I M Perfect lady

Category: Books

  • Knowing Me From the Inside Out.

    "The Four Agreement Companion Book" by Miguel Angel Ruiz, M.D. and Janet Mills.  In it they write:

    "All the suffering and drama in your life is the result of what you have learned.  Whatever you learn is alive.  The image that you have of yourself is alive, and it lives in your mind.  That image is not you, but it will use everything it perceives to justify its own existence. It is not you, but it is eating you alive and destroying your happiness."

    "The voice of knowledge inside your mind controls the dream of your life.  The Toltec's call it a Parasite; the Bible calls it evil.  It is a living being that exists in your belief system, and lives by eating your faith, your intent, and your happiness.  What is sad is that you believe the knowledge is you; you believe the image is what you are.  The program, or Parasite, is really the one who is living your life, not you.  But this program was not there when you were born."

    "When you were born, your mind was completely innocent.  You had no concepts about good or bad, right or wrong, beauty or ugliness; you had no concepts at all.  You had no idea what it means to be a human, to be a man or to be woman, but you saw other people outside of you, and you recognized them as your own kind."

    "When you are one, two, or three years old, you cannot see yourself.  The only way to see yourself is to look at your image in a mirror, and other people act as that mirror.  You don't know what you are, but your mother tells you what you are, and your father tells you what you are, and brothers and sisters do the same thing.  The other humans around you have the capacity to project an image onto you, which means they tell you what they believe you are."

    "What your mother tells you is not exactly what your father tells you that you are, or what your siblings, or the television, or the church, or the whole society tells you that you are.  Every human in your life projects a completely different image onto you, and none of these images are accurate.  What you believe you are is a distorted image of yourself that came from other people — from mirrors that always distort images.  Because you cannot see yourself, you believe them as you agree with them.  As soon as you agree, the image is programmed in your memory, and now you believe this is what you are."

    "What were the images others projected onto you?  When you say, "I am smart, I am stupid, I'm beautiful, I am ugly," it is really the program who says I AM.  These images are only knowledge or a lot of concepts, but they aren't you." 

    "You perceive all the distorted images others create for you, and at a certain point you take all these images and try to make sense of them.  You create another whole image of yourself, and project it to the outside world:  I am good in school; I am bad in sports.  Then you practice that image until you master it.  And because people are projecting different images onto you, you are always asking them about yourself.  You are asking for the projections to support what you already believe, to support the distorted images you have about yourself."

    "In the same way other people project their beliefs onto you, you agree, and they become yours.  They teach you to judge the way they judge, to gossip the way they gossip, to create dramas the way they create dramas.  You begin to play with all these concepts, all this knowledge, and that is how you learn to dream."

    "The Toltec's call this the dream of the first attention because it is the first time you used your attention to create a whole reality.  And because your attention is hooked from the outside, your whole world is projected to the outside.  You begin to search for the yourself outside of you because you no longer trust who you are.  You search for what you believe you don't have:  justice, beauty, happiness, and love, when all of these were always inside of you."

    "Can you see the beginning of all the suffering and drama in your life?  You need a mirror in the world to see yourself, but there isn't a clear mirror to tell you what you are.  So you agree with the image others create for you, but you are not that image.  Of course you modify the image and you change it all the time, but where is the real you?  It gets lost because there isn't a good mirror to reflect what you really are."

                Don Miguel Ruiz, Janet Mills

    This book will be one of my pivotal books in explaining and affirming how I woke up one day and had no idea who I truly was, but had a great idea of who I wasn’t.

    The world is pretty scary when you can’t trust yourself, and instead rely on others to define you, your sense of self changes many times a day depending upon who you are with.

    Wayne Dyer’s quote, “Beyond the good opinion of others…” comes to mind, when their opinions can’t shake yours.

    I have unlearned who I was to re-learn who I am.

    The greatest gift I was ever given was to find out I didn’t know who I was, while it was the most terrified I have ever been, it also was the most exhilarating.

    Parts of the old me come floating in from time to time, just to be recognized for what I am not, each bringing back to me a new space or an open spot for a new idea, a new awareness, a new discovery to be made.

    Undoing the old beliefs and thoughts or mirror images others and my self thought of me, giving way to new me.

    My outsides have changed little, but the redecorating that is going on inside my head and the way I feel about myself is quite stunning.

    Knowing me from the inside out. 

  • Posing as me.

    “The Toltec compare the Judge, the Victim and the belief system to a Parasite that invades the human mind. The parasite is a living being made of psychic or emotional energy.  It can also be compared to a program that dreams through our mind and lives through our body. From the Toltec point of view, all humans who are domesticated are sick because we have a Parasite that thrives on the emotions that come from fear and suffering.”

                   Don Miguel Ruiz

     

    Unless and until you have noticed that your mind has control over you and not you over it, you will not believe that a parasite is living your life for you.

     

    Or if you can’t stop your suffering, a parasite is using your body to be alive.

     

    If you are in fear or suffering, you know that a parasite is living your life, it has taken over the motherboard.

     

    When you are unable to sit in the now moment and find peace with all that is around you, no matter what it is, you know that the parasite has gotten a hold of a thought in your mind and is replaying it over and over.

     

    Like a bad DJ, it doesn’t offer up a new peaceful reason to drop that worrisome thought that keeps you out of the now moment.

     

    Or it has gotten a hold of your emotions and playing tunes on them that have nothing to do with reality, but perhaps an echo from the long long ago past.

     

    Emotions, thought, thoughts emotion, around and around they go… false events appearing real, stealing away your life from you.

     

    The dance of the parasite in your mind.

     

    If you are not in the now moment hearing what is playing in reality, you are listening to the parasite strumming a mournful tune.

     

    I called my parasite “My Mental Lady”.

     

    I could literally tell when she overtook me, my whole body reverberated with tension and stress, and I was fighting with reality, going against it and what would bring me peace.

     

    It truly does seem that she enjoyed my suffering, like it was dessert for her, while hell for me. 

     

    A dance of opposites, she owned my body until I was aware I wasn’t here.

     

    Imagine aware I wasn’t here.

     

    Unaware I was lost.

     

    I was living my life but not aware.

    Not even aware I wasn’t aware that I should be more aware.

     

    It was quite embarrassing to note that I wasn’t aware of my life.

    Like I didn’t even know I was allowed to be part of my life.

    My life was running without me.

     

    I recall when I woke up to the fact that I was unaware of being aware, and I looked around my house, there was no part of me there.

     

    Nothing I loved, no reflection on me, it was like my life, minus me everywhere. 

     

    I woke up in my life but didn’t know who I was, and as I took my life back, I found me.

     

    I wouldn’t have believed this book five years ago, for at the time I was a parasite without awareness, it was all I knew of me.

     

    Me as a mental lady without awareness, a parasite posing as me.

     

     

  • Building me on Reality

    What has stayed with me from reading “The Four Agreements” the companion book, by Don Miguel Ruiz, is that our faith in something means more than the ‘something’.

     

    Simply holding tightly to faith at all costs.

     

    I had to look up the meaning of Faith.

     

    A belief in, devotion to, or trust in somebody or something, especially without logical proof

     

    “Trust in somebody or something without LOGICAL proof.”

     

    It isn’t even logical, but we hold on to our faith and many times it is a fog that stands separated from reality, that when you dissect it, you find nothing.

     

    My strong sense of faith that I had for 46 years melted away when I discovered that what I had been faithful to, was a figment of my imagination and it didn't hold up in reality.

     

    In reality, in the cold glare of truth, my faith in them didn’t change them; it actually shielded reality from me.

     

    Faith stood in the way of me seeing what I needed to see.

     

    In my experience, my faith stood between reality and me.  I built a wall that I could not see beyond, it kept me blind to what I needed to see.

     

    Blind Faith.

     

    My faith in my parents overshadowed who my parents were, in fact my faith in them didn’t allow me to investigate or question, I simply focused on my faith. 

     

    I had faith in my mother. 

    I had faith in my father.

    I had faith in my family. 

    I had a deep unquestioning faith.

     

    What came crashing down that winter day in 2004 was my faith.

     

    I lost my faith.

     

    I lost what I trusted.

     

    I lost what I had built up around me.

     

    When my faith evaporated, all that I was left with was stark reality.

     

    It is like taking off the rosy glasses, eliminating the fluffy white cotton that surrounds your feelings, and to be stripped to the bear raw nerves of what is real, without sugar coating to see where you placed your faith in.

     

    I was irresponsible with my faith.

     

    The only place for my faith now, is in reality.

     

    I have faith with reality, I trust reality, I want to sit square with it, to feel its beauty no matter what it is.

     

    Aligning my faith with reality seems like such a no-brainer.  But it wasn’t until my faith was shattered that I discovered how false I was, and then I had to begin the task of rebuilding me.

     

    This time I am building me on reality.

     

     

  • What is true for me.

    BE IMPECCABLE WITH YOUR WORD

    Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean.  Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others.  Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

     

    Here is a bit more from the chapter on applying this agreement.

     

    “Humans are powerful creators. We are born with all the faith of the Universe, and everything we create is based on faith.  That faith is really our personal power, but what has happened with our faith? We invest all our faith in our beliefs and agreements, and we are left with little power to change our lives.

     

    Imagine that every agreement is just like a brick. Humans create an entire structure out of bricks, and we glue it together with our faith.  We believe without a doubt in all the knowledge inside the structure.  Our faith gets trapped inside that structure because we put our faith in each agreement.  It’s not important if it is or isn’t true; we believe it, and for us it is true.

     

    All of our power of creation is invested in our belief, and because we believe it, that’s the way it is.  If we believe our knowledge, whatever we perceive will be filtered to make it fit into that knowledge. We create a personal dream that justifies the knowledge, and the outside dream proves to us that what we believe is true.  The outside dream reflects our personal dream; it will justify every belief.

     

    During all the education we receive, which means all the knowledge that is programmed in our mind, we create the concept of the I am.  Everything we believe we are, everything we know about how to be a human is the I am.  The Toltec call this the human form.  We are not talking about the physical body, but about our own dream. When we say, “I am a man; I am a woman; I am a human, and this is my whole reality,” everything is judged by that knowledge, and of course, the dream becomes hell.  That is the drama of humanity.

     

    The dream of our life is so limited because we take all of the power of our creation and put it in a little box and with all of our power we seal the box.  And we live inside the box, trapped inside that little box. Well that little box is human form.  It is our creation, and all our will is invested in that I am.

     

    Your faith is so strong that when  you believe “I am never going to be this,” thy will be done, you are never going to be that.  If you believe “I cannot do it,” thy will be done, you cannot do it.  Whatever you believe, you put your faith in that belief, and your faith will make it true.

                        Don Miguel Ruiz

    What I found so intriguing in this book and so affirming is, that it isn’t so much your knowledge about life and about life’s situations, but your ‘belief’ about each thing.  And your belief becomes your will.

     

    Inside each of us is the power of universe and we all use it to put our faith into certain knowledge, and that is what I life reflects, perfectly.  There are no mistakes; you are what you believe your self to be.

     

    Looking upon my last five years, it has been a battle of wills inside of me to correct my long held beliefs about myself, and make them match realities truth.

     

    Even if intellectually I knew better, I had to wrestle with my beliefs about myself; the long established ones that were false and limiting.

     

    Yoga has given me the inner fortitude to break down old agreements that are not true for me and to re-create new ones that bring me happiness, peace and joy in being me.

     

    Bring faith back to me, instead into knowledge that was given to me.

     

    Faith in myself in what I feel, and what is true for me.

     

     

  • The Four Agreements

    On the inside cover of the book, “The Four Agreements” Companion Book by Don Miguel Ruiz with Janet Mills reads…

     

    BE IMPECCABLE WITH YOUR WORD

    Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean.  Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others.  Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

     

    DON’T TAKE ANYTHING PERSONALLY

    Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream.  When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.

     

    DON’T MAKE ASSUMPTIONS

    Find the courage to ask questions and do express what you really want.  Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama.  With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

     

    ALWAYS DO YOUR BEST

    Your best is going to change moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to when you are sick.  Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.

                    Don Miguel Ruiz

     

     

    I can see that I am a new student of these, sometimes I am able to successfully maneuver myself into a new way, other times I fail and resort to the old reactive way.

     

    What fills me with hope and inspiration is that there is indeed another way to live, to be yourself, and it’s your right to do so.

     

  • Shamelessly Me

    “Yoga Makes you you” is what Bikram says near the end of the 90 minutes of yoga, and until today I had always envisioned a new me.

     

    Today I realized that I get to be me minus the shame.

     

    Shame was my inner state of being.

     

    Shame colored the lenses with which I seen myself in the world, or felt myself in the world, I didn’t leave home shameless; I was filled to the brim with feelings of shame, in shame of being me.

     

    In shame of being me, yet I didn’t fully know the cause or when the seed was planted, it seemed I came this way.

     

    Now, I know better, the seed was planted by my father and fertilized by my mother in her reaction to me.

     

    It wasn’t until I read the book “Hannah’s Gift”  by Maria Housden that it affirmed my belief, that depending upon the way my mother handled the facts it would directly affect me.

     

    The tragedy of abuse, of incest, of being raped by your father, is it is bad enough his treatment of you, but then to have a mother do nothing compounds the shame.

     

    Her lack of doing anything to move away from that man locked me in my closet of shame.

     

    I lived there for 51 years.

     

    Today in yoga I finally felt free from the shame I carried about being an abused me.

     

    “Fake it ‘til you Make it” quote came to mind as I looked back upon my last 5 years, I literally forced myself to stand tall, when inside I was shrinking in shame.

     

    To walk a walk of one with no shame hasn’t been easy. To stand and believe in myself against all enemies both foreign (strangers) and domestic (family), to put myself out there all bruised and beaten claiming my rights to be me.

     

    I didn’t know if I was writing my death sentence, if I would survive, but I knew for sure if I stayed in the closet of shame I would have.

     

    I have been out of the closet for 5 ½ years and today was the first time I felt it is my right.

     

    It is my right to live shamelessly me!

    IMG_4981

     

  • A Mother who Walks in Reality.

    Last night I read, “Hannah’s Gift” by Maria Housden, Lessons from a Life Fully Lived. 

     

    What a great gift they gave each other as they bravely faced life as it unfolded for each of them, in truth.

     

    For a mother to be truthful in the face of death allowed her daughter to fully accept with grace who she was, for her son to walk step by step, hand to hand, eye to eye sharing her journey full on.

     

    ‘Sparing’ the truth may seem kinder at times; I am once again affirmed that truth is the only way to be.

     

    There is grace and peace in an odd way when you are able to set your fears and selfish wishes aside, when you can disregard your dreams, and instead stand bravely in what is.

     

    Even when the what is, is the death of your child. 

     

    It allowed this little girl to live her life honorably, for her mother honored her just as she was, in each moment, fully embracing what she had, now.

     

    Her intuition in giving her daughter a voice, allowing her to be who she needed to be to live a life that was hers, no matter its length is remarkable to me.

     

    The courage to let go of the pretend reins we all believe we have in controlling our worlds, our children’s world and gracefully succumbing to reality’s power, to ride the ride no mother wants to take, but do so with her eyes on the child’s desires, is what I believe makes a truly remarkable mother.

     

    Thanks so much for showing me the walk of truth.

     

    Coming from a child whose mother couldn’t face the truth, I know that it was you who gave your child the greatest gift on earth, seeing her truth!

     

    Allowing her to be okay and be fully her self, even while life seemed to stealing her away, she was able to live completely as herself until her very last day.

     

    She never, not once had to pretend to pretend to be anything other than herself in your eyes. 

     

    What a gift you gave her, she was allowed to Live as her self.

     

    Your journey shows me that a mother can literally change a child by their reaction to the child’s truths, if you can’t see it, they will pretend not to see it either, but if you can, you both will be enriched.

     

    Truth sets you free to be you in reality.

     

    Thanks Maria for sharing the wonderful journey being a mother who walks in truth.

     

     

     

  • Movement Against Fear Is Empowering

    I awoke from another profound dream and realized that my subconsciousness is healing.

     

    In the dream I am watching/babysitting an elderly couple, both are in bed, but not the same one, each are bickering to each other, clearly at odds.

     

    I am then sitting in a living room that has a glass wall where I can still see them, and I am reading, when suddenly the man is upon me, groping me, with no longer feeble hands, but very strong.  The woman remains sleeping, unaware.

     

    I am able to get free from his grasp and dial 9-1-1 on my phone, while he continues to pursue, and is now very angry with me for calling for help, and seems desperate to get me before ‘help’ arrives.  He also has picked up an object with which to hurt me.

     

    I put objects in his pathway as I am leaving the house, scrambling and telling 9-1-1 the house number of where he is, which angers him more. 

     

    Then I am in my car and the car is slow to start, but does and he is almost to the door handle… and I take off, leaving him grasping at air instead of the door handle of the car.

     

    I escape, successfully and have informed authorities, dream over. 

     

    I awake with a great understanding of what Peter Levine was talking about. 

     

    In the past this I have had a multitude of cat and mouse scenarios played out in my dreams and the dream always ended with me being caught, the end.

     

    Caught and frozen, just the dream ending and me waking up thankful IT being a dream so ‘nothing’ happened and I were saved. 

     

    Saved only because it was a dream, a scary dream or nightmare and I awoke.

     

    In my dream last night, it was the first time I was able to get away and to take the correct moves to do so, instead of freezing.

     

    Freezing and escaping from the scene by going into a dreamland in my mind, “disassociate” or waking up and it is a dream was all I had in the past.

     

    I had no way to escape in reality…until now.

     

    Boundaries, barriers, putting up a fight, standing up are all things a little child doesn’t have.

     

    It is those very items I am reclaiming and my subconscious mind is showing me in a dream I am succeeding.

     

    I awoke from that dream feeling as a heroine and not a victim.

     

    Moveable and not frozen, clearly seeing the cycle of caught and getting free, being restricted and getting away, instead of just knowing one side, frozen.  Frozen in fear.

     

    The freedom to move makes all the difference in the world.

     

    Movement against fear is empowering.

  • Boundaries are the Key to Healing!

    Putting up boundaries to keep someone out is where I still get a little shaky.  Yet it’s those times when I feel toxic energy seeping in, that I must erect a boundary in place.  It is imperative to my healing.

     

    Set up the space to keep me safe.

     

    Peter Levine says on his CD, “Sexual Healing” that boundaries are key to healing.

     

    He explains how if you have no boundaries you get stuck in that place, that trauma that abuse, the hollering, and the drama.  But if you can erect a boundary, it is the opening to which you flow into.

     

    It is the stopping power that I lost as a child that I can now use as big person, one that will restore my leaking boundaries.  

     

    Stopping them from coming into my world.  I have the power to keep people out, where as a child I had none.

     

    Who knew that trauma is about being boundary less, which is why the world seems so scary, you are unable to protect yourself.

     

    Or you have the reverse, still no boundaries and no contact with feelings, so anyone can stomp all over you, again powerless to more and more abuse.

     

    What I failed to realize is that healing is having boundaries.

     

    Actually stopping toxic people from walking on you is healing.

     

    In fact he says, having memories or not doesn’t matter, it is the process of completing the action where the healing stops.

     

    Traumatized people get left in the trauma energy, the tightness, and the constricted fear with no way out.

     

    He teaches you to flow between being comfortable and going into the tightness or stiffness of neck and places where you are stressed and then into places where you feel comfort, the ebb and flow.

     

    It is so exciting when you find that you can exit a place, a feeling, a stressful moment, a relationship, a situation, and a conversation, to be the one to ask for space.

     

    Space between you and harm. 

     

    Asking for space is the healing.

     

    When you are the one who stops the harmful interaction you are healing, you are completing the cycle of abuse.

     

    You are getting out of the way, instead of being frozen unable to move, unable to speak, to have a boundary.

     

    “Boundaries are the key to healing.” 

     

     

  • “The Invitation” by Oriah Mountain Dreamer.

     

    "It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

    It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

    It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.

    I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.

    It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

    I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day,and if you can source your own life from its presence.

    I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”

    It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

    It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

    It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.

    I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments."

    (my brother had this on his blog, www.messyguru.typepad.com )