Category: Words To Live By

Have you ever walked into a room where everyone seems happy to see you except for one lone individual, who you may or may not know, but for whatever the reason, they don’t appear to particularly like you, even if you know you’ve done nothing negative towards them? If so, are you also the type of person who will then spend the rest of the evening letting that bother you where the only thing you’re able to focus on is that one lone individual who is giving the impression that they have some sort of ill will towards you?

A wise person once told me that I’m not always going to be able to get everyone to like me. Unfortunately, that never stopped me from trying anyway for most years of my life. If I was to delve into why I’d say it probably stemmed back to the relationship I had with my mother because I always wanted to stay in her good grace and keep her happy. With her having been an alcoholic, all too often she was complaining about something I was doing that wasn’t meeting her satisfaction. So if she wasn’t happy, without even knowing why, I often thought there was something I did wrong. Because of that, I’d do all sorts of nice things to try to get her happy again but until she did, I had a hard time focusing on anything else. As life moved on from those younger years, that pattern just morphed from person to person where if someone was upset or didn’t seem too happy around me, I would immediately think it was something I did wrong. The result was usually my attempting to make that person happy through any number of things. So in the case of the example I started out with, when I’d walk into a party where most everyone was happy to see me except for a person or two, my evening was spent trying to figure out why those few individuals didn’t appear to like me instead of having a good time with those who did.

Thankfully, with all the work I’ve done in recovery, therapy, the ManKind Project, with my spiritual teacher, and with God, I’ve been able to see things from a completely different perspective when it comes to this trait. And I’m grateful to say that this pattern is finally beginning to dissipate and hold less and less power over me. As I continue to grow more spiritual, I’ve been noticing that the brighter my soul becomes, the more I appear to be having greater numbers of people show signs of not liking me. At first I didn’t understand why, because I thought it would be exactly the opposite of that, but after working with my spiritual teacher, I’ve learned the answer through a simple principle she taught me.

She told me there are many people in this world who will choose to remain in darkness and do dark-based behaviors for the rest of their lives. They will oppose any light which exposes their darkness and will gravitate to only those people and places that keep them in that darkness. In my case, since I’ve chosen to expose myself completely to the light that God is sending me, all darkness from within me is being expelled and I am becoming brighter everyday as a result. In turn, this has led me to accepting the fact that when I see a person, who I’ve done nothing wrong towards, start talking behind my back, snickering at me, pointing a negative finger in my direction, or blatantly verbally attacking me, that’s it’s just their darkness trying to snuff out the bright light within me. This is exactly what my mother often did to me as a kid as she lived in a lot of her own internal darkness. As a child, my light was very bright. In fact, most children’s are, that is until a toxic parent, or toxic friend, or even from their own toxic actions, start to dim it. For years, I allowed my toxic mother and so many toxic others to take away my light. Then I just stayed in toxic behaviors and addictions that lead me into nothing but more darkness. I am so grateful that my relationship with God has led me back into the light again. Now I stay as far away as I can from those people who are consumed with remaining in their own darkness as I don’t ever want to go back to that place and join them.

I try to focus now solely on the people who want to be in the light. And I agree with that wise person who once said I was never going to be able to get everyone to like me. I’ve found that most people who don’t are generally those who refuse to look at their own darkness that’s living with in them. I pray for those people now and hope that I as continue to shine more and more brightly each and every day, that I may be a beacon for them to be guided out of their darkness. Because as they do, I know they will start to find me a whole lot more likable, all on their own, when their own light begins to shine just as bright.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

When I was growing up, grace was a mandatory requirement before I was ever allowed to take a single bite of my food when the family came together for every meal. Ironically, that grace was always the same and was actually performed as a song, if you can believe that. I’m not even sure to this day how it came to be, but I tend to believe it was a concoction of a child’s prayer and something my parents made up. And it went as follows:

“God is great, God is good, and we thank Him for our food. We’re gonna thank him morning, noon, and night, we’re gonna thank our Lord, cause he’s out of sight, Amen ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch, do do do do…”

It’s amazing to think back now and remember the countless meals in which my family truly did sing that grace. At the time I hated every second of it and as soon as I left home at the age of 18, I stopped saying any type of prayer altogether before all of my meals. For the next 20 years, the only time I ever revisited a blessing prior to eating was often only to impress those I was spending time with. During those moments, I’d ask everyone at the meal to hold hands where I would then come up with some type of prayer to bless the food as well as everyone present. Normally that effort was met with general uncomfortability as I found that many people never did grace at their meals either, even if they did have some type of faith in a Higher Power. But regardless, my intentions for most of those prayers I did here and there over the course of two decades were never pure.

When I began to find humility in my life through all the pain and suffering I started going through in my mind and body, my view on saying grace went from being a self-seeking option to one of a pure desire to do so at all times. Much of that is in part due to the knowledge I have today of some of the World Hunger Statistics.

Here are the most alarming statistics I found that relate to world hunger for 2013:

1. Total number of children that will die this year from hunger – 1.5 million.

2. Percent of world population considered to be starving right now – 33%.

3. Total number of people who will die today from hunger – 20,864.

4. Total number of people who are currently suffering from hunger and malnutrition – 800 million.

5. Time between deaths of people who die from hunger – 3.6 seconds.

My Higher Power, or God as I see fit to label now, has shown me how far I’ve been from ever falling into one of those statistics at any point in my life. Since I was a child, I have never, ever, gone hungry unless I chose to fast for any period of time. I’ve even been privileged enough to dine out quite a bit throughout my life at various eating establishments. Thankfully, there was another good behavior in addition to grace that my family taught me about food when I was growing up. That behavior was to always eat everything that was put in front of me. They used to say there were starving people in China when I left anything on my plate. And the ironic thing is how close that was to the truth back then and really still is in this world as you can see with those World Hunger Statistics.

I’m grateful that God has helped me to develop more humility as well as love and compassion for everyone and everything, because that has led me to wanting to say grace at each of my meals now just like I did as a kid. Only now, I really do what to say it. While I don’t sing my grace anymore, I do make it a point to always bless not only the food in front of me and anyone else dining with me, but also for all those people in this world who are going without food at that very moment. I also make it a point to help out where I can when I see people around me begging or if I am anywhere there is a container collecting money for hunger. It’s not my place to judge where exactly that money I donate is used, I just have faith that somehow I’m doing my part for God to help in the world hunger crisis.

So it’s my desire for anyone reading this, that the next time you are about to put all that food in your mouth that’s sitting in front of you ready to be eaten, that you will take a moment, breathe, and say some type of a quick grace. Try to remember all those people out there, especially the young children, who will die today because they were malnourished. And at the end of your meal, try saving your leftovers to eat at a later date, as what you might throw away is probably more than any of what those starving people will ever eat in a week. Hunger is a real problem in this world, and saying grace at your meals can be just the beginning to having a little more gratitude for the fact that your not starving like 1 in 3 people in this world currently are…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Have you ever wished you could go back in time to prevent yourself from saying something that was said during the heat of a moment? In those situations, were the words that came out of your mouth downright nasty and unloving towards someone, maybe even towards someone you care about?

It’s so very easy to react to someone we love with a tongue that can spit fire when we’re at the height of an argument and our anger gets the best of us. I’m sure you’ve had at least one of those moments where your ego was feeling backed into a corner. It’s usually in those moments where the only thing to do seems to be the drawing of a dagger through extremely hurtful words where they’re aimed at this person’s heart. Everyone usually has at least one thing they could say in those heated moments that they know will stop the other person from cornering them, but yet they also know deep down it will truly hurt not only that person, but also themselves. In the long run, when the dust settles from that argument and those awful words have had some time to linger in the air, the damage is done and they can’t be taken back.

Some say that those words which are thrown like daggers in any heated argument are really the truth on how someone feels inside. Based upon my own experiences in life when I’ve said those kind of words that I’ve wished I could take back, I’d have to agree. A good example of this was with my ex partner. He and I had so many arguments while we owned and ran a bed and breakfast where the both of us found the deepest of ways to always wound each other with our words. The biggest dagger I always threw at him was about his financial instability as he had declared bankruptcy years earlier. When much of our business started to go belly up, I used that data from his past to blame him for what was happening, so sadly, this was my truth back then to how I felt inside about him. And usually, I had regret after each time I said it because I saw the pain in his eyes it caused. The truth was that my spiritual place in life was so low back then and I had no resistance to my ego’s process of lashing out.

The sad part about allowing one’s tongue, like my own once did, to spit fire is that sometimes it has such a damaging effect, that it can end a relationship for good with whoever they were directed at. Other times, while they might not permanently sever the connection with that loved one, they leave a scar behind that is often revisited down the road in another heated argument. With my ex partner and I, eventually there were so many scars that all we could see when we looked at each other was total ugliness and it was then that our relationship ended. But the unfortunate reality was that the true ugliness we were seeing in each other was actually within ourselves.

When words are spit with that fire from our tongues, where the only intention in saying them is to inflict major damage and wound someone else, it really shows just how ugly our insides have become. What comes out of our mouths is a great representation of what exists within us. When a person throws hate towards another during any heated conversation, it’s because they are filled with so much hate inside towards their own self. When I threw all those daggers day in and day out at my ex partner, I really hated myself. I hated who I had become. I hated what I was doing with my life. And I hated that I had become so unspiritual, unloving, and selfish. Thus, the words that flew out of my mouth in all those heated moments where really just a representation of all the hate that lived within me. And the more that I said them, the more I filled myself with hate. And the more I filled myself with hate, the more I became even more unspiritual, unloving, and selfish. It wasn’t until I met several more people down the road after that relationship who were filled with as much hate as I was, that I figured this out.

I went through several years of being close with those people who were great mirrors for myself. During those relationships, they threw out many hateful, spiteful, and damaging words in my direction and each landed with a gash to my heart and tears to my eyes only to get suppressed by my own hatred, anger, and rage. It was then that I began to see that no one wins when words like that are said. The person saying them loses out because they become filled with more and more hate as they say them. And the person receiving them loses out as well because they get wounded, then they start to despise those people saying them, which then turns into more hate from within.

The bottom line is that any dagger based words that are said in heated moments are only a reflection of the insides of the person saying them. They do nothing more than create more hate in this world both inside and around that person saying them. Unfortunately, there are no time machines that can take someone back a few minutes to prevent them from being said, but there is this thing called grace that my Higher Power helped me to develop which has helped in the total prevention of this behavior. Because of that, I’m no longer filled with hate inside nor do I have any desire to ever inflict again that kind of damage to any of the souls on this planet.

Maybe the next time when you are backed into a corner, you might try to take a moment, breathe, and ask your Higher Power for spiritual help in the situation. Realize that anything you are about to say in that heat of the moment could have potentially long lasting or permanent damage to a person who has a soul just like you. Whether they are someone you are close to or not shouldn’t matter. What does matter is that if you want this world to be filled with a lot more love and a lot less hate, then you can do your part by asking your Higher Power to guide you away from spitting that fire from your own tongue ever again.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson