I M Perfect lady

Tag: Finding

  • Wordlessness…

    "Wordlessness shifts consciousness out of the verbal part of the brain and into the more creative, intuitive, and sensory brain regions. Which is more powerful? Well, the verbal region processes about forty bits of information per second. The nonverbal processes about eleven million bits per second."  

    Martha Beck writes about this in her new book, "Finding You Way in a Wild New World."

    "Wounded into Wordlessness."

    "Sometimes it takes a radical event to reawaken you into the inner voice that's always telling you what decisions to make, what to embrace and what to avoid, how to steer through various inner and outer situations. This happened to Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist at Harvard Medical School, when, at the age of thirty-seven, she had a massive stroke that wiped out the speech center in the left hemisphere of her brain. An expert in neurology, she was able to observe her own horrific experience with clinical precision, but it took her eight long years of grueling effort to rebuild her verbal functions so that she could describe the event in words. Immediately after the stroke she didn't even recognize her own mother, or know what the word "mother" meant."

    "This would have been tragic if it hadn't been so illuminating. You see, as Taylor lost her ability to think verbally, she gained the experience of a human mind freed from language. And that, it turned out, was worth having."

    "I felt enormous and expansive," Taylor recounted later, in a TED talk you should watch (Google "Jill Bolte Taylor TED talk").  "My spirit soared free lie a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria." Before her stroke, Taylor "knew" herself to be "a single individual separated from the energy flow around (her) and separated from (others)."  But when her verbal brain shut down, she found herself knowing, with equal if not greater conviction, that she lived in a universally interconnected universe in which "we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful."

    "This is precisely the kind of thing we hear from menders of all cultures: Wordlessness allows us to see our true nature, and to heal from the violence of a thought system that cuts us apart, destroying compassion for ourselves and others…."

     "Unlearning To Be Brilliant."

    "To master Wordlessness, heal your true nature, and become a wayfinder, you must unlearn almost everything you were taught in school about what it means to be intelligent. The sharp focus you were told to sustain is actually a limiting, stressful, narrow, attention field – something animals only use in the moment of "fight or flight". Dropping into Wordlessness moves the brain into its "rest and relax" state. This affects the whole body, releasing a flood of hormones that helps repair and heal your body, relaxes your muscles, and puts you into a deep stillness, with expressionless face and soft eyes. Because you're paying attention to so much nonverbal sensory data, you may not respond verbally to comments or questions from other people when you're wordlessly "in the moment."

    "In our culture, gazing into the middle distance, ignoring language, and reacting only to genuine social interactions, physical feelings, and emotions is interpreted as laziness or stupidity. This is one reason we're so plagued by unhappiness and illness.  Yet when you drop into Wordlessness, you may find that not paying attention to words is a delicate, sophisticated, and at first difficult skill. You won't be good at it without a lot of practice.  I don't mean mere repetition, but something psychologists call "deep practice."

    "Deep-Practicing Wordlessness"

    "Scientists have recently discovered that we physically restructure our brains when we learn new skills, especially when we use a learning process known as "deep practice." Deep practice is more than simply repeating something over and over.  In deep practice, we aim for a precise experience, at first "getting it" only in brief flashes, then repeating the effort until we can perform the skill reliably. Wayfinders of all cultures deep-practice dropping into wordlessness whenever they need to orient themselves, to figure out what they should do next or which direction to go."

    "You'll find sever methods of dropping into Wordlessness in this chapter. Remember you can't learn them by reading about them. Trying to understand Wordlessness by reading is like trying to understand skydiving by drawing parachutes. Please, actually try the exercises. In fact deep-practice them.  You'll know they're working when you begin feeling flickers of peace, calm and safety.  You'll become more aware of the subtle clues informing you about your surroundings, about other people's feelings and intentions.  You'll want to make choices according to your own perceptions rather than whatever people are telling you. You don't have to start acting differently – not all at once – but you'll begin to figure you how you wish you could act. Persist long enough, and you'll be able to stretch the moments of total clarity into minutes and eventually hours.  If you want to be at true wayfinder the will come when you remain in a Wordless state most of the time."

    "Techniques for Dropping Into Wordlessness: The Paths to Stillness."

    Le'ts start with the best-known ways of reaching wordlessness, which I call the paths of stillness. They involve – follow the logic closely here – sitting still. Meditation, which was regarded as bizarre by most Americans, during my childhood, is now something many of us feel we should be doing, the way we feel we should stop eating sugar and organize our shopping receipts.  If you love to meditate, good for you! Keep it up! But if meditation holds the same appeal for you as water-soluble medical fiber, try one of the techniques below. They're very simple, which shouldn't be confused with easy. Persist at deep-practicing these techniques until you feel flickers of softness, expansion and peace. Then practice holding the sensation longer and longer."

    I am only going to write one….here Martha lists 3 in her book.

    "Path of stillness: Follow your bloodstream."

    "This method, which one of my teachers learned from the tracker Tom Brown Jr. is supposedly an Apache technique for putting the mind in a state of Sacred Silence. It's my personal favorite way of dropping into wordlessness.

    1. Take a few deep, full breaths.

    2. Exhale completely, and pause before inhaling.

    3. In the space before you need to breathe in again, focus your attention on your heart until you can feel it beating. This may take up to a minute.

    4. Take another breath and exhale.  Along with your heartbeat, find the sensation of your pulse moving through your hands, feet, scalp, entire body.

    5. Stay focused on the feeling of your entire circulatory system as it channels your lifeblood to your head and extremities.  See if you can feel it moving through your organs as well.

    6. Perform some simple task – walking, washing the dishes, making your bed – while continuing to feel your heartbeat and over all pulse.  You'll find the activity becomes strangely blissful.

    "Wordlessness in Motion."

    Feeling your bloodstream while you walk around is a level of Wordlessness that can challenge many meditators, who associate deep awareness with sitting peacefully on a cushion in their favorite yoga studio. Fully reclaiming your true nature means sustaining a Wordless connection to your environment and inner condition no matter what's going on.  This means replacing thoughts about events with authentic sensations that track whatever's occurring in the present moment.  Because thinking is the most familiar state of being for most of us, dropping thought and feeling our sensations and emotions may be frightening, even painful. But in the end, it's far less painful that typical human behavior, which is to become lost in thoughts and unavailable to anything real."

    "Our universal teaching from wayfinders is that we suffer more from our thoughts about events than from the events themselves. Detaching from our verbal thoughts eliminates almost all of our psychological suffering. As wordlessness arises, fears about the future and regrets or anger about the past events slip away, because past and future don't exist except in stories in our minds. This, according to psychoneuroimmunolgist Robert Sapolsky, is why wild animals don't get stress-related illnesses. They react with fight or flight responses when circumstances call for it, but then return quickly to a baseline of relaxation."  Marth Beck.

    I love this book and how she is explaining what I have experienced.  How my word mind failed me and I was then plugged into the wordlessness.


  • Not our Time to Connect.

    In the past 6 months, I have been in contact with former members of the FALC, and at first glance, it seemed that we would all be on the same page, but that is not so.  

    The common ground ends at the exit.

    Some have left under their own power, while others were forced out or voted out.  Some have left in search of a new religion, to hear a new voice of God or in rebellion.  I am not sure many left like me.

    I left due to the fact that I discovered abuse was sanctioned by the church…in subtle and not so subtle ways.  I left with the discovery of abuse…and not in search of a new God or religion.  My main exit point was abuse. 

    I somehow misjudged the ex-members, believing that they, like me, sought the truth.  That they were reaching for a deeper meaning in their life, in search of walking with integrity or healing from abuse.

    But that is not always the case.

    It isn't as clear cut as splitting or dividing it into the ex-members and the members…it is much more involved than that.

    Just because you exit the church, doesn't mean you are 'better' as in healed.  Your journey then has just begun.  I assumed many had awakened to their own inner truth, but come to find out there are many more reasons for leaving.

    I failed to recognize the walking wounded and assumed many things about them and their journey and granted them a higher level of understanding then they actually had.

    On the surface the scene appeared to be much more healthy than it actually appeared. Their storyline convincing…and I guess I was eager to greet other ex-members, especially those who too had been sexually abused…to learn, share and find a friendship.

    It seemed to be a perfect match. They knew where I was coming from and how it felt, yet I was too quick in trusting and misunderstood our common ground for equal healing.

    Our similar childhoods made the 'getting to know you' stage much shorter, for we all knew the players.  I dropped my guard and level of discernment and calculations of truth, simply because they came from the church…I assumed many things.

    And I of all people should have known better.  I should have recognized the work it takes to undo the years of being brainwashed and what it does to the human Spirit.

    But I didn't.  I somehow elevated them to my level, without the proof or feedback from them.  

    Perhaps this is all part of the journey, learning how to read people and knowing when to walk away.

    Some have come close to me and backed away and I have done the same.  I have supported blogs, to then no longer support them. I have friended folks on facebook and then unfriended them and have had the same done to me.

    I get it.  It isn't as simple as we all belong together outside of the church…we don't, for we are out here for different reasons.

    There is a huge difference depending upon whether you were forced out or you simply couldn't stay there a minute longer.  

    Some left because their families were not treated well, they leave with resentment and anger.  

    I left knowing the breakdown of the system or that it didn't work on big sins.  I left with a complete inner conviction that the FALC was a key player in keeping abuse in my home.  I felt the failings of the church, personally.  I wasn't kicked out, I ran out.

    It is good to know that I can walk down the friendship path and know when to get off.  That I am free to get to know you and when you show me bits and pieces of yourself that don't ring true, I can back away.

    Just because you walk away from a cult or a dysfunctional family doesn't mean you are automatically healed. You then have to learn how to walk functionally.  The exit is that start of healing, but the healing is a long ways down the road.

    As this blog has evolved, as I have evolved, I have openly supported other blogs…and yet I didn't openly unsupport them.  I believe they are on their journey, just not to the point of which I can fully support. There just seems to be more dysfunction than function.

    I can't knowingly support folks who are unknowingly still abusing…still lost even unto themselves.  

    I would like to warn other newly exiting members to be careful as you make contact with other past members. We all have been subjected to years of brainwashing and not all are striving to gain inner control and are left in a very confused state.

    There really is no difference between being lost in the FALC or lost outside of its doors. Each will have to find their way back to their own inner truth and integrity…and some will remain lose cannons without a connection deep within themselves. 

    I am betting the percentage that make it out, completely out and free of the entanglements of mind control etc are few…most will be lost souls, damaged but free…especially those who were also sexually abused as well as religiously abused, a double twist.

    It is not an easy road to untangle those ties that bound us within the church, and just because we shared similar childhoods are we a good match.

    For some the matching time is not right. We are at different places on our own personal journeys…our level of healing is off.  It is not our time to connect.

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    Photograph by Hannah Jukuri

  • Be you alone.

    Yesterday I was asked if I felt lonely and I felt inside of myself and I didn’t, but I understood lonely and have been there often.

    Yet what I failed to understand until I started writing today was that lonely is seeking that part of ourselves that were wounded in childhood. It isn’t so much someone, but a part of us that is missing. We are lonely for ourselves.

    I was writing along and discovered that my meaning or my view of a childhood wound was neglect, sexual abuse, damage, something awful, but do you know what it really is?

    If you look at this from the point of view of what the child lost instead of what happened to them you would discover that the wound is something missing, not something added to who we were.

    It isn’t that we now carry rape and its disgusting features, especially if you were a child and the man your father, but what happens is that in that instant, we felt that our innocence went missing.

    Most focus on the rape and its ugly addition to us, like it now becomes part of who we are, instead of seeing this as something our innocent self endured.

    What I believe is if we are not treated as innocent, we then believe we are not, and then leave childhood minus our feelings of being precious and innocent.

    Living life without knowing you are innocent and precious will open you up to all kinds of situations where you sell your self short, become a people pleaser, have no sense of your own value and self worth.

    The one two punch that my parents delivered left me feeling that I was no longer innocent, my value had changed, I was no longer precious to him and she was unable to see her precious husband change, so instead I had to be the one.

    How confusing this can all be. You think you have to go back and wrestle with the feelings of being abused, but actually it is feeling the loss of innocence.

    A childhood wound is a hole in our innocence.

    And we are the ones to bring it back.

    We are the ones to strengthen our weakened state.

    In the beginning of healing we find ourselves as leaky as a sieve and we slowly over time, we become a solid bowl.

    My container of self, my wholeness is more solid today than ever before, I had plug the holes by speaking up about my innocence.

    In the past few months, I have been able to witness the loss of innocence, the lure and the grooming and the way others treat my daughter after, myself included, to find the intricacies of abuse and what it actually means to be wounded in childhood without the experience of guarding your self worth and value.

    Sadly, the reason there is so much childhood abuse, is these newly arrived souls on the planet haven’t learned to protect themselves they are easy targets.

    They are loving trusting and kind individuals that get lured and groomed into letting go of their innocence for the pleasure of an abusive person, confused with the attention and courtship, they fail to see the hook, before they swallow the line.

    What makes this so hard to stop, is that the abusers knows how to lure and groom and make comfortable and when they have complete trust and faith, they then ask or move in a direction we did not see coming, and in that instant we are asked to stand by our innocence or please them.

    Comfort them, love them, allow them, do this favor, lend an ear, bring compassion and empathy…letting go of our own innocence we focus on what they are asking, and our innocence fades away.

    We become part of the dance.

    Even though we didn’t start it, we participated and that alone makes us guilty, yet all we did was let our innocence go to please someone one.

    Letting go of our innocence is our crime.

    What I also found is the steep incline it took to get my innocence back, I had to put the ‘blame’ if you will on the one who treated me poorly, they had to own their own actions and I got to own mine.

    While I balanced my self worth sheets inside, I created two columns, what was my responsibility and what was yours.

    Separating who did what to whom, what age, what experience, what was reality in that time frame in my life, and in doing so, was able to see the trend continuing forward, all the places I lost myself.

    What I have found is the characters from way back then to present didn’t change, but rather I was able to see what was actually going on, and how I felt and how they felt about me by our actions.

    I had no one to blame in my adult years but me.

    It is in owning me as an individual and not a public held entity, that I see it all begins and ends with me.

    My business is being me, being whole, and finding myself in the midst of deep lonely feelings, for you can be certain there is another hole to plug.

    Healing is removing the parts of my self that I have given away to others, pieces of my innocence, chunks of my self worth, bits of value. To see all the times I looked at other to carry me, to make me happy, feel loved, feel worthy, all are signs of my weakness…the places I let my self go.

    Each time I am lonely…it is clue, I lost my self there.

    Each time I feel powerless, well you can bet I gave myself up there.
    Each time I am angry at another’s action, I am expecting them to do something for me, carry me, love me, make me feel secure, and so I know I dropped a part of me there.

    It is amazing how fragmented we are, how may folks carry our sense of self.

    It is lonely, if you need others to be you.

    In a co-dependent society, being alone means being lonely for no one is supporting you.

    How awful to stand alone, separated, unattached…

    Being whole means needing no one to be you.

    You just be you alone.

  • 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?

  • Resolve who I am.

    It is New Year’s Eve, the day we all sit down and look at the balance sheets of life, pour over our faults and choose one or two that we feel must go, and then declare to everyone we will no longer do those things.

    How many of us take the time to really sit with the affect, the trouble spot and see where it came from, why it was formed?

    What we call bad habits are usually coverings over some pain.

    They are the lids that keep us from feeling the feelings too severe to feel.

    Usually what happens is we just exchange habits, we seldom delve deeply into what lays beneath, to dive below and feel the pain.

    As I approach this New Year, instead of making resolutions to get rid of bad habits, I want to explore beneath the habits.

    The definition of resolution is the process of resolving something.

    The act of answering, solving…

    Perhaps if we looked at the coming year as the year of the answers, we will look at each day differently; we look to be enlightened about our behaviors, instead of running from them.

    Vowing that we will sit down in the middle of our habit and sort through it looking for answers.

    It is my belief that beneath the habit lays our true self.

    My resolution is to resolve who I am.

  • 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.

  • I found my soul.

    “Pen to the page to find and create sanctuary and asylum for soul. “ Margot Van Sluytman

    My blog is an asylum for my soul, a sanctuary for a confused mind, a place where I feel free to dialogue and debate the inner turmoil of unraveling a life too confusing to live, let alone understand.

    It is the place I run to when my emotions need a voice, when my feelings need to be heard, when I have discovered another part of me that was missing, it is a place for me to rest and be me.

    I speak in the asylum and I also listen to myself there, it is the oddest of things, and most often I receive newfound wisdom, wisdom I didn’t have when I put pen to paper, yet wisdom flows as I write.

    In my writings I discovered my innocence, explored my beliefs and challenged my thoughts, worked out crossed wires of dysfunction, expressed long pent up emotions, shed tears, and wrote words of comfort, all in the space of neutral white paper, my sanctuary.

    It is a sacred place, a soulful place, a place littered with emotion and tears, sorrow and pain, as well as decorated with wonderful moments of joy and gratitude and wisdom fills the air.

    I arrived to this place a very broken disillusioned girl, who had lost more than her heart could hold, and all I knew is that I seemed to feel better by writing it out.

    And it seemed to hear me, my great confidant.

    The sanctuary is my private space, to let down and let go, to not have to worry who I will offend or disappoint, for there is no one here but me.

    A space where you can go mental, rant and rave, and a place that is set aside to work on solutions, to find the answers you are seeking, to heal so you can once again rejoin your life.

    In this sanctuary and asylum I found my soul.

  • My Soul Cheers

    Shutting the valves or entry points where I have allowed toxic behavior and or negative energy to seep in, feels soooo liberating, so empowering, so self loving, I feel so lightened by this, if only I knew that I wouldn’t feel alone, but empowered, I wouldn’t have waited so long.

    The first time I left my family, I did so in fear, anger and anxiety, in moments of pure panic due to the way they were all acting, I segregated myself in solitary confinement in fear. Fear of who they were and how weak I literally was, I scurried to be far far away from them.

    I was out of control in a lonely spot with raging fear, alone and empty inside, twisted up with confused and conflicting images, tangling love and fear, I had to run to survive, not knowing that I would survive…I left.

    It wasn’t an act of courage or empowerment but an act of sheer terror.

    The difference between fleeing in terror or fleeing with knowingly and great awareness are oceans apart.

    One leaves you vulnerable and alone.
    The other empowered and alive with great gusts of newfound peace, like breathing or not breathing.

    Breathing with the right to orchestrate your world, using your free will to close the source of pain that flows into your world.

    What a great thing to know, how empowerment is grown, it is birthed by making a choice, using your awareness and seeing the cause, doing what you can to eliminate it in your world.

    This isn’t at all about them, but about you.

    You have the right to open and close relationships.

    I love that I found the energy to use the switch, to flip the button to off.

    It doesn’t change who they are, but it greatly changes their impact in my world. Little did I know, even though I left the window open, that I was the one I was waiting for…

    Inside, as my tank overflows with empowerment, my soul cheers!

    (I think I scored one for me!)

  • Peace with My Self.

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    “Language… has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.”
    Paul Johannes Tillich

    I love that there are two ways to look at being alone.

    I used feel much more alone surrounded by family than I feel now being separated from most, because at that time I didn’t know who I was.

    I was always lonely…lonely for me.

    What I fear more is being lonely with them, than being in solitude with my self.

    Being in solitude with myself brings me great peace; being with others who seem to misread me would leave me very lonely.

    Alone in a group and not fitting in…maybe you are only lonely in a group that isn’t a good fit.

    So, even if I was with my family I would be alone and misunderstood, which is why I find it much easier to be alone in solitude with myself.

    I am not sure if I will join the group of family, where I will leave my solitude behind, if there will come a time when I feel an opening that I can fit into, a space that will hold the new me I found.

    I really don’t feel lonely but rather that I am honoring my truths and enjoying them in solitude.

    In peace with my self.