I M Perfect lady

Author: bjukuri

  • Peace In the Present Moment

    A book by Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle

    “The most important, the primordial relationship in your life is your relationship with the Now, or rather with whatever form the Now takes, that is to say what is or what happens. If your relationship with the Now is dysfunctional, that dysfunction will be reflected in every relationship and every situation you encounter. The ego could be defined simply in this way; a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment. It is at this moment that you can decide what kind of relationship you want to have with this present moment.”
    Eckhart

    “If your relationship with the Now is dysfunctional, that dysfunction will be reflected in every relationship and every situation!” I know this is true.

    The word dysfunctional almost covers up what is actually happening, it is like a cover deflecting the actual event.

    People fail to notice that by not being with what is actually happening, they are having a dysfunctional relationship to what is, no matter what it is and that alone makes them dysfunctional.

    They are not functioning as one with reality.

    I love how simple he breaks down dysfunction.

    In my head it was all one big vast tangle mess, when it happens little at a time.

    A moment in time presenting itself to you and you changing it into what you need it to be…

    What is so exciting about all of this is that you can stop the dysfunction by greeting what is as it is Now.

    Dysfunction begins each moment in time you fail to see the beauty of what is.

    The darkest beauty as well as its opposite.

    “The simple truth of it is that what happens is the best thing that can happen. People who can’t see this are simply believing their own thoughts, and have to stay stuck in the illusion of a limited world, lost in the war with what is. It’s a war they’ll always lose, because it argues with reality, and reality is always benevolent. When you argue with reality, you lose – but only 100 percent of the time.”
    Byron Katie

  • Let the Pain Out

    “Real difficulties can be overcome, it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.” ~Theodore N. Vail

    When you face what you actually are compared to what you desire to be, you will find much peace, it is trying to be someone else that’s impossible.

    Letting go of the potential, the prize of someday, the if only of yesterday, and the idealized version of self that is the hardest to do.

    To sit down fully in imperfection and disappointing the mind, by facing all the evidence contrary to many beliefs.

    What I felt most for the men on stage with Oprah was that they were unable to claim their lost innocence and how abuse changed them.

    They wanted what is impossible to attain, and in doing so sit in denial of whom they are.

    They are the combination of innocence lost and the affects of abuse, and when they can see the imperfections of their lives, they will see how perfectly it is.

    How abuse does steal innocence, how if you don’t address abuse, abuse lives its life for you.

    It seems that you are a victim when you repeatedly succumb to the wishes of if only, or I can’t be different, and you become a victor when you stand and state the obvious.

    I was abused.
    I am confused because of the abuse.
    I lived an upside down life due to being abused.

    Until we can recognize how upside down we are, we can’t seek to right ourselves.

    By holding on to the picture of innocence, we miss who we now are.

    I will never not know the feelings of terror of a father.
    I will never not know who I would be without the abuse, but I can know who I can be in spite of it.

    There is a life after abuse, a way to reclaim your life today, but not undo yesterday.

    Life after abuse starts when you out yourself.
    Until then, you are locked in the dark with the secret.

    Once you step out, your life after abuse can begin…Abuse and its shame lives in the dark quiet silence.

    You don’t have to tell the whole world, but speak to someone, open the wound and let the pain out.

  • Shine Once Again.

    “Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.” ~Maya Angelou

    I don’t know what to blog about the show with Oprah and 200 Adult Children of Sexual abuse, men whose boyhood was stolen and now their manhood too seems to be lost, they are left in a middle ground, no longer innocent and no longer able to be a man.

    What I heard was that sexual abuse leaves you feeling vulnerable.

    The definition of vulnerability is,

    “Susceptibility to attack or injury; the state or condition of being weak or poorly defended; a specific weakness in the protections or defenses surrounding someone or something.”

    Being susceptible to attack and injury is to be a child, especially one that isn’t being properly watched and cared for, being poorly defended…having a specific weak parent that can’t protect you.

    A weakness in a parent can be a simple as loving the predator, defending his goodness while the child’s experience is widely different.

    I have stood on both sides, the parent and the child, the blind and the unseen, the knowing and the unknowing, on both sides feelings are denied.

    Fears are pushed aside…children are left undefended, monsters go on labeled as father, feelings not felt.

    Blindness spreads.

    When I did see, damage lay all around.

    When I did feel, terror was the truth.

    When I did know I was cast out.

    Cast out for speaking, seeing and knowing abuse.

    As I watched these men, I know what they fear, they fear being cast out.

    Shunned for being abused.

    How is that right?

    How do we have this so upside down and backwards?

    What I know to be true is I was cast aside, my voice not wanting to be heard, what they want the most is for me to be unchanged, to appear like the picture of innocence all the men held.

    To just be me without the abuse.

    What an impossible task to attain… to not be abused while being abused.

    So each man stands in the impossible stance, abused while trying to not show the affects of it, yet the abuse has infected each part of their lives, there is no place that abuse doesn’t touch.

    Once you stand fully in being abused, you can then begin to see where abuse created a life instead of you.

    Exposing the abuse allows the innocence to shine once again.

    “In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

  • Change will Happen!

    If you are not trying to change, you do not have any choices to make, you just keep repeating what you have been doing, there will be no inner struggle, no wondering or thinking, no stressing about how you will handle each new moment that arrives, where you will again be asked to make a choice, differently.

    If you don’t make a new choice you remain unchanged, and if you do make a new choice you will be changed, but grow further and further from your old familiar ways.

    Not changing is easy; it is mindless and falls effortlessly within your life, like smoke seeping into each minute.

    Change is like breathing new air into each choice we are asked to make daily, the small and the large, the complicated and the simple, each little decision has to be dealt with as a if you were a new arrival on earth, yet with the magnetic draw of a long held pattern.

    To jump the track of an old pattern isn’t as easy as one suspects and you will not know until you are actually the one doing the heavy lifting.

    Heavy lifting is doing the opposite of what you are used to, the complete and total opposite is required in order to change.
    You can’t change your life by doing nothing different, by not affecting your world and each relationship in it, the only way to change is to allow waves of new you flow into everything in your life.

    Since you are the common denominator in your world and with all whom you spend time with, if you change, all will feel the ripple affect.

    If there is no ripple, you haven’t changed.

    In the book, “Tattoos on the Heart” by Gregory Boyle, he is speaking to a gang member who is asking “How many homies have you buried…you know, killed because of gangbanging?
    “Seventy-five, son,” (this was some years ago. If he asked today, it would be more than twice that number.)

    “Damn, G, seventy-five?” He shakes his head in disbelief, his voice a bare hush now. “I mean, damn…when’s it gonna end?”

    I reach down to Omar and go to shake his hand. We connect and I pull him to his feet. I hold his hand with both of mine and zero in on his eyes.

    “Mijo, it will end,” I say, “the minute…you decide.”

    The moistening of his eyes surprises me. He grabs my hands in his.

    “Well,” he says, “then, I decide.”

    “Omar,” I tell him, “it has always been as simple as that.”

    “How many things have to happen to you,” Robert Frost writes, “before something occurs to you?”

    Change awaits us. What is decisive is our deciding.
    Gregory Boyle

    When you decide, change will happen!

  • Letting go of Perfection

    Courage lies within us in a very deep place, buried behind the walls of fear of imperfection, coated in false ideals and fantasies that are impossible to attain, courage waits for us to uncover it.

    Peeling back the layers and layers of deceit we have of ourselves, piles of unrealistic desires and impossibilities, a mound of what I am not.

    Courage comes when we are able to stand alone in being who we are right now without improvements, without the completion of dreams, minus the goal, but instead standing right here right now, completed up to this point.

    With no excuses, no reasons, just as I am.

    The courage it takes to drop all the idealized versions of your self and just be okay with the raw deal, the real complete version of you, up to this point.

    For some reason we continue to not look at what we are, but instead of what we are trying to become.

    While we focus on where we are going we miss this step in the creative process, this step called today.

    I have no idea of what my final creation of me will be, but I do know who I am today.
    I know where I walked, how I walked and sometimes even why, I don’t know where I will step, but I know that each step will be me.

    It takes courage to be truthfully half done, authentically complete, and yet fully perfect as you are right now.

    Am I whole?
    Am I normal?
    Am I perfect?
    Am I sick, mental, imperfect?

    Whose measuring stick am I using?

    My intention is to be with myself as I walk forward in my life, not a fraction more perfect than I am right now, and not a snippet less.

    It takes courage to accept yourself as you are today, to toss aside the blueprints and be complete now, without a new version in mind, but to be a success thus far.

    Courage is letting go of perfection.

  • Freedom to Be.

    “You are as sick as your secrets” is a phrase I heard yesterday, and what I failed to notice is that the secrets are sometimes secret from you, and you have to look for clues.

    My deepest secret was that I hated who I was, not me my name, but me my experiences that I lived through, it is like not wanting what already is.

    When I had stated a long while back, that I was lost, I didn’t know who I was or even that I was missing, but I was going to find myself, I was wanting to find me.

    A me that isn’t what someone else wants me to look and be like, but a me that is just me, and perhaps to disrobe the secrets that comprise me.

    Once I stood naked with all my secrets hanging out, I found me.

    Many parts are not pretty, but they are all me.

    Each dark secret part of me was controlling me as long as it lay hidden, but once exposed, I was free to add it to the layer of who I am.

    I am imperfect, yet perfectly me.

    Each new secret vice or secret feeling I unwrap allows me more and more freedom to be.

  • Behave my way into love.

    What I didn’t know about self love is that it wasn’t a word in the head,
    a thought in the mind or even a feeling, but rather Actions.

    The actions you have towards yourself, not how you appear in public, how you walk,
    talk or behave, but rather is is the obvious and the not so obvious.

    Self love is the food you eat, to the way you move your body, to the places you bring it, to the people you subject it to, all comprise the love you have of your self.

    Somehow I think I thought, it was a saying in my head.
    Perhaps the absence of saying, “I hate myself.”

    Yet my self hatred was exposed for all the world to see.

    It was in the food I ate and how much.
    It was in the way I didn’t exercise or even take my body out in the fresh air.
    It was in the silence instead of speaking up, hidden in the yes when I wanted to say no.

    All in all the evidence of self hatred lay literally everywhere, and no amount of positive affirmations planted on the pile of self neglect would change a thing.

    I had to act differently.

    I had to behave my way into love.

  • The Voices are Silent

    I finished the Quiet Room by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett. What an inspiring story of girl with a broken mind; a schizophrenia mind.

    She had voices in her head that were finally silenced with the proper medication, treatment and her tenacity to continue working on herself.

    She explains, “I still hear the Voices from time to time. I try to take my own advice. I distract myself, lecture myself, and focus on the outside world. I have taught myself to use a little mantra when they reappear: “These Voices are not real. Don’t be frightened. Don’t get upset. They are not real. Don’t let them overcome you. Try and think of what happened just before you heard them. Is there some emotion you can isolate that will help explain why they are here now? They are not real. It’s okay. Don’t be afraid.”

    “When I hear the Voices, I shake myself back to reality by using all my senses. If I am riding the train to Manhattan for example, I concentrate on the taste of Diet Coke and the smell of the perfume I am wearing. I look out the window at the changing view, and listen carefully to the sound of the conductor collecting tickets. I feel my own ticket flipping back and forth between my fingers.”
    Lori Schiller

    Even though I am not schizophrenic, I can relate to using reality to keep me on the path to wellness, how my voices were alive and walking in reality, voices of the dysfunctional family I left behind.

    Medication was able to reduce the voices mostly and when they returned, she formulated ways to not believe them.

    My experiences of walking out a dysfunctional family had the Voices on the outside in reality that were beckoning me backwards, and there wasn’t medication that would silence them, instead I had to be silent.

    My Voices were sisters, brothers and mother, my father’s voice never appeared.

    Voices and laughter, seemingly vanilla requests urging me to stop being so mental, so frightened, so weird, so odd, so standoffish, so separated, so cold, so heartless, so mean, so unkind…just like her voices in Lori’s head, mine too rose against me.

    The only medication I have to silence their voices is my truth; it seems to keep them far away.

    It is odd that my Voices are real and in living color and they too can threaten my newfound wellness, and perhaps tear little holes in my confidences, eroding newfound peace, as they bounce around like hysterical laughter, wanting me to join in the false hilarity.

    There is a small part of me that longs for the old group, yet a much larger part of me overcomes that, knowing what I would be joining.

    It is almost like I was raised in a Mental Hospital, and that I escaped into normal, and the old patients are beckoning me back.

    And the patients in the Mental Hospital were told that they were living normal, and see me as going into a land of total insanity.

    There are even times that I like Lori, have to concentrate on the smells, sights and sounds around me to keep me with reality, to know that I am okay, I am not the one with mental issues or dysfunctional patterns controlling my life, that I have done the due diligence to get me here.

    Here the voices are silent.

  • Love of Self

    A good friend responded to my post on Sprouting Self Hatred, with a great visual, a thought that I could picture.

    “That picture is: yoga being poured as if out of a fancy vessel and killing the sprouting self hatred–over and over again. This yoga is like emotional Round-up!!!! What a concept. There is “out of body Beth” pouring Yoga on self- hatred.”

    She is absolutely right, doing yoga has been killing me softly, the me that was birthed in Self Hatred.

    Taking all the false beliefs and destroying them, eliminating the source of low self-esteem, little by little, pose by pose, I have been wrestling with hatred of self.

    What a battle.

    Sometimes it took Herculean energy to get me off the couch, out of bed, and on to the mat.

    Bringing my old self to do yoga, an old self that didn’t have any energy to love me, to care for me, it was that person that arrived on the mat.

    And each time I successfully accomplished another day of yoga, the hating me weakened and the Loving Me was strengthened.

    The stronger love I have of self, the stronger I can love.

    Jane Fonda yesterday was speaking to Oprah and she was talking about falling in love, how it is best to stand strong in love.

    I am learning to stand strong in love of self.

  • Sprouting Self Hatred

    As I headed to my room to do yoga with my belly unsettled, images of the laughing sisters, my demeanor glum, I wondered how yoga would be.

    The standing poses went by without a hitch, but as I lay on the floor, my focus went into the belly.

    What was going on?
    What was I feeling?
    Is the gut where you feel?

    The thought came in, “I hate your guts”…and then I thought of how in the last few weeks, while doing yoga, I have been concentrating on my belly, my hernia that has been there for a long time, and I have been mentally pulling my guts back in.

    Whether it will work or not, my focus has been on my belly.

    “I hate your guts”…I thought was coming from my sisters, that I was feeling their negative energy coming in to me.

    As I lay there rubbing my belly, asking it what it was up, what was all this about?

    Tears flowing, caressing my belly, breathing, missing poses, it finally occurred to me, “I hate My Guts!”

    My hating of my self has been with me a long long time; in fact my guts have been trying to escape!

    I hate my self for no longer being perfect, I felt like a little girl hating her body for its abuse wounds.

    During the final breathing exercises, I visualized hate blowing out, and immediately felt that I have been holding a belly full of hate for my body since my abuse.

    I hated being imperfect.

    My belly can rest now, for I will now work on loving my belly, loving more the imperfections that abuse leaves behind.

    How awful that abuse leaves hatred of self inside our bellies, how we try to escape from ourselves.

    I feel I have found the source of all my angst, the infestation of feelings that lay inside, the seed abuse left there to grow.

    Sprouting self hatred…