I M Perfect lady

Tag: change

  • We abuse our self.

    I am working on putting a Picture Book together with my Story Line quilts…and writing a brief synopsis about each quilt as it represents a portion of my journey.

    I have a visual graph of my inner transformation as I undid abuse and changed my perceptions back to the truth.

    Change is a very slippery word and it often times gets misconstrued, for we are expecting a dramatic life altering physical change, when all that is required is a 360 degree perceptional change.

    It is to change HOW you see things, not the things.

    To remove yourself from one belief and settle your self into another.

    Moving your awareness.  Rearranging your thoughts to match reality instead of using thoughts to cover up what is real.

    What most may fail to recognize, are the changes we fail to make when abuse calls upon us.  Many will focus on the physical act, but few will focus on our perceptions.

    In an abusive home, where abuse isn't addressed…what this means is that, perceptions don't change to now match the new reality.  It isn't that the act isn't dealt with, but rather the perceptions don't change to mirror what just happened.

    It is this that totally screws with the minds of a child.

    Here is the deal.

    My father CHANGED when he acted out sexually to me.  At this point, my viewpoint of him should have changed too.  When I didn't change this inside of my head.  My head no longer matched reality.

    With a head that is askew, I then built my life.

    To undo the abuse, what we are really saying is that we need to straighten out our perceptions.  We have to now make the changes we failed to make way back then.

    It sounds so simple, but I had created a whole life, based on the wrong perceptions.

    I now had to change a father into a pedophile, a mother into his accomplice, and it left me with a new family portrait.

    Change one picture, and the rest start to shift.

    My father changed when he abused me and I didn't act like anything had changed. 

    However, my reality had changed, I just wasn't allowed to let my perceptions of him change.

    Instead of recording the actual event, it recorded things that surrounded it.

    I don't have many memories of my childhood, but I do have wierd ones.

    However, most importantly, my body recorded it accurately.  IT feared my father.

    It didn't want to get close to him.

    No matter what my mind concocted, my body held the correct perceptions.

    I had to change my mind to match what my body felt.

    Undoing abuse means you have to change your mind.

    It doesn't mean forcing your body to feel comfortable or at ease with someone who has hurt you.  It means to follow your body's lead.

    When you change the perceptions in your head to match reality, you will begin to act differently. 

    You will act in kind to reality.

    I no longer felt I had to force myself to be in relationships with family who I no longer trusted or felt safe with…or whose perceptions didn't match reality.

    The greatest tragedy of abuse is that we don't change our perceptions of the person who hurt us.  We want a mother and father so badly, we will think anything to maintain this in our heads.  And as little helpless children, we needed to believe that we were safe.  We wouldn't have survived knowing there was no one there to save us, that we were living in the home of a pedophile and his wife.

    How awful this is to an abused child.  Your wounds go unattended, in order to keep up the perceptions in your home.  If they see your abuse, they will see the monster who lives there too.

    In order to keep the illusion going, you adjust your perceptions.

    Most have no clue what this does to a human being.  It makes you insane.

    Insanity is seeing a reality that doesn't exist.

    Seeing a father where a pedophile stands.

    I became sane, when I saw reality…my perceptions finally matched my body.

    Abused children who are abused by a family member, are usually neglected in order to keep the abusive family member. Rarely is the child treated and the family member removed.

    They would rather keep an abusive father than live without one.

    The child then learns, to overlook abuse and keep the relationship.

    What we fail to appreciate is that we are holding onto abuse and there is no relationship outside of that.  Our new relationships are abuse.

    It is abusive to ourselves to change our truth and perceptions to go against reality.

    We keep a 'loving' father and we abuse our self.

  • 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!

  • Cheering for the Butterfly!

    We would rather be ruined than changed;
    We would rather die in our dread
    Than climb the cross of the moment
    And let our illusions die.

    ~W.H. Auden

     

    As I sit in the graveyard of my illusions, I am left with merging emotions, crashing upon each other, overlapping – sorrow and freedom, sadness and joy, feeling left out and being spared, all swaying within like ghosts.

     

    Memories of happier times try to overpower awareness of reality’s raw experiences; a game of pretend almost arises, like an abused woman who refuses to see the man who beat her, by focusing on the good times.

     

    Hope plans a future that isn’t to be, sorrow knowing you can never go home.

     

    Being sprung free and yearning for the cage.

     

    Celebrating while crying.

     

    Unable to firmly grasp one without feeling the loss of the other.

     

    It feels like I am dying while alive, grieving for my own self.

     

    Having one foot in the grave of my old life, while learning to walk in my new.

     

    The hardest part is to let me die, to be strong and keep killing the illusion, the dysfunctional relationships, letting them go on without me.

     

    I wish I could say I am tough and this is easy to feel the sorrow and pain as another section of my life dies…and I am left in the space of empty.

     

    The wise say that without change we would have no butterflies.

     

    But the time between caterpillar and butterfly is you are neither, suspended in time…

     

    You don’t fit with the caterpillars anymore, and you still have no wings to fly.

     

    In a cocoon I live, one life not finished and new one not fully begun.

     

    Suspended in soup of transition.

     

    Crying for the caterpillar and cheering for the Butterfly!

     

  • Life can Change.

    I am just about to the new half way mark, and I am feeling excited about my body and its improvements.

     

    The experience of witnessing the effort along with the change makes you believe to the depth of your being that we are the ones to swing our lives around.

     

    While doing this active yoga, we literally breathe and put our bodies into these postures, giving it our utmost strength and attention, so daily we can see new improvements, slight changes in strength balance and in flexibility, how this yoga is changing us from the inside out.

     

    There is a new relationship being born, one where we are an active participant with this body.  If we can form new will power by slowly going in and out of the poses, if we can manifest new discipline, imagine where we can use this in our everyday life?

     

     I am beginning to see the powerful reactive live thing this body is, and how it responds to the attention I am giving it, it can’t help but be stronger if I am working on those muscle each day.

     

    My body and I are forming a new relationship, instead of me being lazy and expecting the body to go along and be healthy without me, I am slowly turning that boat around until I am leading the body.

     

    In my past, my neglect showed up in my body, except I saw it as the body’s fault, not mine.

     

    If my attention and great kindness allows this body to flourish, then so did my inactiveness allow it to crumple and be out of shape figuratively and physically; I am the common denominator in my health and in my sickness. 

     

    My awareness of this is huge, for without it I blame a body that can’t get fit without me bringing it to the mat, to the postures and beginning.

     

    I am the keeper of the gate; I open the door and close it.  For 48 days I opened the door and joined Bikram for 90 minutes.

     

    As long as I open the gate, life can change.

     

     

  • Punctuate the day!

    What I discovered yesterday is that everyone has to do some things every day that would be labeled work, some we get paid for and some we just do so we can eat or have clean clothes.

     

    It isn’t about what we do, but our attitude doing it.

     

    My freedom comes in what kind of mail lady will I be.  I bring me and I bring with me an attitude.

     

    I feel I have much power over my attitude, or at least the power of acceptance and being present with whatever appears.

     

    It is much easier to live that way then to be in one place wishing you were in another.

     

    Being a stay at home mom, there were tasks that I didn’t enjoy and lately find myself wanting to do less and less of the household jobs, so maybe working outside of the home will erase them from my job list.

     

    It almost feels like I am graduating again, that a new part of my life is opening up and I get to do something new. 

     

    In Elizabeth Lesser’s book “Broken Open” she discusses how she had to change the kind of mom she was when her kids left home and became young adults.  I understand that.

     

    That there is a time when the job ends, when it’s no longer required, and we have to change.

     

    As our lives change we change, we flow and bend as it does.  If we don’t then we will be hanging on when we should be letting go, refusing to bend we will snap.

    The more I am a working girl, the more the household chores are shared, bringing the kids into that extra part of life, the part that has no pay, but needs to be done anyway.

     

    When I am out each day, it evens up the playing field, I became one of them, I too am gone all day, and we all come home wishing there was a mom there cooking, cleaning and getting our clothes washed.

     

    It becomes a tag team effort, we each do some of each job and the job gets done. 

     

    This has been a great opportunity to get a preview of what it would be like if I worked full time.  The part I haven’t brought in was the Art expression.  I let most of that go.  I wasn’t able to maintain creating while working 6 days a week.

     

    It is up to me to carve out space, to block out time that is just for me, it is my responsibility to be creative, it will not just leap at me.

     

    After today I have two days in a row off, I will decide how I spend them! 

     

    We are the ones spending our life.  Imagine that, we are spending, we are taking our lives and using it, we are the ones who decide how will I spend my day, my free hours, and my time.

     

    With free will we decide how to spend our lives, how we either abuse or disuse so much time, like there is an unlimited amount there.

     

    We don’t need to hoard it, but neither do we need to toss it aside, instead we should be aware of the generosity that is laid out for us each day.

     

    Our time stretches out each day, and we can either place well-enjoyed moments, or flop down angry attitudes, we layout our lives, moment by moment.

     

    We decide what we lay down each day.

     

    See it like a patchwork quilt, and each hour is connected to the next, what will your quilt look like at the end of the day, how much contrast, how much texture is laid out?

     

    Even on my working days, I should add just a smidgeon of color, of wild enjoyment, even if it is just a hour, it will punctuate the day.

     

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