Category: Words To Live By

Every year approximately one million people are dying from suicide. This equates to one of these happening at least every 40 seconds. Global suicide rates have increased 60 percent in the past 45 years and that percentage is only steadily increasing with each passing year. The sad reality for each and every person that becomes one of these statistics is the fact that this seemed to be the best and only choice left in their life. And unfortunately, my father was one of them (and I was almost too).

My father was truly a wonderful man who had a very loving and giving heart when he was alive. Regrettably, he also battled with bi-polar disorder through most of it, which is what eventually led him to become one of those 90 percent of people who die by suicide due to a mental illness. He was just one of too many people who grew seriously depressed in life and chose a path they couldn’t come back from. And sadly, this dead-end path is usually the result of their not seeking or finding the necessary help. In my father’s case, he often refused to seek any help at all, and even when he did, he wouldn’t stick with it. This caused him to continually deal with untreated depression, which is actually the number one cause for suicide in our world today. There were other reasons though why my father made the choice to take his own life besides genetics and untreated depression. What most people don’t realize is that when a person commits suicide, it’s usually the result of an accumulation of negative life experiences. The following is a list of just some of those that have led to serious depression and suicide like my father’s, where the first three shown were a major source of his.

– The death of a loved one.

– A divorce, separation, or breakup of a relationship.

– A serious loss, such as with a job, a house, or money.

– Losing custody of children, or feeling that a child custody decision is not fair.

– A grave or terminal illness, or serious accident.

– Chronic physical pain or intense emotional pain.

– Being victimized (domestic violence, rape, assault, etc).

– A loved one being victimized (child murder, child molestation, kidnapping, rape, assault, etc).

– Physical, sexual, or verbal abuse.

– Unresolved abuse (of any kind) from the past.

– Feeling trapped in a situation perceived as negative.

– Feeling a loss of hope, helpless or that things will never get better.

– Serious legal problems, such as incarceration or criminal prosecution.

– Feeling “taken advantage of”.

– Alcohol and drug abuse.

– Inability to deal with a perceived “humiliating” situation or “failure”.

– A feeling of not being accepted by family, friends, or society.

– Feeling like one has not lived up to their expectations of themselves or of another.

– Bullying.

– Low self-esteem.

This is by no means a complete list of all the things that can lead to someone becoming depressed and ultimately taking their own life. In my case, the closest I ever came to suicide was primarily due to my sexual addiction and the obsessive feelings I had developed for an extremely toxic and unhealthy man a few years ago. After one too many bouts of experiencing rejection from him, I entered my storage unit, closed its door to where my car was being stored, started it, and waited to die. Thankfully, God intervened and my story in life didn’t end as tragically as my father’s did.

While I have done a tremendous amount of work in my life to heal from my own mental illness, depression, and negative life situations; my father, and so many others, gave up before they really tried to find their own healing. Their deaths have only caused more pain in this world as it’s definitely true what they say, that those who hurt the most from a person’s suicide is all those they left behind. I spent years battling my own depression and thoughts of suicide because of my father’s death, but I’m grateful to God today for the fact that I have fully healed from it and can talk so openly about it now. I loved my father deeply, maybe even more so now with all this healing work I’ve done. I can only imagine how many souls his life could have touched for the better if he had gone that extra mile to finding his own healing and inner peace. While I can’t bring him back, it’s my hope in writing this, that I may prevent others from following in his footsteps.

So if you are someone out there right now who is depressed and considering suicide, please take a moment, breathe, and know that even though I may not know you, I love you. There is help out there, as I am a walking, breathing, and living example of that. Suicide is never the answer and your passing will only extinguish yet another one of God’s beautiful lights that exist here on Earth. Even though you might find that hard to believe right now, just know that it’s true. I believe in you and so does God, so please don’t give up, as your healing has already begun by you having just read all of these words…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

If you have an e-mail address and friends who e-mail you regularly, my guess is that you probably have been a recipient of a chain e-mail at some point in time. You know those ones that always start out with something so very sweet? But then as you read on, they draw you in with that hook and ask you to send the e-mail on to at least ten friends, including the person who originally sent it to you, for some special condition to be met. Just the other day, I happened to receive one of these but after sending it on, I realized it was time to put an end to ever doing it again for one reason and one reason only. These e-mails are usually based upon the one feeling I’ve been trying to remove from my life and that’s GUILT.

In case you are one of those who don’t know what I’m talking about because you either don’t use the Internet or because you’ve never received one of these, here’s the e-mail I received in my Inbox that triggered all of this.

“Twenty angels are in your world. Ten of them are sleeping, nine are playing and one is reading this message. Please Read…not joking…God has seen you struggling with something. God says it’s over. A blessing is coming your way. If you believe in God, send this message on, please don’t ignore it, you are being tested. God is going to fix two BIG things tonight in your favor. If you believe in God, drop everything and pass it on. Tomorrow will be the best day ever. Send this to at least ten friends, including me, if I don’t get it back, I guess I’m not one of them. As soon as you get five replies, someone you love will quietly surprise you…”

So what are YOU reading in this e-mail? Are you seeing any of that guilt it’s trying to provoke in you? Well I do and unfortunately, I have been falling for it in e-mails like this for years. But thankfully though, the spiritual work I’ve been doing on myself has finally helped me to see how my sending this out yet again did nothing more for me than take me in the exact opposite direction I’ve been heading in lately.

Guilt is a energy depleting feeling and it’s also extremely unspiritual. It’s something I grew up with in my alcoholic family. It’s something I endured through many toxic friendships and relationships, And it’s something I’d prefer to remove all traces of from my life like these chain e-mails.

Here’s what I believe are the real truths in this chain e-mail…

1. God sees us struggling all the time but that’s usually for the fact that we hold onto control and do our will instead of God’s will more than not.

2. God blesses each of our lives every single day except most of the time we are too busy to see it.

3. God only tests us in things that will help us spiritually grow to become more filled with love and light and to see if we have learned certain lessons from previous situations.

4. God fixes things all the time for us, but they don’t come in our time or through our demands. They come in God’s time and not because we are diligently sending out some chain e-mail that declares to God, “Well I sent this e-mail out God, so where’s my two BIG fixes!”

5. God asks us to drop our selfish and self-centered behaviors to help out one another, but sending out a chain e-mail like this is really just another selfish and self-centered action because of the reward it promises to the sender in doing so.

6. God’s guidance in life can lead to having every day be one of the best days ever but that entails removing self-will and leaning more on God’s will.

7. God wants each of us to love each other but not in guilting someone to e-mail another.

8. God loves you every single day just as much as deep down your soul loves God. By slowing down, you’ll see that God can quietly surprise you all the time.

While this is just one chain e-mail with its own set of guilt-laden messages, there are many others out there circulating that I don’t know how or where they originated. All I do know is that they continue to become more and more creative with deeper and deeper hooks to draw people in. They use that guilt and many other negative feelings to keep them going from person to person. So if you are looking to live a spiritual life, the next time you open your e-mail and see one of them in your inbox, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and do what I did when I got another one of them a few days later after the first. Delete it, and move on with your life with a big smile knowing you’re not only helping yourself in doing so, but so many others too.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Sometimes it feels as if a war has waged on between my spirit and my brain for most of my life. It’s almost as if I have had two completely separate entities living within me and all too often, they weren’t in agreement with each other on things. And lately, I’ve been realizing that all the work I’ve been doing has been helping them to operate much better as a unified team.

To help explain this better, I would like to portray my spirit and my brain as two completely independent people with different wants and needs. For my spirit, I compare it to that of a wise old man who’s lived way beyond his years. And for my brain, I compare it to that of a rebellious teenage boy who is very restless and impatient in life. Think for a moment what you could probably see happening when the two of these polar opposite people are placed in a room with each other. The main scenario I always saw playing out for years was the one that became that growing war within me. It’s where the wise old man was often trying to provide some words of wisdom to help that rebellious teenage boy to grow. But that boy never wanted to listen and instead would just roll his eyes, call the old man a geezer, and proceed to do whatever he wanted.

I see now how my old spirit has been trying to send my impatient brain messages for as long as I have lived. But sadly, my brain refused to listen until the pain got great enough. I look back at my life and realize my addictions to alcohol and drugs, gambling, sex and love, caffeine, shopping, and whatever else I chased after, were all tied to my restless and impatient brain that wished to have immediate gratification in life. Throughout all of that time where my brain was engaging in these addictions and more of the one in control, I can still remember those messages that were coming to me from my spirit. Usually they came in these quiet voices that preceded each time I acted out in one of those addictions. Sometimes I could almost hear the words going on from deep within me saying something like “That’s not really going to be good for you Andrew…” But my brain rarely, if ever, listened.

If you still aren’t getting what I mean, here’s a simple example for you. Take a person who just had a heart attack and is now on a mandatory diet by their doctor. Picture them walking down some main street and looking in all the shop windows they pass by. They soon come upon a bakery they once visited with great frequency and see in the window all its delicious pastries. It’s then that their spirit says very quietly, “You don’t need any of those as they will only cause you greater health issues right now, it’s best if you just keep on walking ok?” But the brain starts screaming, “GO IN THERE AND BUY JUST ONE! IT’S OK. IT WILL MAKE YOU FEEL A LOT BETTER RIGHT NOW!” And that’s when that internal war starts raging between the brain and the spirit. In my case, my brain always won out in those situations. That lasted for several decades in this way until my health began to fall apart completely a few years ago.

While these past few years have been a great source of frustration for my brain, the truth is that they’ve given the upper hand to my spirit to making many more of the day to day decisions in life. My brain hasn’t been very happy about this either. But it has been learning, as time has been moving forward, that my life is getting much less complicated then all those days when it was more in control. Little by little, my brain seems to be conceding its control, which is allowing my spirit to make much healthier decisions in life than my brain was ever was able to do. The war appears to be raging less and less within me and I am feeling a lot more peaceful with every step I am taking these days.

I think my rebellious teenage brain is actually growing up and realizing that it’s restless and impatient based life did nothing more than cause me great pain. And that wise old spirit within me, who was extremely patient with my brain for all those years, somehow knew through its wisdom that this would eventually happen. I’m happy to say that I’m starting to visualize a different picture now in that room with that teenage boy and old man. It’s one where I can see the boy sitting there intently and listening to the old man’s stories now. And it’s also one where I can see the old man playing some of the teenage boy’s favorite games with him now. Both seem to be finding great joy in each other’s company, but even better, it’s also allowing God to help them become that unified team with one sole purpose…to fill this world with a lot more love and light.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson