I M Perfect lady

Tag: allowing

  • Fully Engrossed in Her Life.

    “There are three kinds of business in this world, Yours, Mine and God’s. If I am in your business, it leaves no one is in mine…” Byron Kate.

    When you have children it seems that our business is their business at least until they are capable of doing it for themselves and actually that is the greatest sense of freedom we will get when we can see our children flying well in their own business; their lives.

    When they fly way off course it seems that we do have to leave our lives to help them navigate back and at the same time be present in our lives.

    My fear and challenge is to return to my life and allow them to make corrections needed to get theirs back on track.

    And the most important thing to learn is not what knocked you off course, but also how to get your wheels spinning in the right direction again, and the only way to do this is to do this.

    To do the walking, to make the changes, to gather your life back.

    I just didn’t think that we both had to do our parts and return to our separated worlds, somehow I got stuck in my child’s life and my meddling there was actually slowing down the progress of healing.

    I am grateful that she told me what it felt like to have me crowding her world.

    I am also grateful I could hear that and can rejoin my life that has been somewhat neglected. Okay pretty neglected.

    What a gift to return to my business, to relax and give her back business.

    There is finesse to this mothering thing, to help but not takeover, like a hostile takeover I bet it feels similar to.

    Where at a weakened point another entity comes in takes over.

    I don’t want to be a corporate raider, but a loving mom and when I overstay or overstep my bounds, it is like taking over a company, or my daughter’s world. I have the image now, and I can see that I was lurking on the sidelines waiting to snap it up, instead of giving her space to shore up the weak spots.

    I love that I know this now.

    I love that I am not in the business of taking over other people’s business, I love that I can be very content with one business, mine.

    I guess the best mother is there for consulting services and will be asked when needed…until then, she carries on in her world, doing what she loves to do, growing where she needs to grow, learning how to navigate into being a mom in the ever changing landscape of our children’s lives.

    We must remember to keep the woman in the mother healthy, happy and fully engrossed in her life.

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  • Find Their Own Way…

    The battle of the wills end when you allow the other to have free will, it is pretty hard to fight with freedom.

    The tighter you hold and the more you force, the less the other person can feel and find their own sense of what it is they want to do.

    When I was in the beginning stages of my mental breakdown, my husband and I found a place to stand that left us both in total freedom, a place called “I love you today.”

    In this spot, it allowed each of us to change our minds and to gauge our own feelings about whether we wanted to stay together. This free space to be yourself, to feel that which you feel and to express it daily allowed us the time to re-configure a new normal in our relationship.

    We fell into this spot after weeks and months of feeling the instability each of us had during the most stressful event in our marriage, Me not knowing who I was.

    Pretty hard to promise tomorrow, when today is unknown.

    It felt so much easier to breathe when we embraced the unknown and lived presently with each day and even each moment.

    “I love you today” is an honest and alive relationship and we both promised the other that if and when we didn’t want to be here we would tell the other.

    It isn’t a piece of paper, the ‘happiness’ of our children, or a million other reasons that folks stay together, but instead we individually get to choose if we fit together, if we are happy here, if we enjoy this place, if we are at peace here, if it is a spot for us to grow and change….

    It is like a free-range relationship, where each has the freedom to be who we are, and when who we are no longer works together, we will be brave enough and honest enough to let the other know.

    I just don’t feel then, that we can blame the other; we will always hold the power within us.

    I love you today, and if it changes I will let you know.

    I am thinking this same idea can be used upon our children. Instead of raising children who must remain in our pen (religion, mind set, pathway, etc), where we tell them how to be and grow, that we instead open the gate and let them roam free.

    Let their will be done.

    Let them decide which way to go and how to be.

    It releases both of us to be who it is we were meant to be.

    This reminds me of the paragraph from one of Bryon Katie’s books,

    “I don’t know what is best for me, or you, or the world. I don’t try to impose my will on you or anyone else. I don’t want to change you or improve you of convert you or help you or heal you. I just welcome things as they come and go. That’s true love. The best way of leading people is to let them find their own way.”

  • By each Choice we Make.

    Did you know that brainwashing is when you no longer have the option of choice?

    I witnessed my daughter lose her power of choice.

    She didn’t even know she gave up her choices while she attended only one option.

    The one option became the most important, she was willing to lie to protect that option, she was willing to give up her self for that one option, she lost her self by focusing on one choice.

    It soon had control of her and not her of choice.

    This secret life, the clandestine meetings, the specialness of feeling that only the two of them knew, created the one option.

    This one option wasn’t to be shared.

    It was separated from the world.

    It was ‘special’.

    She lost her other choices for none of them were allowed in the ‘special’ spot.

    The special spot and the man who occupied this site began changing her to fit his spot.

    She had to change to play there.

    She couldn’t bring him into her life; she could only go to his.

    This ‘special man’ didn’t fit into her old life; she had to create a new self to fit in his.

    In doing so, she lost the options.

    She lost the freedom, the flowing back and forth between two lives unchanged.

    She had to become different in both worlds.

    In his world, they had to be quiet, keep it secret, don’t let anyone know what it was they were doing, it was the key that turned the lock.

    This twisted sense of special steals away the person you are and you leave your old life and self behind to fit into this new picture, unknowingly.

    You leave yourself bit by bit by bit, until you are fashioned into this new self and the path back to your old self goes dark.

    What my husband and I had to do was let her make choices, to unlock the frozen part in her brain.

    While his key is secret, our key is freedom.

    He had taken away the choices we gave them all back.

    We had to do the opposite of what had led her down this road.

    She gets to make choices.

    We won’t tell her what to do.

    We open up the space for freedom.

    I share my views.

    I show her how I see things.

    I allow her to see them her way.

    What I love is that we remain our selves and that alone will lead her back to her self.

    She left us to play in a secret land we did not leave her.

    So she gets to decide, does she want to play in the secret land or play in our land.

    Does she want to be the person she needs to be to be ‘special’ with him or does she want to be her old self.

    The freedom we allowed was the key that set her free to begin to once again make choices.

    Choices, they seem so obvious so simple so easy, and yet that is what the perpetrator seizes first.

    You are not given an option to do it any other way.

    Their option is the only one that will keep this relationship going.

    You have no choice but to go along.

    And sadly, usually by this time you have become friends, you have given trusts and faith and love to the individual, and in order to maintain this ‘special’ relationship, IT depends upon your silence.

    Your silence and his creates a cocoon that separates you from your self and the world around you.

    You live in this upside down and backwards ‘other’ land.

    You have to change to fit in there and the changes are so noticeable in your old life.

    You have to lie to leave your old life to go to his.

    You have to lie to your self and overlook how it makes you feel in your old life.

    You come alive in his and die in your own.

    What a tragedy.

    The greatest thing we did was to give her back her choices.
    To allow her to choose what path she wants to strengthen and which one she wants to weaken.

    Her brainwashing was in a very short time and she didn’t play in the secret land too long.

    The longer you are there, the more ingrained the false self gets and the further away the road that leads you back.

    But as far as I can tell, by my experience, is that when I gave myself the option of choice, I was free.

    Free to begin, choice-by-choice, bit-by-bit to recapture life for me.

    The freedom in allowing all in our home to be free is the key that makes this a non-brainwashing home.

    A home of choices, you get to decide which ones you want to make, but make no mistake, each and every choice comes with a consequence, and it is up to you which consequence you choose.

    We create a life and self by each choice we make.

  • I Didn’t Forgive Her

    When women feel they have learned to forgive their mothers – and men, their fathers – all it usually means is that they've decided to allow themselves the same kind of behavior.

    ~Mignon McLaughlin

     

    The above quote caught my attention and I full heartedly agreed.  Yet someone commented that it was kinda negative, and I agree it is negative and rightly so.

     

    What is forgiveness?

    How is it applied and why?

    Who needs it and is it our responsibility to apply forgiveness upon the behaviors from someone who have hurt us, and if so, what does it change?

     

    If I hurt someone, will them adding forgiveness on top like gravy make it feel better, remove my actions, will they feel less pain and will it stop me from hurting them again?  What is my consequence for hurting them?  Them being okay and letting it go letting me be a harmful humanbeing, is that good for me??? 

     

    While the word sounds so compassionate and very loving, is it?

     

    Forgiveness is applied upon another, when I believe it was meant for personal use.

     

    I had mentioned to my mother a long time ago, that the forgiveness she seeks is of her self, and I still agree with that today.

     

    How do you apply forgiveness? 

     

    Is it a thought, a feeling, an emotion and it it possible to transfer it to someone?

     

    In my experience of how my siblings used forgiveness it is to ‘overlook’ pardon the hurtful actions and remain in a relationship with my parents. 

     

    It is seen as a more loving thing to do.

     

    More loving than not forgiving.

     

    What is not forgiving? 

     

    Is it to not overlooking the actions, not pardoning them, but holding them accountable?  Is that wrong?

     

    I am not seeing why it is bad to hold someone accountable, to not pardon their behavior, what am I missing here?

     

    It didn’t take me long to realize that IF my father was a monster, and IF I didn’t see that, and due to the fact that I had missed this fact, I had brought my girls to him, I was accountable for my behaviors, there was no pardon that would change that fact, none.

     

    I was the driver of the car that brought them to him.

    I hold myself responsible for my part.

     

    As a child who didn’t know, but feared him and was silent, I was not to be pardoned for not telling, being silent was a behavior that was not to be overlooked, for when I was silent he continued to abuse.

     

    You can’t pardon my behaviors and even if you did, they will not change the outcome of the past 45 years, nothing, absolutely nothing will change if you forgive me.

     

    Nor did it ever even once cross my mind to ask my children or my siblings to forgive me, for I knew full well, what my actions had caused.

     

    Martha Beck has a new meaning of forgiveness that I have adopted, “Forgiveness is accepting that the past will not change.”

     

    I agree.

     

    I have been working on forgiveness, (accepting) my actions and behaviors for the first 46 years of my life, and there is no pardon on earth that will change what happened.  None.

     

    No fancy words.

    No transferring energy to me.

    No emotions can be put upon me to change the outcomes, none.

     

    What was done was done.

    Many a little girl lost her innocence and there is no pardon for that, none.

     

    Pardons will not change it.

    Overlooking what happened will not change it.

    Refusing to hold them accountable today does not change it, yet all I can do is make sure today that I remain accountable of my actions today.

     

    Today I will not forgive him, that is for him to do.

    Today I will not forgive her, that is for her to do.

     

    Today I will forgive myself by accepting that the past will not change, that I can’t change who I was back there, I can’t change what happened, but I can change who I am today.

     

    Who I am today is someone who will not overlook, look around or away from a behavior that hurts, I will hold you accountable for your actions and me for mine, I will speak up instead of be silent about my feelings, and I want you to be honest with me about yours.

     

    I don’t want a repeat of my first 46 years.

     

    I am grateful I have a second chance at life.

     

    Grateful that I have been able to make corrections so history will not repeat itself in my life.

     

    I am grateful I didn’t learn to forgive my mother, for I would have allowed the same behavior in myself.

     

    It was for both of us that I didn’t forgive her.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Both and And…

    ‎"To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path."

    Pema Chodron

     

    The path to enlightenment isn’t a slide of joy, love and bliss, perhaps once you have untangled all the crossed wires and unhooked all the addictive tendencies, connected love of self, but until then…when you feel that it is hopeless, when it seems so upside down and backwards, head in.

     

    Head directly in what is giving you stress and angst, and look about inside and outside, see it all as an experiment in humankind.

     

    I used to look at others and see all the places they were backwards, where they made actions blindly and sat befuddled in the outcome, now I look at how I affect the world around me.

     

    I am not excited or feeling blissful as I delve deeply into how my all or none actions are affecting me, my mothering skills, and how this all affects my children’s sense self, but in the moments when I feel so out of control, I usually am.

     

    I usually have taken a learned behavior and never questioned its application.  Not only on me, but those around me.

     

    It leaves you breathless to see how your words and actions can literally change the way another feels about themselves.

     

    One of the biggest challenges in all of this is to be the changeling mom, to be the one to undo and correct generations of useless tools.

     

    I am never certain what will work, but I am always certain that if I don’t change, the legacy will continue on, a legacy of all or none living.

     

    The perspective alone from all or none, to both-and leaves everyone with multiple options and the gates open wide in allowing different opinions to enter, for new ideas to be born, a change of the landscape as well as the people who live upon it.

     

    It leaves me hopeful, always.

    Hopeful that the damage I have inflicted can be turned around, that when I finally learn a new way, they will instantly feel the affects.

     

    The affects of being accepted, of allowing their true selves to shine forth, their voices to be heard, a life to be noticed, hopeful they will be in a reality of Both and And.