Peaceful Warriors

In May, I released a new video for an unreleased song, "Soldier."

The song was one of those that just came to me.  I didn't plan to write about this particular subject matter, though the message was definitely something I carried with me, and came out in this song.

As humans, I've noticed that we tend to start building walls if we get hurt in life.  After time, these walls can turn into thick armor around our hearts.  We're afraid to let love in and afraid to let love out.

Part of why we're here, I believe, is to learn how to get back to a pure and open heart.  And this, is not often easy.  It can be a struggle, a battle, a fight.  And we become like soldiers, fighting to love, to learn, to surrender.

Personally, in my own life, my armor started going up when I was 11.  My parents got divorced and I switched middle schools ~ went from private to public ~ all in the same month. It was devastating.

As a child, I enjoyed any kind of performance:  dance, singing, acting...some of which I made up myself and performed for my family on the makeshift stage in our basement.

When that fall came, when I was 11 and my parents told us they were splitting up, and I went from a small school where I was completely accepted for who i was, to a much bigger school where I was immediately teased, it crushed me.  The walls went up, the armor got thick, and I stopped being me.

That year, in 6th grade, I had a crush on a boy named TJ Anderson.  My friend, who was also into music and went to my old school, wrote a song about him for me.  One day on the playground, I sang it in confidence for my "friends." They ended up making fun of me for it and prank calling me after school to have me sing the song....they actually had TJ on the line.  It was mortifying.

It's moments like these that make us afraid to be who we are.  We get scared and retreat into a world where it's safe.  Often times, that means we have to close up a piece of our heart in order to protect it. That day I decided that singing wasn't safe.  And it wasn't long after that, that I stopped singing altogether for many years.

Coming back to music has been my heart opener, it has been my slow and steady process of allowing myself to be fully expressed in my heart again, after all these years ~ and it's still a daily process.

Life lessons on forgiveness have been my heart opener.  Often times they've led me to learn the hard way that bitterness and resentment cannot live inside a pure heart.  It takes great courage to really let go of those feelings and transform them back into love.

Learning from our triggers (the things that ignite us with emotion) ~ whether it be anger, jealousy, or sadness ~ if we are brave enough to look at WHY we feel that way and then find ways of effectively dealing with those triggers, we can be free. We can BE LOVE.

However we make our way in life, I believe it is crucial for us to be like Soldiers...or Peaceful Warriors...striving for the peace and love that we all deserve to have in our hearts. Nothing in our past was ever wrong or bad, it was just an opportunity to learn about love, no matter how difficult the lesson. 

So I invite you to look at those areas in your life where you are holding a grudge, where you are triggered by emotion, where you are "stuck" in something that doesn't serve to make you feel amazing about yourself and your life!  Also, where are you blaming someone? Can you see that it's never really about the other, and that it's about how we choose to relate to the situation?

What can you do to bring down the walls, to let more love flow in and out, to purify your heart? These are the important questions of today's world. Not ~ how much money do you make, what do you do for a living, where do you live, etc.

We are becoming a heart-centered world, so let's all take a moment to feel the power we have sitting right in our own chest, and beam our love to ourselves and on all those who cross our path.

And just think....if we are ALL Soldiers "fighting our own internal war," when each of us learns how to overcome our own personal struggles to find peace within, then...there will be peace in this world.