Lighting the Way

As a 100% disabled Veteran under the V.A., I think the hardest part about dealing with my own personal crazy ... is knowing what isn't my own personal crazy. Like I can face my own psychoses and deal with it in all the ways I need to ... but when it's someone else that I'm trying to deal with while they are unknowingly and actively fighting me on healing what I think is my own shit ... well, you get the picture. I say all that to say being able to differentiate between the two takes a simple question ... "is this mine?" If you can answer it clearly that it is, well then you have a heading. But if the answer to "is this mine?" is anything other than yes, whether its a no or its unclear, it's highly likely you're taking someone else's energy onboard. Now, this for me doesn't mean you can always tell the difference because I hold the belief that there are in fact energies completely independent from yours or mine or any human beings for that matter that act independent of what any of us wants. That is to say they have a mind of their own. And they could be acting benevolently or malevolently. This is where, for me, spiritual practice has got to come into play. All the mindfulness, meditation, and mental exercises in the world will at a certain point become useless. And in those moments where everything falls apart, it's your spiritual practice that lights up the ocean keeping your ship from hitting the rocks in the midst of a storm cares not whether or not you come out of this alive.