I M Perfect lady

Tag: 8th habit

  • 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.”

  • Where it is you want to go!

    One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree.  “Which road do I take?” she asked.  His response was a question: “Where do you want to go?”  

    “I don’t know,” Alice answered.

    “Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”

            Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

     

    I read that in the book “8th Habit,” the chapter on Pathfinding.

     

    My brother and I both noticed how the cat isn’t concerned where Alice is going, is simply asking.

     

    As I tentatively join in conversation with my sister, I am like the cat, wondering where it is she wants to go.

     

    I fact my last message included that paragraph and the following simple questions, “Do you know what you want in your life?”

    I took the road less traveled.
    Which road are you interested in?

     

    I am Like the Cat in the tree, if you don't know where you want to go, I can't tell you which road to take.

    It can’t matter enough to me which road you take or which one you don’t travel, it is and always has been up to you.

    My preferences are not factored in.

     

    I guess before we head out or pack our bags we have to know which way we are heading. 

     

    Where is it you are wanting to go?

    Do we know?

    Did we come with a blueprint?

    How do we know we are on the right path?

    How many forks are there?

     

    I heard on a movie last night that there are really only a handful of meaningful days in our lives, days that will make all the difference in our lives.

     

    They could also be called pivotal moments.

     

    Some days hold forks in the road, and depending upon where it is you are heading, you will pick one.

     

    May you hear your voice as you approach those forks, may you have the courage to step boldly and with purpose, may you know where it is you want to go!

     

     

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  • Surrender to the Truth.

    “Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.  In those choices lies our growth and our happiness.”

     

    This quote is in Stephen R Covey’s book “8th Habit.”

     

    He goes on to write,

     

    With many who have grown up with unconditional love in supportive circumstances, the space may be very large.  With others, due to various genetic and environmental influences, it may be very small.  But the key point is, there is still a space there and it is in the use of that space that the opportunity to enlarge it exists.  Some with very large space, when facing adverse circumstances, may choose to cave in, thereby reducing the size of the space between stimulus and response.  Others with a small space may swim upstream against powerful genetic, social and cultural currents and find their freedom expanding, their growth accelerating and their happiness deepening.  The former simply do no open this most priceless of all birthday gifts.  Gradually, they become a function more of their conditions than their decisions.  The latter, perhaps stumblingly and with great sustained effort, open this priceless gift of freedom to choose and discover the force that releases almost all of the other gifts given at birth.

     

    The maverick psychiatrist R. D. Laing captured in the words below how failing to notice that we have this space kills our ability to change.  Humans alone have self-awareness.  Read, think about, and then reread this quotation:

     

    “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.  And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

     

    An awareness of our freedom and power to choose is affirming because it can excite our sense of possibility, and potential.  It can also threaten, even terrify, because suddenly we’re responsible, that is ‘re-sponse-able.”  We become accountable.  If we have taken shelter over the years in explaining our situation, and problems in the name of past or present circumstances, it is truly terrifying to think otherwise.  Suddenly there is no excuse.

     

    I am rereading this book, and this is the part that caught my attention the first time around.  It filled me with hope that I could stretch and grow that space between stimulus and response, and that I too would have enough space to remember myself.

     

    The other part I loved was the part that we “failed to notice, we failed to notice.”

     

    My sister in her last message to me suggested that she is seeing a different mother.  Perhaps she is seeing what she failed to notice before.

     

    Just because we fail to notice, doesn’t mean that the truth wasn’t always there to notice, but for some reason, perhaps survival, we failed to notice, we failed to notice.

     

    What then do you do with a ‘different’ mother?  What steps are you being asked to take, what happens if you take none?

     

    What I believe happens if you begin to take that one step, is that the space will open wider and wider for more steps and more choices, without taking one step, the space gets smaller.

     

    I didn’t know that it gets smaller, that it shrinks, but also so do you.  You become less and less of who you are.

     

    I know how difficult it is to make a change, to step out and do one thing differently, but I also can feel the death of self in the no choice mode.

     

    Isn’t it odd that he uses the word ‘taking shelter’ in the failing to notice, but once you do, all excuses fall down!

     

    My sister is standing there trying to decide what kind of mother she is holding in her heart and hands? 

     

    What will she see?

    Do you see what I see?

     

    That moment in time, where you look down and see what kind of mother you really have, it is not a pretty sight.

     

    It rips through you with such speed and anguish it leaves you forever changed. 

     

    The rapid tumbling of emotions and knowing create a torrent of thoughts, past and future slamming into each other each claiming to be the truth, you get left in a place of great distress and unknown, in a very doubtful mind, a messy and confused mind.

     

    For if you didn’t see who your mother really was, then who are you?  What else did you fail to notice, what other choices did you blindly make, what parts of your world is really real and how much else is a scam?

     

    It seems to me it is the first block to shatter, the first piece of the flimsily held puzzle, it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, it was the one missing link, to see a mother who can’t see you.

     

    My first piece was to see my father, but in close succession behind him she fell, and then my whole life was like cascading dominos fell crashing upon each other.

     

    She is either standing there trying to keep the first domino from falling or lying beneath the rubble.

     

    The first domino is shaking, wobbling and tilting, what will she do?  Will she prop it up and hold on to it, or will she be too tired and let it all go?

     

    I am waiting for her next move, it is hers to decide and she alone is the one standing with her heart and hands holding the mother domino upright.

     

    Why is it the child who has to let go, why do we have to be the ones to walk away, to ask for space, to be the ones to face the truth?  It seems too much to ask.

     

    A child stands hands and heart holding, knowing when she lets go, the mother will fall, what strength it takes to let go!

     

    Surrender seems such a gentle word, unless you have to surrender to the truth.

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