I M Perfect lady

Category: Books

  • The Mastery of Love, by Don Miguel Ruiz

    “Truth”

    When we look at our wounds with the eyes of truth, we can finally heal these wounds. YOu begin by practicing the truth with your self. When you are truthful with yourself, you start to see everything as it is, not the way you want to see it.

    Don’t believe all the lies you tell yourself – all those lies that you never chose to believe, but have been programmed to believe.

    Don’t believe yourself when you say you are not good enough, you are not strong enough, you are not intelligent enough. Don’t believe you are not beautiful. Don’t believe whatever makes you suffer.

    You can chose how you want to live your life. And if you are honest with yourself, you will know you are always free to make new choices.

    “Forgiveness”

    There is no other way but forgiveness to clean emotional wounds. Forgive those who hurt you, even if whatever they did was unforgivable in your mind. You will forgive them not because they deserve to be forgiven, but because you don’t want to suffer every time you remember what they did to you. When you can touch a wound and it doesn’t hurt, then you know you have truly forgiven. Forgive others, and you will see miracles start to happen in your life.

    Forgive yourself also – for everything you have done in your whole life. When you forgive yourself, self-acceptance begins and self-love grows. That is the supreme forgiveness – when you can finally forgive yourself.

    “Self-Love”

    Love is the medicine that accelerates the process of healing. There is no other medicine but unconditional love. There are millions of ways to express your happiness, but there is only one way to really be happy, and that is to love.

  • Discovered the real me.

    I listened once again to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor speaking to Oprah about her stroke and how she lost all contact to the person she was before the stroke and was left as an infant in a woman’s body, unknowing who she was.

    What struck me were the differences between the two Jills and how I can relate having lived as two of me.

    We both like our second self much better than the first and it took her eight years to grow her second self, and then parts of her old self memories filtered in, but by then a whole new her was in its place.

    My experience wasn’t quite so dramatic physically, I didn’t have to re-learn how to walk, talk, read and write, but my self -identity was equally destroyed, my past all a fraud.

    The me I thought I was wasn’t real and the real me was nowhere and I had to get myself away from the false relationships and places that abused me.

    My healing relied on me walking away from family.

    Her mother came and mothered her a second time and fully embraced her where she was, an infant who needed to be taught all over again. They mourned the loss of her first self, but never expected the second one to be like the first, but a new Jill.

    While they had a second mother and daughter relationship…my mother and I went our separate ways.

    In fact my new self and wellness depended upon whether I could separate myself from my family of origin, the family who created the false files.

    My old self drew its energy and life from being in the old relationships and in doing all the old behaviors and my new healthy self emerged from walking away.

    The tricky spot I was left standing in, was that I knew the old self, and yet the old self was built upon lies, and I had no clue of the new self, but the new self depended upon me walking away from all that I knew.

    I had to learn how I grew wrong to then grow correctly the second time.

    My whole world crashed around me, and my left hemisphere (the storyteller of who you are) was all wrong and it led me to cling to the right hemisphere where intuition, nature, being, now, artistic, and pictures lived.

    While she didn’t understand words, I didn’t trust them.

    Dr. Jill spent 8 years connecting back to the Left side and I have spent 6 years disconnecting from files that were all wrong and then filling them with new contents or meanings.

    I find it interesting what I have learned from her stroke experience, how the brain works and where the self lives.

    What I feel makes a great self is when you occupy the right side most of the time and use the left to communicate.
    We both learned that we couldn’t live unattached to the left side, even though the left side was so damaged, we had to bring it back in order to live whole.

    Somehow hearing Dr. Jill speak of never expecting the second self to appear like the first, took away an unconscious fighting that had been going on within me that it was almost adultery to accept the new me, like I was cheating on the old self.

    My love of my old self and my love of the new self were at odds…it has taken me time to get used to loving the new me, while unloving the old me, if that makes sense?

    There is a wistfulness at times when I struggle to do what my new self needs, a wanting the comfort of being used to this new self.

    While I see my husband in new eyes, it isn’t him, but the eyes looking upon him.

    It is strange to have a new me in an old life and to feel the new self being rejected in places the old self was accepted and it is harder to find confidence in the new self’s love.

    This self loves differently, this self sees differently, this self believes differently.

    This self was grown from the wisdom that my first self experienced.

    I would not be the woman I am today, if I hadn’t lived as the first self first.

    As I learned how she grew to be that way, I discovered the real me.

  • The Sun

    Let the minutes show that I’m here, that I braved a none-to-happy childhood; legal drugs; illegal drugs;organized religion; disorganized religion; toothaches, stomach-aches, the occasional headache, plenty of heartache; the death of my father; the death of my mother, the death of my infant son; three marriages, two divorces, and a long and utterly impractical love affair with myself.

    (this appeared in The Sun’s April Issue- Sy Safransky’s Notebook)

  • My Natural State.

    What struck me as I wrote about the Unbelievers verses the Believers is that we all breathe air and we all have the same bodies, our only striking differences are what we believe, or the thoughts in our heads.

    I had just heard Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor speaking on Sirius and she made reference to the genetic similarities of humanity that I would love to share.

    (My Stroke of Insight)

    “Biological evolution generally occurs from a stat of lesser complexity to a state of greater complexity. Nature ensures her own efficiency by not reinventing the wheel with every new species she creates. Generally, once nature identifies a pattern in the genetic code that works towards the survival of the creature, like a blossom for nectar transmission, a heart to pump blood, a sweat gland to help regulate body temperature or an eyeball for vision, she tends to build that feature into future permutations of that specific code. By adding a new level of programming on top of an already well-established set of instructions, each new species contains a strong foundation of time-tested DNA sequences. This is one of the simple ways through which nature transmits the experience and wisdom bestowed by ancient life to her progeny.

    Another advantage of this type of build-on-top-of-what-already-works genetic engineering strategy is that very small manipulations of the genetic sequencing can result in major revolutionary transformations. In our genetic profile, believe it or not, scientific evidence indicates that we humans share 99.4% of our total DNA sequences with the chimpazee.

    This does not mean, of course, that humans are direct descendants from our tree-swinging friends, but it does emphasize that the genius of our molecular code is supported by eons of nature’s greatest evolutionary effort. Our human code was not a random act, at least not in its entirety, but rather is better construed as nature’s ever-evolving quest for a body of genetic perfection.

    As members of the same human species, you and I share all but 0.01% (1/100th of 1%) of identical genetic sequences. So biologically, as a species, you and I are virtually identical to one another at the level of our genes (99.9%). Looking around at the diversity within our human race, it is obvious that 0.01% accounts for a significant difference in how we look, think and behave.
    Dr. Jill

    What I find so interesting is that we are so alike yet so different in our responses to life, and what we are taught to believe makes a huge difference in how we live.

    Our bodies have similar genetic make up, yet how these bodies experience life is much more dictated by who raised us and their personal beliefs.

    It is very interesting to me to learn about why you live life the way you live it. I always say, I am perfect coming from whence I came. I simply couldn’t have known no better, being taught what I was taught, either by word or deed.

    I am a perfect rendition of a person who traveled as I traveled.

    What I awoke to in December 2004 was the realization that I had no independent beliefs or even person.

    I thought as one part of a big mind controlled religion, my mind wasn’t mine to own.

    What actually woke up in that moment was the awareness of how little of me was actually mine.

    I told my brother today, all I owned in that moment was my breath.

    All the rest seemed to be tainted from the abuse or the religion, there wasn’t a part of me that was free, but my breath.

    I stayed with my breath. I trusted nature and walked with it, seeking its natural independence. Nature became my teacher in learning how to be me.

    Slowly I am returning to my natural state.

  • Turning Bad to Good.

    On the sliding scale of normal, I lived on the high end up near the top. I was pushed up there by fear and fear stood between the middle ground and me.

    My hyper responses seem normal, unless you compare them to another’s; they seemed natural in their unnaturalness.

    It literally feels like I am being put in harms way to forge into the middle responses, like they are too weak for my security.

    My security calls for over the top measures, I do not trust middle ground.

    Middle ground appears as doing nothing, is standing still, is allowing, is not knowing what your playing with, it seems pointless and weak.

    And perhaps what I call middle ground is the bottom rung called nothing, the very opposite of where I lived.

    It seemed my scales of normal had two responses, hyper screaming or nothing. Middle was nowhere to be found.

    I had to crawl through fear and let go of where I was in order to be introduced to reasonable.

    What is reasonable?

    Balancing on the razor edge of reason feels like a weak position to my hyper vigilant self.

    The space that is needed is what Stephen Covy writes about in his book, The 8th Habit. The space between a life incident and your response. He says that the space is almost non-existent for an abused person; we have no space before we react.

    What he calls space I will call reason. We are left without reason.

    We enter into a life changing moment without reason.

    We can’t be reasonable, for we don’t have reason.

    We can’t find a reason and we don’t’ look for it. We react without reasons.

    This may sound very peculiar to some, but what I felt was that the situation is what drove me up the tree, like a fearful raccoon; little did I know I lived there and beckoned it to come to me.

    I reacted from there. I brought in the high hyper energy, it wasn’t the scene that spewed it forth, it came from me, I elevated the situation as high above middle as I was.

    Instead of meeting the situation, I brought it up the tree with me.

    In order to find reason, I had to lower myself down.

    What an odd view I had of myself lowering my energy, letting go of my fear, and climbing slowly down towards middle and not dropping all the way to nothing, but to sit in a place of reason. To meet the situation where it is.

    Reason. I had to look up the meaning.

    n. The basis or motive for an action, decision, or conviction.

    It is interesting to see that Reason is the basis or motive for how we act or the decisions we make.

    I had reason, I had many reasons and all my reasons were fearful reasons.

    It was reasonable for me to be so high up the scale of normal.

    I read that Fear is False Events Appearing Real.

    If Fear believed in what isn’t real, you would think we would naturally turn to what is real.

    But what if what is real is horrifying?

    What if you have to give up father for a pedophile?
    Then what?

    My lessons letting go of false events was to grab on to much more scarier things.

    Yet I believe this is why most hang on to fantasy, to what isn’t, to build up a wall of fear, a wall of false events, false ideas, a fairyland between them and reality.

    What is so sad, is that you think by not dealing you are keeping the boogie man at bay, and what you are actually doing is creating a cage for you all to be together.

    It was like I lived in the highest tree in the cage, for fear of what lay at my feet.

    It is incredible the wall of fear we build out of false ideals…and we don’t want to drop the pretty curtain to reveal who really lives with us.

    And imagine, we think fear is about something scary, when fear most often is putting pretty masks on scary things.

    Fear is make up, a pretend mask on a bad behavior or person. Fear is making up a fantasy.

    Who knew that fear was creating things that were not real?

    Fear is to a make up story.

    What I had thought, was that fear was about something scary, I failed to understand the application of fear.

    Fear is building a false event or story and the unease I believe is the body knowing the truth that lay beneath.

    The body trembles in the false events appearing real.

    What also occurred to me, we rarely make up scary stories about good things. We make up wonderful, kind and loving stories about scary things.

    Interesting fear is turning bad to good.

    A friend passed on a quote she found on an Art Quilt made by Tina Koyama, “Beyond the four walls of fear is all of life’s energy waiting for me.”

  • Gate to love

    Fear… this incredibly small word is extremely powerful and it has led my life and all its decisions.

    I am not sure I can articulate the difference of living life from a position of love compared to fear.

    Unless you see your fear driven life, you may not even know how much of your life has been absconded by fear.

    I looked up the word absconded, for it isn’t my usual word, but it felt right to express my sentiments, but I wanted to make sure I was using it properly.

    Do you know its meaning?

    It means – “To depart in a sudden and secret manner.”

    It fits perfectly. Fear absconed with my life.

    Here is what I know for sure, is that if you are left untreated after abuse, you will live from that day foreward, not as love, but fear.

    Fear replaces love. A young girl living in love, becomes a young girl living in fear.

    How to explain this. I go into a situation with my father filled with love for him and I come out filled with fear. I go to my mother in love and with fear of my father, and she doesn’t do anything, I then leave in fear her….

    My love, or those who love me are absconed and replaced with fear.

    Dr. Maya Angelou has a quote about the endurance of a child suffering is born out of the lack of alternatives.

    I didn’t have a loving place to go, so I had to live as fear.

    This fear mode of living is hard to describe, but it leaves you with the knowing that the world is not a safe place to be, that at any time terror will jump in front of you, that those you love will do something fearful…and you have to prepare and plan to dodge these bullets.

    My whole view of life was geared toward protecting and a very defensive way of living.

    I was on guard. A Fear Filled guard.

    The small pint of love that lived within me was toward objects and things, items that had no power of hurting me.

    But live living creatures, yikes, at anytime a friendly face could turn and bite you…and many did.

    The most sad and tragic part in being a fear filled maniac, is that my children were mothered from this position.

    Instead of teaching them the wonderful loving kind beautiful amazing things, my mantra was what was out to get you.

    Understandably we all know how I was raised to become this way, and gratefully with a lot of fearlessness, I have been able to learn how to love and not fear AND to fear those who rightly needed to be feared and not loved.

    What an amazing ride.

    There is a a poem that Kim Rosen speaks of in this months Oprah magazine, called Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

    “Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things,
    feel the future disolve in a moment
    like salt in a weakened broth.
    What you held in your hand,
    what you counted on and carefully saved,
    all this must go so you know
    how desolate the landscape can be
    between regions of kindness.
    How you ride and ride
    thinking the bus will never stop,
    the passengers eating maize and chicken
    will stare out the window forever.

    Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
    you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
    lies dead by the side of the road.
    You must see how this could be you,
    how he too was someone
    who journeyed through the night with plans
    and the simple breath that kept him alive.

    Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
    You must wak up with sorrow.
    You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.

    Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
    only kindness that ties your shoes
    and sends you out into your day to mail letters and purchase bread,
    only kindness that raises its head
    from the crowd to the world to say
    it is I you have been looking for,
    and then goes with you everywhere
    like a shadow or friend.
    Naomi Shihab Nye

    What I know for sure, is that without the years and decades of sorrow, I would not recognize kindness.

    Kindness, again such a simple word, but it is the gate to love.

  • A Lady with Borders

    I listened to Dr. Laura Berman speak about “Borderline Personality Disorder”. It sounded so similar to where I came from, where the lines between what is your life and what is my life are blended, and how you can flip between like and hate in relationships, blaming the other for your actions. She was speaking to a woman whose husband had this and the husband blamed the wife for his cheating.

    Dr. Laura’s advice to the woman was that even if you are the only one that is sane and all are calling you insane, you are still sane. That for her to grab a hold of reality and not let go for it seems we can get sucked into their twisted reality and get very confused. And usually these types of individuals are married to or in a relationship with co-dependents who live to make you happy.

    I was glad to hear of this Borderline Personality Disorder, and I feel that it mirrors own life in how I used to blame my poor behavior as a mother on misbehaving children and how I also have lived on the other side of the coin, being a good daughter to make a good mother.

    This was an interesting view of my family and how they still are using each other to behave.

    I will get a good sister IF I be a good sister.
    I will get a good mother if I be a good daughter.

    This conjoined way of living is very weird to me now, and the insanity that ensues mind blowing, for they literally believe that they can control another’s behavior by their behavior.

    I am stunned to know that finding reality and separating bodies is what is needed, to stop bleeding into others lives or having their lives bleed into yours, that we need to find a way to stay completely in your own power.

    I also listened to Mark Nepo who wrote “The Book of Awakening,” and he spoke of a time when he lost his job and found out he had cancer, and at the moment when his life seemed to all fall apart at once, he found his soul, a part of him that remained untouched by the chaos.

    I get that.

    I felt that at the time my whole world fell apart that inside of me my soul awoke or I awoke to my soul. It was the only thing dysfunction hadn’t touched.

    I can’t be certain what my overall mental status was for 46 years or what conditions all in my family have, but this Borderline Personality Disorder seems to explain the sense of guilt I had when I wasn’t able to make them better, or the shame I felt for my father’s deeds, like we were all one big ameba.

    I woke up as a woman without borders!

    The past six years have been constructing fences, separating my flesh from theirs, my emotions and feelings being shanghaied by their lives, and learning how to be a lady with borders.

    IMG_5609

  • Selfishly I Respectfully Do Not Care!

    “I respectfully do not care!” is a new quote I heard from Martha Beck as she spoke today on the Lisa Oz radio show.

    People have told her (Martha) that in order to promote and sell books and to keep her selling herself she needs to be on facebook, twitter and the like, but doing so has made her sick, physically sick with shingles.

    She found that she can talk with her daughter, and if her daughter feels her mom says something profound, her daughter will post it online.

    Martha has total trust in her body and she was getting physically sick doing what others wanted her to do, but what wasn’t natural or feeling right for her.

    When she says, “I respectfully do not care,” it means I respect what you are saying, it’s not for me.

    I love that.

    She is following and listening to her body.

    This may be my second favorite quote from her and it validates that you heard the request, but don’t care.

    Don’t care if all are doing this, me and my body are not okay with it,

    “I respectfully do not care” almost sounds like what I tell my children. I respectfully do not care if all the kids are doing it you are not. (when the other kids parents didn’t care and we had different rules.)

    This phrase actually gives you the freedom to be an individual, to follow the signals of your body, to listen to the inner knowing, to care more about yourself than others.

    Selfishly I respectfully do not care!

  • Spoiled Brat?

    Sarah Ban Breathnach writes in her book, “Moving On,” let’s take a fresh look at the word that saps our strength often:

    Scared.

    “What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?” wonders Toni Morrison. Fair enough question. Woman have always know how to comfort the fears of others; we just don’t remember to use the same tender, loving, tactics on ourselves. So the next time you feel a random panic attack starting, take a deep breath, and transpose the “a” and the “c” in “scared” and you’ll find not only another word but a world of difference. You’ll uncover the

    Sacred

    Doesn’t that make you feel better already? It works for me, every time. I’d be willing to bet the house that your sacred, like mine, is very close – the walls surrounding you or the floorboards supporting you, even if they need a good scrub. The best definition I ever heard of fear is “False Events Appearing Real.” When I am anxious I notice that my fears seem to be speculative future-tense marauders. Will there be enough? What will I do? How will I cope? The best way I know how to disarm such fear is by keeping a Gratitude Journal. A Gratitude Journal is a polite, daily thank-you note to the Universe- and a reminder to yourself of the very real blessings you have now. In this moment. You know how insulted you are after you’ve knocked yourself out for your kids and all you get in return is surly silence. What am I raising you probably wonder, a bunch of brats? Well, an ancient spiritual axiom teaches us, “As below, so above.”

    Because you’re not spoiled rotten, at the end of every day write down five things or moments you experienced for which to be thankful. Small pauses that brought a smile or a sense of relief during the day. The kindness of somebody holding your place in the post office line when you have a lot of packages to get from the car. The plumber showing up on time. Fitting in to last summer’s shorts. A hug from a friend. A fortune cookie with just the right message. Saying no to a bake sale without guilt. Easily switching carpooling days. Getting an extension on the deadline. Better yet, meeting the deadline, Phew!

    We think it’s the big moments that define our lives – the promotion, the new baby, the renovated kitchen, the wedding. But the narrative of our lives is written in the small, the simple and the common. The overlooked. The discarded. The reclaimed. Life is not made up of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years, but the moments. You must experience each one before you can appreciate it.

    Whether you are chopping carrots, shampooing your hair, writing a memo, making love, talking on the phone, walking the dog, or eating an apple, savor those sensations involved. All of those moments, whether happy, routine, or even painful are Life’s heartbeats.
    Sarah

    In the past six years I have been made to be much more sensitive to each of life’s heartbeats, to feel that which is in reality now, and even how life seems to be lived on a pinhead of time, how it literally is the heartbeat of life.

    This moment, the one we are breathing in is where life happens and to be grateful or even to see all that arrives is overwhelming.

    I love how she says we could be like spoiled brats and not even pay attention to all that the Universe gives us each day.

    Yesterday while delivering mail in the high winds and whiteout conditions, I focused on the black bare roads at times, and was so grateful to see their blackness in midst of swirling white. “Thank you black roads!”

    When you begin to look for things to be grateful for, you will find more and more grateful things.

    I will just watch how I go about my days, how I approach or leave little moments in time, and I a grateful child or a spoiled brat?

  • The Artist Way

    On the CD of “Romancing the Ordinary” by Sara Ban Breathnach, she mentions Julia Cameron a few times. She is the author of the book, “The Artist Way”.

    My brother sent me the book and notebook that went along with it a little over six years ago to begin discovering the Artist within me.

    Julia wanted us to write “Morning Pages” just a simple practice of writing a few pages each morning, putting to paper our thoughts.

    They could be just stating what we had to do that day, how we were feeling, just ramblings but getting them out of our heads and on to the pages, cleaning up the space to be creative.

    I was a beginning student to this Way, when all hell broke lose in my life, and what surprised me greatly, is that I clung to these morning pages, which often grew to day long pages, for sometimes I wrote morning, noon and night.

    I filled that first book in a short time and then bought my first journal and after four years of writing longhand, I began a blog.

    I still write most days, sometimes more depending upon the unsettledness of my soul; writing is now part of who I am.

    What is so synchronistic is this book came to me just a week or so shy of a major event in my life, and it helped me find my way.

    What also has happened simultaneously my Artist arrived, she is having a ball playing with ladies, fabric, colors, designs, and is going places Artists go and her work is in an Art Gallery.

    I don’t know the way, but it seems to happen anyway.

    Perhaps that is the Artist Way.

    (I will have to go back and read in her book to see the marks I hit unbeknownst to me.)