Meditation on Negative Thoughts

I had a tarot card reading two weeks ago.  One of the things that came up during the reading was

HONOR THY ERROR AS HIDDEN INTENTION

I have been trying to meditate on this for the past two weeks because honestly I didn't understand it completely.

As I have thought about the reading and its themes over the past two weeks, something that came up frequently in the reading was that I have a chronic negative way of thinking that I need to revise.  It seems that the cards are telling me two things:

1) Honor the journey.  The things you see as mistakes can only hold me back if I only see them as such.  Instead I can see them as bumpers that are trying to keep me on my path.

2) Change the negative thought patterns.

I was having a conversation with my boyfriend last night after we saw Saving Mr. Banks at the movies.  It's a film about a father and a daughter, who ultimately became P.L. Travers and a woman who was writing her story as a way to save her father.  I thought about Nebraska, another film about a child/father relationship that I saw recently.  And it made me think about my own Dad.  Many or most of the negative thoughts that I have about myself can be traced back to my Dad.  And when that's the only relationship I had with my Dad--where he criticized me and I took it--to give those negative thoughts up feels like I'm letting go of him now that he's gone.

And that's exactly what I need to do.  I literally cannot progress in my life until I let that go.  It is what is holding me back and has been holding me back.

I don't honor him by holding on to the limiting beliefs that I have about myself because as a child he was trying to protect me by pushing me so hard that I would have a thick enough skin to survive the world long after he was gone.

I have the armor.  I can protect myself.  But a warrior does not wear his battle gear all of the time.
There's no reason for it.

So as I continue to think about this idea of honoring my error as hidden intention, it really is about embracing my journey.

I had a recent conversation with my best friend Alanna and the boyfriend.  Alanna and I were spending the weekend at her house, catching up when he called.  And she was talking about the latest rewrite of this play that I just gave to her.  It's a play that we are going to produce with her in the lead role.  But she talked about what this play is and what it says about me as a writer now.  That I could have gotten a job on a Disney show or a Nickelodeon show and that would have been fine.  But I would have been miserable and it wouldn't have allowed me to tell my whole story as a writer.  Not that every job has to do that.  But my point of entry would have been different.  If this new play is my point of entry it says that I am a writer who writes complex characters, provocative stories and cares about structure and language in a way that's not simple or linear.  It's more stream of consciousness, improvisational and musical in quality.  She talked a lot about James Joyce and Ulysses.  It was a wonderful complement.  But I thought about what she said.  This is my point of entry.  For it to happen earlier would have brought a different result.  That would have been a different journey.  But this is my journey now.  My work is more evolved, mature, new.  I am not writing for anyone other than myself.  It's the purest expression of who I am.  I have washed off the stink of trying to work in the TV industry for years.  I am writing in the fashion that I choose to.  So if the writing gods descend upon me, this is the creature they will find: the one who is not pandering to them.

I am learning to stand alone and far ahead of the pack.

For years, I have been afraid to do this because it leaves me vulnerable.  I thought that being different made me unlikable, undesirable, unemployable.  I then strived to be like the back.  But as my friend Dave said years ago, I can't help but to be myself.

That is honoring my error as hidden intention.  My intention is to be myself.  I can't help it.  But for so long I thought my individualism made me a target versus making me special.  But that's what striving for popular success does.  It smooths down the rough edges.  It doesn't have to.  It's what we do to ourselves because we want to be liked.  It's like high school.  You wear the right jeans, the right hair cut, the right shoes to fit in.  But the right thing is the thing that everyone else is doing.  When someone does something different, they are ridiculed.  And I didn't want to be ridiculed.  I had been ridiculed my entire life as that kid who was different.

So when I got older and cuter and smarter and more likable, I thought the way to increase my likability was to be like everyone else.  But what I didn't realize was that it made me less special.  And the past three years has been a journey of getting back to my voice.  The time away has been good for me.  This hibernation has been transformative: the caterpillar into the butterfly.

The error is not being different.
The hidden intention is being different and celebrating that.

What are the negative thoughts?
I think that self-cruelty is a catalyst for my own success.  That is simply not true.
I think that there can't be two nice guys in my relationship.
I become suspicious of someone who is so open and loving because I think he must not be seeing the bigger picture.
I think that I have to be pushy in order to get my way.  That I have to ram the idea that I'm the right person down everyone's throat.
I think that success hasn't come to me because I haven't worked hard enough.
I don't understand how great my journey is and how far I have come.
I don't love myself enough and I don't give enough love to my work.
If I don't value what I have done, then I will treat it like trash and throw it away.
I have to value myself first.  All I have to do is give massive and endless amounts of love to myself.
Now I truly understand the fullness of the statement that came up in a tarot card reading two years ago:
The Serpent Has Outgrown His Purpose
Maybe it's
The Serpent Has Outlived His Purpose.
I couldn't hear it fully before.
I thought it referred to my ex-boyfriend and his negative thoughts towards me.
But it really referred to the negative thoughts put in my head by my father.
The Serpent Is Dead.  Bury him and put him away.
Let him go.
The Serpent is no more.
I don't need him any more.

My negative thoughts are the serpent.
I need to take his limp, dead useless body.
And throw it in the garbage.
Let the garbage man take his stinking carcass away
and let the truck dump it,
away with all of the other rotting, rotten
trash that has outlived its purpose.

For awhile, the rotten smell still lingered.
Now it is clearing.
There's a faint trace of it.
Wait…
No, there's not.
There's the memory of it.
But now even that's being forgotten.
It's gone.
It's nowhere.
Not even in the pillows.
Not even in the windmills of my mind.