I M Perfect lady

Category: Books

  • The Body Awaits our Attention.

    "A Spiritual Life is about becoming more at home in your own skin."  Parker J. Palmer

    While doing yoga this morning, well it was actually after yoga, that it occurred to me, that by doing yoga I am taking care of the living breathing body that my awareness lives in.  I could see it as one would a plant…how it is alive.

    That tending to my body is to nurture and care for a living thing.

    In the past, the reasons were more removed from the actual living breathing body, they were about getting rid of a pain, or slimming down, but I truly don't believe I could see that I was caring for a magnificent living organism.

    Being a good caretaker of the body, for me, means doing yoga.  I move better or the body does…it is more limber and stands taller with more muscle to support it.  The body awaits our attention.  

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • A spiritual experience for me.

    "We often underestimate the power of giving voice, but it is real and sustaining.  It is the basis of all song.  It is why prisoners break into song.  It is why the blues are sung, even when no one is listening.  It is at the heart of all hymns and mantras."

    "And it works its healing not so much by being heard as by the fact that in giving voice to what lives within, even through the softest whisper, we allow the world of spirit to soften our pain.  In this way, the smallest moan is in itself a lullaby. In giving voice to what we feel, the darkest cry uttered with honesty can arrive as the holiest of songs."  Mark Nepo

    I love, "the darkest cry uttered with honesty can arrive as the holiest of songs."  My honesty in writing about sexual abuse does feel very holy to me, even if the topic itself isn't.  And writing about my experiences with the FALC and how its applications kept dysfunction going, also feel more holy than anything I heard in church.

    It isn't the topic that is written about, but the energy of honesty and integrity.

    And to me, the greatest songs and words ever spoken are those whispered or cried in total honesty.  I felt at one with God the day I began walking my truth…giving voice to how I feel, even if what I had to say was not welcomed by many, it was a spiritual experience for me.

     

     

  • Live where I was Planted.

    "In nature, we are quietly given countless models of how to give ourselves over to what appears dark and hopeless, but which ultimately is an awakening. This moving through the dark into blossom is the threshold of God."

    "As a seed buried in the earth cannot imagine itself as an orchid or hyacinth, neither can a heart packed with hurt imagine itself loved or at peace.  The courage of the seed is that once cracking, it cracks all the way."  Mark Nepo

    Nature truly is remarkable Grace.  

    Nature is the only place I clung to when the rest of my world was falling apart. It demonstration time and time again as  how to live life.  

    It is perfectly orchestrated and never resists…but flows in harmony.  Each part of nature stands as itself in its full glory.  It doesn't know how to be fake or pretend…it just is.

    Watching nature helped me be me…to find peace and live where I was planted.

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    Photograph by Hannah Jukuri

  • Acknowledgement of Hurting.

    "Unintended hurt is as common as branches snapped in wind. But it is the unacknowledged hurt that becomes a wound."  Mark Nepo

    I believe we all will hurt others and be hurt…as long as we are living and in relationships.  It is the unacknowledged hurt that wounds us.

    "Even if our awareness of being hurtful comes years after delivering the hurt, the smallest word or gesture – owning what we've done – can reopen the heart."  Mark Nepo

    I was sexually abused as a child, but no one ever acknowledged that they hurt me.  It is the unacknowledged hurt that wounded me.

    Even when it all came to light 40 years later, silence stood in the place of acknowledgement.

    I have often felt it wasn't enough to acknowledge how I mistreated and hurt my children with my angry words and general dysfunctional mothering…this lesson today has shown me, that in owning how I hurt them, began the closing of the wound and opening of our hearts.

    This is the opening I was waiting to enter…the acknowledgement of the pain they caused me…would have allowed my heart to reopen.  

    That is the difference, the dividing factor between estrangement and growing closer…Acknowledgement of hurting.

     

  • Truth or Pretending not to know the truth.

    "Peace from Broken Pieces, by Iyanla Vansant…speaks of our pathology, our patterns that we inherited from our parents and they got them from their parents; how we replicate their lives, unless we break the cycle.

    I taught my children by how I lived my life. I taught them the same way my mother taught me, in how she responded to life and mimicked her self worth. 

    The way she responded, shouted out her self worth, her allowance for behaviors and lack of boundaries showed she did not matter to herself.  As she continued to put others first, I too was taught that I came last, always.

    When I saw myself differently my pathology began changing.  I no longer was invisible to me and others magnified…instead I began living my life as if I mattered.

    I still see the old pattern emerge now and again in my children, its fragments clinging to their lives…echos of my old self still present…ghosts of my old pathology long ago recorded, still singing itself out in the now.  

    I totally get the lure of this pattern, I understand completely its profile.

    I had no real self unless I was doing, giving and living for the needs of other…I considered it selfish to focus on me.  I would disappear if another didn't need me in some capacity.  I needed to be needed, or I would have been left with my worthless self.  My value and sense of self came strictly from others…I had to shine in their eyes, for my eyes seen nothing in me by myself.

    As my mother before me, I lived self less… as a tool for others to use.

    I didn't have a me.  I didn't know what that me wanted…I was a complete stranger to myself.  I didn't know how to act if I wasn't acting for another.  

    My pattern was to disappear in others lives.

    The old pattern now is in shredds and a new one has replaced it.  I can only imagine how difficult it is for my daughters…with pieces of both patterns in their lives…yet hopeful.

    I can't know how long or how deep the old pathology is within them and which pattern will present itself more fully in their lives…and a part of me believes they signed up to learn this complicated pattern, the reversing of dysfunction.  

    All I do and feel I can do, is keep reflecting the truth back to them, for the old pattern was knitted together without it.

    It truly is broken down into two distinct patterns, Truth or Pretending not to know the truth.

     

     

  • I no longer have to pretend.

    ‎"I learned to survive by withholding what feels real. When events happen – when someone says or does something that hurts me – I have learned to absorb the hit and pretend that nothing changed, that everything is the same. But when I do this, my energy is used up in maintaining the pretense that nothing has happened, and I begin to spin coldly in the dark."

    "It is so simple and yet so brave to say that we are hurt when we are hurt, that we are sad when we are sad, that we are scared when we are scared. In very direct and daily ways, this energy of realness – this mana- changes situations because the immediate expression of our truth releases light and warmth that influences the life we are a part of. This is the way our spirit shines." Mark Nepo

    Learning to absorb the hit and then act as if nothing has changed is the crux of all dysfunction.  It leads you into a false life…an illusion, where your 'kind' parents don't hurt you.  You brought in the hit/abuse and then you proceeded to act like nothing changed.  It did. Your body is carrying the truth, while you are acting as if all is well with thee.

    I didn't even know that I lived this way, didn't fully grasp how my un-realness was the key to my pretend life.  In fact, I didn't know that I was allowed to truly act as if something HAD changed.

    The forgiveness of sins seems to dovetail with this, for when you utter the words, "your sins are forgiven" you then can revert back to the acting as if nothing happened.  Back to pretending…

    Learning to be real was actually shocking to my body at first, I was filled with terror and fear to actually say what I needed to say and even flooded with guilt for doing so. That I had no right to be real.

    In believing this way, anyone can do and say anything to you and your job is to absorb the hits.  Take it in and swallow, in silence.

    Doesn't that seem like a victim's role?  Like you are not allowed to speak up or get out of the way?  

    Imagine life if all were allowed to say and move in response to real life.

    I know for me, it has simplified my life.  I feel so much more at peace when I can use the words yes and no, when I can move towards or away from folks, when I am no longer an absorption cushion to all kinds of behavior.

    And the best part is, I no longer have to pretend…

     

     

     

  • If you don’t know…

    I heard Wayne Dyer speak of what we know, and the comparrison to what we don't know and yet how we live in the small place believing only in what we know.

    As I heard him talk about moving out of the small space of knowing into the mystery of unknown and live from there, it is exactly as I did with my daughter yesterday.

    Somehow, in my mind, I believed that I had to know what was best…and then give my advice in how to get there.  When in actuality, it is just a mind game, a place of believing you know, while the unknown is really alive and moving.

    When I fully embrace that I can't know, I am free.  It is only when I feel I am supposed to know and it is impossible to know, that I feel out of control.

    Yet if I fully embrace the out of controllness of unknowing I am free.

    Not sure if I can articulate this correctly, but the feelings inside are completely different.

    As a mother who FEELS she should know, and it is impossible to know, I feel anxiety and stress.

    As a mother who FEELS she can't know and doesn't know, she is totally at one with the mystery of the unknown.  I love that I am not supposed to know.

    I was okay not knowing where I was going, but somehow the mother part was still plugged into believing that I know, as far as my kids are concerned.

    It seemed like a careless mother to not know.  So much for the phrase, "Mother knows best…"

    What advice can you give if you don't know?

     

  • Feelings feel felt.

    "The fastest way to freedom is to feel your feelings."  Gita Bellin

    "This sounds pretty simple, but though it's easy to know you have feelings, easy to know their weight and agitation and suddenness of mood, it is another, more subtle matter to feel them – that is, to let them penetrate your being in the way wind snaps through a flag."

    "This is necessary because if we don't feel our feelings all the way through, they never leave us, and then we do all kinds of unusual things to get out from under them.  This is the cause of many an addiction."

    "I've diverted myself many times by becoming involved in what surrounds my pain or sadness, while never feeling the thing itself.  So, when someone asks me how I feel, I wind up retelling the circumstances of the pain, but not feeling it.  Or strategizing what to do next, but  not feeling it. Or anticipating reactions, but not feeling what is mine to feel.  Or swimming in the anger and injustice, but not diving through the wound."

    "Though we fear it, feeling our feelings is the only clear and direct way to free our hearts of pain."  Mark Nepo

    How appropriate to have this reading this morning.  Feeling our feelings seems like it would be impossible to do, yet I quickly get caught up in the current of anger and injustice, the wide and swirling river of it…unexpressed feelings from long long ago.

    It seems that river never runs dry.

    What I believe happens is that if you can't feel as a child, then as an adult, you don't just feel this moment of feelings, but all the similar type feelings of the past pile upon  each other to be expressed.

    So, instead of being mildly put out, I am outraged.

    Instead of feeling a bit overlooked, I feel totally neglected.

    The wealth of feelings that I have to feel, truly feel like 50 years worth of bottled up negativity…and even joy.  

    Overreacting is standard for me…for in the past I under felt.

    I never felt all the way through feelings…

    And sadly, the more traumatic, the less I ventured in.  Now all feelings feel like tragedies are looming.  Simplistic and typical pulls and pushes of parent and teenage child, feel to me like I am being abused, again.

    Feelings stored in me find opportunities to be expressed…so of course it is in relationships that they line up, pushing and shoving to come out.

    Separating the old feelings from the new is very tricky.

    Letting out and airing the childhood wounds AND not inflicting wounds upon my children is crucial.  The two can't be joined…yet it seems this is where my expressing happens.  I get a voice of expression, but at the wrong time…

    When someone labeled feelings "Time travelers"….they were right.

    I am saying what I needed to say, but 50 years too late.

    How do I now feel them all the way through, without subjecting my children with their expression?  How do you get them to rise to the surface without something/someone prompting them?  Is it possible to get them to rise by myself? Is it possible to feel them, without a label?

    In yoga feelings arise without labels….I feel.

    In real life feelings are triggered, labeled.  Does it matter?

    Am I like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode?  Is yoga the place to defuse that bomb? Writing and acknowledging and knowing is good, but it is when I get an emotional response that the feelings feel felt.

     

  • Free will is outside of the Program.

    "The structure of the human mind has been likened to a computer in that the mind's basic structure is akin to the hardware and its content to the software.  The mind has limited control over the content of the programming; thus, the human is simultaneously accountable and responsible yet innocent."  David Hawkins.

    "The mind has limited control over the content of the programming"…Most of us fail to understand the power of the program that is running inside of our heads.  How it sees for us and has us living a life from its base and that we have very very little free will.

    Our free will is all within the program, but you do not have a choice outside of what is offered there.  It isn't even possible to consider a choice that the program doesn't have.  Our limits are our parents limits.  It is near impossible to reach beyond the confines while in the confines.  The program has a list to choose from, a limited list, we can only select from the list.

    What I believe happened to me, is that my whole program crashed.  I for some reason was able to see the program and then reality.  And how the two did not match.  It is a rare opportunity to see outside of the program.

    My 'mental breakdown' was actually falling out of the program.

    I was the computer and could see the program….instead of believing the program was me.  

    How I was able to see the truth outside of the program, I can't know, or how that happened, but it did…And I believed IT over the long running program.

    Once you see that the mind/program can be wrong, you lose faith in your head.

    My head had stories that didn't match reality.  My head had definitions that didn't match reality.  I saw and felt and experienced first hand how out of sync my mind was with reality.  

    Once you know you have a defunct operating system running your life, you are aware you have a program operating.  

    My 'natural' reflexes were actual reflexes of the program…but not of truth.

    The program seemed to be built to ward off the truth and reality instead of walking hand in hand with it.  And my life was built upon the program and not of my truth or the truth alone.

    For seven years now I have been finding threads of the program, beliefs and thoughts that eclipse my spirit.  

    When the program is running a part of my life, I feel out of control now, and am.  The program is driving me and I follow.

    Hard to articulate this to folks who have never, not once stepped out of their program, it makes perfect sense to me since I experienced first hand how off the mark it was.

    I had believed that I was a program and that the program was of high morals and values, to come and find out it was filled with abuse and lies.

    While it was extremely difficult to see the program in its fully glory, it was the only thing that would have gotten me out.  I am not sure if there was one thread of truth within the whole thing, for if I had the correct word, I had the wrong definition.  Or the right definition but had it placed upon the wrong person or relationship.  There always seemed to be one thing that made the whole thing wrong.

    Very interesting to investigate your self, your program and place it facing the truth to see where you and reality match.

    It seems to me, that unless something huge happens in reality that our program can't handle, we will get left idling along behind the program, content that it is spot on.

    Perhaps restless now and again, or a bit resentful, but not with enough volume to send us completely out.  Life's little bumps are something that the program can handle.  

    We can live with mild to moderate stress with spikes of rage and not get tossed out of the program.  The moments of great tragedy or crisis are the situations that are set up to toss you out…

    I can't know what those are or what programs are running, but what I can seem to tell is where you are compared to reality.

    I can see the justifiable lies of the program, you call you.

    In dysfunctional homes, the justifiable lies are what holds the family together.  Its the glue and the rose colored glasses that keeps you from leaving.

    It isn't the truth of there being love and kindness there, but the lies that it is there.  And while under the power of the program, you can't tell truth from fiction.

    The program is living your life…and calling it a loving family.

    I see folks asleep behind the program…living life unaware;  Not being aware they are accountable and responsible for choices they are making within the program…for there is no part of them that can reach for a new choice outside of the program..that choice is unavailable to them.

    Free will isn't a choice that they have to pick from.

    Free will is outside of the program.

     

     

     

     

  • Be a Surprise

    "I know that over the years, through fear and expectation, my mind has gathered and hoarded places I needed to go, things I needed to have, selves I needed to be.  But here I am, without most of them – the goals and wants all used up in learning how to love."

    "So, try as I do to imagine and construct where I am headed, try as I will to plan and know what this life of feeling means, it is the pulse of what I feel itself that lifts me into spirit.  In truth, wings don't grow any differently to fit south or east or west, and our lives,  no matter how we train ourselves are more fundamental than any direction of worldly ambition.  We, like birds, are meant to fly and sing – that's all – and all our plans and schemes are twigs of nest that, once outgrown we leave."  Mark Nepo

    What I took away from today's reading, is that no matter what we think we need to be doing or where we think we should be, all we can do is live where we are right now and do so fully being with what is.

    It matters not if you have goals or destinations, in order to get there you live.

    You live whether you have lofty goals or not, whether you have intelligent wants, or righteous destinations.  You live.  

    For me the more I concentrated on goals or end games, the less I lived right now, for I was living for a certain outcome. Bypassing this day, focusing on the one over there.

    Now I just live and an outcome happens.  Often times a surprise destination appears.

    It seems rather careless in a world that wants you to keep in mind your destination and to groom your life to assure you end up where you planned on going…to NOT plan, but live.

    In my past, this moment in time was just something to overlook, for my mind was focused on the goal….tomorrow, when, and If.

    When you live staring at the horizon, you miss what is right here, right now.

    The sights, the smells, the sounds, the people…all the opportunities to be alive and engaged in living.

    It truly doesn't matter where we end up, for there are so many days and hours to live before we get there.  Some how we feel that  when we get there life will begin, when in actuality, living in this day is to live.

    Living in this day has to matter more than any lofty goal in mind.

    If you can't fully live this day, you are wasting days waiting for the goal to appear.

    We somehow have been sold a bill of goods called, goals, dreams etc…that steal our attention from living today.

    Maybe it is when your future starts to shrink, that you can see how fruitless it was.  

    What good is a goal if all the days leading up to it your not living, but counting the days till you arrive.  Imagine all the days spent and passed by, giving up for this goal.  It is like the goal has stolen your everyday life.

    Living without staring at goals or focusing on a certain outcome, will allow you to live and breathe better in this day.

    Imagine how you could live today, IF it didn't have to be a step towards a goal.

    You could be careless and things wouldn't matter if they fit into the 'plan'.

    You could be a live living work of art…where you truly don't know how you will end up when you get 'there'.  Live without a firmly painted goal or pictured outcome.

    Live… allowing the ending to be a surprise.