Loving Your Life Fully-Regardless

Weather is intimately related to freelings.  Weather that we love and brings us joy mirrors back to us those parts of our life and ourselves that feel freeing, liberating, gleeful and playful.

Weather that we dislike reveals life and/or feeling states that we have not healed, made peace with, or otherwise accepted within in ourselves.

One of my least favorite weathers is cold, gray damp. It has tended to mirror for me feeling states of depression and even dispair. I didn't realize this until I began to ask myself what it was about drizzly or rainy and cold weather that made me uncomfortable.

Late last week, while savoring unusually warm weather for December here in Dallas, I listened to a forecast promising several upcoming days worth of rain (which we do need) along with dismal cold weather. My first response was "Yeach.. it will be a miserable week".

The other morning during my daily meditation time, it came to me that by learning to enjoy that weather (or at least positively tolerate it) and love it, I would also be loving those parts of my life that in my past felt exactly the same as our forecasted weather would look and feel-gray, wet and cold.

In other words, I would be loving, forgiving and embracing those parts of my life that spoke of hard times, frustration or other negative experiences/feelings despite my best efforts - and re-framing them as having been OK and as natural as seasonal weather changes.

In our personal journeys in this life time, we have all gone through phases that were difficult due to a combination of circumstances plus our inability to deal with them in ways that from our present perspective would have worked better. Many of us still hold grudges against ourselves from those chapters of our lives, much to our detriment.

After receiving my insight, I promised myself that I would try this with the weather and its metaphor for those parts of my life.

So today during a break at work, I went outside and took a walk in misty, gray winter coated upper 30's weather and simply surrendered to it.  Even more magestic was when I returned home from work and observed pillars of mist rising off the lake by my home, caused by cold air hitting the surface of warm water.  It looked mystical, magical, photogenic.

No, it's not going to do the sweet beauty of snow or demonstrate the lively thrill of lightning shows, which in the past made going through grayness of this sort worth it. It will just continue to be- gray and cold.

Yet in this moment all is well, beauty envelops me and my life need not look dismal at all.