I M Perfect lady

Tag: child

  • Imperfectly Me.

    Yesterday morning, after a sleepless night I wrote the post about unconditional love, about knowing to the depth of my soul, no matter what I will not be the one to abuse my wounded child.

    I let go of all things but unconditional love.

    My husband and I had decided we would get out of the house and go for breakfast to give us a chance to talk privately.

    My husband turns to me when I enter the car and says, “do you have anything left to say to our daughter, is there anymore you have to offer?”

    And I say very weak defeated, no, I have nothing, all my knowing, my wise words and experience, all my efforts and love are not seemingly working, I am at the end of the road, I have nothing.

    He says, “Good. Here is how this is going to go down. What we did to her last night, by pressing her is going to drive her out of our home. I will not do that to her. She is hurt and needs a place to be, where there is no one pressuring her, a place where she feels comfortable…I love my daughter and want her always to feel that she is welcome in our home no matter what.

    I tell him, I agree. I just learned about my unconditional love for her, that I too will not hurt her when she is down.

    The next thing he says is you have to let her go, let her do it her way, let her be EVEN if she decides to move out of our home, let her decide, You have to let her go.

    I tell him he is asking too much.

    In that instant, I feel the little girl in me terrified of letting go, of losing once again.

    I tell him, Honey I know about letting go, about letting them decide, of allowing them to be, I let my family go and none of them came back to me.

    I have lost and I have lost and none of them ever come back, you are asking way too much, and now you are asking me to let go of my little girl to let her go free while she is alone and lost.

    I can’t let her go, for if she doesn’t come back I don’t know what I will do, I can’t let her go, I don’t have a heart big enough to bear this if she doesn’t come back.

    I tell him, “Mr. Big as a House Heart Man, you will have to lead this, you will have to stand in front of me, for me with the “Little as a Rock Broken Heart lady can’t be out front, I am afraid that if this little piece shatters, I will not have anything left, that I will go down and not come back up.”

    Honey I can let her go but your big heart will have to carry me, my heart isn’t big enough to do this alone and I don’t know how.

    In that moment I felt my holding grasp, its final clutch leave, and she was set off alone.

    Peace overcame me in that instant that seemed to settle over the spot that terror lived.

    My husband continues on unaffected by my emotional display. He says, “we can’t tell her what to do, she is a young lady, she is inexperienced, but this is how she will learn, we will offer her a space here to heal, but not tell her what to do.”

    I am in total agreement and following his lead.

    It is the first time in my life I let go of being responsible of taking the lead of getting on the back of the motor bike, of getting out of the wind and flying bugs and debris to snuggle in behind him and let him tell me what it is we need to do.

    What my husband and I then discussed was exactly what he had done for me six years ago when my world crumbled, when I too discovered that the relationships I had were very dysfunctional, when I had lost my way, when I found my self upside down and backwards, when I didn’t have a radar that knew its way, my dear husband opened up his heart wider, opened up our home, and allowed me to enter in.

    Nothing changed inside, it remained a place of normal in an otherwise upside down unnormal world.

    I entered in exactly as I found myself; there were no requirements no rules or regulations that I had to change first to be here.

    He allowed me the space, he demanded nothing, he asked no questions, he made no suggestions, he allowed me, a frightened wounded animal, to come into the warm space of his loving home and curl up an be safe.

    He never, not once asked me to do something I did not want to do, he waited for me to decide I was ready.

    He never not once wanted me to be further healed than I was, he waited for me to share with him.

    He continued to love and hold me like nothing had changed, to him I was the same person but sick or wounded, that was all.

    I told him, ”What you want me to do for our daughter is what you already did for me, I can do this.”

    I get to be him, to walk in his shoes and just allow her to be. I know even more for I have actually walked those steps.

    I felt immediately, that this was the right path for healing for I know that without him, this house, the space and undemanding loved ones, I would not have made it. I can now give to her that.

    I told him, “I can’t imagine what this had to be like for you, with a wounded wife, to be the only one to do this, it had to be very hellish, and how did we make it through that?”

    He isn’t wanting to go back, he wants to be here.

    He tells me, “you are not to say anything negative, in fact you are not allowed to say anything at all, you are to go on creating a loving home, doing what we have always done here and let her just be.”

    I say, “Honey I get it, I get to be a loving mom unconditionally l can do this.”

    I say I will follow your lead, for did the perfect job for me.

    As we sat face to face over breakfast, my body a noodle, empty and drained, feeling like I had just completed a 6 year marathon, I say to him.

    “Honey, what would a perfect mother have done?”

    He says to me, “she would have stopped this morning like you did, she would done exactly everything you did and said, but she would stop now and let her go.”

    I know for some this may not seem like an answer to a trouble wounded child, but it worked for a very mentally twisted up and wounded adult child.

    I sit in awe of what this man has done for me, and what we, him and I can do for our little girl, our almost woman child who has been wounded, we can open our home, our hearts and welcome her in.

    We demand nothing but accept all.
    We say nothing unless asked.

    We work hard to maintain the energy or atmosphere of our home as it always was.

    We keep this the one piece in the world unchanged in her very changed life.

    This home, the people in this home were my saving grace.

    They never treated me like the outside world talked of me, they remained true to me as what we had previous, they did not change.

    They went to work and did what they loved, they did not have a blame or shameful eye directed at me.

    In their eyes I was imperfectly me.

  • A Man abusing a woman.

    I have such great admiration for the choreography of the Universe, how it manages to give to you the right and perfect set up to heal your wounded self.

    In my quest for wholeness, the main theme has been feeling and seeing. As a child of abuse, I had separated myself from my body, and what I need most is to bring up those emotions, to feel them and greet them with understanding, and they recede on their own, once I ‘get it’.

    The message.

    What I was able to feel and see is beyond what I can hope to put into words.

    It gave to me the access of feelings that I feared I had lost.

    It brought forth a visual so brightly displayed for me to witness the dance of luring and grooming of an innocent girl.

    Delivering to me, the need of the perpetrator over shining the care this innocence needed.

    Showing how innocence the friendship begins and its ultimate conclusion, where the courtship is long and subtle, their needs small at first and how they build, how we start simple and grow into a complex adult scenario long before our time.

    How we are changed slowly and you don’t see yourself change, how you gradually succumb to the tiny wishes, one at a time, trusting and going along, until one day you wake up and your no longer there, in its place is another woman.

    It showed me how a mother should respond and how a mother did respond.

    My daughter found herself in a relationship with a married man, the man she was babysitting for, a man whose children she cared for, tended to like a second mother for many years, since the time she was just a girl herself. To see her in the role of being the other woman, to see her self so changed, broke my heart.
    To see her lost of her inner self worth shattering.

    The overall picture of seeing my young and innocent daughter being courted by such a knowing man, brought me back to the way my abuse played out for me, but with a different ending.

    The dual lesson that my daughter and I danced through leaves me breathless and to feel past overlapping onto the present, the weight of the legacy and it’s vine stretching into the next generation and feeling and seeing my abuse from all angles left my mind whirling.

    I had to first feel the devastation as a mother seeing my innocent daughter in a friendship with a man who single-handedly soiled her fine reputation, without blinking an eye.

    To feel my worthlessness in undoing what was already done.

    To then see the dance and the lure and the friendship and its ‘friendly like’ image have such a dirty ugly affect on the girl, left me shattered and broken as I clearly saw what she failed to see.

    And to be the one to shatter her dreams and love and to flood him in a new light, but then to also put the image on to her self and to see what she ‘allowed’ her self to be. By showing her what the other woman does.

    I was able to see what my mother couldn’t see.
    I was able to do what my mother couldn’t do.
    We both, my daughter and I, were able to stand taller and stronger in truth, than either of would be able to do in lies.

    It was an incredible and heart breaking 24 hours.
    My daughter feels she carries the shame of being the other woman, I feel she carries the experience of being abused.

    I can see how we carry forth from abuse, that we were at fault, that we allowed it, we dance too, but there usually is One with more power, more experience, more everything, that leads the dance to lowering our self worth in their blind desire for their needs being fulfilled.

    The fail to see how it affects us.

    My daughter’s reputation was damaged while his remained unchanged.

    She approached the friendship as innocent.
    A young girl who didn’t realize when you knowingly do what you feel is wrong but do it anyway, you are giving away your self worth.

    We do it for many reasons, to be liked, to please, to get attention, to feel good, and what we all fail to realize, is this feeling is fleeting, it is like a drug, we are forever needing more.

    A habit of pleasing another for our high of feeling good, while our sense of self gets depleted.

    The subtle disappearing self in the dance of friendship that has a greedy needy thirst on one side and the other willingly feeding the supply is a train wreck waiting to happen.

    How grateful am I, that my daughter was able to see and feel her sense of self being lowered, being changed, how she became a stranger to herself.

    Yet when this happens as child, we don’t even have a self established to see disappear, it is gone before we knew it.

    The lessons I was able to experience while she experienced it first hand is like a mirror image of me as a child.

    I can see how my mother’s reaction affected how I was unable to see myself. For my mother’s affection and allegiance was to my father. She didn’t see my change within; she didn’t see my self worth leave.

    I can see how my husband reacted, how she had a loving space to show her the difference between what is a loving friendship and what lowers you.

    There are a million ways this has opened my eyes and hers, how it shows us both, our own boundaries of self love matter most before any request outside.
    Some may see her as the other woman and call her awful names, judge and criticize her actions, view her as the home wrecker etc. I will see her as a victim of
    Abuse.

    Her babysitting children’s father took advantage of her.

    The lack of self worth on his part lent itself to overstep his boundaries. He took liberties that were not his to take.

    He tried to make an adult friendship and press it further with someone who was way out of his league.

    Her innocence was no equal match for him. It was like taking candy from a baby.

    I will see his strengths and her blindness and trust, see her having to lower who she was to become his friend.

    Friendships like that we don’t need.

    Friendship and love will raise you up, not lower you down.

    What a great lesson to learn as such a young age.

    The reason I was having such a hard time seeing her as the ‘other woman’ was that she was just a girl.

    An innocent girl being swept away in an adult world of lies and secrets, of being chosen for the role of ‘other woman’.

    It wasn’t that she auditioned for the part, that she was out seeking this; it came in while she was babysitting.

    The contrast to the label he put on her back and the girl who sleeps on the top bunk in our home is a world apart.

    They don’t even come close to matching.

    Imagine, she still shares a room with her sisters.

    She occupies the top bunk. How can the other woman be the girl who sleeps on the top bunk?

    I feel so fortunate that we have her on the top bunk to have her in our home, to have this wonderful loving, kind and gentle girl in our home.

    What a close call.

    She now knows that when a ‘friendship’ lowers who you are, it isn’t a friendship, you are being abused.

    It is not the other woman on my top bunk, it is my little girl.

    My little wounded girl, who we will love back to her bright sunshiny self.

    We will love her as we always have, for this family didn’t believe, was shocked to the core that our innocent girl was put in the role of ‘other woman’.

    It is abuse, no matter the age.
    A man abusing a woman.

  • I was Missing?

    One theme of fear that has nagged at me in the past six years is; I don’t belong.

    I don’t match, I don’t fit in, I am different, I am at odds with those around me. I stand out; I walked away, leaving behind many.

    I see them fitting together and me fitting out.

    I see a flock of people being in life in harmony and then me, singing off tune.

    The feeling inside was one of separation, loneliness, not belonging, forever standing on the fringe.

    What I failed to do was take one more step back and see the completed picture.

    My focus has been on the group, not on me, my view is from this odd angle of group mentality.

    Understandably so, for I was raised to be a group member, but not an individual and I excelled at this.

    I was a superior group member, outstanding in blending in, merging my life into the group, that I simply disappeared.

    Each time I felt the separation I felt lonely and not whole and grew smaller and smaller.

    I seemed to disappear from their life while my own life seemed to loom larger and larger.

    If you could see me from both views, you would see me growing fainter in their light but if you stood on my side you could see me growing bigger and brighter.

    My success or failure depends on where you are standing.

    If you are expecting me to return and become a group member, you will see me fading, growing weaker and farther away.

    And if you jump over to the side of individual your view will totally change.

    You will see a person standing up for her own feelings, her own passions and truths, a separated soul finding its own self worth.

    I too fall victim to the group view, to see me in their eyes and each time I do, I feel less.

    However, when I stand inside myself and witnessed my life from the inside out, I feel my uniqueness and my independence of free will.

    A group no longer owns me.

    As a child I was taught to give up my body, my feelings, my life and my individual stakes for a group called family, which was governed by religion and undermined by abuse.

    They took ownership of me piece by piece.

    Or I gave them pieces of me little by little, believing the more I gave the more I would become.

    I gave til I was gone.

    It has taken me a long while to remove the sense of self from the views of a group and see myself within my self, to feel my self as self.

    To weigh and measure myself by my own ruler, to no longer feel my value is defined by the Ruler of the group.

    This separated wholeness I see of me outside the group is to see and feel something I am not familiar with, a self beyond the group.
    My favorite image or saying is, “I am going to go find myself, and I don’t know who I am or even that I am missing…”

    I had no idea who I was separated from a group.

    I had no individual view of self.

    I was nothing out side alone.

    My whole composition of self was defined by their needs of me.

    My fear of being alone was that alone I am nothing.

    I recall being scared spit less to the point of frozen immobility, to be naked without a group.

    The group I had woken up in was filled with filth, untruths, lies and cover-ups, forgiveness of sins, a mess.

    It was me!

    The group looked liked me, talked like me, walked like me, it was a direct reflection, a bird with the same feathers.

    There was no dividing line between it and me.

    I found me, lost, brainwashed, blind, abused, broken, confused, mental…I was upside down and tilted away from reality.

    It’s denial and mine were equal.

    My long walk back to find myself and see myself in reality has not been an easy road, but one that has set me free to stand alone belonging to me.

    Isn’t it funny I found myself exactly as I felt, Lost but not knowing I was missing?

  • Activating Inner Compassion.

    “The Presence Process” by Michael Brown

    Activating Inner Compassion

    The Intent to re-establish a loving relationship with our child self activates the procedure of learning how to become our own parent. Connecting with our child self calls us to step onto the pathway of self-nurturing, a pathway that is paved with compassion. This pathway invites us to overcome issues we unconsciously have with our own parents by reaching into a place where only forgiveness can take us. Every effort that we make to re-establish a loving relationship with our child self is rewarded with an every-increasing sense of present moment awareness.

    Many of us in this world appear to be very helpful, but when it comes to the necessary ability of knowing how to nurture ourselves, we discover that we are at a loss. We also realize that we tend to feel a deep sense of guilt whenever we attempt to do anything real and loving for ourselves. This is because it is only our unconscious sense of helplessness and neediness that drives us to sacrifice ourselves in the name of helping others. The behavior of running around and trying to help everyone to our own detriment is always fueled by the reflection we see of our own helpless plight mirrored in the world around us. We cannot give away what we do not have, so only when we learned how to truly nurture and unconditionally love ourselves do we develop the propensity for authentic service. Unless we consciously step into the present moment and own our life, our ability to be truly of assistance in this world will remain shallow and ineffectual. The first step in learning how to nurture and unconditionally love ourselves is to understand which aspect of our being is really suffering and needing our attention.”

    As adults, we experience myriad physical, mental and emotional states of imbalance, and when we do, we usually do everything in our power to numb, or distract ourselves from our plight. Or else we run to someone for attention. When we live in a time-based paradigm, what we are unable to see is that none of our physical, mental, and emotional difficulties stem from what is happening to us right now, even though they are clearly reflected in and by what is happening to us right now.

    During Session Four, we were encouraged to allow ourselves to feel all our pains and discomforts without fear or judgment. By allowing ourselves to have this experience, the realization to which we are opening ourselves is that all our pain and discomforts carry and emotional signature. The identity of this emotional signature will be one of the many emotions that arise from the trinity of fear, anger and grief.”

    Throughout The Presence Process, we call this emotional signature “the emotional charge”. We may identify this emotional charge by a variety of names ranging from fear to rage to grief. This emotional charge is an unpleasant feeling that we will literally do anything not to feel. As we progress through The Presence Process, it will become clearer to us that it is the emotional charge crouched behind our pains and discomforts that fuels our compulsion to metaphorically run from the present moment and into distraction. By reacting to this emotional charge, we lunge free Presence to pretence. We sidestep from authenticity to drama.

    We also know by now where this emotional charge is really anchored. We have already been shown how to track it back in time. To recap: if we look back over our life, and instead of viewing our past experiences as physical circumstances we choose instead to see them as a re-occurrence of emotional signatures, we will see a clear pathway of similar emotional signatures extending all the way back into our childhood. This pathway reveals to us that the imbalances that we feel today, be they physical, mental or emotional, have nothing to do with our present adult life. They are merely reflected in it. This pathway shows us that all our experiences of imbalance were initiated by encounters that we had before we turned seven. And so one of the biggest revelations we can have at this point is:

    It is not our adult experience that requires healing: it is our childhood.

    From the moment we turned our backs on our childhood so that we might become acceptable in the adult world, our child self has been using physical, mental, and emotional states of imbalance to attempt to attract our attention. Our child self has been attempting to attract our attention so that we can consciously and compassionately attend to the unintegrated emotional state in which we left it. Until we consciously attend to the unintegrated experiences of our childhood, our adult experiences will continue to be an unconscious unfolding “effect” of our unintegrated childhood.

    In “time”, our adult experience is an echo of our childhood.

    Until we integrate our childhood, our adult life will continue to be an seemingly chaotic and disconnected experience sewn together with what appears to be randomly occurring physical, mental and emotional imbalance. It is crucial at this point in The Presence Process that we understand that an unbalanced adult experience is “an effect”, not a cause of anything. It is crucial that we understand this because it is futile tampering with an effect of anything, as it is only at the point of cause that any real change can be initiated. The only value our adult symptoms of imbalance is that we can use them as clues to successfully navigate our awareness to their childhood causes. Unless we embark on such a journey, we remain ineffectual.

    The pursuit of happiness, in other words, the drive to control and sedate external circumstances so that we can feel at ease within ourselves, is nothing more that a behavior that stems form attempting to fiddle with an effect to adjust the cause. This is impossible. Such behavior leads us further and further away from our inherent joy that is already available and waiting for us within our child self. The child self is our harbor of innocence, joy and creativity. When we ignore its state of imbalance, we trade our inherent innocence, joy and creativity, and instead invest our energy in attempting to be happy by “making something of ourselves”. And so we are faced with another major revelation:

    Unless we are prepared to reach back through time and space and rescue our child self by bringing it into the safety of the present moment, where we can give it unconditional love and attention it is calling for, we as adults will never experience authentic peace.

    The intention to metaphorically reach back and rescue our own child self can be thought of as a form of time travel. However, this form of time travel is not science fiction. It does not take place “out there”, and its purpose is not to visit other far-off places. It takes place within us, and its Soul purpose is for us to compassionately reconnect with a particular attribute of our own Being from which we have become separated and alienated. This is an inside job that consciously connects our present moment with our past. It invites unconscious behaviors triggered by our past experiences to the surface of our present life so that we can consciously attend to them right now. If approached with commitment, consistency, and sincerity, this inner work releases our child self of its pain and discomfort. The unfolding consequences of rescuing our child self is that our present adult self will gradually be released from the emotional charge that is the source of all our distraction and imbalance. In other words, it is our child self that is the caretaker of our emotional charge. Emotionally it is in charge.
    Michael Brown.

    One more paragraph….

    If we have not done work with our child self prior to this moment, then it is important to realize that our relationship with our child self right now will be similar to that of a parent who has for many years abandoned their own child. At about the age of seven, most urbanized humans begin preparing to enter the adult world. This requires a willingness to turn around and walk away from our childhood. As the years unfold, it is very unlikely that we choose to look back or even consider the state of the child we once were. In most cases, we lay a blanket of forgetfulness over that aspect of our Being and openly admit that we cannot remember much of what happened when we were children. We can no longer see our child self, yet it sees everything. We seemingly no longer feel its pain, yet all our adult pain is a mirror of its unresolved feelings. We may ask, “Why must we now go back and deal with the past? Can we not just leave it alone and carry on with life?”

    Our unfortunate predicament is that the pain and suffering of our unresolved childhood issues follow us as an emotional trail of imbalance that pollutes our adult experiences in an ongoing patter that is as regular and punctual as a time piece. And this timepiece is not neutral, as the mechanical watches we wear on our wrists. The ticking of this childhood timepiece and the effects it has on our present life is what maybe thought of as “emotional time”. Wearing a watch and using it as an instrument to navigate the present moment of our life is different. It is a conscious experience. We can choose to remove the watch at any moment and no longer be exposed to its influence. However, the debris of “emotional time” is constantly invading our present moment and distracting our attention. For years, we can sedate and control the effects of the childhood debris which leak out into our adult experiences, but sooner or later it will rear up like an angry snake and challenge the very fiber of our Being. It is not necessary to get to a crisis point in our life before we begin paying attention to it, but sometimes a crisis is exactly what it takes for our desperate abandoned child self to harness our attention.

    Yet the moment we turn inward and start sincerely attending to our child self with the unconditional love, compassion, and the devotion it deserves, our physical, mental and emotional states of imbalance gradually begin subsiding. This is the real work, and it realizes very real consequences. Once our child self comes to peace, so do we. It is that simple and that powerful. If we are not at peace, it is our child self that is in conflict. There is nowhere else to look, and there is no other solution but to compassionately reach inward and lovingly attend to this precious part of our Being. Only when we begin to accomplish this task, we will be able to truly understand what it is meant by the words:

    “Only when we become as children again, can we enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 18:2-4)

  • Growing Up.

    I heard my own words coming back to me, I listened to what I sounded like, it was a live tape recorder, my son.

    “You are not listening to me.”

    “Why are you being so difficult?”

    “Why do you have to make this so hard, you know what you need to do?”

    He wasn’t screaming, but trying to maintain his polite stance so that I could see he was good.

    I had done this too, I didn’t want him to see the bad side of me, yet after a few times of speaking and no action I would abandon that plan and just go full tilt in the hollering mode.

    I had wanted him to take care of his responsibilities without me having to take care of mine.

    Something had changed within me; he could feel my strong stance and that he had lost his power or rule between him and I.

    I no longer cared about being a ‘nice’ mom.

    I was done.
    I was tired.

    My words, my pleading, my forever telling him what to do and when, my constant directions had me exhausted.

    I had a voice-activated son. If I screamed and hollered, he moved.

    And I was tired of moving this big kid around, for
    I now had to look up at him.

    Perhaps it was his large body or the fact that I was worn down, but I finally had had enough.

    I took his iTouch hostage in exchange for responsible behavior.

    What I want most is a son who is responsible for self.

    What is insane is that I have been spoiling, babying and taking care of him, EXPECTING him to be responsible. Guess there was no need, for I had it!

    I was finally tired of doing his life along with mine.

    I will take away whatever else needs to be taken away to get him to now undo all my years of spoiling.

    It will be a hard and long learning curve for both of us, for I am guilty of over tending since I was so unattended.

    There is a balance in the middle.

    I will continue to find the things that I am responsible for, what a tending mother does, but not a spoiling mother.

    There is a fine line.

    He isn’t a bad kid, but he was teetering on the edge of following his peers and group mentality, for he was so used to following words of others.

    He was perfectly taught by me.

    What is so blatantly obvious is how he treated his superiors at school was the same way he treats me.

    He dances on the line of disrespect, before slipping back into compliance.

    He is approaching the cross roads in life, where he will decide who he is, what behaviors he wants to define himself, will he be responsible or blame those in charge for his circumstances?

    What I know for sure is that I have been a negative influence as far as holding him responsible for being responsible.

    I had taken too many responsibilities away from him and now I am going to have to work harder to give them back.

    And it will be harder on him to learn to follow his own voice inside.

    Perhaps that is called growing up.

  • The Neglected Child

    “Do not leave child unattended” is a sign that should be on the inside of my eyelids.

    I was surprised to find that I too was unattended.

    I was one of the ones she left when she went on a weekend getaway, I was one of them, and I responded in a way I felt was needed, perhaps not what I wanted to do, but what was called for.

    The resentment I felt covered up my unattended feelings; the abandonment was hidden behind the duties of being responsible.

    I wonder if the reason I kept being so responsible, is I didn’t want to feel the loneliness, the feelings of being left alone, the absence of being cared for?

    As long as I focused on the resentment of being responsible, it shielded me from sitting down in the middle of forlornness of knowing I was carelessly handled.

    This camouflage feeling became the standard I lived by and was defined by and NOT labeled as unattended.

    In fact, I am sure I tried to present to the world that we were all put together and fine.

    When I take a quick jaunt backward, to the age I was, I see a slideshow of neglect.

    Some of the boys took this adult-free zone as a weekend of no rules, ‘let the party begin’!

    It seemed it was my poor choice to pick up the responsibility instead of play.

    I played adult.

    And I took on the responsibility with it.

    What I can only guess is that it was easier to play adult that it was to be the neglected child.

  • Dismissing the Messenger.

    In Michael Brown’s book The Presence Process, he speaks of dismissing the messenger.

    “The first step is to acknowledge that the person or event setting us up has nothing to do with what is actually happening; they are just “the messenger” (Mess-ender). They are reflecting a memory that is surfacing from our unintegrated past. It is pointless to “shoot the messenger” because the Universe has an unlimited supply of them! So the first step in the emotional cleansing process is to dismiss the messenger. Internally, we can thank them for their great service and let them be on their way. In other words, instead of reacting to and venting at them we can say, “I could use a little time alone right now.” In the beginning, this step of gracefully side-stepping our urge to react may require courage and powerful self control because it requires breaking our life-long habit of knee-jerking into drama.”

    Step two Get the Message. The second step is to not automatically resort to our predictable yet unconscious physical, mental and emotional drama, but instead get the message. We have practiced this too. To accomplish this, we turn our attention inward by describing to ourselves the nature of our emotional reaction we experienced from being set up. We find one word that captures our emotional reaction. We say out loud to ourselves, “I feel angry. I feel sad. I feel hurt. I feel alone. I feel….” We keep searching in this way until we find the word that resonates, physically with our emotional reaction. If we are angry, our face may flush, or our hands may buzz, or we may feel a downward movement in our solar plexus. Once we have accessed the word that describes reaction that the set up has triggered within us, then we have completed step two.

    Step three: Feel it. Instead of externalizing what is occurring to us by resorting to blame, we must now consciously internalize the experience. We must feel it. We have practiced this step as well. This particular step is a remarkable part of this whole procedure because instead of projecting our emotions out into the world as we normally did when we got set up in the past, we are now choosing to internalize and thus contain the experience. This is not to be confused with the act of suppressing our experiences. Our conscious choice is to internalize the setup so that we can learn from it is not suppression: it is discovery. It is also called “containment.” Suppression is the act of pretending it did not happen. Our choice to now be present with whatever upsets us enables us to realize that we can physically feel within our body what we initially thought was happening “out there”. So whatever the emotion is that we have successfully named is what we must allow ourselves to feel without censorship or judgment. In essence, what the messenger (mess-ender) has done, or has been attempting to do, depending on how many times we have been triggered by this same event is to bring to our attention the fact that we have an internal blockage that we resist feeling our way through.

    Step four: Come Pass On. Once we feel this emotional blockage as a physical sensation within our own body, we are ready to transmute it with “divine alchemy” by moving it out of our body by applying the power of our compassionate Presence. We have already prepared ourselves for this step as well. Take a careful look at the word “compassion.” Phonetically and visually it reveals itself as “come pass on”. Compassion throughout The Presence Process means: You can come to me and I will let you pass on without interference (entering fear) or judgment (agenda).

    At this point in the procedure we might justifiably exclaim, “oh come on! Here we are feeling angry, our hands buzzing, and our solar plexus all tightened up, and now we are suddenly expected to switch to compassion? Get real!”

    Getting ‘real’ is exactly what we must intend. Activating compassion when we are in the midst of an emotional reaction involves inclusion of our child
    self. To accomplish this, it is important to remind ourselves that the emotional reaction that was triggered within us by the messenger has nothing to do with our present adult life. It is a cry from our child self. It is an echo from the past calling for our attention because only our attention can restore real balance to the quality of all our experiences. We choose to respond to what we are experiencing emotionally therefore by closing our eyes and picturing our child self feeling exactly the same way we are as a consequence of being set up by the messenger. We have already practiced this too. By metaphorically embracing our child self, we automatically activate compassion. We are saying, “you can come to me, and I will love you unconditionally until what frightens you, making you angry, or making you sad passes.”

    When we become sincere in approaching our child self, our chest will automatically start to well up with the emotion that we have resisted
    feeling for so long. This suppressed emotion will surface in waves and dissolve into tears. We will feel the energy moving up and from our solar
    plexus, through our chest area, into and through our throat and eventually out of our body. Often we may even have the sensation of heat literally
    peeling off our body.

    Once this experience of release subsides, we will enter a sense of relief and peace. Through consistent application of The Emotional Cleansing Process, we will discover that the messenger that had repeatedly triggered us over and over again will not return. Why should it when we have consciously received the message? Sometimes, it will take going through this emotional cleansing procedure two and three times over a couple of days or weeks to restore balance to a particular experience. With devotion and commitment, balance will be restored. The more diligently we apply The Emotional Cleansing Process, the more proficient we become at wielding it and subsequently the more efficient it becomes. So the new pathway of learned responsible behavior is:
    Dismiss the messenger – get the message – feel it – com pass on.

    We can apply this technique to solve disagreements, to heal physical ailments, and to integrate any situation of conflict and confusion arising in our life. Every time we apply it, we will be equally astounded by the realization that we can transform the quality of any experience “out there” by moving consciously inot ourselves and compassionately making the internal adjustment. This technique confirms, without a doubt, reflection of our internal emotional condition. It proves that making peace has nothing to do with the other party. It shows us that an unbalanced adult is an unattended child. It also reveals that tears detoxify the Soul and that compassion is the key to reopening the doorway of our heart.”

    Michael Brown

  • Joined them back together.

    The way I described this past Christmas was an ugly beautiful one, where inside I was so dark and the outside so light, how mental psyche steers my world, not the decorations on the outside.

    I was clearly shown that no matter how I orchestrated and decorated and baked and made perfect the outside, it had no influence upon my inner world.

    It wasn’t even a blue Christmas it was black.

    Frozen darkness inside…is that called depression?

    Yet it was a moving depression where I was working on the outside to cheer me up inside.

    I always pictured depression as sitting in a stupor, unable to move. Is there a moving depression or a fallacy that if you can create a warm peaceful atmosphere you will have the same inside?

    What I think I thought, was that if you were dark inside you could change it up on the outside to help alleviate the feelings, yet what needs to happen is that you have to go deeper into the feelings, leaving the outside alone.

    When I started to spiral into darker feelings, I kept
    cleaning, instead I should have stopped and sat with my feelings.

    Writing and exploring why I felt the way I felt.

    I wonder if depression is repressed feelings, if denying them and focusing on changing the environment you live in, instead of investigating your feelings and relationships is the cause?

    What I feel is I was given a real life experience, situations and feelings that represented the flavor of my childhood, and then a dream to show where the seed was planted, how my mental psyche was developed.

    A main piece of the puzzle was cleared up for me.

    My father was happy and desiring me.
    And I was happy to please him.

    The sheer terror wasn’t there, perhaps too young to know…in my mind no terror.
    And my head seemed detached from my body.

    My body and head separated.
    Hence, no memory in my head, but my body held on tight to the trauma.

    I am filled with admiration for the little girl who so bravely withstood such trauma, who did her best to please in the most horrific of circumstances, all she wanted was her daddy to be happy.

    When it is over, and the child seems ‘unaffected’ it is because they no longer are one.

    The mind and the body separated.

    The body holds the truth while the mind was elsewhere.

    Bikram Yoga is about bringing the mind back to the body.

    In the 360 days that have passed, I have missed 32 days, days in which I was working so hard to reconnect my head to the rest of my body.

    To live as mind body and soul.

    Yoga is the yoke that joined them back together.

  • Where I stopped caring for me.

    As I read back a few days in my blog, I saw where the trimmings had a hold of me and almost ruined Christmas, and then the actions and expectations did the job the trimmings had started.

    It is like negative energy travels from item to person to thing, to any place in my world to latch on, and if I am not aware where my power is, it slips in and takes over.

    What I believe happens as well, as the busier you are the more unaware you become, so busy doing you forget to be.

    My Christmases of past were very busy doings, they wore me out to the last drop of energy, it was what I thought was needed to make a great Christmas to do over and beyond what you normally do.

    To put your self into trimming the house, oodles of gifts, baking, card sending, wrapping your self up into a dozen places until there is no you left.

    Exhausted and depleted.

    A manic Christmas cheer.

    Taking the season of giving into a manic state of doing and overdoing and then doing yet more.

    This holiday season is a playground for those of us who have ‘responsibility addictions’ who feel we carry the power to make others happy. It is like a drugstore of places for us to get our hits.

    There should be a warning label on Christmas.

    “Be careful not to give your self away.”

    I had a very odd dream on Christmas Eve, well actually very early Christmas morning, as I awoke from it, it left me knowing its content was a metaphor for how I lived my life.

    It isn’t a nice dream, but I will state it here anyway.

    I became aware I was in the back of a station wagon, face down, naked from the waist down, I was a young girl and I was watching a man approaching the side of the car, the windows are open and I hear him say my maiden name. In the middle seats are young kids, and the feeling I have is that I will offer my body to him to spare them. He climbs on my back and does his thing. I don’t feel anything, except that I am making him happy.

    When I awoke from this dream it seemed like a complete metaphor for my life.

    How I will be a whore for another and I will do so to spare another pain, I will abuse my body for the sake of others.

    It stayed with me this ugly dream on Christmas day.

    Its contents a visual of how I navigated life in co-dependency, how I will use my body in two ways for the pleasure of others and to spare pain for the innocent, to protect them I will abuse to my body.

    How others use my body was clearly displayed with my approval and willingness.

    Perhaps I needed that shocking dream to wake me up to how I get lost in another’s life.

    And what was so telling was the age of this young girl, as I caught sight of her in the rearview mirror, very blonde hair and young body, her flat chest, being strong beyond her years, willing to suffer for another.

    Courageously selflessly boldly the sacrificial lamb.

    Perhaps I don’t have images of my child abuse, but this is as close as it gets.

    And what I feel was that I truly didn’t focus on his deed and my pain, but his happiness and who I spared.

    What began at the moment of abuse was the fragmentation of living life for self.

    It is there my responsibility gene was developed and pruned, where I became the pleaser and the saver.

    Where I stopped caring for me.

  • Actions towards Self.

    On facebook as we all add cartoon characters to our profile to stand against child abuse, we are just nudging the tip of the iceberg and the action steps needed are not for the faint of heart.

    I watched my father travel through the system that society has in place to ‘deal’ with the perpetrators, and I watched him exit the other end, a free man.

    After 40 years of abusing little girls, he was ‘tried’ on one reduce criminal offense. That is the court system in action. Believe it or not people were paid to act as a detective, act as a judge, act as defense attorney, and their actions all benefited my criminal dad.

    I watched my mother and her response to all this, how she visited him in jail, how she drove him (after he was set free) to her daughter’s house. Her actions enabled him til the bitter end.

    I watched my siblings, most who had been abused by him, act in accordance to their upbringing, using their definitions of conditional love do what they needed to do.

    Keeping the family together, knitting back after the hole that was ripped in its fabric, holding on tightly unknowing what they are holding on to.

    Actions of dysfunctional love.

    I watched actions and there were plenty of them, all the actions are supporting the pedophile, all.

    Not one supported the child.

    To support the child, the family falls apart.
    To support the child, the love is shown to be abuse.
    To support the child, the court systems not be a tunnel to pass through, but the end of the road.

    The child carries the weight of evidence.

    The child’s actions have to stronger than the judge, the detective, the family, and society at large.

    The abused child has to topple it all.

    The only hero I see is a brave abused child saying who abused her, and after telling nothing was done.

    Everyone failed her… one by one they fall.

    Somehow we feel if we can only get the child to speak of it, if we can teach them what to do.

    Guess what the child is the only one who is doing this right.

    We need to teach the judges, the lawyers, the families, the mothers, wives, daughters, and sons.

    We need to stop focusing on good touch bad touch, and focus on the actions and what they are really really doing.

    I am incensed by all of the folks who knew and did nothing well nothing would be nice.

    Who knew and then made their action step one that was for the good of the man who raped me.

    Like mad puppets, they responded like robots, pulling strings to see him free.

    Actions. Be wary of your actions.
    Who do they serve and what is their message.
    Who are you standing near?
    What chorus are you singing with?

    Actions.

    Actions are what I watched in total disheartening disbelief.

    I watched as once again, just as it was when I was but a little girl, all hands, deeds and actions moved to cover him.

    While I was displayed with my underwear down, my abuse showing, no one tended to my wounds.

    The detective pleaded that I wouldn’t allow this to change my relationship with my dad.

    My mother says, “forgive and forget and move along, we have wasted five years, now six” pull up your underwear and get back to the family tree. She is back where she once began.

    With all the actions, nothing changed.

    At the end of the scene all roles remain firmly in place, all except one.

    Mine. This required me to change me.

    Be the change you want to see in the world, it begins with you.

    I agree with Buddha.

    I couldn’t change the world, so I changed me.

    Actions towards self.