I pulled myself out of bed and I was back exactly where I had started. 20 years old, a young man with all the hopes and dreams that young men have but I was newly single, back in my mothers box room with a flat full of my stuff and a heart more broken than I thought I could handle. I was so down I would wake up crying. I went back to my old job working down the road and I couldn't have felt more like a failure. It was then I made one of the most stupid mistakes of my entire twentines, and trust me I made a few corkers but this one that would take me ten years to undo. I blamed everything, EVERYTHING on the guy that had left me. My pain, my situation, the anger dating back through my childhood all got focussed into this defining moment and instead of taking responsibility for how I felt I pointed the finger outward. When I look back at that time I see the nucleus of so much of my victim based behaviour. The habits I created during that time to survive the pain of it all I still catch hanging around the corners of my ego today. You see it's not so much about how people treat you, it's how you react and treat yourself is what creates your own karma. What I got in my 20's was a blissful gift to restart but at the time I could only see it as something negative and stunting.
Because I had chosen to be a victim to my life and because I had tried to ignore what was happening instead of actually facing it, the situation just kept repeating itself. No matter what happened and no matter where I went that pain would show up in different places behind different faces. It was all the same thing. Have you ever had that feeling like your life is on a loop? Like you're living the same situation over and over again? I did it for a long time and it was because I hadn't forgiven and I hadn't let go. But the Universe is clever and kept sending me signs everywhere I went. The Universe kept pointing me towards the time I made a negative decision. No matter who I dated they seemed to have a connection to that initial ex. Some of them had dated him too. Now I know the gay scene is small in Swansea and Cardiff but it's not THAT small. Still, it wasn't until years later when I ended up on a date with a guy who had been engaged to my first ex that I decided to stop and take stock of what was happening. It was not a fun process, by that time I had created a whole bunch of internal negative chatter on top of my initial wound and looking at it was not pretty. But there was no other way. I couldn't sit on another date, with another guy and talk about our ex in common. It took that experience for me to be ready to deal with the pain.
Your karma is your responsibility. How you treat yourself teaches others how to treat you. If you spend all of your time making your life about other people then you can't be surprised if a million different shades of that turn up in your life. Energy goes where the mind flows. What you concentrate on gets magnified in your experience. Once I forgave my ex, and forgave myself for blaming him I wiped the slate clean. If you hate someone then that hate is still inside your chest and it's that energy that is creating your life. It's better to find the pain behind the anger and figure out why you co created that. I became so grateful for the lessons that the pain they came wrapped in was inconsequential. As soon as I started to learn to love myself, to love all of those that had blessed and enriched my life I stopped the pattern in it's tracks. I now instinctively no longer blame others for what goes on in my life. I look to my own energy. I look to that parts of me that either created or allowed an experience in my life and I change those. Inside myself I found a never ending compassion and connection to love and as soon as I tapped into that the world rose to meet me. I am now happier than I have ever been and more in the space of love than I have ever been.
Thank you for reading.
Big Love,
Ryan James x