Permission to Have a Bad Day

There is no hiding from the yin and yang of life. There are days that are dark. Days that feel as if the weight in your heart will bring it down to your toes. Even the brightest stars in our societal sky have such dark days that some of them choose to end the suffering instead of trying to walk through it. Certainly, that is their choice even if it is such a final decision and very hard for those of us who love them to understand. But the truth is we’ve all had those days that feel so thick with gloom and despair that we do not see a way out.

There are also days when we’ve had a revelation into how we’ve lived our lives that is so profound and sad the regret casts a shadow over us like a thunderstorm. On those days we are actually having a breakthrough. Once we can see the pattern of a thought form or belief that has wreaked havoc on our lives, we have accomplished distance from it. We are in the process of breaking through to the other side of such a misguided thought pattern. When the thought pattern is so engrained in our consciousness that we cannot see it clearly, then we have not done enough work to free it. It is like an overgrown garden. All the plants are tangled up in a big mess. No order has been restored. So, the gardener cannot see one plant from another. As we do more and more work in consciousness to bring order and harmony to our lives, it is like the garden. We free up space, let go of beliefs that do not serve us any longer and start to see what else is planted that does not support beauty. Despite having done a lot of this work internally, we sometimes then discover at the base of the garden a rampant theme – grass run amok as it were. This is a belief we thought we had dealt with or whose real roots are still deep into the fabric of our consciousness.

Here is an example, if you carry an ingrained sense of fear of how people will treat you garnered early in your childhood as I did, you can do a lot of work until one day (for me in my 50’s) you see you have lived your whole life creating situations in which to be afraid. These situations are what Life has been saying Yes to every time you’ve said, in your belief system, “I am afraid.” Life says, in the neutrality in which it must respond to each person individually, “yes you are so here are more situations in which to be scared, frightened and afraid.” The repetition of the experience is not a mystery. It is like light shining through a prism with a particular pattern. The energy flowing through the prism will repeatedly create the same picture on the wall. Until you change the pattern, in the prism, the light cannot make another image no matter how much it wants to. We are the prism. We are at choice over what patterns we create. Life is the light or energy, flowing through our thought patterns to create experiences in our lives. Until we change the pattern through which life energy flows, we won’t experience a different result.

The fallacy of the “new thought” movement is that this is easy or to have a bad day is to relinquish all previous work in surrender to defeat. This work is not easy. It can be very difficult. Staring straight into negative results of a thought pattern you did not even realize you had deep within your mind is not easy. In fact, it takes amazing courage. The kind of quiet courage no one is around to applaud you for unless you have cultivated the kind of rich, spiritual friendships complete with the vocabulary to discuss such breakthroughs.

No matter what the reason for today’s bad day, give yourself a break. Applaud the work it has taken to clear belief weeds enough to see a really big plant that needs to be removed. The fact that you have done enough work to clear a transcendent pattern is worthy of celebration. Until you can get to the celebratory mood, allow yourself to mourn what has begotten in your life. Allow yourself a little space to wind so completely down that you can rest, release the tears and pent up emotion and try again tomorrow.