There are many types of boxes in the world. There are cardboard boxes, wooden boxes, and the boxes we put ourselves in and others put us in. All of these types of boxes impact our lives. They can be heavy or weigh heavily on us. Do some boxes do both? I’d like to explore this with you from a couple of different angles.
The first one is a physical box. I have many boxes in my house from the last time I moved. Some of them had been packed for many years and have moved twice unopened. I have had people say to me “If you haven’t opened them by now, you should just throw them away.” There is part of me that agrees because if I haven’t needed it in that amount of time then why not just get rid of it. Well, some of those boxes contain memories from a time when life wasn’t what it is now. They are part of my past and even though I’m done with the past I haven’t had the heart to get rid of some of the items from that time. So this would be a box that is heavy in weight and at times they weigh heavily on me because I question if keeping the items is good for me. Do these items serve me anymore?
It is an interesting thing to think about when you have distance from the situation/time/people. I have held off getting rid of things because of an old meaning or an attachment that they had been part of my life. What I have realized recently is many of these things are weighing my energy down because the energy they carry is negative. Once their energy wasn’t negative but it turned negative because of what they represent. They are taking up space in my home and affecting the energy there within. So I have decided that it is time for the items in the box to be released from my home and allow them to go somewhere else where they will no longer hold the negative energy they have been sitting in for all these years. Ahhhh … so freeing!
The second box is non-physical as it is the box we put ourselves in or that others put us in. This type of box doesn’t weigh anything but can weigh so heavily on us it makes us change who we are or rail against how we think others perceive us.
If you have read other pieces I have written you know I was told a lot when I was younger how I wasn’t good at a lot of different things. It made me change the way I think about things and made me pull within. It also had me box off my emotions and feelings because it was the only way I could see to survive in my world. So the box in this case was my mind and I built up an immense amount of inner chatter. That inner chatter kept me perceptively safe because it reminded me what not to do and what not to say. The problem is it got so loud I couldn’t hear myself anymore as it was hidden anyway in an even more well-protected box inside of the outer box.
The unfortunate part of stacking those types of boxes inside one another means at some point one of the boxes is going to unravel, split apart, or bust wide open. When that happens it all spills out and it might not be very pretty. At least that was my experience. Mine didn’t just bust it exploded wide open and I had to find a way to not reconstruct the box. But here is the beautiful part of that happening, it no longer weighed heavily on me. I could breathe again.
So what boxes do you have in your life? Do they weigh a lot? Do they weigh heavily on you? In my experience, it is good to have a look and see what is there because only when you are aware of something can you make a choice to deal with it or not. We all can make those choices and we all have the courage. Sometimes it just takes a bit of time to remember.
