God

Thank you for your patience. This is long overdue (as usual).

I posted this picture on IG the other day with a caption speaking about how slow I am to recognise my own energy whereas other people pick up on it so easily. A lot of that came from self-doubt. I'm still struggling with that a little bit but I'm becoming a little more confident each day. The idea to write this was inspired by a conversation I had with a new friend of mine. A conversation that happened after my ig post and I didn't realise the two would connect so beautifully. So this is a little insight into the lessons I've been learning and how the conversation I had was able to help me sum them all up into something coherent lol. Bear with me..

There are very few people in this world that I've come across that speak to the God in me. Throughout my life, I've tried my best to speak to the God in others. I learn them and I learn what triggers them into action. Sometimes it might be as simple as a reminder of something they've already said. But there is a certain dynamic that I have with each of my friends/people I've learnt that allow for God-like conversations to take place. It is such an honour to know that something you've said to somebody was heard by the God in them and they began to change their lives. I believe healing is internal. So as much as other people may be a catalyst for your healing, I believe that the actual healing must come from within.

With a lot of my past friendships, I fell victim to co-dependence. Only after coming out of it did I realise what was happening. And then I picked up on some of those traits in my new friendships. My co-dependence in friendships included a lot of over sharing. You do not owe ANYBODY every single detail of your life. It does not matter who this person is. Having been very involved in some of my friends' lives and having had friends very involved in mine, it's as though we begin to mesh into one person. This person's problems becomes yours. Your problems become theirs. At one point, I thought this was the making of a beautiful friendship. Being inseparable and talking about our future lives together. One day, I realised that I was yearning for isolation. Before I could even figure out why, I began feeling extremely guilty. Of course my friends are going to take this personally. Is it personal? Do I have something against them? I did not even have the time to figure out why "I" wanted to be isolated because I was so consumed with worrying about what that meant for my friendships. Being unable to voice that without fear of losing friends, it made me resentful. Let me explain how dumb this was to me.

"I want to be alone but I don't know how to say it to my friends without them taking it personally."

Mind you, I have no idea how they're going to take it because I'm yet to say anything.

"Hey Eva, let's go out." "I'm coming over." "I'll sleep by you."

I was so worried about rejecting them that I just said okay to everything and it just made me more and more resentful. Clearly, I was not a fan of confrontation (still not a fan) so my resentment turned into passive aggression. These are things I can now realise because I have come out of the situation. I'm pretty sure my friends picked up on it but even if they tried to discuss it with me, I would have nothing to say because I was unaware that's what was going on with me. I began to share less and less because I wanted to have something, ANYTHING, to call my own. I wanted to get better at keeping my life more personal. When my friends would ask me certain questions, I would refuse to answer sometimes because I just no longer felt the need to share so much of myself. Also, I would stop asking them certain questions because I did not want to seem intrusive. My philosophy was "if you wanted me to know, you'd tell me." But then some of your friends might say "if you wanted to know, you'd ask." Anyway, those dynamics seemed to be laden with insecurities. Being unsure that your friends care about your life so you wait for someone to ask. Being unsure your friend cares to share their life so to avoid them telling you no or even to avoid feeling like you've forced them because you asked and they feel like they CAN'T say no, you just don't ask.

- Inability to accept rejection.
- Inability to create healthy boundaries.
- Inability to be honest with self and others.
- Fear of isolation.
- Fear of tension.
- Fear of "seeming like a bitch"

I took a step back and assessed all my relationships. In some of them, I realised I was..I'm not even sure how to put it. Essentially, I was too involved, like I said earlier. To the point where I'm writing messages for my friend to send to somebody else. To the point where I'm literally telling my friend what to do step by step. How on EARTH is my friend meant to learn how to deal with issues if I'm there taking away their power to do so by being their voice. I had no control of them asking me for help/advice or whatever, but I did have control over how much I helped. And in many instances, I felt too eager to help. A sign that I now realise indicated how helping others others made me feel useful because it allowed me to not be as as invested in my own issues. A lot of things I liked to solve on my own. I was never really good at taking advice because it felt as though people would tell me what they would do in the situation rather than advise me based on what I was like. Knowing that, whenever I gave advice, I would give advice based on what my friend was like. Until it became an unconscious thing for me to just tell people what to do whenever they would come to me with an issue.

In a conversation with one of my closest closest closest friends, Leona, I learnt that not everybody that comes to you with an issue is looking for advice. Sometimes, people just need to be heard. A lot of the time, this person already knows what they have to do and they just need to vent. Maybe they need to hear themselves speak about it out loud to arrive at a solution. I remember my cousin telling me to be more sympathetic because how I operated was, if you coming to me with a problem then expect a solution. I wasn't here for the "pussyfooting" and "complaining". I was very solution-oriented. I still am to an extent. And every time someone would suggest to me that I change, I would get upset and my rebuttal would be "well if they know I'm just going to focus on how to fix it rather than console them then why continue coming to me?"

My solution was to stop giving advice unless it was explicitly asked for. Instead, I put my little uni education to use and adopted a Socratic method of questioning. Like I said, I believe the healer is within the person. I believe the answer is within the person. Even if I feel like I know the answer, it is not my place to give the answer. AND more importantly, you can only communicate to somebody what they are in a position to receive. What I will do, is to ask the questions I think will help the person think about their issue in different ways. Questions that will help them understand themselves a little better. A lot of the time people ask for answers from God or say they don't hear God's voice. I believe that's because they're looking externally for it. A lot of the time, the right question does way more than an answer. The questions I like to ask are directed to the God in you. So when YOU answer, you hear God's voice. Whether you answer in your head or out loud, you hear God's voice. You might ignore it, but you will hear it.

I recently met somebody who spoke to the God in me. You know when you keep saying you wish you had a "you" in your life? You wish somebody would do for you what you do for others? I was blessed to have experienced that. Such a gentle, genuine spirit that seems to be very aware of God. And most importantly, very aware of the God in himself. In speaking to him, I learnt so much..about the world, about spirituality, about myself. I felt like somebody's words were enough to motivate me into action (very rare).

He asked me what I believe in. And I struggled to come up with a straightforward answer because I knew it wasn't as simple as "God". Because what does God mean to me? What do I mean when I say I believe in God? Eventually, his questioning got me to recall something I had said a few days earlier that seemed to sum it up perfectly. "Whatever the difference is between me being able to speak to you and move my limbs etc. and a corpse, that's what I am. The thing that keeps me from just being a body/corpse, that is what I am." To which he responded, "now I know what you believe in." And although I had said those words before, I started to really think about that. I am life. You are life. You are most certainly not this body. I also watched a video recently that said, "if you can perceive it, it is not you." My body, my thoughts, my possessions, my brain are all things I can perceive and therefore are not me. And what made this even truer to me was when the man in the video said, "you are the thing that remains present to observe passing thoughts. If you were your thoughts, when your thoughts left, you would leave too." Yet here you remain.

The more I understand this and the more I see this to be true, the more the dynamics in my relationships change. He (let's call him X) also made me more aware of the fact that, "overnight" change is a result of awareness. There are things that might take you a while to understand and incorporate into your life but an awareness of the truth of certain things puts you in a place where you can no longer think how you used to think. And this happened to me recently.

If you remember from my last post (I think) from when I just moved back to St. Lucia, I mentioned my Love and shared my insecurities around that. Well, let's just say an event occurred, lol, that caused a shift in my consciousness. I'm going to explain it as best as I can because what happened to me and the messages I received did not use vocabulary. And X has also reminded me that a lot of miscommunication is chalked up to a lack of the power of vocabulary. Sometimes we feel things and we know we feel them but trying to put it into words becomes such a difficult task because it did not come to us in words. It came to us as a feeling. We don't hear "you are happy" for us to know we're happy. We simply feel it. The depth of feeling a lot of the time, however, is not compensated for with a depth of vocabulary. Hence why babies cry for all their needs. They cry and they get a response and we carry that with us throughout the rest of our lives. Even when we learn to speak, we still cry. (More wisdom from X lol).

Without going into too much detail, my Love and I have been put into a situation where we really have to learn ourselves. We have to be brutally honest with ourselves. In the past, I've had a bad habit of giving in too easily. I tend to give into lip service. So with my ex, he would do some really foul shit and then say all the sweet things in the world and I'd want to give him a chance. This time around, that didn't even feel like an option. I tried to access old feelings and memories and I was BLOCKED from accessing them. It was as though God said "nah B, cuz u gonna get caught up in how things were and it's going to distract you from what really is." And I appreciated the hell out of that. A lot of the time we stay in relationships because we hope for things to go back to how they were at the beginning. In this instance, I didn't want that. It felt fake to me. It didn't seem real. And I wanted real. This time, I wanted action. I wanted to see actions matching words. I no longer get excited over words and promises. And it reminded me of something Leona had said to me a year ago. "You're such a powerful spirit Eva. But I feel like when it comes to men, you lose a lot of that power." Well hunty, that shit has been reclaimed.

Even when I met X and had those amazing conversations, a part of me started to feel a little insecure about "not being on his level" but why did that even matter? What did that even mean? What I found was somebody I could learn SO much from. After every conversation, I feel rejuvenated. I feel myself get closer to God (my higher self). And from my understanding of God, I am able to see it in everything. I had a conversation with my brother the other day about divine intervention. And we both agreed that either God is in everything or God is in nothing. I think he might've been leaning towards the "nothing" part but for me, I definitely saw God in everything. I saw myself in everything. In the trees (me and my Love went to hug trees the other night and it felt good) and in the wind and in the sea, I saw me. I saw life. I saw God.

That being said, I feel very stagnant. I feel very lost in this world. I have learned so many beautiful things. I feel like I am becoming such a strong woman. And it feels as though this world has no outlet for that. And X gave me the depressing news that we all have to succumb to babylon eventually. When your most basic needs cost money, you need money. Even where that job is not fulfilling you or it feels as though you're not advancing, you need to eat. You need shelter. You have bills that need to get paid. In a society where you're basically working just to survive, not live, survive..depression becomes rampant because people feel stagnant. People are angry. People are frustrated.

My new challenge is trying to apply what I've learnt to the world that I live in. I'm also trying to remind myself that as much as I am a "soul" and I want to be enlightened and I want to be aware and I want to expand my consciousness, these things do not only come as a result of deep study. Trust me, that can send you very crazy very quickly if you don't monitor it. I was on a path where I couldn't just appreciate something anymore. I had to analyze it. I wanted to look for the meaning in it. I wanted to give everything meaning. I was so scared to accept the idea of things being meaningless. I thought about what impact that would have on my beliefs. To me, nothing happens by chance. And this caused me to look for the connection in EVERYTHING. And then I wonder why I'm so tired. I wonder why I struggle to pay attention. I wonder why I'm so restless. My mind is working OVER TIME. Let me explain. A bird could could cross my path and I will start to question what that meant. I'm being dead serious. I did not want to miss any lesson I had to learn so everything became a lesson for me. And it made me laugh at myself because I'm always telling people to relinquish control because I really thought I had already done that. When in fact, I had relinquished control in the ways they hadn't but that didn't mean I had relinquished control altogether. I have no desire to control the events that come my way BUT I seem to have an obsession with making sure I learn every single lesson there is to learn. How I'm trying to get out of that space is by understanding and TRUSTING that the lessons I need to learn for MY journey shall be presented to me.

In a lot of the articles and blogs and instagram posts that I've seen, they keep reminding people of the importance of spirituality and not forgetting what matters most. Reminding people to check on their loved ones. Essentially, the things people say on their death bed that they wish they had done. "I wish I hadn't worked so much and spent more time with my family." I feel lost because it feels like the other way around for me. It feels as though I'm taking the advice of those people on their deathbeds to enjoy life and spend time with friends and family but that is difficult when it feels as though everybody else is just living the same life those people on their deathbeds warned them about. And it makes me feel very stagnant. The things that are important to me don't seem important to the majority. And the things that seem important to the majority, don't seem very important to me. And learning to live in it is not fun. Lol simply put, it is not fun. It makes me think that maybe I'm one of those people who will die young because I don't see a purpose here. And that is the genuine truth.

That is not to say I won't find it but a life spent worrying about meeting your basic needs day in and day out does not sound like a life worth living. And that is what MANY people are doing today, especially millenials who get A LOT of flack for being a lazy generation and not willing to work for anything. But I won't get into that now. What time do you have to seek the God in you when your children need schoolbooks and things to eat? What time do you have to seek out your purpose when a hurricane has stripped you of everything and you need to build your life back up from scratch? In those situations, it becomes a lot easier to believe in heaven; to believe that life will get better when you die; to feel as though there is something coming to save you.

#ReclaimYourPower

What are the things you wish God would do to help the world and ask yourself what you have the means to do in that regard? How are you helping poverty, even if it is the poverty in your own home? And knowing that you have a small percentage of the population richer than everybody else combined? This is hell. For anyone questioning what hell might be like. This is it. Feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. This is hell. And I do believe in yin-yang depicting the essence of life so where do we find the heaven in this hell? I find it in people/nature (that's just me). I find it in those who still honour virtues like compassion, kindness, justice, love. They exist. They are those who are able to remain aware of the God in them regardless of what is happening around them. It is not easy and it is damn well admirable. And the most beautiful thing about it is we all have access to that God in us. When you have a certain privilege, it is difficult to speak to people without it and try to tell them that good can come from their situation, regardless of how true that is. For example, the hurricanes that have caused WHOLE islands to evacuate..how do you sit behind your laptop with Wi-Fi and tell those people that life gets better EVEN THOUGH IT MIGHT BE TRUE? In the same way we look at celebrities and legit feel like these people don't deserve to be depressed or unhappy. Because in your mind, if you had those things you'd be happy right? Hella wrong.

If I've learnt one thing this hurricane season is the power of God. The power of life. Hurricanes do not care what house you live in. They do not care what car you drive. They do not care what your status is. They just do what hurricanes do. Hurricanes are not "good"or "bad" but we label them as such because of the effect it has on US. It affects us badly so it is bad. For some politicians it is good because of the money they can make in the process of rebuilding. It all comes down to the effect it has on us as individuals or as a society. I've learnt the power of not taking life so personally. This hurricane season has allowed me to embrace my insignificance (it does not care that I am Eva..it will kill me if it needs to) while not forgetting my significance (I'm still in a position to help others). Being in a position of privilege (we ALL have some kind of privilege..yes even you) does indeed help us not take life personally but it is not necessary. It is no surprise that children in different regions in Africa who have not even running water can be happier than Donald Trump's son. It is not about external things. God is internal. God is the way to happiness. You MUST go within. That is if you want lasting happiness anyway.

As a result, my friendships have changed. I no longer take away a person's power to help themselves by giving them all the answers. My insecurities or appearance of insecurities are a result of ignorance. The more I learn, the more secure I become. Forgive yourself. You did what you could with the information you had at the time. And even if you knew better, it is not always easy to do better. But like I always say, something being difficult should not be a reason to avoid doing it.

I am in a stagnant space right now and it might not be the best but it is part of the journey. I struggled to write a post for so long because I was like "my life is so boring, I have nothing to share with my readers." I continue to look for other outlets. I have found things that bring me joy and a source of income. One of my favourite things to do is tarot readings because of how much learning takes place in the process. I LOVE helping others. And knowing that I was able to help somebody do more or get somewhere further in life is nothing short of a blessing and I am SO humbled by it. It's one of the few places I feel like I am expressing my God given talents and gifts. Sometimes I depend on modern society to show me where I belong forgetting that I belong to the universe and possibilities are endless. There are no restrictions on what the universe can provide for you. Keep an open mind. Keep positive. Relinquish control. Stop taking life so personally.

Thank you so so so much for reading. I have created a separate blog to document my personal journey. So once a month I will give an update of where I am and what I've learnt and the struggles I've had to encounter. I will let y'all know when the first post will be. I might begin posting at the beginning of next year. I think it is very important for people to see the messy parts of growth. I think it's important for people to see that a life that appears good and well structured on the outside is not the full picture. I think it is important for people to be reminded that they are not the only ones going through hard times. I see some of my friends posts sometimes and I get so happy for them and I come to speak to them and they tell me all the ways in which life sucks. We are all doing the same thing. Giving the appearance that we have our shit together. People who have their shit together don't need help or at least don't appear to need help. So which is it? Do you need help or you have your shit together? Be honest with yourself. Be humble. Accept help. No man is an island. It's okay to ask for help. It's also okay to handle your shit on your own. But time and place for everything. Be HONEST.

This blog will still remain and will be dedicated to messages that I feel channelled to share or anything that I've learnt from somebody else's situation or anything that is not explicitly a personal update on my journey.

Again, thank you so so so much for your patience. I feel like this is long overdue and I am a little bit nervous because it's been a while and I feel a little intimidated by all the new blogs coming out. But as always, I take solace in the fact that I expressed my truth and people shall receive the message relevant to them. SO much love to all of you! Especially those who ask me about my blog and that girl Naomi from the food truck that recognised me from my blog (raeee) and those people that keep telling me don't stop writing. I get so much encouragement man! Y'all are awesome sauce! Don't stop being awesome sauce! Thank you thank you thank you!