Not Everything That Weighs You Down Is Yours To Carry

I’m having to practice this this week. There’s been a lot going on, in all aspects of my life, and I have to take a step back and look at the weight I’m carrying around. Is all of it mine to carry? The answer is no, but here I am, lugging it around with my already tired mind, body and spirit. I juggle a lot of every day, and I think I can do it all, but I can’t, no one can, and when I realize I can’t there are times I get angry with myself. It is in those times of frustration I need to remember self-love and self-care, but even though I know better, and know what the right action is, I can still fall down the rabbit hole of my old thinking and try to carry the whole load myself. No one is asking me to do this, and there is help if I need it, and yet, there I go, dragging all of it, and myself, trying to reach the imaginary finish line I’ve drawn in my head. It’s time to take a breath, maybe a few, and really look at what I’ve got dragging behind me.

In the past I dragged it all. It never occurred to me that I may be suffering and straining myself more than I needed to, I just kept trudging along, slowly, each day, running out of steam, until I finally hit a wall and had to stop. I couldn’t do it anymore. When I got myself up and started to dust myself off, I reached out for help, not just to ease the load, but to find a new way of life, I couldn’t keep living the way I was, it was going to kill me.

As I traveled the road of recovery I learned that much of what I had been carrying wasn’t mine to carry at all. There were also things that I carried knowing they weren’t mine to carry to further burden myself, to purposely drag myself down, and keep myself in a state of exhaustion and despair, so identifying what wasn’t mine to carry was only half my battle, I had to also identify what I was carrying to keep myself down, and then learn to let it all go. It took some time to really look at what I had been doing for most of my life, and make the changes to my behavior, but as I got better it got easier to see the truth in what I chose to do. And, I had to learn to say no. There are always people who will gladly let you carry their load if you are willing to, or we ourselves will take on someone else’s load to carry, even if they haven’t asked, because we feel responsible, or capable, or, we are trying to burden ourselves with more weight. It comes back to being rigorously honest with ourselves, what we are truly doing and why and if it’s any of our business in the first place. We are responsible for ourselves, to honor ourselves and take care of our needs, it is not our duty to take on those duties for everyone else in our lives.

We all walk a little heavier some days, some days we carry more weight than others, but are we truly needing to carry all of it ourselves, or any at all, or we self-sabotaging ourselves and piling on more weight? Find some time today SLAYER to access the weight your carrying. Is all of it really necessary, or even yours to begin with, or are you carrying around a lot of dead weight? SLAY on!

SLAY OF THE DAY: Do you tend to carry around a lot of weight? What are the main things you carry around? How can you let those go, or lighten their load? How can you do that? Are there things you carry that aren’t yours to carry at all? What are they? Who’s are they? How can you let those go? Why did you pick them in the first place? How has it harmed you to carry someone else’s weight? How will it help you to let it go? SLAYER, we all have full busy lives, and we do carry the weight of that, but how much weight is up to us. Make sure you’re only carrying the weight that you should, and then find a way to lighten that load. We have the power to drop the weight that weighs us down.

S – self L – love A – appreciate Y – you