It is so easy to hold yourself back, to smother yourself in the safe cottony comfort of being just where you are. Planted in buried guilt--for moving on, for exorcising old ghosts, for having the courage to move blissfully and boldly into a new chapter of your in your life. Nourished by the dark barbs sent your way--a flash of envy, a spiteful glance, a hasty judgment--that you cannot deflect in your current state of Doubt. It is then that these psychic weeds emerge, not full blown thoughts or even articulated in spoken word, but they snake through your mind like a whisper of an idea, a haunting of something you won't completely admit to telling yourself: best not to isolate yourself from the rest. Best not to create ripples.
Yes, so much easier to just keep yourself in your place.
You walk in the daylight, true. And yet you are still learning to protect yourself from the shadows splayed across your path. They come for you, ready to feed--an accidental by-product of your brief stint in Catholic school, a side-effect of living out loud. Guilt for living your creed, guilt for being living proof that life is a feast for the senses, not a sentence of penitence in over-work or a study in shame. Guilt for not giving away your hard-earned bliss.
But what is the use, really, in holding yourself back? What is the purpose of not walking your path?
It is cruel to hold yourself back...but somehow safer, more comforting to be like the others. These thoughts swirl together to form a terrible thing--an unspoken hex--that blossoms in the silence of your mind. A hex to stunt your growth. A hex to buy you the satisfaction (at least for a moment) of being one of them. But like any spell, a hex can be broken.
The cure is at once simple and so, so difficult: it is recognizing that you, ultimately, can cast a curse upon yourself worse than anything others could create. It is in knowing that you could easily turn your power of life against yourself through your own fear of your limitless potential. It is honoring your true self; it is facing down that guilt with the teeth you were born with. So you unravel those dark threads of your self-inflicted hex, crushing them to dust with your heartbeat. One by one those traps fade from your path, no longer feeling the pull of your Doubt. You resume your journey, once again walking in the daylight, fearful of no shadow, not even your own.
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