I M Perfect lady

Tag: feelings

  • Listen…

    The 20 most important questions we should be asking ourselves is the theme of Martha Beck’s column in The O Magazine for February.

    There are many great questions, but I love this one.

    “Is this what I want to be doing?” This very moment is, always, the only moment in which you can make changes. Knowing which changes are best for you comes, always, from assessing what you feel. Ask yourself many times every day if you like what you are doing. If the answer is no, start noticing what you’d prefer. Thus begins the revolution.” Martha

    Most often I hear what people don’t want to be doing while they are doing it.

    We call it complaining or whining.

    Yet what we fail to Hear is the actual words.

    Maybe it isn’t so much in asking the question, but listening to your voice or complaints, whether they are spoken out loud or silent behind, as begrudgingly does that which you don’t want to do.

    And I love her first question.

    What questions should I be asking myself? At first I thought asking yourself what you should be asking yourself was redundant. It isn’t. Without this question, you wouldn’t ask any others, so it gets top billing. It creates an alert, thoughtful mind state, ideal for ferreting out the information you most need in every situation. Ask it frequently. Martha

    Both of these questions can be life changing if you ask the questions with integrity and listen to your body and how you feel and then be courageous enough to actually follow through.

    Ask a bunch of questions today and listen…

  • My feelings are me.

    In reading, “A Course in Weight Loss” by Marianne Williamson, it came to me how we are so untruthful with our feelings, so neglectful, so mean, how we run away ducking and hiding, how the planet at large doesn’t like to see sad feelings.

    Feelings of grief or despair, feelings that lower the energies within, a dark foreboding feeling, the feelings that maybe we are not one with reality.

    It seems that at least in my house, we were to skip over reality and that alone was the cause of most dark feelings.

    I am thinking, and I may be wrong, but that when you walk hand in hand with reality, you will be less sad, if you are not wanting things to be different.

    It is the wanting to change what can’t be changed that brings sadness.

    To not be who you are.

    When there is a separation between what is and what you want, that the most suffering happens.

    When you surrender in agreement and sit with what is, although you feel sad to let your dream go, eventually you will see the peace of being in sync with the Universe.

    My greatest sadness was that I didn’t have a dad.
    It wasn’t that I had a pedophile.
    Once I got over the fact that I couldn’t have a dad, when I accepted I was a girl without a man who could be a dad dad, I was much more content and at peace, I was no longer fighting reality.

    To me, when you feel deep sadness I wonder if you are in a place of wishful thinking, mad dreaming, reality changing, if you are struggling hard with acceptance.

    Sadness has a message.
    What is it saying?

    To me I have lots of sorrow escaping in yoga, past sorrows, past dreams and expectations that never came to bear. Even new sadness comes in along with a future dream, which can be no more.

    Some of my sadness that escapes in yoga is the little girl finally telling me where I hadn’t been with her.

    Where she was left alone while I dreamed on.

    Where she was in reality and I escaped.
    Tears flow of rejoining, connecting and being one.

    I stay with my feelings now and find them very enlightening no matter how dark and confusing and restricting, for underneath the tangled mess is a part of me that has been lost and unfelt and needs to be tended to.

    All feelings are signals, which steer you to live authentically as you.

    They are not about the other person, the feelings are specifically made for you, they are your prized possessions, they are what makes you you.

    When you stand with your feelings, you are standing up for you.

    When you cover them up, you are pretending to be someone else.

    My feelings are me.

  • 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

  • Tamper with Reality.

    I was asked after my last blog, if others will think I am crazy, and perhaps they will. However, unless you have lived a life deeply in denial where your head view of life is not what is actually going on, where you body is experiencing one thing and you are telling yourself something totally different, you will not get my post, my blog or my experiences.

    What I feel happened to me was that when I found out my father was a pedophile my body’s feelings made sense, although in my head there was no evidence of it.

    The totally extreme opposites of what I thought life was compared to what it really was was mind blowing.

    It blew all my beliefs, thoughts and views to pieces and I was left with a head that had to relearn how to see reality.

    I taught my head by how my body felt, instead of allowing it access to create a scenario that opposed reality.

    If I sound crazy, well that is okay for I was for 46 years, and it is crazy to go back and discover the way I was formed, how my mind made things up, how it was detached, how it and my body saw life drastically different.

    I feel that the root of all madness or insanity is to live a life where the mind and body are not aligned.

    In cases of child abuse or where the adult says one thing but does another, is where insanity or madness begins.

    Love hurts is an example.
    Relying on someone who repeatedly lets you down.
    Where we are unable to put up boundaries we then make up stories to live with instead.

    So much so, that we live in an alternative reality.

    If at anytime you let your feelings down, by not voicing them, by fooling your self that you don’t feel what you feel, you are dabbling in insanity.

    What I learned most in these 6 years, is that I not only have the right, it is best if I walk hand and hand with my feelings, and my thoughts and beliefs will follow.

    I have learned that by watching actions and feeling the sensations in my body, I can navigate myself in reality and be authentic in words, thoughts, feelings and actions, we all agree.

    Sanity does not have to pretend a feeling doesn’t exist.

    What some call social niceties are close to insane allowances, pretending to pretend not to see/feel/know what you know.

    I again feel that some of what we call ‘Mentally Handicapped’, are actually more sane than most, for they don’t seem to have the flipping switch to pretend.

    They call life as they see it, as do little children, they are not looking to spare another’s feelings; they are just calling it like it is.

    Sparing another’s feelings by making up a lie…just seems odd to me, are we not making up a new reality?

    Anyway, call me crazy I don’t mind, but I am no longer interested in sparing someone’s feelings.

    I spared my father, I didn’t want to disappoint him, to make him unhappy, and look where it led?

    I would rather hurt your feelings than tamper with reality.

  • A Life Review of Feelings

    While in yoga yesterday, I wondered if the body could express itself without a head, is there a way to vent your feelings below the neck?

    It seems to me that the head holds all the valves of release.

    Our tears are shed through our eyes, our mouths speak words, our beliefs and thoughts either match our feelings or deny them, but all the expressions are done above the neck, yet the feelings seem to be below.

    We feel deeply with our heart, our gut has instincts and intuitively knows, we feel ‘something’ deeply in our bones, and the truth of our experiences seems to reside in the torso.

    Yet the head is where we can articulate what the body feels.

    It is like the head needs to tune into the body, open a line, and form a connection.

    When the two are joined as one, we can live a life that is steered by feelings and emotions allowing us to express specifically our needs, wants and desires.

    Living totally in the head leaves you separated from feelings and emotions.

    I am not certain you can release emotions with out a head.

    The vents are in the head as far as I can tell.

    If a body is detached from the head, it just fills up with unexpressed emotions, which grows into rage, rage that explodes and subsides all without ever delving into their formation. I believe the root of disease.

    A head that is detached from the body, is a senseless head.

    A head that is making choices based on whims of others, for it has no roots, nothing to anchor it down, it is not grounded in feelings or emotions connected to your life, it floats a few feet ahead of your body.

    Amazing to witness this, live this way and then get the opportunity to experience the rejoining of head to body, to feel feelings that have long been stuffed down, to go back in a life review of feelings.

  • Almost Ruined Christmas

    This Christmas finds me in a different spot, a place of being too tired to care about Christmas, where joy and love and peace would be found not having Christmas.

    It isn’t so much Christmas itself, but that I am the one to create the Christmas feeling and I am too tired to be of good cheer.

    It is like Santa lost his jolly.

    The desire and spirit within me has faltered along with my lost energy, and I feel the weight of responsibility to carry it all.

    Not sure why, perhaps because in the past I had the time and the know how, I simply did it.

    Now that woman is gone, she went to work.

    She is unavailable to whip up Christmas on the side.

    And I feel the pressure to bake, not the joy.
    I feel forced to do things I used to enjoy.
    It isn’t pleasure now, but added work.

    I found myself unprepared.

    Maybe it is time for traditions to change or be passed on.

    Fighting with, instead of succumbing to, what is.

    Letting go of orchestrating the family Christmas and bringing in new recruits.

    My new santa makers leave everything til the last, for there are still four days, I was told yesterday. I guess in a young person’s eyes, that is a long time.

    I think I will have to re-adjust my way of doing Christmas, it will be more inclusive and I will take a back seat.

    I just can’t lose my spirit for Christmas.

    Instead I will change the traditions, letting many of them go, bring in simpler things that keep the spirit alive.

    After all, a cookie is a cookie, and it is insane to think it will matter if it arrives or not for Christmas.

    So, we will be joyful with whatever we accomplish in the next three days. I must relax and let the it be as it will be.

    It will be much better than having a grumpy lady in our home for Christmas.

    And let me tell you, I was grumpy last night trying to be a Christmas baker after a long heavy day of mail.

    No more.

    We now have some grumpy cookies and if that is all that happens I am fine.

    Much better to be happy than grumpy with the trimmings.

    The trimmings got a hold of me and almost ruined Christmas.

  • I feel Solo

    As I look at my self in my life today, I am so much freer than I would have ever dreamed possible.

    While I live in the same house, married to the same man, and still have four children with me, I am no longer chained by their behavior…well okay, I still get stuck for a half hour or so, but I can usually set myself free.

    Dr. Berman spoke of the triangle affect, where relationships get stuck when couples move from one corner to the next exchanging roles and manipulating feelings.

    I lived on that triangle for years and years, and I was the master at being a hero and dabbled in the victim villain roles pretty often as well.

    On the triangle you are never in control of your feelings, somebody owns yours and you own anothers, we forever go around making other people feel and feeling how other people make us…never free to feel by yourself.

    If your not moving feelings around, there is the spot of hero, where you literally take over the responsibility of another’s life, where you come in and save the day, allowing them to miss a lesson to grow and learn by experience.

    This triangle is dysfunction and it leaves you separated from your feelings, where you are forever at the mercy of another.

    My past six years have been unlearning the triangle reflexes of blaming the other, and instead look inside to see where I gave up power.

    Looking for the power leak, where I lost control of my own power.

    Any time I say, “you disappoint me” or “ you make me feel sad” I am back on the triangle as a victim.

    Instead if I say, “I am sad or I am hurt” I am in control of my feelings and I get to explore why.

    What actions did I do to wind up feeling this way?

    What can I do now to make me feel better?

    It leaves the other person out of my feelings; it frees them up to be in charge of their own.

    The co-dependency triangle leaves you so tangled up and out of control, where you never can be assured that your peace, love and joy will stick around, that soon something or somebody will come along and steal it away.

    What I love love love, is that you are the only one who can give that away. It isn’t stolen, you literally hand it over in a victim like drama way with great words and feelings.

    When I learned that my love, my joy and my peace were mine and I had right and obligation to protect them, life was much easier, I walked away from the triangle.

    Standing authentic with your feelings isn’t always easy, but always empowering.

    I no longer disappoint my feelings or cover them up or speak down to them or pretend them to be different than what they are.

    I stand up with them no matter what.

    My feelings empower me.

    The Spirit of me is alive in feelings.

    I am as I feel or I feel as I am.

    I blame no one for how I feel.

    I feel solo.

  • A whole You.

    I listened yesterday as Dr. William Petit talked to Oprah about the evil that came into his life that destroyed his wife, his two daughters, and his home, that when it left, there was very little of himself standing, he was a man he didn’t even know.

    A few points struck me as he talked, one is how evil feels looking at it from the inside, and how he used to see evil somewhere out there, a distant thing. He was introduced to evil in a very large way, and it totally changed who he is and how he sees the world.

    There is a huge difference between understanding intellectually what evil is, in comparison to living in the throes of what it destroys, what it takes away and what lay in the aftermath and how you will deal when it comes knocking.

    Feeling evil and its energy and knowing how it tromps into life with no regard to life and feelings, is to feel evil’s blindness to another human being.

    Oprah asked him about forgiveness and evil, and I can’t remember his words, but I understand his feelings on this. That forgiveness is no match against evil.

    Forgiveness always seems to take on the image of being able to negate what happened, to find a place of peace in spite of the hole that evil left behind, or perhaps not even acknowledging the hole it left behind.

    Society has this unchallenged ideal that forgiveness trumps evil, that forgiveness can change evil.

    I believe what he is saying is that evil is an actual phenomena that we can’t change by forgiveness and that we are to acknowledge its power.

    The energy of evil is to destroy; to hurt, to deliver pain, it isn’t warm and fuzzy.

    I thought he sat in the middle of what is, in the center of what happened and described what evil feels like and how it changes who you are.

    The challenge left behind is who will you now become?

    I watched a few clips, and you can see he is still freshly wounded, that it pains him to talk and how he is trying to wrap his mind around such sudden drastic changes in his life.

    Holding on trying to focus on the good, bringing more good, trying to not succumb to the negative pull of drowning or giving up.
    He describes closure, as the hole will eventually lose its ragged edges that waves of goodness will wash over those rough spots leaving them smooth, but the hole will always remain open, a hole in his heart and soul.

    I agree.

    It is also an opening to find your authentic self, a you that stands behind the roles and titles, a you that lives beyond the surface of life; the hole drops you into the center of your being.

    Being a whole you.

  • Sprouting Self Hatred

    As I headed to my room to do yoga with my belly unsettled, images of the laughing sisters, my demeanor glum, I wondered how yoga would be.

    The standing poses went by without a hitch, but as I lay on the floor, my focus went into the belly.

    What was going on?
    What was I feeling?
    Is the gut where you feel?

    The thought came in, “I hate your guts”…and then I thought of how in the last few weeks, while doing yoga, I have been concentrating on my belly, my hernia that has been there for a long time, and I have been mentally pulling my guts back in.

    Whether it will work or not, my focus has been on my belly.

    “I hate your guts”…I thought was coming from my sisters, that I was feeling their negative energy coming in to me.

    As I lay there rubbing my belly, asking it what it was up, what was all this about?

    Tears flowing, caressing my belly, breathing, missing poses, it finally occurred to me, “I hate My Guts!”

    My hating of my self has been with me a long long time; in fact my guts have been trying to escape!

    I hate my self for no longer being perfect, I felt like a little girl hating her body for its abuse wounds.

    During the final breathing exercises, I visualized hate blowing out, and immediately felt that I have been holding a belly full of hate for my body since my abuse.

    I hated being imperfect.

    My belly can rest now, for I will now work on loving my belly, loving more the imperfections that abuse leaves behind.

    How awful that abuse leaves hatred of self inside our bellies, how we try to escape from ourselves.

    I feel I have found the source of all my angst, the infestation of feelings that lay inside, the seed abuse left there to grow.

    Sprouting self hatred…

  • The Wise Listened

    I only spent one hour in her presence and wanted to follow her home, and in fact we may have been behind her motor home as she left our town, I had the chance but turned off as our road appeared, allowing her to leave me wanting more.

    It wasn’t so much her story but rather the affirmations I felt as I listened to her.  I wanted more.

    Her story and mine shared some similar roads, and I could see how her courage was grown, how she shined in her individuality how comfortable she is in her skin, although I know it wasn’t always so.

    She spoke of her childhood in a tone of ‘this is what it was’ marveling with us and showing us how those steps were gifts that she used to become who she is today. 

    Dr. Maya Angelou.

    From an abused mute child to one who had us all sitting in rapt attention to each word, insight and profound wisdom she uttered.

    Maybe we can’t listen to another until they have something worthwhile to share.

    She has enough wisdom inside, and I feel I just got one little tiny peek.

    A peek of who I will be!

    She makes life seem only worthwhile if it is colorful; with characters and scenes that put fiction to shame.

    It’s like the more you suffer, the better the storyteller you will become and how much more interesting the story will be to tell.

    She didn’t hide the ‘shameful’ parts, rather she allowed them their truths to stand equal to the kinder parts, the happier times and she weaved them all together into one strand of self.

    The audience followed her as she led us on her journey as we sampled a few moments of significance that made her who she is today.

    A colorful woman telling us this isn’t a rehearsal, so get on and live life.

    Thanks Dr. Maya Angelou for taking the journey to come and speak to us today.

    We are just another spot on her journey, and she a spot in ours.

    A connection and energy exchanged.

    I left feeling she was giving us a hand up, as she reminded us of all who came before us, what their cost was, and how we don’t have the right to waste our time being less than who we can be.

     A wise woman sat on that stage and the wise listened.