Healing & Breaking

Healing & Breaking….

I’ve been thinking a lot about what this means

To heal and to break

A few months ago I had a dream about my biological mother and my little sister. The dream was an actual memory of a situation that happened, and how it played out wasn’t good.

My mother introduced me to physical abuse at a very young age, and it’s not something you can just “forgive & forget.” There’s loads of unlearning that need untangling.

There are loads of lies that I believed about myself…that I was somehow damaged goods…that I didn’t deserve good things in my life….

I wish it was just as simple to drop the baggage ,and I believe I did at one point in time

Then it just kind of came back…

It took me a minute to actually understand that healing isn’t linear, it’s not about golden rainbows and happiness shooting out of your ass all the time.

That may be a part of the healing, but healing mostly looks like you laying on the floor and crying

And doing A LOT of that…

And writing, and crying some more…

A friend of mine told me that healing is messy and she was right

it’s so damn messy…

Healing requires vulnerability and vulnerability is painful ,and breaking requires feeling your emotions and that is perfectly okay.

Allow yourself to break and give yourself some grace when breaking. Allow yourself to feel the things you’ve avoided feeling.

It’s okay to break, and it is okay to heal.

Exchanging Pain for Love

“Walking alone to hear your pain

And feel the sound of your shame Exchanging pain for love

Exchanging pain for love”

I wrote those lyrics in 2008

So YEARS ago

I wrote it in attempt to try and grasp the feeling I felt inside of me.

That feeling of hopelessness, darkness and despair. I wanted someone to rip that feeling out of me.

I look back on it now years later with different eyes and a different perspective.

At the time that I wrote this, I wrote it in an attempt to try and be deep, because I felt so deeply within myself. I guess I was trying to process the things I didn’t know how to say.

I read it now and maybe I wrote it for the other people in my life, or for people who knew me. Maybe I wrote it to my future self….

We all have pain or some kind of trauma from our past. Maybe that pain or trauma resurfaced recently, maybe something was done to us.

Maybe it was something we did or something we said to others, and we can’t get over it….

Exchanging pain for love could mean different things to people. For me it often means writing poetry, prayer, and reading the Bible.

It also means for me to learn and relearn to love myself, learning to listen to people without shooting off at the mouth or waiting for them to finish so I can talk about something different.

It also means sometimes you don’t need to post on social media everyday, it means it’s okay to sit in the silence and be still, sometimes you don’t need the music on 24/7.

Maybe the silence is what we all need

Maybe if we exchange all our pain, all our trauma, all our past mistakes for Love, we actually will experience inner peace.

Short Poem #6

Short Poem #5

Writing is a Beautiful Struggle

Hey beautiful people, I hope you all are doing well.

So as some of you know, I write, I write songs, I write poems, and for a couple years I had another blog called ‘APLTF’ (A Poet Learning to Forgive.) I decommissioned that blog because I was writing everyday but after awhile I couldn’t come up with anything.

I have kind of loved ,and hated writing. I hate having to write if I have to, I hate having deadlines on when something should come out, I don’t like the pressure I feel that I NEED to put out something. As I’ve said before I hate forced creativity.

I just feel its way too inauthentic if I try to get something out there or force it. Its not sincere, and for a long time I feel I’ve been in a place or season where I’ve found myself force creating songs, poems etc for creativity’s sake. For from the heart.

Its a terrifying thought for me…

Writing is a struggle, its hard to explain the things I want to get across, its a struggle, yet I enjoy the struggle, the uphill battle.

Writing is a beautiful struggle…

What I’m currently learning as a creative and as a person that I NEED, ABSOLUTELY NEED to be patient in the process.

Dark Dreams

Hey everyone, I hope you all are having a good week so far.

I want to discuss something I haven’t talked about in my previous blog sites.

I get terrifying nightmares, and I’ve dealt with these “dark dreams” for most of my life. I also call them “demonic dreams.”

I’ve come to realize that these dreams are based on fear and kill my confidence. Sometimes I wonder if its just my imagination acting up, that also could be a thing.

Something I’ve learned is that as scary as these dreams get, I need to learn that nothing can happen to me, the demonic dreams can’t cause any harm to me. I also need to fight the thoughts I have with truth, speak life where there is no life, reading the Word.

Speak light into the spaces where its dark.

Stay awesome people

-Openhandspoetry

Its been awhile…

Hey everyone, welcome to my first post.

My name is Austin Jenkins and this is my new blog site ‘Openhandspoetry.’

I can’t tell you what ‘Openhandspoetry’ means yet cuz honestly I don’t know what it means to me. All I really know is I really missed writing…like a lot.

I think the last time I had a blog I was writing almost everyday. Inspiration was on my side, I did my best to be honest in my posts about where I was, how I was feeling, yet also encourage myself and those who read my blog posts.

My problem was I was writing so much and so often that I ran out of things to talk about and in turn had me stuck. I tried to get myself unstuck by trying to come up with a topic and after that it just became what I like to call ‘forced creativity.’

Any creative knows that when you try to force create a piece of art, its not going to come out the way you want it or need it too. That’s what I did, so eventually I just put my blogging to rest.

I just need to take it easy, step back, but mostly take breaks and commit. That’s seems to be my problem is committment when working on something. Inspiration will come when it comes but sometimes you gotta work a bit before something good hits you. That’s just how the creative process sometimes works.

Alright y’all, hopefully you all have a goodnight

Stay Awesome

Austin Jenkins

Openhandspoetry