Self Esteem & Positive Thinking Support Group

- I find love in a hopeless place -

Where do you turn when you feel down, when hope is needed, when your reserves are low, your spirit in need of a nourishment?

When your love of life is lacking...is there a book, a person,or a place that brings you comfort?

A thought or an outlook that keeps you strong, when maybe all around you feels hopeless.

Rhianna's lyrics to her latest track, set me wondering about hope -

and how we find it through having love to hold to, when living in a harsh reality.

Or, as Oriah Mountain Dreamer puts it in her famous poem, "what sustains you from the inside when everything else falls away?"

It always seems to me that the news focuses on what we have to fear, and what it is that will get worse. Instead of helping us to see where we're going right and what we can hold onto to help us make it through to something better. Its when things are bad that your attitude, your focus of attention and your beliefs, matter the most.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

At times lately I've been feeling so much sadness in my heart, sometimes I wonder, how its all contained there without breaking.

To express helps, but just as i cannot always cry when i need it, i also cannot always find a way to write about what I'm going through either.

It isn't always possible to sum something up and place it in the context of a post.

But the past few days i wrote some things down - to do with both finding hope and feeling hopeless, here's some of what i have been feeling.......

There are times I'm happy and things I'm so thankful about and that is what keeps me going. There are things I'm sad about and things i'm very worried about, and at times it all feels so hopeless. But mostly, i try not to let my mind think much on that, i stay as much as possible in the moment and the day to day, so that i don't feel too overwhelmed.

I try to keep a balance in all of this and not be hard on myself if things arent the way i'd hoped. I have a habit of believing that all things within healing are possible, that in itself is how i keep hope but sometimes that means I have high expectations on myself and that can feel like pressure.

I have to both believe in my abilities and my hopes for a well future and yet not allow that to become too great a feat to achieve. I also need to be careful not to feel I'm letting people down or that I'm not letting any feelings of not being good enough drain me. Hope is a strange thing in that you can have too much of it, and that can lead to disappointment and yet too little and that too is not a good place from which to live.

Having hope as i see it, goes hand in hand with believing in yourself - and that is something so multi layered, that it stretches across many areas of your life. So to, believing in there being a reason to everything you're experiencing. Sometimes I need to remember though that despite all the supportive beliefs, and the hope, its ok to feel my feelings about the harsh reality and get upset about the despair of making steps forward only to be knocked down again. It can feel like bullying, it can feel so very hurtful and yet you have to pick yourself up carry on, seek the goodness.

So feel feelings, cry, feel down, but always take from the day the best of it, make a way that is as full of light as you can and be yourself in as many small ways as you can.

I share - I read - I continue to hope

I give - I receive - I continue to believe

I find - I feel - I continue to heal

I see as i'm writing, that I need to stop and appreciate myself, appreciate that though some outlooks feel like a necessity, they are still a choice that i make.

And that it takes courage to make those choices, to continue to believe and be optimistic and to feel the world as a good place to be.

What would life be worth, if we didn't have love.That to me is where hope springs from, that's what nourishes it.The choices I've made in my outlook, in the healing I've journeyed through,they've all brought me to where I am today. Nothing, no moment of it, is ever wasted.

But none of it, none at all, would ever have been bearable without Love.

My life is in my hands to an extent, but it is also about something greater than myself of which I'm an inseparable part - Love.

Sensing this can either make us feel scared or supported, depending on our deeper belief in life.

I do my part and I trust in the timing and unfolding of the rest.

I trust it to Love.

In this I feel much less pressure and much less, like its down to me alone.

As this year closes, I am in a stronger position, I'm wiser, I'm more grounded and I'm still as in need of "a life more lived" as I ever have been.

* * * * * * * * * * *

We carry within our hearts a great love, a compassionate presence that encompasses us and is within everything.

I think it's that part of me, that supports me, that cherishes me and that makes it all possible. When i am quiet and still, and when i go within my deeper heart, i feel it... thats where the hope comes from, because it's where it was never lost.

If I'm in touch with that place in my self, then it communicates to me without words - that it is all alright, that I can trust, that I am safe and that it's somehow right to believe in dreams, in better times becoming real.

That's what dries tears.

That's how I find Love in a hopeless place. Or how it finds me.

Love Kathryn

http://secretsofabutterfly.typepad.com/ secrets_of_a_butterfly/2011/12/i-find-love-in-a-hopeless- place.html