Sheila Winter Wallace BodyGateways

My New Drivers License by sheilawinterwallace

I live a very good life.

I recently visited the license bureau to renew my driver’s license, which demanded a new photo being taken. Since the last one was done five years ago, a lot has changed.

Amazingly, I look younger… more full faced… smiling (the joke on me is that I wasn’t even ‘trying’ to smile for the photo… LOL!). That was not the case, five years ago, when I was hoping for death so that I might live… so warying and so wearying was I experiencing my life. A real Catch 22… I couldn’t and wouldn’t take mySelf out, yet I did not want to stay in the game I knew as ‘Sheila’. I did not trust mySelf; I did not know who I was; I did not know What I AM. I was everything to others, yet not mySelf.

I have been though a lot in my life. Yeah, I can tell a good story about me… one that I can choose to believe is true as I choose to perceive it. I can listen to others tell their stories and know that they have been through a lot, too. And, then it gets interesting – as in crazy – ’cause I could, if I wanted to, rationalize that I have nothing to complain about… that their stories are indicative that their lives have been so much ‘harder’ than mine… as if ‘harder’, ironically, meant ‘fuller’… and I should just be thankful.

Then, the other side of that is, perhaps I haven’t suffered enough… as if living life has to be about suffering and persecution. Man, we have modelled that one well… do I have to live like Jesus, stoned and nailed to the cross to measure up?

Is anyone getting the underlying presupposition here? It is the one that says suffering is the way to salvation (that which connects us to source, as if we are not already connected... another presupposition). And, our stories about our lives are just fictions that fuel comparison and competition among people, so as to justify whom we are and our right to BE. The irony is that we never, ever allow ourSelves to BE.

I think that the greatest paradox of all to awakening the truth that we are sacred Beings is that we continue to create our own suffering… and we keep digging the trenches for this deeper and deeper. Enough already!

If I just live my life as I choose and invite you to live yours as you choose, I can love you and leave you. I can delete your name from my email data base in full respect of whom I am and whom you are. I can say ‘no’ to you as a client. I can change my mind about how I choose to move through my world. I can be the invitation for you to change your mind, too. I can demand payment in respect of mySelf… which means in respect of you, too. I can hold mySelf as able, which means I can hold you as able, too. I can choose to stop making mySelf responsible for your outcomes, which means that I no longer make you responsible for mine. I can be your friend forever… and then, I can be done; and, I don’t have to make you ‘wrong’ so that I can be ‘right’ about my choice. And, if you choose to make me ‘wrong’ about it, so that you can feel ‘right’ about yourSelf… well, I don’t have to defend mySelf to mySelf. I can just move on.

Defend mySelf to mySelf… for so many, the ultimate rationale for living… and totally directed by story… the one that I tell mySelf about how my story never measures up. Measures up to what?

Well, my current truth of my experience is that I am naturally smiling in the photo on my driver’s license. I am Self-licensed in and Self-driving of my own life… smiling. Evidence to me… and that is all that counts… that both the story of my past and the fiction of my future are irrelevant…

I have given mySelf a new license to drive.

I live a very good life… right now, ’cause I say so.