I M Perfect lady

Category: Books

  • 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

  • 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!

  • 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 Sorrow, By Mary Oliver

    Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
    take care of what has been
    given. Brush her hair, help her
    into her little coat, hold her hand,
    especially when crossing the street. For, think,

    what if you should lose her? Then you would be
    sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
    would be yours. Take care, touch
    her forhead that she feel herself not so

    utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
    altogether forget the world before the lesson.
    Have patience in abundance. And do not
    ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment

    by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
    abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
    sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
    And amazing things can happen. And you may see,

    as the two of you go
    walking together in the morning light, how
    little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
    she begins to grow.
    Mary Oliver

    I love how she writes about sorrow as being a child, a part of you to love
    and care for, instead of trying to shove it away, or change it somehow, rather bring it along gently and with patience and understanding.

    I believe each of our emotions would be better treated this way.
    To walk along with each allowing them to express themselves as need be.
    Until they grow into wisdom of lifes experience.

    Thanks Mary Oliver for expressing sorrow in these words.

  • The Quiet Room

    I am reading “The Quiet Room” by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett.

    What is so interesting is that her parents don’t want to accept her illness, and deny it by looking repeatedly for ‘normal’ behavior and are more concerned about how she ‘got’ this illness, they are fearful they caused it.

    Yet the mother had a mother with the same illness and didn’t know it until her daughter displayed the same behavior, then her mother made sense.

    She was mentally ill.

    I know how odd this is that you can’t recognize sickness, especially if you called it normal all along and it is only after the fact that looking back the red flags are waving wildly all about.

    Even Lori herself, believes we all have manic voices in our heads telling us to do things, bad talking esteem wrecking talk…and we do, just not to the degree she did.

    The first half of the book is about looking for normal when normal is nowhere to be found, how everyone wants her to not be sick while she is.

    How awful to have to live pretending or working hard to pretend, that nothing is wrong, how much kinder a ride to be a mentally ill person as you are mentally ill.

    To stand in the truth, no matter what truth you have to stand in is much easier, than trying to be something you can’t be.

    Even if her family didn’t accept it, it was there.
    She was expected to be the one to be the strongest to lead the way, while being mentally ill.

    Like having the blind lead, the deaf listen for us.

    I can’t wait to compete the story and see how she was finally able to see that she was sick and then to convince others of this fact.

    How much easier to just be yourself in whatever state you find yourself in…

  • Homeless to Harvard.

    “Breaking Night” by Liz Murray, how she went from Homeless to Harvard, shows that you can change the legacy you were born into.

    Her endurance to survive was what she needed to change direction when she could see her course aligning with her parents.

    She is seventeen when she decides to return to high school, a friend suggests an Alternative high school, “It’s a place like a private school, but for anyone who is really motivated to go, even if they don’t have the money. The teachers really care about you.”

    Here is where she sees her past and future collide.

    “I was scheduled to begin high school in September, it was May now. I would use the months ahead to prepare; I had four years to make up. The next thing I had to do, in order to complete my registration to Prep, was return to JFK, my old high school, and get my official transcript.

    Having seen Prep, JFK looked absolutely massive in comparison. I passed through metal detectors to enter the building. No one looked at me. Students were everywhere, thousands of them. It felt like a bus station. Taking the number 1 train back to Prep later that day, I sat down and ripped open the manila envelope. Columns of failing grades- 45, 60, 50- were everywhere. It was unnerving, reading row after row of flunking marks. I felt like a mess, a big walking train wreck. The experience of talking about my grades (having been lectured by adults so many times) versus actually seeing my transcripts was night and day. Transcripts were a real thing, a tangible expression of what I had and had not done with my life, and a road map of what still had to be done. Looking at my academic disaster, I could see that I had a mountain ahead of me to climb.

    Then, very suddenly, sitting on the train gazing at the JFK stationary, it dawned on me – my Prep transcripts were still completely blank. I literally had nothing, no grades, zip on my Prep transcripts yet. I could start fresh.

    The thought of the clean slat was thrilling, especially after looking at the mess I had created. With all the things that had been difficult, it was one blessing to count on, the knowledge that what I did from this moment on didn’t have to depend on what I had done before. Back on Nineteenth street, I asked April to give me a copy of my blank Prep transcripts, which was a simple printout of my name on Prep stationary and rows of blank columns waiting to be filled in by my future grades. The JFK ones I handed to April and never looked at again. The blank ones I kept with me at all times. They were a reminder that I was, day by day, writing my future. Sleeping in a hallway around Bedford Park later that week, I took out my blank transcripts and I filled in the grades I wanted, making neat little columns of A’s. If I could picture it – if I could take out these transcripts and look at them – then it was almost as if the A’s had already happened. Day by day, it was just catching up with what was already real. My future A’s, in my heart, had already occurred. Now I just had to get to them.

    A memory of Ma helped me decide this. The only papers I’d ever seen that were as ‘official’ looking as transcripts were Ma’s short stack of documents to verify qualification for welfare. Ma’s caseworker were always so difficult, so technical with us. And the walls of those depressing welfare offices, for some reason, were always painted puke green, a color made uglier by the harsh fluorescent lights and the iron bars on the large windows. There were so many people waiting in those offices – dozens, hundreds. When the hard little seats filled up, people sat on windowsills or on the floor; they stood or they paced.

    Ma, Lisa and I would wait for hours too, one of the dozen of other families all nervously checking and rechecking their own short stack of vital documents. When it was finally our turn, what I can remember most about being hoisted onto Ma’s lap is the bizarre interaction between Ma and the caseworker. It did not matter what Ma was saying. All that the caseworker focused on were Ma’s documents. Birth certificates, notarized letters, doctor’s notes to verify mental illness, our lease. Ma’s actual words and particularly Ma herself, were invisible to this woman, a woman who had the power to give or take away food, rent and safety. All that boiled down to was this; either we had the exact documents required for approval, or we did not. There was no in between. And even if we were missing only something small, like a second set of copies or one of Ma’s doctors’ notes, a single error could make all our effort- the document gathering, the travel, and the hours of waiting –irrelevant. One missing or invalid document and our file was shut, tossed. They called “next,” and we had to come back another day to start from scratch. All because the documents were either correct or they weren’t, period.

    How was this different from my high school transcripts? It wasn’t. I thought, if one day, maybe just maybe I wanted to go to college, some person in a suit in a very different kind of office would open my file, read my documents, and either I would have the qualifications, or I wouldn’t. Yes or no, nothing in between. And if I didn’t, my file would be shut and they would call “next.” I would be out of luck. Some things in life, I’d learned, were nonnegotiable. Documents as official as these transcripts were big, they were my yes or no, they were my options. They were my ticket. Now I was going to think of everything I did at Prep inside the framework of my transcripts – and that turned out to mean everything.”

    Later, there would be times when I did not want to go to school. I wanted to sleep on Fief’s floor and not get up. Bobby and Jamie were hanging out, walking around the Village. People were cutting school, and I was missing all the fun. There would be times I did not want to sit in a chair all day long while fresh air was outside and I was missing out. But all I had to do was think of my transcripts, and I would go to school, on time, every day, for the first time in my life. Either I would have the qualifications or I wouldn’t, and besides my friends weren’t going to pay my rent.”
    Liz Murray

    Each moment she has to make a choice to either act differently and get a different outcome or fall back on the way of life she was used to.

    Her focus on having a different document to hand out in life, gave her the tool she needed to stay the course.

    Change is not easy, you have to go against all you have ever known, extract stamina in each moment to not waffle and capitulate, you have to be willing to let go of who you are to become who you wan to be…as Wayne Dyer says.

    A great book of how she turned her life around…imagine she did this at seventeen homeless and with a father addicted to drugs who lived in a halfway house.

    Literally, Homeless to Harvard!

  • Love after Love, by Derek Walcott

    The time will come

    when, with elation,

    you will greet yourself arriving

    at your own door,

    in your own mirror,

    and each will smile at the other’s welcome

    and say, sit here. Eat.

    You will love again the stranger who was your self.

    Give wine. Give bread.

    Give back your heart

    to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

    all your life, whom you ignored

    for another, who knows you by heart.

    Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

    the photographs, the desperate notes,

    peel your own image from the mirror.

    Sit. Feast on your life.

    —Derek Walcott

    I heard this recited by Kim Rosen on Sirius Radio with Ed Bacon, she wrote a book called, “Saved by a Poem”. I have it on hold at the library. Until then, I have browsed her website and found this poem.

  • The Journey, by Mary Oliver

    One day you finally knew
    what you had to do, and began,
    though the voices around you
    kept shouting
    their bad advice—
    though the whole house
    began to tremble
    and you felt the old tug
    at your ankles.
    “Mend my life!”
    each voice cried.
    But you didn’t stop.
    You knew what you had to do,
    though the wind pried
    with its stiff fingers
    at the very foundations,
    though their melancholy
    was terrible.
    It was already late
    enough, and a wild night,
    and the road full of fallen
    branches and stones.
    But little by little,
    as you left their voices behind,
    the stars began to burn
    through the sheets of clouds,
    and there was a new voice
    which you slowly
    recognized as your own,
    that kept you company
    as you strode deeper and deeper
    into the world,
    determined to do
    the only thing you could do—
    determined to save
    the only life you could save.

  • The Wise Listened

    I only spent one hour in her presence and wanted to follow her home, and in fact we may have been behind her motor home as she left our town, I had the chance but turned off as our road appeared, allowing her to leave me wanting more.

    It wasn’t so much her story but rather the affirmations I felt as I listened to her.  I wanted more.

    Her story and mine shared some similar roads, and I could see how her courage was grown, how she shined in her individuality how comfortable she is in her skin, although I know it wasn’t always so.

    She spoke of her childhood in a tone of ‘this is what it was’ marveling with us and showing us how those steps were gifts that she used to become who she is today. 

    Dr. Maya Angelou.

    From an abused mute child to one who had us all sitting in rapt attention to each word, insight and profound wisdom she uttered.

    Maybe we can’t listen to another until they have something worthwhile to share.

    She has enough wisdom inside, and I feel I just got one little tiny peek.

    A peek of who I will be!

    She makes life seem only worthwhile if it is colorful; with characters and scenes that put fiction to shame.

    It’s like the more you suffer, the better the storyteller you will become and how much more interesting the story will be to tell.

    She didn’t hide the ‘shameful’ parts, rather she allowed them their truths to stand equal to the kinder parts, the happier times and she weaved them all together into one strand of self.

    The audience followed her as she led us on her journey as we sampled a few moments of significance that made her who she is today.

    A colorful woman telling us this isn’t a rehearsal, so get on and live life.

    Thanks Dr. Maya Angelou for taking the journey to come and speak to us today.

    We are just another spot on her journey, and she a spot in ours.

    A connection and energy exchanged.

    I left feeling she was giving us a hand up, as she reminded us of all who came before us, what their cost was, and how we don’t have the right to waste our time being less than who we can be.

     A wise woman sat on that stage and the wise listened.

     

  • God Only Accepts Originality.

    “What makes you think that human beings are sentient and aware?  There's no evidence for it.  Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable.  For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told – and become upset if they are exposed to any different view.  The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare.  Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their "beliefs."  The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings.  But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all.  We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists.  Any other view of our species is a self-congratulatory delusion.  ~Michael Crichton, The Lost World

     

    I read the above paragraph on the Quote Garden site, and I am also reading a book called, “Under the Banner of Heaven” a story of a violent faith, by Jon Krakauer.

     

    I wonder how many people question where the seeds of their religion were started, who began each of the separate strains of religion, who created the rules and decide what was the perfect concoction that would get you into Heaven, what would anger God, what would make him happy, how you must behave in order to have the correct ticket into heaven upon your death.

     

    From my viewpoint of being an observer of the regulations each church puts upon its members, being your self isn’t enough, you have to design yourself to fit into their boxes of what is right and what is wrong.

     

    Reading account of how Joseph Smith began the Mormon Church is insanity at its best.  Just the way in which he dictated the information alone is crazy.

     

    “Joseph would place the magic rock in an upturned hat, bury his face in it with the stack of golden plates sitting nearby, and dictate the lives of scripture that appeared to him out of the blackness.” 

     

    This is the how the Book Of Mormon was created and today there are more than eleven million saints that follow this writing.

     

    The golden plates have never been found; yet 11 million people are following what some man created with his head buried in a hat.

     

    It leads you to wonder how the rest of the religions were founded, by whom on what grounds.

     

    I am a skeptic at best that any religion has a sturdier bottom than the Mormons.

     

    A violent faith…, it seems that all faiths are violent to the individual spirit and uniqueness of each of us.

     

    One God and many paths, perhaps if we each formed our own religion it would be a much kinder planet, since most of the fighting is about who is right and whose church goes to Heaven.

     

    Heaven is knowing there isn’t only one right church and one right path, Heaven is knowing God isn’t found in certain religion. 

     

    Heaven knowing you don't have to be in a certain religion acting a certain way so that when you die, you will be in heaven.  Heaven is being you.

     

    There is a quote that goes something like this.  God only accepts originality.

     

    Imagine 11 million people are trying to be like Joseph Smith….