A LOVE FOR A THOUSAND YEARS

Love... it is indeed one of the most mysterious feelings we human beings can ever experience as we go on living. Whenever we feel love, we tend question why. 

No one can really give us the answers answers and if look into our hearts deeper, we end up accepting the truth that we all need to love and feel love no matter what the consequences are. Love is the one thing that will keep us alive... to feel we exist.

Why do we exist? I believe we exist for many reasons and that we do exist for love. We exist for that one person in our lives who, just by the look in their eyes and their hearts, we find everything we need... it is then we know we must have loved them for a thousand years.

I stumbled into a beautiful inspiring song of love and hope sang by Christina Perri, "A Thousand Years"... which reminds me of my existence in this life. Yes, I am in love. I found love and despite the distance between me and him, I have stopped questioning love. All I know is that as I look into his eyes and his heart, I have everything this world can ever offer.

I must say I am an incurable and hopeless romantic. Having been able to fall in love and loved back, I fell from it in and out way too many times to realize that despite of the past, we exist for just one true love in a lifetime.

Our definition of love changes as we age from teen years to adulthood. It varies too with the people we tend to open our hearts to. In a funny way at my age now, I define love in totality as an orgasm... if we have to question it, then perhaps we didn't have it. We can't question love... it just happens... and if we throw caution to the wind and go to it's direction... life will be very beautiful.

To my Ilias... I love you for a thousand years. One step closer...


Images by Vincent Garrucho

FEELING WHAT I WANT

There are times in my life that I get sad, unhappy and depressed. Things go wrong and I couldn't help it. These emotions however, always help me live through life and these makes me feel eventually, what I want my life to be.

Before you go on reading, let me amuse you with this great dance video to set you in the mood as you read along....



But what is it that we usually do or should do whenever we are suffering from these emotions?

I've enumerated below things I do whenever I am sad, unhappy and depressed which might be of help to you just in case you fall into such condition...


I Dance, I Exercise 
Getting into an activity that requires me to sweat is the most effective method of feeling better right away. I just either play a dance music and dance into it or I go outside and just start running. It doesn't matter how fast I ran or how far I ran for as long as I get my heart pumping and my blood flowing. It works wonders as sweating releases endorphins that makes me feel better especially if I do these under sunlight and fresh air. When I'm done with these, I always find myself catching my breath that nothing else seems to matter. Yes, there is something about struggling for air that makes all troubles seem very trivial.

I Laugh
Although it's not always easy to laugh when I can't find something funny, I just look for it further. Life has so many things to offer there is absolutely nothing that we can't laugh about. Laughing releases endorphins, it makes me feel better and it relaxes me.

I Reminisce
I think of good old memories.... I think of moments when I was truly happy. I spend at the end of each day recalling good memories I have that before I know it, I start relating everything to those happy times. What happens to my sad memories? They end up being a vague recollection of the past.

I Do The Things I Love
As I do the many things that I love about in life like singing, dancing, swimming, doing sports activities, writing, travelling, taking photos etc.... I take them all in and really appreciate it because it makes me feel great and alive. 

I Pick Happy Friends
Having a lot of naturally happy friends work wonders! They make me happy randomly over the long term, I start to learn why they are happy and learn the source of happiness for myself, they have happy friends also and so I get to meet even more happy people and they introduce me to activities that make them happy! I pick happy, smiling people... and I hang out with them on a regular basis because happiness is infectious! 

Life sends various negative emotions to me at times but when I want to feel what I really want, I throw caution to the wind and let go of it all because there is always a spectacular side over negative ones!  


Thanks to Vincent Garrucho for my party images here at Time in Manila.

IT IS DEFINITELY GOOD TO CRY

When life becomes too harsh or too good enough to make me cry, I succumb... I whimper and I cry hard. 

I would shed my tears all out... knowing that if I cry my heart out, I'll be better the next days... shedding tears make me tougher and stronger because after each and every cry, I feel cleansed... like my heart and mind consoled each other to feel better.  William Shakespeare once said, "To weep is to make less the depth of grief." and I truly believe it does.

Is crying good for us? Here are some of the 5 reasons why I believe, people should cry once in awhile...

• Crying is cathartic... It's purifying and a very good therapeutic technique to release emotions and stress we endure.
• Crying build relationships... When we cry with friends around, the bond becomes stronger. I myself am astounded by the resounding support of my friends and the level of intimacy exchanged among us. Crying simply forms communication and connection... bringing us closer to people in our lives.
• Crying cleanses our eyes... tears lubricate our eyeballs and eyelids which helps our eyes avoid dehydration. When our eyes our not lubricated well enough, we can't see things clearly, right?
• Crying manages stress...It relieves us of tension, reduces blood pressure and removes chemicals that are built up in our bodies due to stress like endorphins, prolactin and many more.
• Crying helps kill bacteria... Say goodbye to wet wipes! Our tears contain lysozyme! Tears can kill 90 - 95% of bacteria in just a few minutes! 

Crying is not a negative thing as other people perceive it to be because it has a lot of benefits in awaiting for us. Some people control themselves from crying thinking that they can be tough, look tough in the eyes of others but no... it just adds up worries. Suppressing a cry is bad. 

Shedding a tear or two relieves us from worries, stress, etc. It is just normal for us to cry and crying is not being weak. Not only does it make us feel we co-exist with others, it just simply proves we are human.

LOCKED UP ON EMOTIONAL PRISONS

There are times we yearn for more intimacy in our lives yet, we aren't really certain how to get what we want that sometimes, just when we get to be close to getting what we desire, we build walls.



I had a good discussion about this with my cousin last night about his being vulnerable in the past and building walls. Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable is dangerous as being one implies we might get hurt. No one wants to get hurt or to hurt another.

What is intimacy? It's a step towards a possible relationship because a relationship without intimacy is not a relationship. It's what you call "friendship".

With this, we talked about who builds walls more... the men or women. My cousin built walls and I built my own walls too. However, for me, it's the men. As children, girls wail about physical pain and they're allowed to do so while the boys brought up to think it is not manly to show the pain. This caused little boys not talking about their feelings. They grow into men with an emotional vocabulary less developed than that of the women.

Men in general often have trouble naming exactly what they feel and often more vague in describing emotions. I remember an ex-boyfriend who would often be anxious when the whole topic of emotions are being brought up while I was more comfortable talking about almost anything else!

Some men talk about feelings as if they live in fortresses with walls as high as The Great Wall of China! A few were allowed to walk in but these are the ones closest to them. Although they felt safe within the confinements they built, they feel as if there is essentially no one with whom they can truly be themselves... which is really sad. Some men i know including my cousin overcame and break down their own walls because they realized it gets too be too lonely.

So many of us confuse thoughts and feelings. Feelings are words, not explanations. We all live in a time when depression is rampant in our time. Depression isn't always feeling sad. Depression is at times, just feeling numb or very little thus; we build walls which is not good.



Defenses though aren't bad. Without these, we would be vulnerable and some experiences can be very painful. If our shield is always up, we should always think not just with our thoughts but feel our feelings. When we yearn for intimacy, we need to acknowledge our feelings. When something happens, we take a deep look on it for we never know if what we are feeling is actually more than one feeling.

I keep my defenses up all the time but there are instances that I lower them to find out what could actually be because I don't want that one day, I'll forever wonder what could have been, what should have been and what might have been with a particular person or situation. After all, everything is a risk and pain... we just gotta let it ride out or we wouldn't feel human at all!



Life is just way too short to worry about so many things!

Thanks to Vincent Garrucho for my own photos :))