I M Perfect lady

Category: Examples of an Imperfect woman

  • Change will Happen!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    When you decide, change will happen!

  • Letting go of Perfection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Whose measuring stick am I using?

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

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

    Courage is letting go of perfection.

  • Freedom to Be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I am imperfect, yet perfectly me.

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

  • Behave my way into love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I had to act differently.

    I had to behave my way into love.

  • The Voices are Silent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Here the voices are silent.

  • Love of Self

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

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

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

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

    What a battle.

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

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

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

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

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

    I am learning to stand strong in love of self.

  • Sprouting Self Hatred

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I hated being imperfect.

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

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

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

    Sprouting self hatred…

  • 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.

  • Peace with My Self.

    IMG_5198
    “Language… has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.”
    Paul Johannes Tillich

    I love that there are two ways to look at being alone.

    I used feel much more alone surrounded by family than I feel now being separated from most, because at that time I didn’t know who I was.

    I was always lonely…lonely for me.

    What I fear more is being lonely with them, than being in solitude with my self.

    Being in solitude with myself brings me great peace; being with others who seem to misread me would leave me very lonely.

    Alone in a group and not fitting in…maybe you are only lonely in a group that isn’t a good fit.

    So, even if I was with my family I would be alone and misunderstood, which is why I find it much easier to be alone in solitude with myself.

    I am not sure if I will join the group of family, where I will leave my solitude behind, if there will come a time when I feel an opening that I can fit into, a space that will hold the new me I found.

    I really don’t feel lonely but rather that I am honoring my truths and enjoying them in solitude.

    In peace with my self.

  • Do you own or Rent your life?

    In my dream I was visiting a house that had a hotel lobby in its living room, and strangers continually dropped by intruding into their lives, one long continual social interruption.

    As I lay in bed after waking the vividness of the dream stayed with me, the two story lobby, the winding stairs, the owners trying to live life uninterrupted while being without walls to have privacy, struck me this is how many people live.

    Their lack of being able to say no makes their lives an open pathway, where anyone can drop by and take up space in their worlds.

    In the dream I sat and observed the whole scene, even the intruders were being intruded upon by new comers, layers and layers of lives overlapping each other, meshing together as one chaotic buzzing busy moment in time.

    What a great metaphor for life.

    If your life were a house, what kind would it be?

    Who do you entertain and how?

    Do you own or rent your life?