Category: Healing From Chronic Pain And Illness

Why do people feel the need to hold onto resentments, anger, and the like? Why is it so hard to forgive? What benefit does it really offer someone holding onto all that negativity towards another? I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can tell you from my perspective, the only benefit it’s ever served me was my mind telling me it was to protect my heart from ever getting hurt again. Yet ironically, harboring all that inner anger and resentment, thinking it was protecting my heart, was only ever hurting me anyway, keeping everyone at bay overall.

Losing so many people throughout my life from family to other loved ones truly left me jaded and feeling broken. For the longest time, I didn’t let anyone in and walked around with an incredible amount of anger and resentment and a wall around my heart. I refused to forgive those who had left my life feeling so broken, which in turn left me a very bitter and very alone individual in life.

Developing close friendships and intimate relationships with others takes having an open heart. It takes being vulnerable. It takes letting go of the past. And it takes forgiving those who we feel broke our hearts. So long as we hold on to the pain of the past, keeping a wall around our hearts, living in resentment and anger, we’ll never let in anyone long enough and deep enough for them to stick around to love us for the rest of our lives.

I’ve worked hard in my life to remain vulnerable, to forgive those who hurt me immensely, to keep my heart open, which in turn has led to experiencing a closeness with friends and loved ones I wasn’t able to prior. People often open up with me now, feeling safe to do so, because I don’t walk around with a sword out and a shield up, like I once did, ready to stab the next person who came along and said or did anything that reminded me of the people I was still harboring anger and resentment towards.

Here’s the simple reality I came to see through it all. If you really want to be free of anger and resentment, if you truly want to experience closeness in your life, and don’t want to feel alone in this world, I’ve learned it means forgiving those that hurt us, I’ve learned it means not comparing others to those who hurt us in the past, and I’ve learned it means always keeping an open heart.

The only person who really ever ends up hurting by harboring anger and resentments towards another, by not forgiving anyone who led us to feel broken, is ourselves. Because in harboring any anger and resentments from the past will only leave us bitter and alone, complaining the world has done us wrong, when really it’s only ourselves that has done us wrong, by not practicing forgiveness and doing what we can to keep our heart open for new love to enter our lives…

Peace, love light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

Can death be prevented? This is a discussion that’s come up so very often in life these past two years during this pandemic. For each person on this planet, I’m sure their answer would be different. For me, I’ve felt for a long time now that our deaths in this world are preset, that when it’s our time to go, it’s our time and nothing can prevent that. But just as true, when it isn’t our time to go, something will prevent our deaths from happening. Watching my father’s repeated and unsuccessful attempts at suicide during much of my adolescence was when I first began to feel this way.

His first attempt came when I was 8. He had walked into the local apple orchard that bordered our neighborhood. There he drank a whole bottle of vodka in extremely cold weather, putting himself into a coma. Someone oddly enough found him deep in that orchard that day, getting to him just in time, where the doctors said he should have died from it, but thankfully he didn’t. Years later, he attempted it again when he swam well out into the frigid-cold winter waters of the Long Island Sound late one night, so far out that there was no way he’d make it back in without dying of hypothermia. As he waited for sure death, he said a set of circular lights appeared and surrounded him in the freezing water, where it warmed him up, and pushed him back to shore. When my father finally died during his last suicide attempt many years after that, it was no different from any of his prior attempts. So why were none of the prior attempts successful, when the last one was? I spent years pondering this until I finally accepted that “something” beyond my understanding must be in control when it’s our time to go and not us and I’ve chosen to label that “something” over the years as God. While that didn’t make it any less painful to deal with, it helped immensely in accepting my father’s tragic passing, especially when I saw how many good things never would have happened in my own life if any of those earlier attempts had been successful.

Not too long after his death, I dealt with this again with a friend I’ll refer to as “G”. “G” attempted suicide three times. The first time was after swallowing a whole bottle of pills where 911 got to them just in time. The second was when they tried to asphyxiate himself from carbon monoxide fumes from a tube they connected from their tailpipe into his car window, when an off-duty cop randomly found them there and got to them just in time. And the third, was when they fully loaded a revolver and tried to shoot themselves, where the first pull of the trigger ended up being a blank! I’m thankful to say that today they are alive and well, running a business and far healthier.

While these two stories deal specifically with suicide, there are plenty of others I’ve come to know over the years through my volunteer work where I’ve learned of people who should have died from various things from accidents to diseases to addiction but didn’t and went on to have drastically altered lives because of it, many becoming selfless and humanitarian in the process. I should include my own life here because I’ve skirted death multiple times myself. One instance when I used to deal drugs as a young kid, where the expensive gold jewelry I wore out one night, that I almost didn’t wear out that night but felt compelled to do so, ended up being the very thing that saves me from being murdered by rival drug dealers who used my jewelry as collateral.

All of this has led to me approaching death so very differently these days. While all death is tragic of course and painful to go through no matter what the cause, I accept that when someone dies now, it’s just their time, and couldn’t have been prevented. It’s how I’ve dealt with all the tragedy of COVID-19 thus far. So many have died during this pandemic, especially the non-vaccinated, but what if it was just their time? Maybe they would have died from some other tragedy around the same exact time in their life, even if they had been vaccinated? There was a great non-fiction book I once read that dealt with this concept. It was called “The Afterlife of Billy Fingers” and was originally suggested to me by my dear friend Caryn. It really helped to solidify much of my inner spiritual beliefs surrounding death.

Regardless, at my core spiritual essence now, I accept God is in charge of when it’s my turn to go. If it’s my time and God’s ready for my life-force to leave this plane of existence, I’m convinced it’s going to happen, not a day sooner, and not a day later, and not within my control. On some level, maintaining this belief has really helped me to live far more at peace during this terrible pandemic, rather than living in fear surrounding it, which sadly seems to continue to consume the majority these days…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

I often feel like far too many people walk around claiming not to be insecure about anything in their lives. I tend to believe the reason for that is it makes them feel weak and vulnerable to the world around them if they openly admitted they had any insecurities. But truly, I think everyone, and yes, I do mean EVERYONE, has some sort of insecurity or insecurities in their lives. While some genuinely might be completely oblivious of them, I find most just do a pretty darn good job covering them up by always pointing out the insecurities in those around them, that they themselves battle within.

There are many insecurities I have seen in plenty of individuals over the years, mostly because I have dealt with the very same insecurities myself. Spending as much time as I have in so many different types of support groups, therapies, retreats, and the like over the years has totally helped me to “truly spot in others what I got”. Some of the top insecurities I’ve witnessed the most in this world deal with one’s appearance, finances, social standing and status in society, relationship status, sexuality, and health.

While most probably rarely consciously choose to ever talk openly about any of their insecurities with the world in general, such as on their social media, I decided to do that very thing today by sharing a list of my insecurities in this blog entry. Because I’m not perfect and I do have my own flaws and shortcomings, just as each of us do. We may do our best to tell the world we don’t have them, but deep down there’s always that part of us that knows otherwise. The more I’ve tried to deny this, the more I find myself living in ego, falling back into some sort of an addiction, and growing farther away from being the unconditionally loving being I want to be in this life.

So, am I doing this exercise for some sort of therapeutic reason? Partially. But ultimately, I’m doing this simply because I want to be more of an honest, vulnerable, and transparent individual in this world that people can relate to, because deep down we really all do have our set of insecurities. We just may not talk about them openly with each other. So here goes. This is the true fully transparent me…

• I am insecure about my lack of employment and income.
• I am insecure about my weight and my looks in general.
• I am insecure about ever saying or doing anything that might offend or hurt another.
• I am insecure about the many health issues I continue to endure with no end in sight.
• I am insecure about dying a nobody and being easily forgotten.
• I am insecure about being alone in this world.
• I am insecure about what my closest friends, family, and loved ones think about me.
• I am insecure about whether I’ll ever feel truly happy, joyful, and at peace in this life.
• I am insecure about ever following in my father’s footsteps who took his own life.
• I am insecure about ever expressing my sexuality openly.
• I am insecure about God’s existence and whether I’m even doing God’s will.

And I will end with this. There is one thing I am absolutely secure in and that is I always do my best everyday to be an unconditionally loving, caring, and kind individual, something that only came about by becoming as open and transparent as I’ve become in my life, insecurities and all…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson