One Sip at a Time, Blog

Live Your EMPOWERED Life!

Photo by Oleksandr Pidvalnyi from Pexels

Have you been holding yourself hostage?  I know I was. I didn’t know it until I went through divorce and began my journey to an empowered life of personal freedom.  Working to find my inner freedom was a growing experience. I found myself crawling through the muck of my divorce on my belly, facing things in my life I didn't want to face.  I recognized I had given pieces of myself away.  In that empty space, I realized I didn't love myself.

Many of us create this inner bondage with negative self-talk.  It keeps us from addressing the real issue which is: Do I love myself?

Because we believe the harmful things that we or others may have told us about ourselves, we stop growing.  We doubt ourselves. 

Through divorce, I realized all those places where I held myself hostage. By hostage, I mean where I gave pieces of myself away which created a cage or a fortress around my heart, not realizing it. Ever heard the story about the frog in the hot water?  If you drop a frog in hot water it will jump out, but if you slowly turn the heat up it won't know it's boiling to death.  That's what happens when we give pieces of ourselves away, we begin to slowly boil to death. 

When we hold ourselves hostage, we are not living our authentic life because we have stopped investigating the truth of who we are. Personally, I had stopped living my life from a heart centered place, connected, loving and being kind with myself.  In divorce, I realized I wanted to be free, not just free from the marriage but free from that inner bondage I had created. All those walls I had put up around my heart kept me from loving life. 

Recognizing something is empty and missing inside you is where you begin to see where you sold yourself out, where you've been holding yourself hostage. That is where your freedom can be accessed.   By making the choice to investigate yourself. Ask yourself: Who am I now? And how do I want to express myself in the second half of my life? Do I want to live from a place of resentment and anger? Or do I want to serve my family and/or my work colleagues from a place of loving kindness? 

Love, compassion and creativity are qualities that always reside within us. We forget them when we give pieces of ourselves away, when we lose our self-esteem. We begin to not respect ourselves because we have stayed too long in that relationship, that marriage, or that job that doesn't allow us to be fully us. Finding your freedom is a very important aspect to living an empowered life. Not just happy, but empowered. The other thing about feeling empowered is you get to make it up however you want because it's your power, it's your life. And who doesn’t want that?