Tag: body

  • Colored windows lose their beauty.

    “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still,” is a phrase that stops me from entering into a closed mind.

    What I find so enthralling is that religion isn’t a thing it is a thought.

    A thought, a wispy flighty jumble of words and it has the power to control a body and a family and a whole community a group and a bunch…just a few words.

    You can open up a church door and not find ‘religion’ and you can open up a mind and not find it there either, it is nowhere to be found, yet people build their whole lives based upon it.

    This illusive imaginative faith is as controlling as a dictator and yet there is no dictator to be found.

    When someone dies where does their religion go?

    Deepak Chopra says that you can dissect a brain and not find one single thought. And we know it isn’t held in our arms or legs, but yet we move like we are puppets on a string when we commit ourselves to a certain religion.

    Our words are tempered, our voices rising in unison using the same phrases and following the same rules, our minds are synchronized to match.

    Yet, when you take us apart no evidence will lay there.

    In fact the only evidence of your religion is how you lived your life, your life’s trail is a clue.

    What does your life’s trail look like?

    Just as there are footprints I believe there are religion prints that showed how you traversed this life.

    It shows what you leaped over or what you dodged, where you stopped and for how long, who you traveled with and why, your life history is your religious history.

    My first 46 years of my life were led by this religion, it told me who to be with and who to shy away from, what to overlook and what to look towards, who to befriend and to unfriend, who to care for and who to be indifferent to, when to shun and when to embrace, when to talk and when to sing…it controlled my everything.

    My body wasn’t mine it was a vehicle that I had to use to get to heaven and I had to do or not do certain things to it in order to arrive at Heaven’s gate.

    Heaven’s gate was the total focus and life and my body were out to see that I wouldn’t make it, they worked against me at every turn.

    It is my new understanding that what was working against my old religion was me. Me the individual, a me that wasn’t happy without a say.

    It may be hard for folks to realize the ramifications of following a religion and how it leaves out the individual freedom, where your own intuition is squelched.

    I was taught to not listen to my body and not to pay attention to the subtle and not so subtle messages it sent, to instead pull my attention away from the body and focus on the church.

    The church knew the way for me…yet many times I went against it, in shame and guilt, doing what felt right to me.

    It seems that the only way religion works is if they can control you mind body and soul. If the soul is alive if it has a whisper of breath, you will deviate off the path and be less controllable.

    What is so maddening to me is that they take the lives of people but they don’t care about the people.

    They are after the control, but not what they control. There is power when you control.

    Just as Hitler wanted power, he was able to control people to kill people…imagine???

    Perhaps religion has a kinder tone a more gentle approach a church it is housed in, with pretty glass windows, but it’s the overly sweetness that scares me.

    The charismatic chairman whose actions of indifference trail behind him. To the preacher whose trail of raped boys lie in his wake…the pretty colored windows lose their beauty.

  • Protected me.

    For six years I have been saying that I have no memory, and I have lied. I have no mind memory, but my body has always had its memory.

    I don’t have actual vivid stories to recount, but I do have the physical reaction within my body’s mass, its nerves and muscles…it knows what I forgot to remember.

    For years I wasn’t pleased with my ‘cold’ body, how it chose not to get close to my parents, how it literally would feel unease in their presence, never the desire to snuggle close or lean in and get into their aurora.

    It was like I wasn’t driving this body, that this body had a life of its own…it craved things and repelled things on its own volition.

    Now with hidden truths and untold stories known, I now am supportive of this living organism that has a beautiful memory, a trusting articulate knowing and isn’t fooled by flimsy masks.

    It never pretended to pretend it always reacted accurately aligning itself to the experiences of its past.

    Me inside was always disappointed in its lack of warmth for my parents, its lack of trust and faith and its inability to recognize and feel their love.

    My body stood strong and resilient to all my longings and childish wishes…it would not give up what it knew.

    It knew my father’s imprint, my mother’s indifference…it never once changed its way, lost its courage or grace.

    It just was…

    An abused body and it knew its source.

    Its memory carried me when I was to blind to see, to wounded to know, It always has protected me…

  • Grace and Courage

    As Alice Miller’s book comes to a close, she encapsulates her thoughts.

    “In this book (The Body Never Lies) I express hope that , as psychological knowledge grows, the power of the Fourth Commandment will wane in favor of the appropriate respect for the vital biological needs of the body, including truth, loyalty to oneself and to one’s perceptions, feelings and insights. If I seek genuine expressions of my feelings in a genuine form of communication, everything that was built on lies and insincerity will fall away from me. Then I will no longer strive for a relationship in which I pretend to have feelings that I do not have, or suppress others that I do have. Love that excludes honesty does not deserve the name of love.

    The following points may serve to sum up these ideas.

    1. The “love” of formerly abused children for their parents is not love. It is an attachment fraught with expectations, illusions, and denials, and it exacts a high price from all those involved in it.

    2. The price of this attachment is paid primarily by the next generation of children, who grow up in a spirit of mendacity because their parents automatically inflict on them the thins they believe “did them good.” Young parents themselves also frequently pay for their denial with serious damage to their health because their “gratitude” stands in contradiction to the knowledge stored in their bodies.

    3. The frequent failure of therapy can be explained by the fact that most therapists are themselves caught up in the snare of traditional morality and attempt to drag their clients into the same kind of captivity because it is all they know. As soon as clients start to feel and become capable of roundly condemning the deeds, say, of an incestuous father, therapists will probably be assailed by fear of punishment at the hands of their own parents if they should dare to look their own truth in the face and express it for what it is. How else can we explain the fact that forgiveness is declared to be an instrument of healing? Therapists frequently propose this to reassure themselves, just as the parents did. But because it sounds very familiar to the messages communicated to them in childhood by their parents, albeit expressed in a more friendly way, some patients may need some time to see through the pedagogic angle of it. And even once they finally have recognized it, they can hardly leave their therapist, especially if a new toxic attachment has already formed, if for them, the therapist has become like a mother who has helped them to a new birth (because in this new relationship they have started to feel). So they may continue to expect salvation from the therapist instead of listening to their body and accepting the aid it signals represent.

    4. Once clients, accompanied by an enlightened witness, have lived through and understood their fear of their parents (or parental figures), they can gradually start to break off destructive attachments. The positive reaction of the body will not be long in coming: its communications will become more and more and more comprehensible; it will cease to express itself in mysterious symptoms. Then clients will realize that their therapists have deceived them (frequently involuntarily) because forgiveness actually prevents the formation of scar tissue over the old wound, not to speak of complete recovery. And it can never dispel the compulsion to repeat the same pattern over and over again. This is something we can all find out from our own experience.

    “In The Body Never Lies, I have tried to show that some widely held views have long since exploded by scientific research. Among them are the convictions that forgiveness has a salutary effect, that a commandment can produce genuine love, and that feigning feelings that we do not have is compatible with the demand for honesty. But my criticism of such misleading ideas is by not means to be equated with a refusal to recognize any moral standards or with a wholesale rejection of morality.”

    “On the contrary, Precisely because I staunchly uphold certain values – such as integrity, awareness, responsibility, or loyalty to oneself – I have difficulty with the denial of truths that I consider self-evident and have in fact been empirically substantiated.”

    “Inability to face up to the sufferings undergone in childhood can be observed both in the form of religious obedience and in cynicism, irony, and other forms of self-alienation frequently masquerading as philosophy or literature. But ultimately the body will rebel. Even if it can be temporarily pacified with the help of drugs, nicotine, or medicine, it usually has the last word, because it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind, particularly if the mind has been trained to function as an alienated self. We may ignore or deride the messages of the body, but its rebellion demands to be heeded because its language is the authentic expression of our true selves and of the strength of our vitality.” Alice Miller

    What I find so affirming is are the major factors that Alice believes will help a person heal from abuse is what I discovered as well…

    Honoring thy Mother and thy Father…is no longer valid when they don’t honor you. This is a two way road and that love without honesty isn’t love.

    Secondly, the forgiveness to keep them ‘sin’ free…will not put scar tissue on our wound; it will not help heal us at all. In fact, we eventually will hurt our children, for we are still unhealed and hurt.

    From what I am hearing in my old church based upon the premise of forgiveness, this is self evident. If forgiveness worked, it would have stopped a long time ago. But when you hear that the grandparent was a perpetrator, the parent was perpetrator and now a child is, Forgiveness doesn’t stop abuse!

    And I love how she uses the body as a gauge for our barometer to our honesty. Your body simply does not know how to lie, it just responds in kind to the climate in which it is forced to live.

    How easily our world troubles could be solved if we all were brave enough to speak our truth and walk behind it with grace and courage…

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  • Elders of the Church

    There are no coincidences in life and the fact that I am learning about more and more sexual abuse in my old church while I am reading Alice Miller is profound.

    She is literally writing about the hows and the whys that seemingly intelligent functioning adults are unable to stop this behavior…or it seems “Knows” and does nothing.

    What I am getting a view of is my family but displayed in a much bigger group, widespread from state to state.

    That there is an underlying very pervasive evil preying upon the children, while half the adults sleep and the other are the perpetrators, and all presenting a mask to society of high morals and values, where TV, Music, drinking and drugs, etc are forbidden, where truth and honesty is the way of life….

    The grand scale and its history from generation to generation of criminal sexual behavior under the auspices of a religion of high morals and value is mind blowing.

    My mother was not an anomaly she was a typical church mother.

    And what is so extremely shocking to me is that I didn’t know of it when I was in it. Yet, here is the deal on that…I didn’t leave the church until I had seen the truth of who my father was. So, I guess, their families were like my family we all matched…so we were not outstanding in the fact that the children in the family were abused.

    Knowing that my father abused the neighbors and the neighbor’s parents were in the church and did nothing shows to me, that they too didn’t find this shocking or something that should be presented to the law of the land.

    Again, I felt I lived in this little nest of incest with neighbors that I later found out had their own nests, but that we were the ‘odd’ ones in the church. But 6 years later, I am finding out that we are far from odd, but perhaps just normal parishioners.

    In Alice’s book she speaks of forgiveness in how I seen it work in the church and how it actually is the juice that keeps the evil in the pulpits and on the church boards, literally running the church while raping the children.

    “Can forgiveness for the crimes done to the child be not just ineffective but actively harmful? It certainly can because the body does not understand more precepts. It fights to make our conscious minds admit the truth and transcend our denial of genuine feelings. This is something children cannot afford to do. They have to deceive themselves and turn a blind eye to their parent’s crimes in order to survive. Adults no longer need to repress their feelings. But if they do, the price they pay is high. Either they ruin their own health or make others foot the bill.”

    “A therapist who has forgiven his parents for the cruelty they showed him may feel the urge to suggest this same remedy to his clients. In so doing, he is exploiting their dependence and their trust. If he is not in touch with his own feelings at all, he may indeed be unaware that he is doing to others what was once done to him. In suggesting forgiveness as a solution, the therapist is abusing and confusing others, while rejecting any kind of responsibility for his actions. He is convinced that he is acting for their own good. Are not all religions unanimously in their conviction that forgiveness is the path to Heaven? Was not Job ultimately reward for the fact that he forgave God?”

    “Unlike children, adult patients have a choice. They can leave a therapist once they have seen through his deception and self-deception….”

    “To break through this vicious cycle we need to understand that so-called love cannot survive abuse, deception, and exploitation without seeking new victims. And if it requires new victims it is no longer love but at best the longing for love. Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality, of what really happened can break through the chain of abuse. If I know and can feel what my parents did to me when I was totally defenseless, I no longer need victims to befog my awareness. I no longer need to reenact what happened to me and take it out on innocent people because now I know what happened. And if I want to live my life consciously, without exploiting others, then I must actively accept that knowledge.” Alice Miller

    What is so vastly incredible is that the one thing a child needs to heal is not offered to him in that church, instead the only thing that is offered is the forgiveness of sins and the fourth commandment…”to love and Honor thy parents”.

    It is no wonder to me, as a person who has lived in the system, who was abused and left untreated there, and has witnessed the responses of my siblings, that this vein of power is still in play, whether you leave the church or not, it will take Herculean power to stop the mind set of forgiving sexual crimes and not passively accept love hurts.

    As long as forgiveness is preached, children will suffer abuse from the elders of the church.

  • Children will suffer.

    From Alice Miller’s book “The Body Never Lies,” she writes…

    “My attempts to persuade the Vatican of the importance of early childhood experiences have revealed how impossible it is to arouse feelings of compassion in men and women who right at the beginning of their lives learned to suppress their genuine, natural feelings so mercilessly that there is no trace of them left in their conscious minds. All curiosity about the feelings of others has been stifled. It seems that people who were physically mutilated in early life immure themselves in a fortress deep inside themselves, where they can only pray to God. It is to Him that they delegate all their responsibility, and they carefully obey the precepts of the church so as not to be punished by this “loving” God for any sins of omission they might commit.”

    “Shortly after the capture of Saddam Hussein in late 2003, the Vatican was largely instrumental in orchestrating the sudden increase, all over the world, of voices expressing compassion for the unscrupulous tyrant who had been such an object of fear and loathing while he was still at large. But in my view we cannot simply allow ourselves to base our judgment of tyrants on ordinary compassion for the individual, if that means disregarding things they have done.”

    “As biographers Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie tell us in their 1990 book “Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf”, Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937. He grew up in a peasant family living in penury near Tikrit. They had no land of their own. His biological father died before his birth. His stepfather, a shepherd, constantly humiliated the boy, calling him “son of a whore” and “son of a bitch,” beating him mercilessly and tormenting him in the most brutal way imaginable. To exploit young Saddam’s working capacity to the full, he forbade him to go to school until the boy was ten. Instead, he would wake him in the middle of the night and tell him to guard the flocks. In these formative years, children develop and image of the world. Ideas take shape in their minds about the values that are worth upholding in life. At the same time, they begin to cherish desires and dream of their fulfillment. For Saddam, the slave of his stepfather, these desires all centered around one thing; limitless power over others. In his brain the idea presumably took shape that he could regain the human dignity he had been so radically deprived of only by possessing the same power over others that his stepfather had over him. Throughout his childhood, there were no other ideals, no other examples to live up to, only the omnipotent stepfather and himself, the defenseless victim of the terror inflicted on him. It was in line with this pattern that the adult Hussein later organized the structure of the country he ruled over. His body knew nothing but violence.”

    “Every dictator denies the suffering of his childhood and attempts to forget them by indulging his megalomania. But the unconscious mind of an individual has completely registered his biography in the cells of the body, it will at some point urge that individual to confront the truth. After the coalition invasion, despite the immense financial resources at his disposal, Saddam sought refuge precisely in the vicinity of the place where he was born, the place where all help was denied him as a child, a highly precarious spot that could not provide real protection. The fact that he should have chosen this place to “go to ground” reflects the desperate plight of his early years and clearly illustrates the power of compulsive repetition. His return to his childhood was the return to the place where he had no chance to escape.”

    “there is conclusive evidence that the character of a tyrant will not change as long as he lives, that he will abuse his power in a destructive way as long as he encounters no resistance. The point is that his genuine aim, the unconscious aim concealed behind all his conscious activities, remains the same: to use his power to blot out the humiliations inflicted on him in childhood and denied by him ever since. But this aim can never be achieved. The past cannot be expunged, nor can one come to terms with it, as long as one denies the suffering it involved. Accordingly, a dictator’s efforts to achieve that aim are doomed to failure. Compulsive repetition will always reassert itself. And an endless succession of victims is forced to pay the price.”

    “With his own behavior, Hitler demonstrated to the world the kind of person his father was and the kind of treatment he suffered at his hands when he was a child: destructive, pitiless, ostentatious, merciless, boastful, perverted, self-enamored, shortsighted, and stupid. In his unconscious imitation he was faithful to his father’s example. For the same reason, other dictators like Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Ceausescu, Idi Amin, Saddim Hussein behaved in a very similar way. Saddam’s biography is a striking example of how extreme humiliation in childhood is avenged on thousands and thousands of victims at a later date. The refusal to learn from these facts may be grotesque, but the reason for refusal are not difficult to identify.”

    “ The fact is that an unscrupulous tyrant mobilizes the suppressed fears and anxieties of those who were beaten as children but have never been able to accuse their own fathers of doing so. Their loyalty to these fathers is unswerving, despite the torments suffered at their hands. Every tyrant symbolizes such a father, the figure whom the abused children remain attached to with every fiber of their being, hoping that one day they will be able to transform him into a loving parent by being blind.”

    “This hope may have been what prompted the representation of the Roman Catholic Church to demonstrate their compassion for Hussein. In 2002, I turned to a number of cardinals for support when I presented the Vatican with material on the delayed effects of spanking and asked authorities there to do what they could to enlighten young parents on this subject. As I have said, not one of the cardinals I approached with this request showed the slightest interest in the universally ignored but crucially important issue of physically abused children. Nor did I come across the slightest indication of Christian charity or compassion in connection with this issue. Today, however, those same representatives are eager to show that they are indeed capable of compassion. Significantly, however, this compassion is lavished not on maltreated children or on Saddam’s victims but on Saddam himself, on the unscrupulous father figure that the feared despot symbolizes.”

    “As a rule, beaten, tormented, and humiliated children who have never received support from a helping witness later develop a high degree of tolerance for the cruelties perpetrated by parent figures and a remarkable indifference to the sufferings borne by children exposed to inhumane treatment. The last thing they wish to be told is that they themselves once belong to the same group. Indifference is a way of preserving them from opening their eyes to reality. In this way they become advocates of evil, however convinced they may be of their own humane intentions. From an early age they were forced to suppress and ignore their true feelings. They were forced to put their trust not in those feelings but solely in the regulations imposed on them by their parents, teachers, and the church authorities. Now the task facing them in their adult lives leaves them no time to perceive their own feelings, unless those feelings happen to fit in precisely with the patriarchal value system in which they live and which prescribes compassion for the father, however destructive and dangerous he may be. The more comprehensive a tyrant’s catalogue of crimes is, the more he can count on the tolerance, provided his admires are hermetically closed off from access to the sufferings of their own childhood.” Alice Miller.

    What a brilliant cycle this abuse is, for the circuitous madness not looking creates. How nature creates ways in which our mind can overrun our realities for survival and yet this very technique is what allows it to continue.

    The hurt child ends up hurting children and the hurt children who don’t want to feel their pain ends up seeing the ‘heroic’ adult and not the monster.

    It takes Herculean efforts to go with the body of truths and swing wide of society, church and family to see reality.

    Imagine a world full of delusional adults who carry a false picture of their formative years, they will not be able to spot a monster in their presence?

    No matter not how detailed his catalogue of crimes are, what matters most is that his followers, family and friends, haven’t discovered their own box of crimes of childhood…the sightless followers, the ones who love to live in the land of denial will not see his crimes.

    It is incredible to me, it isn’t that they are not seeing what is going on today, but the long ago blindness that makes them unconscious supporters of evil.

    You simply are incapable of seeing in the present if you didn’t see in the past.

    And the sheer volume of people refusing to deal in the past wrecks havoc on today’s reality.

    While I screamed loudly about the present, they clung to the vestiges of their ‘happy childhood’.

    Who knew that holding tight to a ‘happy childhood’ could cause so much pain!

    By not seeing who you really are you are incapable of seeing the truth in others…and this works so well for the monsters among us.

    Who will stop them?

    What will make the blind see, how much destruction has to be spread around the planet, before we can begin to see that children are not born this way, the parents are the cause.

    As long as we don’t see the suffering children, children will suffer.

  • My Body, My mind and My Spirit.

    Something magical happens when you are forced, as in my case, to stand without secrets, to be bare unto the world, to have nothing hidden out of sight, when your worst fears and beyond are realized, you are exposed and free.

    I didn’t seem to have a choice, my incest was uncovered the same time that my father was exposed as a pedophile, and yet in the moment of time, while it seemed as if I would die in shame, I sprung forth with a new resolve to live openly and decided I would carry no more secrets in my pocket.

    I would instead own this legacy of abuse and I would live my life fully aware of where I came from and how it formed me into who I was today. I understood all my idiosyncrasies and me perfectly, they were all birthed in abuse.

    Once I accepted that all the mess was from where I grew, I could then begin to grow in ways that were different.

    While you are holding on to secrets, the secrets are holding on to you and you are not free to heal and move beyond them, but once you agree that it is time for you to accept the truth of your roots, you begin changing out of abuse.

    How tragically sad that we can’t share with the world our deepest wounds that unlike cancer it is a shameful disease and while we keep it hidden in the deep pockets of our bodies, our bodies are not free our spirits are not free and we are in a prison of silence.

    Yet we hold the key that unlocks the door of shame. We have to be brave enough to align ourselves with our past’s reality. We have to have the courage to look upon the secrets that our families carry, our legacy that few will speak of but all know.

    The truth is what sets you free…and the willingness to lose all you are, to become someone you have never met, the person you were prior to abuse.

    My body and I have an agreement, we will no longer hide truths, we will speak our feelings always, regardless of the consequences, we have a bond now, a sacred bond, we are one…my body, my mind and my spirit.

  • My body knows

    David Hawkins writes in his book, “Power vs Force” the experiment he preformed on the body’s reaction to artificial sweeteners.

    First of all here is the test.

    “It takes two people to perform a kinesiological test. Choose a friend or a family member for testing. We’ll call him or her your test subject.

    1. Have the subject stand erect, right arm relaxed at his side, left arm held out parallel to the floor, elbow straight. (you may use the other arm if you wish.)

    2. Face your subject and place your left hand on the right shoulder to steady him. Then place your right hand on the subjects extended left arm just above the wrist.

    3. Tell the subject to resist when you try to push his arm down.

    4. Now push down on his arm fairly quickly, firmly and evenly. The idea is to push just hard enough to test the spring and bounce in the arm, not so hard tha the muscle becomes fatigued. It is not the question of who is stronger, but whether the muscle can “lock” the shoulder joint against the push.

    Assuming there are no physical problems with the muscle and the subject is in a normal relaxed state of mind, receiving no extraneous stimuli (for this reason it’s important that the tester no smile or otherwise interact with the subject), the muscle will “test strong” – the arm will remain locked. If the test is repeated in the presence of a negative stimulus (for instance, artificial sweetener), “although you are pushing down no harder than before, the subject’s arm will fall to his side.”

    “Initially, the most striking finding of kinesiology was a clear demonstration that muscles instantly become weak when the body is exposed to harmful stimuli. For instance, if a patient with functional hypoglycemia put sugar on his tongue, upon muscle testing, the deltoid muscle (the one usually used as an indicator) instantly went weak. Accordingly, it was discovered that substances that were therapeutic to the body made the muscles instantly become strong.”

    Below is another example of the reaction of the body and artificial sweeteners.

    “In addition to its inclusive applicability, the test was quick, simple and easy to perform, and highly decisive; all researchers confirmed the absolute replicability of test results. For example, an artificial sweetener made every subject test weak, whether placed on the tongue, held in its package adjacent to the solar plexus, or hidden in a plain envelope (the contents of which neither the tester nor the subject knew).”

    “That the body responded even when the mind was naïve was quite impressive. Most practitioners did their own verification research, placing various substances in plain envelopes and having a naïve second person test a third. The overwhelming conclusion was that the body would indeed respond accurately, even when the conscious mind was unaware.”

    “ The reliability of the testing experience never ceased to amaze the public and patients – and, for that matter, the practioners themselves. When I was on the lecture circuit, in audiences of 1,000 people, 500 envelopes containing artificial sweetener would be passed out to the audience, along with 500 identical envelopes containing organic vitamin C.

    The audience would then be divided up and would alternate testing each other. When the envelopes were opened, the audience reaction was always one of amazement and delight when they saw that everyone had gone weak in response to the artificial sweetener and strong in response to the vitamin C. The nutritional habits of countless families across country were changed due to this simple demonstration.”
    David Hawkins

    What I find so fascinating and thrilling is that the body doesn’t need a mind per say in order to understand what makes it strong or weak. It knows what is true and what is not.

    It doesn’t even care about what it is that is brought in front of it, it merely responds favorably to truth, always.

    It has no story or past belief, it just knows. It doesn’t care about a future disappointment or promise, it just responds.

    Put something artificial in front of it and it goes weak.

    I have a greater faith in my body responding without prejudice than my mind.

    My body knows…

  • Surprises Me!

    “What is so interesting is that your quilt Lady has no body and your blog is all about the body…” is an insight a woman shared with me about my Art. “I don’t think you even see what you do…”

    I was so shocked and surprised at the way this woman was able to see and understand so clearly my Lady…and I was shocked she put the two together and seen the opposite.

    My lady quilts are all about feelings but there isn’t a body or even a face to be seen on the quilts. In fact it is a challenge to create them minus actually having a body, you make the clothes move like a ghost is wearing them.

    And the blog is totally different; it is all about the body, the mind and the soul…all things missing in the quilts.

    On my way home, I was thinking about the Lady not having a body and it struck me deep within, it is how I lived for so long, just clothes. That within me lay a ghost of me, but not one that was able to express herself.

    How curious or not, that my Ladies still have no body…yet are filled with expression or feelings…free enthusiasm a woman owning her life.

    I love that my blog is the missing body from the quilts and that each stand strong alone, but become greater together, like the blog is the background story or the Lady the pictures in a book.

    How interesting to be the author and the artist and learn about your work from another.

    I love that my work surprises me!

    Smug mug pics 2522

    I can see how this quilt is the emerging awareness!

  • Familiar isn’t Good.

    “Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.” ~Henry Miller

    I seem to have an eating person and then a person who sees the affects, but the two haven’t met.

    My eating person calls foods delicious and has cravings for sweets and she lives above my neck. She enjoys the tastes and eats as if the food will fall on the ground after she chews, paying no attention to the body underneath.

    My eating is similar to smoking without inhaling, or so my mind has me believing, but the mirror tells a different tale.

    What is so odd is the body that needs better eating is not in control of the eating and the eating mouth cares less about what happens after it tastes, chews and swallows.

    While some diets look at the food and other people are telling the person to exercise, what I am thinking needs to be changed is the mind.

    It is the town crier calling scrumptious bakery delicious, but who is it delicious for, A thought in the head?

    My thoughts about food and what is the reality of food is a world apart, not even in the same room.

    My awareness is never in both places at the same time, yet my head is attached to my body. My body is not welcome in the boardroom when decisions about it are made.

    It shocking to know that my head lies or fails to acknowledge how the words and food don’t match, that there is a huge contradiction going on.

    Yet my head is the first to complain as I stand in front of the mirror, Like it had nothing to do with the weight upon my thighs!

    It is insane, the one that is craving and eating is now berating or feeling disappointed in the body…when the body is simply a dumping ground or garbage bag for the head.

    I am right in the middle of calling its bluff, and trying to stop reacting to eating choices and instead bring the body to the table and eat for it and not for my head.

    It is a fickle head…for it slurps up food, burps and then turns on its self when it sees the affects, like the traitor it is.

    This lying eating head is the same head that wanted me to stay in bed and not do yoga; it is a part of myself that sucks the living out of me.

    Within my food palate are vestiges of dysfunction, camouflaged in pretty cakes and candy, the pretty sounding names and tastes I have become accustomed to, my way with food.

    My immature food palate will take time to adjust to eating food that the body can use for energy and nutrients instead of pleasing a childish mind set.

    I am finding it odd that I have a iron grip on my sweets and feel less without them in my mail jeep. I like knowing they are there. It is odd to have this ‘value’ in no value items.

    Like clinging to love that is really abuse.

    I am holding on to the food that is keeping me overweight and out of shape, tired and lazy…and pushing away the good.

    This is a repeating cycle in my wellness…holding on to what hurts me…fear of letting go of familiar even if familiar isn’t good.

  • Body, Mind and Soul

    It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways. ~Buddha

    What I find so interesting about eating, is we don’t eat what the body needs, we put items into it that do not work with the body, but actually against it.

    My backward eating habits reflect my old thoughts and beliefs and now I have to find new eating habits that match my new mindset.

    It is interesting that I use sweet treats as something that makes me feel good, yet the outcome has very little goodness IF any. I feel tired, dragged out, lethargic and my body is oversized from the useless calories I consume.

    There is a separation between how my tongue tastes the food and how it affects my body, like the two parts of me that don’t intersect.

    My head says its good and my mouth likes the taste, but once I swallow all hell breaks loose, my sweet treats wreak havoc once beyond my taste buds.

    The sweets are really saboteurs in disguise and I have programmed myself to discount the affects while enjoying the snack.

    The separation is critical in not linking the culprit and the feelings together, it is keeping the mind and body separated.

    Isn’t it incredible that the mind and body are not aware of each other, and instead of working together; they are fighting with each other, a civil war inside?

    Bikram speaks of bringing the mind back to the body for 20 seconds during each yoga pose. What yoga is teaching me is to pay attention to my body.

    When I eat I am not paying attention to my body, it is like my head is eating alone…until I swallow and then after my head has had its fun, my body then pays the price.

    It is so odd that we can ‘believe’ we are enjoying food that literally isn’t good for us. How is it possible to enjoy something that will cause us harm?

    What will it take to flip this around?

    I can’t seem to care while eating and enjoying the flavors that the affects after are not enjoyable.

    It seems like I am more addicted to the feelings afterward, that my natural state is to be sedative and unfeeling instead of feeling alive and alert and in touch with my feelings.

    We don’t even seem to have the feelings of being full or near full or tasting and appreciating the scents, the taste, the texture, let alone the incredible journey some food has taken to get from plant to table or even seed to plant.

    This is a new frontier for me to become more aware of what I eat, how I eat, when I eat and how I feel during and after eating and how it all impacts my body.

    It is time to stop eating as a head alone and eat with my body, mind and soul.