This morning during my stillness time I became quite aware of the wide range of feelings that I have been experiencing all week. I ran the gamut from intense grief and sadness for my suffering to intense gratitude, awe, wonder and rapture for what is, for how fully alive I am and how much in love I am with my husband and the cosmos. It is beautiful, freeing yet also distressing to hold all the emotions at the same time.

I try to feel and observe the life force energy of these emotions move throughout my body. I still go into a flight or fright response and experience hypervigilance because that is what my brain and body do due to my PTSD. However, I have learned to hold this suffering by placing my hands on my heart gently and warmly while telling myself that I am sorry I have to suffer.

During this process I am breathing into the fright and hypervigilance and letting the energy flow through me and out into the universe which is much more capable of holding this intense energy. This is how I have learned the art of self-compassion for my suffering. I am truly blest.

From all the skills I have learned over the last 11 years, I feel that I have come to a place of managing my PTSD which includes being self-compassionate to my suffering. I have learned to live fully and enjoy and express the radiant life I am living even in my intense suffering, pain and challenges I face on a daily basis. There is a radiance and rapture to it all and it is time for me to be radiant myself and celebrate the rapture I feel for life while embracing all that is in my life.

I have always been a spiritual person but a great desire in my spirituality was to transcend the pain and suffering and attain bliss. Today I can claim I am both a spiritual and soulful person but as this soulful person, I live the depth of the human experience and honor that suffering is part of this experience. Suffering certainly comes daily with my living with severe PTSD, Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia. Furthermore, it is my choice to be fully engaged in my evolutionary journey to evolve which also brings its own level of distress. Fully living and embracing suffering with self-compassion is my soul’s purpose and it only adds to my ability to be compassionate towards others who are living a common human experience with all its fragility and vulnerability.