain way too, like my observation of This One Guy, although we have already changed, moved on, and grown fundamentally – if we choose to.

Besides this being ghost-story scary in itself, (because who wants to recycle shit versions of our past selves? Anyone? ) the most unnerving part is we do this to ourselves! (#wtf)

In that way, we all see ghosts.

I find freedom in doing the very things that scare the shit out of me. While it may not feel free in the moment, the act opens up a space for freedom to take place. Like letting fresh air into a musty room.

Besides these blog posts, ha ha, the scariest thing I’ve done lately is tell a special someone that I cared very much about him. I knew telling the truth about how I felt would break what we had. I was scared because I didn’t want it to end. So my desire to be honest butted up against my need to keep things as they were. But nothing ever stays the same, we’re always only ever changing.

The crux between fear and freedom is buried right in here: I like how things have been, but something’s different, so I’ve got to go with the change or become a prisoner, get stuck in the past.

Freedom feels like it’s directly linked to our ability to go with the changes that life will always present.

A few posts ago I asked: “what’s your brand of fear?” The purpose of the question was to get you to look at your behavior so you could tell where fear was hiding. Because underneath that is where freedom lives. For example, if you’re doing things on auto pilot or excessively controlling, and have even a glimmer that those things may be rubbing up against your daily experience in the wrong way, that’s a fucking clue right there. Again, you don’t have to make it public, you just have to know it for yourself.

The definition of freedom differs for each of us, but I’m pretty sure we can all agree that freedom does not feel like contraction, shrinkage or tightness. Freedom feels expansive, open and limitless. And sometimes you have to contract a bit to expand afterwards, just like breathing.

What the fuzz? Yes, fear again. The number one biggest dream killer!

Let me tell you a story while you sit, legs tightly crossed, on break eating a caprese sandwich or hotdog, both on crispy baguettes leaving crumbs all over your lap. Your head is slightly hunched over, smartphone posture.

If you were to take a deeper breath right now, you may notice how your ribs expand a bit against your (under) garment on the inhale, and relax away from it again on the exhale.

That, my busy friend, is the inside of your body where everything is intertwined by fascia.

Fascia. The connective tissue inside our bodies linking everything, muscles bones organs, together. Seriously from your pinky toe to your eye socket, lungs to butt crack, fascia.

At night, you tuck yourself in under your soft white linen duvet or fall asleep (again) on the couch, remote in hand drool on chin, sound of your own snores jarring you awake… no matter where, as we slumber fuzz forms in between fascia lined muscles. The fuzz grows at night. Making us stiffer in the morning and the fuzz doesn’t budge until we do.

Why do you think it feels so good to stretch in the morning? Because we are clearing the nights fuzz away from the body just as much as the sleep lodged in the corners of our eyes. Now what happens if you don’t clear the fuzz? Stiffness. More fuzz. Stuck. And eventually unbudging until we need outside help (i.e. body work.)

Now back to fear. Over time the problem is that we grow a similar type of fuzz in our lives.

Imagine, as kids we grow up our worldview molded by family, school, society. We get older, and most of us, start to operate within increasingly smaller life frames we’ve established on the way. It’s normal, it just kind of happens. As we get even older (maybe 30’s) careers, family, life corral us into a type of routine.

Along the way these routines can turn into forms of limitations, barriers and here is where they also point to our insidious fears. Because we choose our actions based on ease, if we are not careful, we may stay stuck in comfort.

Here you’re like, “What? Not me.” As you brush a crumb away from your mouth. But you keep reading.

I’ve discovered that our worst fears are the ones we don’t see. The ones hidden by the behaviors in our daily routines. Because they’ve grown gradually, like the fuzz, they sneak up on us. Little by little, we don’t even know or remember what it was like when we had complete range of movement.

Instead it has to “go too far” to get us to notice.

So either we wake up one day with nagging thoughts: Did I drink the whole bottle of wine alone, again? Wait, who the fuck did I marry? Or something outside us forces us to stop and think: an injury, a divorce, some big shit that we cannot brush over with our comfort zone anymore.

Now here’s what I want you to do, first move your neck and shoulders a bit to shake smartphone posture off. Good. Next, get a closer look at where your comfort has become uncomfortable and change something. Doesn’t have to be big, but it does have to be a conscious choice to do something different. Movement.

Jump in the sea. Walk another way to work. Eat something new. Do the opposite of what you normally would do. You like to run? Stay. You normally stay? Run.

It will incite fear. That is the whole fucking point. Do it anyway.

Fuzz is real thing. For more information on fuzz watch “The Fuzz Speech”

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