flash fire, the kind that lights your soul

“The mantra becomes one's staff of life and carries one through every ordeal. Each repetition has a new meaning, carrying you nearer and nearer to God.”

Rob and I were talking last night about mantras. The kinds of things you live your life by, even when you aren't aware that you have that mantra swirling around your head like a broken record. The kinds of things that lead you to react or not react based on what you stand by.

I realized that when I thought about various people in my life, the people with whom I share and receive much of my energy, I immediately saw words and phrases swirling around them. As if I could sift through the thousands of opportunities I have had to interact with them (or merely sit idly by as a spectator) and filter all of those details into one solid foundation from which they stand on.

Like at the end of "The Lorax", when you turn the page to see the tattered pile of stones that the Lorax once stood on, and the word "Unless" is engraved there.

And our discussion reminded me of when I was 17. It was my senior year of high school, one of my best friends had just passed away through a violent death, my oldest brother and I weren't on speaking terms after a lot of turmoil in his life, and I had just returned from 3 weeks of partial hospitalization in a mental health hospital (wow, talk about disclosure).

I wasn't in a very good place emotionally. And my step father overheard me screaming through tears in my bed that "I didn't want to live this life anymore". He pulled me out of the bed and into the bathroom where I couldn't even stand on my own because of the sheer weight of the emotions raging through my body. I felt like the power of a thousand screams were pounding inside of me while my mind felt nothing but fatigue. And that was the mantra I had been living with up until my 17th year of life, "I don't want to live this life anymore." I felt like every memory and moment I had experienced in those 17 years was laden with pain and misery.

I remember my Ma asking me that night, "does that mean you want to die?" And I distinctly remember thinking, "No, it means I want to live. This is what death feels like, and I don't want *this* anymore."

It was that night that I adopted a new mantra. A new foundation to live on, a new air to breathe. I have been living by that new mantra ever since, and to say it has been transformational doesn't even begin to scratch the surface.

I am a new spirit. I resurrected an energy inside of me that knows pain but grows through it. An energy that grabs a hold of the most painful experiences my body can handle and spins them into the most blinding light I have ever touched.

And I feel like I saved myself that night. Like I tapped into the universal energy that connects us all and freed my own mind. I freed my mind so that it could align with a soul that was soaked in love. A soul that knew all along that pain wasn't everything I was, because pain is a reminder that you are still fighting to feel. I was a soul that used pain to find peace through love.

So when I step away from my own tattered pile of stones, the stones that built the life I created, at the bottom you'll see "peace & love".