I Want to Be as Emotionally Honest as Possible…

I am an ‘Inspiration Seeker,’ always searching for inspiration from out there in the world and from within me to add to, update and improve my own personal TROML Program. My goal is to maintain an ‘inspirational thought-life’ from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep. I don’t avoid reality or negative feelings and emotions. I embrace the bad side of things, feel them completely and when passed, re-frame them to extract the good. There is always good in any encounter or life experience. My TROML Program gets amazingly stronger in the face of, even what appears to be, negative worldly trends. As I learn more about me and about me and my God I find there is an endless source of inspiration from within that emerges through the TROML Process too. Maybe it is as simple as seeking the right things in life and if you are lucky and/or persistent you will find them.

“I wanted to be as emotionally honest as possible.” were the words I heard from Adrianna Haslet-Davis on the ‘Chasing Down a Dream’ feature on CBS This Morning. They struck me quite directly as a unique combination of the words emotion and honest I had not heard before. Emotional Maturity, Emotional Recovery, Emotional Intelligence—yes I had heard before, But not—Emotional Honesty. It was as if Adrianna had brought two of my TROML Worlds together—my pursuit of honesty or transparency to the world with personal boundaries and my personal growth understanding, accepting and being inspired by my feelings and emotions.

This, of course, is a feature on a young women, innocently injured by the events at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the world’s oldest annual marathon, on April 15^th, 2013. Adrianna was one of 260 people injured that day. Three people were killed tragically that day with no earthly, moral or spiritual reason for their death. The good offered for the many has emerged from the bad done by a few who have nothing to offer me or my TROML Program. Good always overcomes evil in the outside world as Adrianna referred to it. Inside me the recovery always wins out over the slip with the slips becoming of less and less magnitude and the recovery taking me to a higher, more stable altitude and attitude in life.

The moments before and after she uttered those words—“I wanted to be as emotionally honest as possible,” were as inspirational to me. Recounting her recovery, she said “I feel like I can stay as positive as possible but it doesn’t mean the outside world is not going to hurt me.” Then later after revealing she documented the whole recovery experience, she said “I was thankful it was as raw as it was and that I captured those raw moments. I wanted to be as emotionally honest as possible.” The she shared what it was like to stand on her own for the first time—with a prosthetic device where her lower left leg used to be. “That moment was amazing. I remember standing up and just like anyone would adjusting my shirt at the bottom with both my hands free. The emotion built up and I lost it.”

Honesty with our feelings and emotions, first with ourselves and then with others is key in life. We do so much to develop our body and our mind growing up but really our feelings and emotions are always there except, of course, when we bury them, which always comes at a personal cost to us. In my TROML Program if I can develop spiritually I feel, think and know my emotions balance into my life along with the mental and physical aspects. It all starts with honesty and if you can’t put words down on paper in your TROML Journal then who are you really fooling other than yourself?

Adrianna went from not being able to walk away from the finish line area that day to now running in her first Boston Marathon though one could argue she has already demonstrated the incredible endurance of ten marathons already in her life and she was not even a runner.

She’s completing a race that she never dreamed of running. Think about that. She’s accomplishing something she never dreamed about. How many times have we beat ourselves up for not finishing something we chose with our own will to start? Maybe if our race in life is something other than what we envisioned then it is the right race.

I am always seeking inspiration and when I find it I now look for the power behind it. What spiritual principles are out there that I can add to my TROML Program?

The thoughts, words and behaviors of Adrianna Haslet-Davis from Boston surely demonstrate a few.

She “believes in feeling every single bit of that (experience) and not burying it.” Why? “So you can enjoy the good days. You get in these mindsets, it is important to see how far you have come.”

“I want my life defined by how I live it not by what happened to me.”

TROML Baby!

She’s documented the whole thing… life voyager and documentarian is she!