Author: Regina Cates

When I was 21 I was briefly locked up in a psychiatric hospital. I became severely depressed.  At least that is what I was told I was.  Deep inside I knew my depression was the result of no longer being able to outrun the personal issues I had struggled with all of my life. Without anyone to confide in and nowhere to turn for help, I retreated inward as an act of desperate self-preservation.

At the time I considered life too unbearable to continue. So the answer as professionals saw it was to medicate me and slap a variety of labels on my condition.  But labels only served to further distance me from a real solution to my underlying problem – self-acceptance.

While I cannot speak for everyone, I have learned many things about the variety of reasons we get lost in the limitations of our mind. With our lives moving at ever faster speeds we are often too quick to reach for a drug, or to give up on ourselves, or to isolate ourselves in an attempt to cope. For me, healing began in earnest when I stopped looking for answers to repair my heart from someone or something outside me.  As long as I continued to give my power away to other people to fix my life, to accept me as I was, or to validate my existence, my life remained broken.

While one size does not fit all when we speak about moving past depression and traumatic issues, I feel it is important to remember our soul is powerful. Within us is a loving force capable of helping us overcome the challenges we tell ourselves we cannot.  While physical and emotional trials are very real, so is our soul’s power to move us past them. For me, and countless others who have taken our power back, we simply want to share our experience of how powerful we truly are when we believe in our soul’s power to help us heal.

Freedom does not mean we can do anything we want without care to the outcome of our choices. Freedom of choice is both a great privilege and an enormous responsibility.

If we choose to drink, text, or talk on the phone and drive, and cause an accident, we have created heart-break and chaos for ourselves and others. If we choose to keep loaded guns in our home and a child accidently shoots someone our choice creates devastation. If we choose to justify using substandard construction methods and a building collapses killing hundreds we have created anguish for thousands.

Everything we do is a choice and every choice we make has a consequence.

While our intention may not be to cause harm to ourselves and others, without forethought to consider the potential outcomes of our choices we are mindlessly rolling the dice. Life has so many variables we can never control. It makes good sense to want the best odds possible over each and every choice we can control – our behavior. We really are the powerful creators of our life when we exercise the freedom to think and care about the choices we make before we act.

When I was in my late thirties I drove a little pick-up truck. On the back I had a Practice Random Acts of Caring and Kindness sticker. One day I was at a full-service gas station and a young man in his late teens who was filling my tank said, “I like your sticker but I don’t understand why you would have the sticker and also carry a big stick in the cab of your truck?”

There is a saying, “Out of the mouths of babes” meaning profound wisdom does not only come with age. His observation was a soul opener. He was right. How could I profess to be a supporter of peace and kindness and carry a big stick as if I was looking for trouble? I reached in, took the stick out and put it into the trash can.

I was reminded of my big stick and bumper sticker experience recently. I was on an LA City Bus when a man wearing a cross and carrying a Bible started an argument with another man over a seat. I thought to myself, “What an amazing world we will create when each of us who professes to be a faithful follower of an enlightened messenger of peace actually behaves aligned with the kind, respectful, tolerant, and loving tenants of our faiths.”