Tag: love

Love Is…….

Published on by Kimberly Novak4 Comments

There are so many different ways to finish the thought Love Is…. and today I heard a song that really filled in those blanks for me.  This is probably one of the topics where I could sit and blog for hours on so many different points.  Tonight I just want to focus on how I felt when I heard some of the lyrics.   (You will find a link to the song at the bottom of this post.)

Sometimes love will make you cry.   Recently, my journey has brought on an unpleasant challenge.  Surprisingly  the first thing I struggled with was the fact that I still wanted to go to my ex for comfort.  Here I am after all of the time, heartache, disappointment, resentment, and pain still wanting to share important life changing moments with him.  I have had to share some instances with him that concerned the kids, but this time was different, because it concerned only me.  To tell you the truth I really didn’t know what I wanted or needed from him, it was just the fact that I was so used to sharing important things with him for so long. I was not ready to break that cycle; until now.  When I heard the lyrics “Sometimes love will make you cry” I knew that it is time to move past that urge of calling on him in a crisis.  This is something that I didn’t know still needed work and realizing it was step one. I will always carry some kind of love in my heart for the person I spent half of my life with.  Learning how to put that love behind me is step two.

Love will change your life.  This spoke to me on so many different levels.  There are so many forms of love that can change your life.  For instance the fact that I love my job!  I never thought I would end up where I am.  I am so grateful and blessed to have all of the people who were brought into my life because of it. Love won’t leave you empty.  The love from my church and Sister’s In Christ.  I cannot even begin to describe how my faith has blossomed because of the love I receive from all of those special people.  These instances all involved Love and they in fact have changed my life.

Love can heal you if you let it inside.  My absolute favorite lyric!   So many people are afraid to let love back in once they have gone through a heart-break.  I did not think it would be something that I would willingly do.  I say willing because it is definitely something that I wanted; but would I be able to let it happen?  Even letting in strong friendships was a scary thought for me because I also lost my best friend in the divorce.  Luckily, I did not struggle with my decision for very long.  I have begun to allow some of those feelings happen for me again.  It has been extremely healing for me.  Scary – yes!  but the amount of happiness that feeling like that again has brought into my life, far outweighs anything that is scary about it.

Remember, love’s not easy….but it’s worth it.  Worth it, as are most things in life that are not easy.  As survivors we have to love ourselves enough to allow those feelings back into our lives.  It will take confidence to be willing to allow it to happen.  Imagine the caterpillar in the chrysalis finally realizing that she/he is worth it; the chrysalis breaks and she/he is free to fly.  We can have that same experience and how beautiful it is!

Love can hear you, I know love will heal you….. Are you allowing Love back into your life?  Please share.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO65vqbkG_0

Kimberly

Courageous Butterfly

7/10/12

Unguarded Heart

Published on by Kimberly Novak2 Comments

Protecting  someone or something is a natural instinct.  We’ve all been in a situation where we needed to protect a friend, child, or family member and we’ve even seen footage of wild animals protecting their young.  So if we have this natural instinct to protect then why is it so hard to know whether or not we should be protecting or guarding our hearts?

What is the heart? If you look it up in Google, it is referred to as the following:

1.  A hollow pump-like organ

2. The center of the total personality

3. The center of emotion

4.  Capacity for feeling.

I’m sure I”m not the only one to notice that the very first definition that comes up on any search engine is “a hollow pump-like organ”.  Most of us believe that this is the place where we store emotion, joy, sadness, any feeling we can possibly feel.  When in reality those feelings technically come from our brains.  If  you stop to think about it though something has to send the signal to our brain in order for us to have those feelings.  I like to think the heart is the culprit.    I had a hard time accepting that the heart started out as a hollow organ.  There had to be some sort of emotion or feeling stored in there at the moment of birth.  Then I looked at the other definitions and they made more sense to me.   I would much rather believe that when we are born our heart is filled with the capacity to feel and as we grow we use that capacity and center to develop our personalities.

If you look into the eyes of a newborn baby you can see the love in their hearts and as they grow their personality develops.  Based on this principle I disagree with the first definition of the hollow organ.  Yes I know medically speaking the organ is described that way because it does not contain anything, it is just a vessel.  Well, non-medically speaking it contains a hell of a lot!

We hold everything in our hearts and what is in our heart determines how we live our lives.  It doesn’t matter what we are suffering from if we hold that  in  it will continue to have a negative effect on our lives.  It’s not easy to let things go and move on but it is so important for our well-being not to hold onto the pain.  I”m not healed 100% just yet but, I have noticed that the days I can say I’m ok with everything are so much more productive in my life.  I’ve had to do a “clean sweep” of my heart on many occasions over the past couple of years but it was always necessary.  By “clean sweep” I mean taking the time to think and focus on how that pain was affecting my daily life.  I found that by keeping the painful feelings so close it was only going to bring me down and I would never move forward.  I still have some days where it tries to creep back in and those are the days I stand up and fight!
Our hearts will also hold happiness and there is a lot of room in there for that!  We start out in life full of happiness and somewhere along the road things happen and  that space can be taken up by grief, sadness and sorrow.  Any type of  loss can destroy the heart no matter what the circumstances are and having the courage to put yourself out there again is terrifying.  No one who has been through those feelings want to go through them again and many of us decide to close off the heart and not take the risk.  I wonder though, are we doing more damage by being so guarded?  Some of you know that I made the choice recently to go in unguarded and no matter how it ends up, I will never regret letting my heart feel again.   Each day that I spend with an unguarded heart I am the happiest.  The days that I choose to be protective of it is was when the fear and uncertainty creep back in.  I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m not a fan of feeling fearful or uncertain.  I spent too many years that way and it’s time now to choose not to let my heart fill up with those feelings.


We all have heard the phrase “it’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all”.  I truly believe that;  no matter how much pain or suffering I went through with my divorce.   The beauty behind that phrase is that  it applies to anyone you have loved.  Be it a friendship that didn’t last, a romantic relationship or the passing of a loved one it is all the same.I will continue to be somewhat protective of my “feelings” which are controlled by my brain, rather than being over protective of what I am allowing to pass through my heart.  I know that it has a lot of room, I”m hoping most of that will be for happiness but I also know that there will also be some pain that has to pass through it again as well.  The good thing is I’m ok with that because I have already proven to myself that I can survive the pain that passes through my heart what’s important is that I allow that to happen.  In order to survive it you have to let it pass through, do not choose to hold it in.

Kimberly

Courageous Butterfly

4/9/12