Author: opreacarmen75

Growing up, I devoted my heart, with reckless abandon, to the idea of finding my soulmate. Wistfully, I listened to the stories of the ancient gods and how they split each human being into two parts. Our other half will make their way into our lives, completing us and emptying into us a love that we had never experienced. Now I realize that such a philosophy is more harmful than useful.

We should feel something rare when we finally meet the person we choose to spend our lives with. We should be encouraged and genuinely moved by the love we are gifted in life. Yet, we are not imperfect human beings, and there isn’t anyone in this world who’s going to fill the voids of our souls other than ourselves. The rush of feeling that we want to experience when we meet our soulmate is not a feeling bred from stitching together two reunited hearts.

There is more to forever than merely finding someone whom you feel incredibly connected to. We have to let this surge of feeling to act as a compass toward strong liaisons. Unique and enchanting feelings for someone are a significant compass, but they shouldn’t be the only factor we take into account when falling in love. We can’t keep striving for this absolute, perfect love because when life throws us some less than ideal situations, we are going to need more than connection, more than an upwelling of exhilaration. We are going to need pragmatic love. We are going to need somebody who fights for us every single day and chooses us in spite of the circumstances.

Soulmates don’t exist. Good human beings do. The aim is to redefine this idea of the perfect kind of love and turn it into an openness to an authentic kind of love. You aren’t going to find somebody who completes you, and you shouldn’t want that. Instead, strive to discover someone who encourages you to complete yourself. Strive to find someone who urges you to see all the potential flowing within your bones. Strive to find someone with whom your love grows slowly but strongly. Strive to find someone who ignites within you the motivation to love in the most enduring ways because, luckily, that kind of person exists.

Love,

Carmen Monica

When rain knocks upon your window like an eager child, it’s important to remember that even the world cries. Even the sky that holds everything together falls apart from time to time.

How often we forget that we are just living between the lines of life, between aches and joys, between what is happy and what is sad within us. Sometimes we forget that we are not alone, that no one lives in perpetual bliss or perpetual sorrow. We are all just playing with light and darkness, and we’re trying to find our harmony.

Sometimes people don’t understand why we love the way we love, why we stay the way we stay. Sometimes people can’t comprehend that we don’t love because we want to, but instead, we love because we have someone else’s blood within our veins, we have someone else’s hands clenched tightly around our heart.

Love,

Carmen Monica

There are going to be days when you’ll wake up and feel this surge of energy flowing through your veins and know that you can accomplish everything you set your mind to.  You will feel like the mountain in front of you has just transformed into a small hill. Everything will make perfect sense, from the simplest tasks to the more complicated ones. Your mind will unclutter and you will see with perfect clarity what needs to be done. Your heart will sing a song of happiness, and joy, and peace, and you will know that you have reached a state of contentment that no longer requires anyone’s validation. After a very long time, you have become whole again and filled with a passion for living that you haven’t felt in ages. Heaviness has lifted from your shoulders and you know that your wings are ready. You are ready to soar into the highest skies and take the world by surprise once again with your power of rebuilding yourself.

It is then when you know that the long trip that has started a while back has brought you to the place you were always meant to reach. It might have taken you longer than others, but it was your journey and everything that you experienced was your style of interpreting life.

Some days you’ll have the need to hide from the world and its bustle and find yourself among art, and poetry and music. And these smalls acts of concealing yourself from the world have nothing to do with being weak. They are your way of recharging and finding harmony in a familiar place surrounded by the things you love most. Do what needs to be done to make yourself whole again, because you are all you have and the world needs what you have to offer.

Be pleased by the gifts bestowed upon you and don’t be shy to share them because you might be answering someone else’s prayer.

Love,

Carmen Monica

This is a fragment from my new book, The Power in Our Scars, a collection of thoughts that will appear in the month of December. It is meant to bring comfort to a weary soul and to show that we can draw strength from our hurts.

***

Often people use fate as an excuse, as an apology for all the people who we have walked away from. We speak about those times and pretend that if it were meant to happen, it would have.

But we were wrong because fate doesn’t exist. Only our effort does.

And this is where we fail each other. If it were meant to happen, we would have made it happen. If it were meant to be, we would have stayed. And we would have fought.

Love,

Carmen Monica

It’s hard to move on. It tears you down in ways you never expect to be broken. And when this happens, don’t get scared. You will rebuild yourself. Do not cry for the piece of yourself that you’ve lost nor the parts of yourself that were left over. Instead, splash them across the grass. Then, look at every one of them. Look at the memories you’ve made, and then look at the sacrifices. Look at them from a place of healing and choose to create yourself all over again. Shape your mind and your spine to be stronger this time. Then shape your heart to grow more prominent this time. Shape your eyes to see more than you’ve ever imagined, and shape your mouth to say all the words you never allowed yourself to speak.

Begin again.

Some step into a season not knowing what tomorrow would bring and they have made the brave decision of doing it anyway. They have made the brave decision of trusting and going on even on days like this and this is what matters. That they are still moving on living one day at a time, trusting in a better tomorrow, waiting for the storm to pass.

I believe that there is beauty in contrast, in the light and the dark days. I believe that there is beauty hidden in hope and in hurt, in ashes and in flames. I truly believe that one can fall and then rise again, that one can sin and still be saved.

I truly believe in sitting with the broken, the ones holding their piece together with belief, the ones bandaging their fear in faith. I believe in the souls who had protected their soft, who had always known, even when it ached the most that their wounds would heal, that the hardest part of life grows from the inside.

I truly believe that there is beauty in contrast, that you haven’t lived until you have died.

Love,

Carmen Monica

Deciding to forgive is the first step, but we have to do something more important than forgiving. We have to pray and bless our enemies. Wow! I am pretty sure many say to themselves: Are you kidding? How can I pray for someone to be blessed when the truth is I don’t want them to be blessed? But when we decide to pray for our enemies to be blessed, we are releasing them so God can bless them with the truth that has the power to free them.

I truly believe that God expects us to help those who hurt us by giving us the grace to carry on this heavy task. Our hardest test will be how well we handle those who mishandled us. Forgiving the ones who hurt us is the most powerful thing we will ever have to do, but it will open doors to many blessings in our lives.

We can only overcome evil with good, for the evil things that were done to us can only be overcome by a willingness to let go of bitterness and anger and by praying and blessing our enemies. When we show love, and we are kind and do good things expecting and hoping for nothing in return, our recompense is abundant, our hearts are filled with love and grace.

Love,

Carmen Monica

One of the most beautiful things in the world is a woman’s heart. It is both fragile and strong, delicate yet resilient. When a woman decides to give you her heart she gives you her most prized possession. If you love, cherish, nurture and protect it, a woman will give you the world. She will make you her world and everything she does will gravitate around you. Be careful how you treat her heart so that you will always be her guiding light, her island of joy, her place if tranquility, her confident, her friend and her lover.

One day we’ll forget the reason we cried, and the ones who brought the pain. We will finally realize that the secret of being free is not revenge, but allowing the things to unfold in their own ways and time. After all, not the first chapter in our lives matters the most but our last. It is the last chapter that will show how well we ran the race. So smile, laugh, forgive and love over and over again. You show maturity when someone has hurt you so badly, and instead of lowering yourself to their level you let Karma clean up the mess.