27 APRIL 2020 BLOG 41 BOOK OF SONGS AUTHOR’S 2ND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
27 APRIL 2020 BLOG 41
Knowing yourself is very different from accepting yourself. Do you accept who you are? Accepting myself was an interesting discovery for me as well…and I mean this in a good way. I accepted myself when I realized that I was ok just the way I was. I can’t recall the moment I decided that I had to change who I was in order to be accepted by others, to be what others wanted me to be, and to live my life as others believed I should live my own life.
The only feeling I have of when this change occurred goes back to grade one. It’s the first recollection I have of feeling bad about myself for being me, for being different from the other students in my class. I also recall, even from a young age, that I was treated by my teachers based on my family background. Poor and uneducated…according to the teachers and society’s definition of the words ‘poor’ and ‘uneducated’…as though the two words came as a pair…and with the expectation of not having any expectations from the students who came from ‘poor’ and ‘uneducated’ parents.
From that year in grade one, I recall feeling layers of feelings that weren’t good, about myself, about the world around me, and about my own lack of expectation. But I also recall layers of feelings that I wanted to experience different things that were different from my classmates and those around me, and from what the teachers told me I should expect from life, and what my parents told me I should expect from life as well. And I recall my mother saying on numerous occasions ‘walk your own path’ and ‘never mind the others’, and ‘if they don’t like what they see, they don’t have to look’.
Whatever occurred in my life between the life I had been leading without any doubt about myself, to fearing everything and doubting myself, can be illustrated in hundreds of stories. However, my life’s journey has taught me that it is how I feel, my mood, that writes the script of my story, and not the story that writes the script about how I feel. Basically, it’s what I tell myself that defines how I feel, every moment of my life, and it’s not the moments I experience that dictate how I feel. I decide how I feel, every moment of my life.
However, in order to experience the freedom to decide to feel good, I learned that I had to change certain things in my life, I had to change certain things about myself in order to have full control over myself. I had this once. I just needed to learn how to get back to myself, back in alignment with my soul. Wanting change in my life required that I be committed to this desire to have a better life for myself. So, what stood in the way of change for me? Again, I could write books and books about the stories I believed; the ones that stood in the way of change for me. And…I could ask you the same question. What stands in the way of change for you?
I now know the answer to this question. I decide to make the change that I want. It’s that easy. If I need help with the change, I find the help I need and accept the help I need. The only thing that stands in the way of not changing anything in your life is deciding not to change, it’s deciding not to make that commitment to yourself that you are worthy of this change that you desire in order to have a better life for yourself.
This is a book of songs. The journey of a songwriter. What lies between each lyric is the soul of a woman who is ready to live the life that she has grown into at her own will. The conditioning that the grown-ups imprinted on me was successful until I realized that I had to undo all of this conditioning in order to get back to myself. My transformational experience is too grand in a series of encounters with all manners of life to cram into books. My transformational experience can only be expressed in a few words, where I am telling a new story, where I assume responsibility for what I experienced and will experience.
Looking into my own soul allows me to look at other human beings as souls instead of persons. I now see people as souls, here on this planet, just like me, with a desire to experience whatever it is that they decided to experience on this earthly plane.
Everything I have ever thought of life, of other people, of myself, and the way I have been towards others and myself is a transformational change for the better. This transformational change for the better is a conscious decision because my most precious possession is my soul. My soul is my alignment with myself as I am now, as Suzanne Mondoux. Suzanne Mondoux can only align with her soul and nothing else. With this alignment, I am capable of being me, and that’s all that matters. When I am myself…I experience the life that I desire.
When I experience the joy of being myself, many wonderful things happen in my life. One of the many wonders of being yourself is that you experience an overwhelming sense of love from someone you don’t even know, who is momentarily present in your life. This love you experience is a consequence of the love that you have come to know for yourself. You can’t give what you don’t have.
When you resist yourself, when you deny your true self and ignore what your heart is telling you, you live a life where you can’t get past the narrow constraints of the stories you tell yourself about who you are and about others. You struggle with yourself. You live with your inner struggles for as long and as painfully as you decide to live this life for yourself.
Your inner conflict is created by you and only you. You are the one who can release yourself from the bondage you have become accustomed to living, and you will argue to your death for your own limitations rather than allowing yourself to be loving and compassionate with yourself, and to take that one step towards your soul, towards your true self.
I can write about this now because I have lived this myself. I have embarked on this journey many times in my life. I have fallen off the wagon. When I fell off the wagon, I sacrificed my own values because I wanted to feel that I was being a part of something, even when it wasn’t who was at the time. I told myself stories and others stories, clearly showing the corners where I was fighting from. These stories convinced me and others of what I was protecting from myself, and protecting myself from perceived threats that came from elsewhere, all at the expense of my own soul. Each story I told convinced me and the others who were in my court that I was right about what I was experiencing, and about why I was experiencing it.
I lived my life in black and white. Now I live my life in colour. It’s a much better way of experiencing life. It’s a much happier way for me to know that colour is all around me, and that I am not bound to the black and white life that I was taught to believe in.
To answer the question ‘Who Am I?’, I had to ask myself these questions: ‘Can I start looking at things differently for myself and help myself where I can, and change my outlook on things for myself as well as for the world around me?’ ‘Can I embrace my transformation with compassion and kindness for myself, releasing critical judgment of myself as well as of others, releasing all of the baggage that I acquired because of an experience, and experience forgiveness as dynamic energy because of where my awareness goes and of where my energy flows? And where do I want my energy to flow? I want my energy to flow towards my soul. I want a dancing heart. I want a dancing heart because I want my writing, my books, and my songs to inspire countless people, to enrich their lives as well as mine, to feel how my books, songs, and plays enrich and deepen not only my life, but the life of countless souls.