I M Perfect lady

Author: bjukuri

  • Growing Up.

    I heard my own words coming back to me, I listened to what I sounded like, it was a live tape recorder, my son.

    “You are not listening to me.”

    “Why are you being so difficult?”

    “Why do you have to make this so hard, you know what you need to do?”

    He wasn’t screaming, but trying to maintain his polite stance so that I could see he was good.

    I had done this too, I didn’t want him to see the bad side of me, yet after a few times of speaking and no action I would abandon that plan and just go full tilt in the hollering mode.

    I had wanted him to take care of his responsibilities without me having to take care of mine.

    Something had changed within me; he could feel my strong stance and that he had lost his power or rule between him and I.

    I no longer cared about being a ‘nice’ mom.

    I was done.
    I was tired.

    My words, my pleading, my forever telling him what to do and when, my constant directions had me exhausted.

    I had a voice-activated son. If I screamed and hollered, he moved.

    And I was tired of moving this big kid around, for
    I now had to look up at him.

    Perhaps it was his large body or the fact that I was worn down, but I finally had had enough.

    I took his iTouch hostage in exchange for responsible behavior.

    What I want most is a son who is responsible for self.

    What is insane is that I have been spoiling, babying and taking care of him, EXPECTING him to be responsible. Guess there was no need, for I had it!

    I was finally tired of doing his life along with mine.

    I will take away whatever else needs to be taken away to get him to now undo all my years of spoiling.

    It will be a hard and long learning curve for both of us, for I am guilty of over tending since I was so unattended.

    There is a balance in the middle.

    I will continue to find the things that I am responsible for, what a tending mother does, but not a spoiling mother.

    There is a fine line.

    He isn’t a bad kid, but he was teetering on the edge of following his peers and group mentality, for he was so used to following words of others.

    He was perfectly taught by me.

    What is so blatantly obvious is how he treated his superiors at school was the same way he treats me.

    He dances on the line of disrespect, before slipping back into compliance.

    He is approaching the cross roads in life, where he will decide who he is, what behaviors he wants to define himself, will he be responsible or blame those in charge for his circumstances?

    What I know for sure is that I have been a negative influence as far as holding him responsible for being responsible.

    I had taken too many responsibilities away from him and now I am going to have to work harder to give them back.

    And it will be harder on him to learn to follow his own voice inside.

    Perhaps that is called growing up.

  • The Neglected Child

    “Do not leave child unattended” is a sign that should be on the inside of my eyelids.

    I was surprised to find that I too was unattended.

    I was one of the ones she left when she went on a weekend getaway, I was one of them, and I responded in a way I felt was needed, perhaps not what I wanted to do, but what was called for.

    The resentment I felt covered up my unattended feelings; the abandonment was hidden behind the duties of being responsible.

    I wonder if the reason I kept being so responsible, is I didn’t want to feel the loneliness, the feelings of being left alone, the absence of being cared for?

    As long as I focused on the resentment of being responsible, it shielded me from sitting down in the middle of forlornness of knowing I was carelessly handled.

    This camouflage feeling became the standard I lived by and was defined by and NOT labeled as unattended.

    In fact, I am sure I tried to present to the world that we were all put together and fine.

    When I take a quick jaunt backward, to the age I was, I see a slideshow of neglect.

    Some of the boys took this adult-free zone as a weekend of no rules, ‘let the party begin’!

    It seemed it was my poor choice to pick up the responsibility instead of play.

    I played adult.

    And I took on the responsibility with it.

    What I can only guess is that it was easier to play adult that it was to be the neglected child.

  • My own load I can manage.

    What I experienced was the karmic wheel that was much larger than what I seen of my boss’s one day.

    This was an energy that had been repressed and bundled in fear.

    Each moment in my life where I felt the superior was neglectful; I became insubordinate and tried to correct my mother’s behavior by correcting them.

    The Universe has delivered to me various opportunities to attend to myself, but in each of the situations I instead became rebellious to the boss, not wanting to once again endure the treatment of childhood.

    More than once, I have been told I walked a fine line of being insubordinate.

    I looked up the meaning, it means to refuse to obey orders or submit to authority.

    Of course my insubordinate nature was always to protect the unprotected children, no matter if the ‘children’ were my fellow employees.

    I was stuck in the fear of being responsible for things that I wasn’t suppose to be responsible for and for making the supervisor/mother aware of their behaviors while wanting to please them by allowing them to leave for rest, yet resenting the mess they left me in.

    If you look at this without the fear of being unattended, or the fact that I will not be held responsible for things that could/would and may happen, I am just a woman whose only responsibility is to care for my one rural route.

    I can do that.

    I did do that.

    I literally kept bringing the focus back to my mail, my job and tried to ‘not care’ about what was going on in her world.

    The separation is key.

    The knowing what is my business and what is hers.
    What is my responsibility and what is hers.
    Thankfully she didn’t leave behind babies who were in need of much care, babies that I just couldn’t neglect and leave unattended.

    What I see and feel most now is that I have a much broader view and less fear of the lines between what is my responsibility and what is others.
    Picking up others responsibility has weakened my shoulders and weighed heavy in my life.

    I feel the correction and the absence of fear that I am not being a good responsible girl in their absence with a load so much larger than my capabilities.

    My own load I can manage.

  • Attend to me.

    In the past few days I have been tangled and untangled, in the present and in the past, with my mother and with my boss, young and then old, a child then an adult, feelings from the past trickling into the present, until I feel frozen in unknowing how to be, how to respond etc.

    The overall feelings I have is being neglected and under the rule if you will or under the care of a self absorbed person.

    My brother had me looking into The Presence Process book for a section he was curious about, and ironically or not, it was the words I needed to explain my past few days.

    I was perfectly set up to revisit the environment and the nature of my relationship with my mother, how she acted and how I then felt.

    It was so perfect, that even the home/office was falling apart and when my boss left the office she was replaced with a man who was irresponsible and a risk to be with.

    The choreography of the Universe leaves me shaking my head in awe.

    There is a line in the previous post that I took from the book, “An Unbalanced adult is an unattended child.”

    Looking back at my childhood, if I were to put one word on how I felt, it would be ‘unattended’, and I was given a tour back there via my experiences at work in the past few weeks.

    It’s re-creation was remarkable and my the feelings that surfaced were perfect little time travelers from the past.

    The resemblances between the two women brought to me the exact emotions I needed to feel.

    What kept me silent at work was that I was confused as to what now? I did question my boss about her choice making, and was met with defense, and even the defense was perfectly my mother.

    Each time there would be one more item from the past that completed a perfect picture of the dynamics that create the atmosphere where a child is left to its own devices.

    I could clearly see the shoes my boss stood in and why she made the choices she made, her inner constitution couldn’t take one more day in our office.
    It mattered less to her the kind of individual she left in charge or who was under his care, what mattered most was her rest and her sanity, she fled.

    And like my mother who ran away repeatedly in my childhood and in my teenage years she came back feeling better, not wanting to explain or hear my side.

    Feelings of resentment of her being able to escape and me being left to deal were perfectly felt.

    My mother left my father in charge, who wasn’t really a take charge kinda man, so I had to step up long before my age had this kind of responsibility tools.

    So, not only were we left alone with a pedophile, we are left with me, a unattended child taking care of unattended children.

    In a home that was falling apart or held together on a string, whose cupboards were lacking, mountains of clothes, piles of kids, endless disasters looming.

    As I sit here today, I am still silent and feeling.

    I know that the messenger/boss was delivering my past, that I am to feel my feelings releasing this fear of being unattended, and attend to me.

    What I love the most is that at the end of the day it is now my honor to attend to me.

    I am not stuck in the office, I am no longer a child, there are not children who are in vital need of care, I am not little girl who is unable to defend herself, it is not my worry if the furnace breaks or the water pipes freeze etc.

    I am able to witness and now see the scene before me and not feel that I am responsible and unattended.

    I am grateful for the set up for my boss playing the messenger, and for me being released from the fear of being left unattended.

    Unattended.

    Oh the ways I want to care for the unattended little girl in me…

    I will attend to me.

  • Dismissing the Messenger.

    In Michael Brown’s book The Presence Process, he speaks of dismissing the messenger.

    “The first step is to acknowledge that the person or event setting us up has nothing to do with what is actually happening; they are just “the messenger” (Mess-ender). They are reflecting a memory that is surfacing from our unintegrated past. It is pointless to “shoot the messenger” because the Universe has an unlimited supply of them! So the first step in the emotional cleansing process is to dismiss the messenger. Internally, we can thank them for their great service and let them be on their way. In other words, instead of reacting to and venting at them we can say, “I could use a little time alone right now.” In the beginning, this step of gracefully side-stepping our urge to react may require courage and powerful self control because it requires breaking our life-long habit of knee-jerking into drama.”

    Step two Get the Message. The second step is to not automatically resort to our predictable yet unconscious physical, mental and emotional drama, but instead get the message. We have practiced this too. To accomplish this, we turn our attention inward by describing to ourselves the nature of our emotional reaction we experienced from being set up. We find one word that captures our emotional reaction. We say out loud to ourselves, “I feel angry. I feel sad. I feel hurt. I feel alone. I feel….” We keep searching in this way until we find the word that resonates, physically with our emotional reaction. If we are angry, our face may flush, or our hands may buzz, or we may feel a downward movement in our solar plexus. Once we have accessed the word that describes reaction that the set up has triggered within us, then we have completed step two.

    Step three: Feel it. Instead of externalizing what is occurring to us by resorting to blame, we must now consciously internalize the experience. We must feel it. We have practiced this step as well. This particular step is a remarkable part of this whole procedure because instead of projecting our emotions out into the world as we normally did when we got set up in the past, we are now choosing to internalize and thus contain the experience. This is not to be confused with the act of suppressing our experiences. Our conscious choice is to internalize the setup so that we can learn from it is not suppression: it is discovery. It is also called “containment.” Suppression is the act of pretending it did not happen. Our choice to now be present with whatever upsets us enables us to realize that we can physically feel within our body what we initially thought was happening “out there”. So whatever the emotion is that we have successfully named is what we must allow ourselves to feel without censorship or judgment. In essence, what the messenger (mess-ender) has done, or has been attempting to do, depending on how many times we have been triggered by this same event is to bring to our attention the fact that we have an internal blockage that we resist feeling our way through.

    Step four: Come Pass On. Once we feel this emotional blockage as a physical sensation within our own body, we are ready to transmute it with “divine alchemy” by moving it out of our body by applying the power of our compassionate Presence. We have already prepared ourselves for this step as well. Take a careful look at the word “compassion.” Phonetically and visually it reveals itself as “come pass on”. Compassion throughout The Presence Process means: You can come to me and I will let you pass on without interference (entering fear) or judgment (agenda).

    At this point in the procedure we might justifiably exclaim, “oh come on! Here we are feeling angry, our hands buzzing, and our solar plexus all tightened up, and now we are suddenly expected to switch to compassion? Get real!”

    Getting ‘real’ is exactly what we must intend. Activating compassion when we are in the midst of an emotional reaction involves inclusion of our child
    self. To accomplish this, it is important to remind ourselves that the emotional reaction that was triggered within us by the messenger has nothing to do with our present adult life. It is a cry from our child self. It is an echo from the past calling for our attention because only our attention can restore real balance to the quality of all our experiences. We choose to respond to what we are experiencing emotionally therefore by closing our eyes and picturing our child self feeling exactly the same way we are as a consequence of being set up by the messenger. We have already practiced this too. By metaphorically embracing our child self, we automatically activate compassion. We are saying, “you can come to me, and I will love you unconditionally until what frightens you, making you angry, or making you sad passes.”

    When we become sincere in approaching our child self, our chest will automatically start to well up with the emotion that we have resisted
    feeling for so long. This suppressed emotion will surface in waves and dissolve into tears. We will feel the energy moving up and from our solar
    plexus, through our chest area, into and through our throat and eventually out of our body. Often we may even have the sensation of heat literally
    peeling off our body.

    Once this experience of release subsides, we will enter a sense of relief and peace. Through consistent application of The Emotional Cleansing Process, we will discover that the messenger that had repeatedly triggered us over and over again will not return. Why should it when we have consciously received the message? Sometimes, it will take going through this emotional cleansing procedure two and three times over a couple of days or weeks to restore balance to a particular experience. With devotion and commitment, balance will be restored. The more diligently we apply The Emotional Cleansing Process, the more proficient we become at wielding it and subsequently the more efficient it becomes. So the new pathway of learned responsible behavior is:
    Dismiss the messenger – get the message – feel it – com pass on.

    We can apply this technique to solve disagreements, to heal physical ailments, and to integrate any situation of conflict and confusion arising in our life. Every time we apply it, we will be equally astounded by the realization that we can transform the quality of any experience “out there” by moving consciously inot ourselves and compassionately making the internal adjustment. This technique confirms, without a doubt, reflection of our internal emotional condition. It proves that making peace has nothing to do with the other party. It shows us that an unbalanced adult is an unattended child. It also reveals that tears detoxify the Soul and that compassion is the key to reopening the doorway of our heart.”

    Michael Brown

  • Innocent day in the Future.

    I watched a bad day unfold and witnessed the innocent bystander caught up in its throes, and was shocked to see it in slow motion, seeing the day as innocent and the person actually doing the bad day to her self.

    The furnace that she felt was out to get her had actually been complaining that it was having issues.

    For three weeks it failed to keep running at night, so when we arrived at work, the temps were near 40 degrees. She would hit the re-start button and go on with her day.

    Until one day the re-start button failed to re-start.

    It was a bad day.

    Funny how the furnace gets blamed, when it had given early warning and the warnings had gone unheeded.

    A pattern began to emerge as I watched her day, how items came home to roost, items that she had put off for another day, arrived to be dealt with.

    What I seen was how the cycle keeps running and keeps coming back, that troubles don’t go away un attended, they just circle around gathering power until they are big enough for you to see.

    What you call is a bad day, is really the day of reckoning.

    Some people have piles of things that they do not want to pay attention to, a swirling tornado of stuff, and on some days a bunch hit the ground and fly in many directions and they sit there stunned, not making the connection that their non action started this ball rolling.

    Life is asking us to pay attention to be present in each moment to respond now and when we put it off it doesn’t fall off the planet, it just circles around until a later date.

    I could clearly see no one gets away with anything.

    There is a very accurate bookkeeper in charge, nothing slips by or falls off the earth unaccounted for.

    We either resolve what appears or it circles around and comes back later to be resolved, one way or another it will get your attention.

    Oprah puts it this way; first you get a whisper, than a brick falls on your head and then the whole wall. Paying attention to what is going on and dealing with it at that moment will complete the action reaction cycle.

    There will then be no karmic flow of unresolved choices to rain on an innocent day in the future.

  • Ladder of High Self-Esteem

    While I intuitively knew that my actions would have an affect on my children that they would respond to however I moved that we were joined together as one unit and that if I always thought of them when I moved, we would remain connected.

    I also believe that this holds true for husband and wife, that when you start operating as a sole proprietor you will soon be single.

    My boss made a decision based upon her own needs and in doing so left us without a leader or feeling part of the team, it put us on her same agenda…being selfish, operating on our own.

    This carried a strong resemblance to my mother’s behavior when I was a child.

    I also felt like I was the problem for expecting a different action that my standards were too high…

    As she openly admitted to her own selfish needs, she also seemed disappointed that my sense of respect for her was lowered.

    And I felt almost guilty for not overlooking her decision to overlook the poor conduct of one of her employees.

    Funny how sometimes life returns to explain itself by displaying behavior of the past and how I find myself back in the same role of being the one with a selfish leader.

    And isn’t that an oxymoron?

    Not only having a selfish leader, but my failure to be okay with it.

    When the head of any outfit loses sight of the group, we are immediately disbanded until another leader is formed.

    It is amazing that the leader has the power to undo the team.

    I can see where I tried to take over and ban together the family as a young girl, yet with out any power or decision-making rights, it was impossible to do.

    At the end of the day, I am left with my own standards and without a leader to lead me, which leaves me once again to lead myself.

    I am grateful that I was able to witness this in her to better see my childhood, to see where it was that the team fell apart.

    My sister had said of us, “we were left alone in our minds without adult supervision.”

    Children raising children.

    I can even see the weakened run down state that preys upon the easy choice, and how decision-by-decision self worth evaporates, each time making it harder and harder to climb back up the ladder of high self-esteem.

  • A new you emerges…

    “When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” ~Tuli Kupferberg

    Somehow this quote paints a scene of great Art, of stepping out of the box and being presented with a wondrous new world.

    In my experience breaking an old pattern requires stamina, fearlessness, standing out and being different, walking away from familiar and entering into the unknown, which I guess is where the new world emerges.

    Even if the new world is much healthier, happier and more peaceful, there is sorrow as the old pattern dies.

    It is a piece of your personality or a fragment of you that is being disposed of.

    If I were to pile up all the old patterns that I broke, you would see a whole person standing there.

    Her pattern had shades and tones of abuse and dysfunction, faint colors of washed out places of low self-esteem, heavy dark corridors of unawareness and brainwashing along with righteously wrong values.

    She was an enigma, a very confusing mystery to unravel, a body of truth and a head of fiction.

    The breaking of the pattern was all headwork, my patterns of thoughts and beliefs that didn’t match reality and I had to work to reconfigure them in my head.

    It was going backwards in time and reworking or removing the patterns I had set in my head.

    Patterns of me that were formed by childhood, patterns that reflect those who raised me, those who cared for me, doing the best they knew how.

    It was their pattern that I was living by, not mine.

    I was a designed for their use not mine.

    When patterns are broken, a new you emerges….

  • Choices we make.

    What I want to know is do we all have the same choices and the same mechanism that selects them?

    Is it possible that some of us have choices while others do not?

    What makes some of us change our choices and others continue selecting the same ones over and over like ordering the same thing from the menu of life?

    Is there a moment in time when all the choices we have been selecting seem distasteful and we then meander to another part of the menu?

    What happens to us inside that creates the desire for something new?

    Something changes inside of us, something happens to the mechanism that chooses.

    Looking back with 20/20 vision, I can see how a new truth landed inside of me, demolishing my old choice maker.

    All my old choices seemed useless, inauthentic and utterly distasteful.

    Those choices created an illusion that deflected reality.
    In order to walk hand in hand with the truth of reality I had to change all my choices.

    So, was it that choices were limited before or was the truth limited?

    Was my mechanism broken or designed to create illusion?

    Is it possible that we choose based upon our level of awareness, that the choices are always there, we just are unaware?

    All I can know is that my choices are just as limited now, for I feel akin to sticking with my truths, to being authentic with my feelings, to aligning myself with reality.

    My old options are still available but I have lost the taste for them.

    Guess at the end of the day we all make choices based upon what we know, what we feel and our own inner truths.

    It isn’t that the choices are limited; it is that we limit our choices.

    And each of our lives is reflected of the choices we make.

  • Who has Control?

    My expectations of the New Year aren’t about the New Year but rather about me.

    The New Year is neutral, a pile of days linked together, and many hours in which we live our lives.

    What we do within those hours is how our year will unfold, or more importantly how we will emerge on the other end.

    I went back on my blog and read some of my entries in January 2010, the beginning of my first 60-day Yoga challenge.

    It was incredible to read about the beginnings of my year doing yoga.

    Below is a section I quoted from Bikram’s book, and it shows the reality of what we are up against when we strive to make changes in our lives, what we are battling is gaining control over the mind.

    “Without control of mind, you can do nothing. You have something, but you don’t know how to use it. The greatest challenge we face as human beings is controlling and properly using our own minds.

    The mind is the communications system between the physical body and the Soul or Spirit; its primary responsibilities are to control the body and supply the Spirit with immediate and exact information. When the mind instead gives distracted and wrong information, the Spirit cannot govern properly – in fact, it cannot assume control at all. The ego-driven mind has had to rule for itself, and now it does not want to give up its ultimate authority over your life. This is a bitter, perverse fact about human beings, but it is the truth.

    Without proper training, the mind will continue to give you the wrong information and divert your focus from your Spiritual goals. The way it does that so successfully is with fear and desire – its primary weapons. Like a drug dealer, the mind gets addicted to these two opposite but conjoined emotions, and when we are constantly reacting to our attractions and aversions to people, things and situations, we can’t see what really is and reopen the channels of our true Self, the Spirit. That’s why I say that the mind has become our worst enemy.

    To overcome this will not be easy. The weak mind is ever growing, constantly feeding on your fears and negative habits. And as my Guru taught me, the natural human attraction to something negative is NINE TIMES more powerful than our gravitational pull to toward the positive- another inconvenient fact.”
    Bikram

    So if you are endeavoring to make changes in your life this upcoming year, please take note, that what you will be going against is a very powerful pull, 9 times stronger than your thought of change.

    Say your desire is to stop eating sweets; you will have the power to eat sweets 9 times stronger.

    And if your desire is to exercise or do yoga each day, you will be fighting a powerful pull 9 times stronger to stay in bed, lay on the couch, and do nothing.

    What I am most impressed with as I look back upon my year of doing yoga (332 out of the 365) is the sheer effort was exerted in getting to the mat.
    Even though the actual 90 minutes of yoga is rough, it is nothing compared to the struggle to begin.

    The real battle is not in the actual doing; it is in the seconds or minutes prior to the event.

    The fight ensues in the actual debate about whether you are going to abstain or succumb.

    To do or not to do is the where the war is fought.

    It isn’t about the sweets, the beer or the exercise; it is about the seconds of power right before, the space before doing or not doing.

    It is on that edge of time, that second where your life is determined, who has control?