I M Perfect lady

Tag: Heart

  • Bring into the New Year.

    As I sit here on New Years Day, I am not filled with wishful expectations, nor am I hoping for a better year…and then sitting back to see what happens.  

    I have learned that Life is a game where you get what you give….and the more you put into it, the more you get back.  I know that karma works.  I know that the Universe doesn't just randomly give out bumps in the road for no reason, that each hurdle comes with a gift of freedom, IF I face it squarely and be completely honest with myself.

    So, there is no point in wishing. However,  I remember Oprah saying she wanted to have a year of Love and Peace….and all she got that year were challenges for her to find peace and love in the worst of situations.  A challege if you will, in loving the unlovable.

    With that in mind, be careful what you wish for.

    For your wishes are God's command.  

    I don't really have wishes, but it does feel like I have just begun to live…or perhaps grasp what living is about.

    In Elie Wiesel's book "Open Heart" he writes,

    "Yes, I have written much, and yet, at this stage of my life, at the very threshold of the great portal, I feel that I have not yet begun."  

    "Too Late?"

    "Similarly, I question my many other activities. For example, in my combat against hatred, which I wished to be unrelenting, did I in fact invest enough time, enough energy, in denouncing fanaticism in its various guises? Evidently not, since all of us who have fought the battle must now admit defeat."

    "At the time of the liberation of the camps, I remember, we were convinced that after Auschwitz there would be no more wars, no more racism, no more hatred, no more anti-Semitism. We were wrong. This produced a feeling close to despair.  For if Auschwitz could not cure mankind of racism, was there a chance of success ever? The fact is, the world has learned nothing.  Otherwise, how is one to comprehend the atrocities committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia…?"

    "I have initiated many actions, in countless locations, with many companions. And fought so many battles. Was it all in vain?"

    "What shall I say to God?  That I was also counting on His help?  Shall I have the nerve to reproach Him for His incomprehensible silence while Satan was winning his victories? While my father, Shlomo son of Eliezer and Nissel, lay dying on his cot?"

    Later on he writes,

    "A credo that defines my path: "I belong to the generation that has often felt abandoned by God and betrayed by mankind. And yet, I believe we must not give up on either."

    "Was it yesterday – or long ago- that we learned how human beings have been able to attain perfection in cruelty?  That for the killers, the torturers, it is normal, thus human, to act inhumanely?  Should one therefore turn away from humanity?"

    "The answer, of course, is up to each of us.  We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves.  Or not."

    "I know – I speak from experience – that even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion.  That it is possible to feel free inside a prision. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor.  That one instant before dying, man is still immortal."

    " There it is: I still believe in man in spite of man.  I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed and preverted by the enemies of mankind.  And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console."  

    "As a Jew, I believe in the coming of the Messiah. But of course this does not mean that the world will become Jewish; just that it will become more welcoming, more human.  I belong, after all, to a generation that has learned that whatever the question, indifference and resignation are not the answer."

    "Illness may diminish me, but it will not destroy me. The body is not eternal, but the idea of the soul is. The brain will be buried, but the memory will survive it."

    "Such is the miracle: The tale about despair becomes the tale against despair."  

    He also writes in chapter 15,

    "Such are the thoughts that the patient, a prisoner of his condemned body, confronting his fate, is experiencing the ferocious intensity. As I face the gravity of this moment, I feel the need to search my soul."

    "I am eighty-two years old.  As it has often before, and now more so than ever, the fact that I am who I am leads me to look back: What have I done, and what have I toiled to do, during this long journey filled with dreams and challenges."

    "Strange, I suddenly remember Baudelaire's outcry in his Mon coeur mis a nu  (My Heart Laid Bare): There exists in every man, at every hour, two simultaneous impulses; one leading toward God, the other toward Satan."  Have I distinquished the path to Good from the one leading to Evil?"

    "My life unfolds before me like a film: landscapes from my childhood; adventures in faraway, sometimes exotic places; my first masters, followed by my first moments of adolescent religious ecstasy as I and my friends at the yeshiva recieved from our old masters the keys that open the secret doors of mystical truths."

    "Have I performed my duty as a survivor? Have I transmitted all I was able to? Too much, perhaps? Were some of the mystics not punished for having penetrated the secret of forbidden knowledge?"

    "To begin, I attempted to describe the time of darkness. Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald.  A slight volume; Night.  First in Yiddish, "and the world remained silent," in which every sentence, every word, reflects an experience that defies all comprehension.  Even had every single survivor consecrated a year of his life to testifying, the results would probably still have been unsatisfactory.  I rarely reread myself, but when I do, I come away with a bitter taste in my mouth:  I feel the words are not right and that I could have said it better.  In my writings about the Event, did I commita sin by saying too much, while fully knowing that no person who did not experience the proximity of death there can ever understand what we, the survivors, were subjected to from moring till night, under a silent sky."'

    "I have written some fifty works – most dealing with topics far removed from the one I continue to consider essential: the victims' memory.  I believe that I have done all I could to prevent it from being cheapened or altogether stifled, but was it enough? And if I often publish works – articles, novels on other themes, I did so in order not to remain its prisoner.  My battle against the trivialization and banalization of Auschwitz in film and on television resulted in my gaining not a few enemies.  To my thinking, it was my duty to show that the sum of all suffering and deaths is an integral part of the texts we revere."  Elie Wiezel

    He continues to ask great questions of himself at 82 years of age….and his reflection will be ours someday.

    I wonder if we ask his questions of ourselves today, will we at 82 still be living with questions…and perhaps the questions are how we move into a deeper life…to fully live, aware.

    I do understand how knowing the evil of mankind, he yet believes in mankind.

    How the silence of God doesn't have him no longer believing there is a God.

    And, when or can you write enough about the subject of victims?

    He and I are not on the same scale on the specturm, but even at my lower end, it matters.

    Have I too, distinquished the path to evil?  

    I still am a faithful believer in mankind…that is the energy I bring into the New Year.


  • A broken Heart can open you up to you.

    I made it to the yoga mat today, the third time in a week.  I was surprised that my yoga was waiting for me, that my poses were pretty much where I left them.  

    I was a little stiff, and a bit wobbly in locking my knee, and my middle had bulked out some, which didn't make that much of a difference.

    Today, when I went into the first floor exercise, and lifted my left leg, the pain in my hip or joint area was very intense.  As in the past, I began asking it what was its source…and when I said the word guilty, immediately I began to sob.

    It felt like I was left feeling guilty for being abused, that I was carrying the guilt and it constricted me, made me curl into myself.  I began doing what David Hawkins suggested, to cancel the guilt beliefs about myself, and breathed in the knowing of innocence.

    As I do the floor exercises my belly button hernia sometimes bothers me, so I was rubbing that and wondering what belief or what message the body was delivering with this bulging of my guts. How did this develop… I asked was it that I was "spilling my guts" and nothing happened.  I then pondered if I hated my guts, if I as disgusted with myself, and again immediately an emotional response.  I acknowledge this wrong belief, feeling the innocent me getting this wrong…and then did the cancelling breathing and adding that I recieved the message from my body, that my belly no longer has to gain my attention.  I will continue to do this in yoga now and see how things improve and change.  

    It is so telling that as children in our innocence we believe things due to the lack of adult supervision and correcting our distorted beliefs, and it becomes something we re-inforce as we unconsciously don't fully embrace ourselves.

    We have to see where our innocence left and then make a correction in order to make changes in our minds.  Our Spirit can recognize the place where we veered off the path of innocence and it too can bring us back.

    What a very healing yoga session…working my body and correcting my mind.

    Then, I went to do a Valentine Quilt, but what came to me was to work on the one Lady Quilt that was a work in progress.

    My Valentine Lady is much more pensive than what I had pictured…perhaps I had to get this one out of the way, and then do one that represents a very much in love with herself Lady.

    IMG_7317
    The Hearts say, "Broken – Open" and  "Self – No one" and the bottom one says, "Self Love". 

    I see her as trying to protect herself from heartbreak, and yet her hearts break.  

    IMG_7314
    By feeling the loss you can become whole.  Very interesting to me how this lady turned out.  A broken heart can open you up to you. 

     

  • Best Valentine!

    On Happy Valentine’s Day, be the one to care for your heart; speak its truth and follow its desire, revel in its uniqueness, be grateful for its strength, celebrate its joys and find all that bring it life.

    Our hearts are our business, no one can tend to them better than us, we are the ones who know what makes them sing and twirl with happiness and what plummets them down to the depths of hell, what makes them giggle with sheer joy and fill them with lightness, be a great caretaker of your own heart.

    Take your heart on a wild adventure, show it something it loves, let it breath in Love, Peace and Joy, do something that it longs for, listen to its subtle and not so subtle wishes. Or say what it needs to say, feel what it needs to feel, allow its truth to shine forth.

    On Valentine’s Day others offer to us how much they love and appreciate us, but we too can celebrate this day by giving ourselves our hearts desire.

    Be your own best Valentine!

  • Emotional Cheating.

    Emotional cheating definition: It is an emotional relationship between a married or a committed person with another in the opposite sex not the spouse. It does not involve sex but includes emotional feelings and attraction and it is also referred to as an “affair of the heart”. It is difficult to spot because there is no physical evidence about it and its signs are susceptible to other interpretations. Emotional affairs are more about intimacy and romance but it can also be as damaging as physical affairs.

    Emotional cheating or an emotional affair has destroyed a lot of marriages because of various reasons. The cheating spouse invests his or her emotional energy and feelings to another person instead of the spouse and this usually results to a weakened marriage. These emotional investments should have made the marriage stronger but instead, it is passed on to another person.

    The problem with the emotional cheating definition is that it is inconclusive and there is a thin line separating an emotional affair and a platonic friendship. This why there are still debates whether emotional cheating should really be considered as cheating. But experts believe that an emotional affair is indeed a form of infidelity because it involves deception, betrayal, and a lot of lying.

    An emotional affair usually begins as a simple friendship with another person who shares a lot of common interest and desires. Then they start spending more time with each other and hang out more often. They share secrets and personal stories. If two persons are telling more things about each other and building intimacy and keeping it as a secret from the spouse, they are having an emotional affair.

    The most common signs of emotional cheating include: loss of sexual interest, spouse becomes too busy and spends less time at home, spouse becomes secretive and demands for privacy, spouse becomes moody, and the spouse becomes self-conscious on his or her appearance.

    Although some do not agree with the emotional cheating definition, there are still some ways to differentiate emotional cheating from a simple friendship. If your spouse’s relationship or friendship with another person is exclusive or very secretive and your spouse does not want you to be part of it and know more about it, chances are it is an emotional affair.

    Evelyn Andersen is a writer about emotional affairs and other relationship problems.

  • Brand New

    As I sit here today 52 years on the planet, I see one huge pivotal moment, a second birth, mixed in with little life changing decisions. It is like a before and after life.

    While only one lifetime for me has passed, I feel like I have had two births.

    The first is the arrival on the planet, landing in the home of my parents, being raised by them and their beliefs, ingesting all unquestionably growing into a carbon copy of my mother.

    The carbon copy was torn to shreds when I discovered that beneath the surface of things, our family had a river of abuse running through it.

    My second birth was to find my self standing over her head in a life that she was unaware lived parallel to hers. While drowning in my old life, I gave birth to a new one.

    I was born onto me.

    A big grown lady feeling like a newborn inside, it was like I had arrived on the planet again, but this time with eyes wide open.

    My new discerning eyes, and the astute feelings my body carried, I led me into a new life while completing the old one.

    Sadly or maybe gratefully nothing from my first 46 years survived the transition, my insides were totally transformed.

    What Vaishali writes in “You are What you Love” is that we can live life from the mind or from the Heart.

    My first life was all mind driven, brainwashed and unconsciously walked, like a robot I carefully followed the trail that my mother walked, to a T.

    You can see evidence in all areas of my life, where my mind was the master of me.

    Vaishali writes that the mind keeps repeating itself for us to realize it, to see it, to see our mind working or playing itself out in front of us.

    Self-Realized is to see yourself and who is leading the charge, who has control over your life?

    Mind or Heart?

    While living life purely from the mind for the first 46 years, I was totally disconnected from the heart and feelings that my body felt.

    I lived as a head.

    My thoughts and beliefs led the way, thoughts and beliefs that had been given to me like second, third or forth hand me downs, generations of ladies in my past lived as me.

    To awaken to a life outside of the mind was to literally go out of your mind, a mental breakdown.

    My second birth was to begin living life backwards to unearth all the places where the mind had things incorrect, to discover the truths and expose the lies.

    The life review of sorts was taking place and it birthed the new me.

    Each segment of lies brought forth a new segment of me; an aspect of me was freed from my mind.

    Six years have passed since I went out of my mind and into my heart, six years of living life from the inside out.

    I am so grateful for the opportunity I had to explore the madness of mind, to see the shallowness and the narrow path it leads, its dark hallways of fear and denial, frozen areas of brainwashing.

    What a journey to be wide-awake while totally out of your mind.

    Very frightening at first to see the mad puppeteer, the mind pulling the strings of your life, to see in each relationship and task, my old response, yet so very thrilling to make a new Heart felt response.

    So, while the calendar says that I am 52 today, I am in heart years, only six.

    I feel I have lived more the last six than in the first 46.

    I am living my life, not repeating life as the generations before me.

    I have no clue where I am going, what will be asked, what direction we are leaning towards, for the heart doesn’t repeat itself or re-create the same cycle, the heart life is open, free, expansive, bold, creating, and unknown.

    The good news is that I don’t have to fit into anyone else’s life and their hand me downs, I get to live brand new.

  • You are What you Love.

    “Don’t just make up your mind, make up your heart” Argisle

    I am reading a book, “You are What you Love” by Vaishali, and it is interesting to read that we have two choices, listening to our minds or listening to our Hearts.

    And what you are listening to you love.

    Page 42, Chapter Ultimate Truth & Ultimate Lies.

    “The ego will always direct us towards the limited outcome just like we trained it to do. These ego-based stories, conclusions, thoughts and beliefs are now charged with the energy of our attention, which makes them the wound in the wave. The use of awareness that makes this impression or mark on the psyche is an incomplete action. In Hinduism and Buddhism, incomplete action, or incomplete cause and effect, is called karma.

    We can visualize the impressions as a kind of karmic map of mind. If we want to know our biggest nastiest karma, just look at what our biggest nastiest belief is about ourselves, about life, about relationships, about others and we’ve hit pay dirt. The ego is a lot like CNN but without commercials. If you watch your mind, your wave, it will parade in front of you all the news you have trained it to program and air over and over and over again, ad nausea.

    There is a relationship between unconscious and accumulating karma, and being conscious and burning off karma. It all depends upon what you are doing with your awareness. Let us approach understanding what happens when we are unconscious as the accumulation of incomplete cause and effects. When we are unconscious, we are not in the present moment, we are not accepting what is from an open Heart. When we are unconscious, we are listening to the ego’s limited, tiny version of reality from the head place. This is not what we came her to do with our will, love, service, and life purpose. It is therefore and incomplete action.

    When we are conscious we are in the present moment with what is from an open Heart. When we are conscious it is the Flame of Pure Awareness, the Heartfelt wisdom from the feeling place within, that observes with gratitude the perfection of every given moment. Since this level of conscious practice is the highest function behind the design and creation of the physical world, it is what we came here to do. It is therefore a complete action. Witnessing what is from the Heart is the conscious action that burns off negative and incomplete karma, which accumulates when we listen to the ego from the head.

    Incomplete action or duality happening within the wave would look like this: I give my attention to thoughts and beliefs about who and what I am; I give my attention to thoughts and beliefs about who others are, what life and relationships are; I understand myself, life, world and value system through the deeply trained habit of seeing everything from the subject/object perspective. This would appear internally as an inner dialogue that sounds like, “I am a successful attorney, superior to the dregs I squash in court. My power is that I command respect and am a force to be reckoned with in the courtroom, even though I respect no one other than myself. I drive a sixty foot long Mercedes and I live in a multi-million dollar mansion, in case you are interested in seeing my value and worth measured against yours. This behavior and these possessions make the appropriate statements about my obvious superiority and importance.” The dialog could run in the reverse direction, “I am a lowly piece of shit that no one could possibly love or respect.”

    With incomplete action, a person’s awareness goes out into the exterior world and touches an object: another person, house, care, whatever. Incomplete action occurs when the awareness coming back to the person tells them that whatever they perceive is exactly what they think and believe it is. No one came her to listen to the ego’s version of reality; that is an incomplete action. In doing so, we re-create a story of duality; another person with so much power and worth, who in turn affects my sense of power and worth. It is all cause and effect: thoughts and beliefs, which re-creates more limitations. It just keeps spiraling downwards until it is out of control.

    Action is incomplete because it is not witnessed by the aspect of mind we recognize as the Flame of Pure Awareness. The action was witnessed instead by the ego, by the disease of duality. So when action is witnessed, by the disease we are here to get over, it fragments the mind. It creates more duality, which in turn drives every known and unknown disease and limitation even deeper into the wave. We’ve created our own personal hell.

    The action needs to be witnessed by the aspect of mind that has the inherent power to return our mind to a state of wholeness, beyond the illusory grasp of duality, which fragments mind into tiny pieces. This action can only occur when we give our awareness to eternal consciousness for solving our eternal problems, without a thought or belief, because that is an action we came to the rock to complete. That is the sole action that makes the Flame of Pure Awareness the senior witnessing force in our lives.

    The action is made complete only when awareness going out into the exterior world touches something, and the awareness coming back to the person is then run through the Flame of Pure Awareness in the Heart, not through the ego-head filter. The Flame of Pure Awareness keeps the person in witnessing mode. Without it, we would fall immediately back into the limitation of what we think and believe life and self are. The Flame of Pure Awareness is beyond duality intelligence, beyond subject/object orientation. It is in unifying, indivisible quality of authentic intelligence, which reveals, recognizes, and realizes the interior through the process of witnessing it in the exterior.

    The Flame of Pure Awareness is the intelligence that sees and gets real about how the mind is organized by witnessing itself reflected back in the medium of the physical world. “This is what Jesus means when he refers to “those who have eyes to see;” those who see not illusion, but rather the movement of realized love, movement of the One everywhere.

    When awareness realizes itself, it is purified, and that is the action we came here to complete. When mind becomes self-realizing the action is complete. The purpose of all created life, the purpose of a physical world is for self-realization. It is to fully realize we are what we love, and we love whatever we are giving our attention to. Once we realize what we are doing with our love, manifesting either Heaven or hell on a moment to moment basis, then the action is complete. The purpose of being here is realized.

    When the mind realizes it is looking at itself, the seeds of karma become purified, or roasted by the Flame of Pure Awareness. Then, no karma sprouts up and grows from this action. The action is complete because we go from what it came here to realize. Karma is repeating whatever you need to, until you get it. In future chapters we will refer to karma of an incomplete action as re-creation. Anything born from a limited intelligence, such as the ego, will only have the capacity to re-create what is already here, which is itself limiting. Only healthy God consciousness is unlimited and can therefore create something new, manifest something from nothing. We all came here to create a new response to ultimate lies, to end the limitations we are all here to get over. Eternal consciousness has the power to create a new response to any old or new problem. The ego on the other hand, can only re-create over and over again. It cannot create something new. It is a limited form of consciousness. What do you want from it? If the ego is providing answers to all of your eternal problems, there is only one possible outcome for you. Look up the word futile in the dictionary, if you have not already guessed what that outcome will be.

    Understand what this whole shootin’ match was created for the convenience of your enlightenment. As God consciousness, as eternal consciousness, if there were a better faster way to reach enlightenment, you’d be doing it. You’d already be there. If you do not understand that everything you are experiencing here is the exact, perfect reflection of the relationship you have with your own mind, then you will be destined to re-creating what you think and what you believe it is. That would be re-creating the limitation you are here to get over. This will continue until you realize that what you are looking at is your own mind, and then choose to move on from that place of truth.”

    Vaishali

  • Cold without a Heart

    “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.”
    ~Confucius

    Going forward with your whole heart is heart breaking, for you are wrenching your heart out from all the people you gave it to.

    What I failed to understand that it isn’t so much as finding new steps, new friends, new routines, new traditions or even getting used to the new me, but rather the yanking and pulling on my heart as I leave.

    For it is impossible to head out ‘half hearted’ and fully embrace life, with pieces of your heart dragging along getting snagged on old memories.

    Even the good old memories feel tainted with fresh paint of recent events, their red marks slashing over familiar “remember when…”

    I saw myself in past Christmases, the gifts made, the parties held, the efforts bestowed, the carols sung, the decorations hung, gathering everything I could to drape a happy Christmas upon so many. It began when I was very little.

    Many holiday memories hold parts where I used to be, for them and for me.

    The years of the oldest shopping for the youngest began when there was just two oldest…and a lot of youngest.

    The years spent making and creating a new ornament for each.

    The years of opening my house, giving of my time, until nothing was left to give.

    My heart emptied itself into them, little by little, child by child, I poured myself into their lives, and now they are all gone.

    It feels that I am ripping my heart to pull it back inside, gathering it from places far and wide, in events, tucked in memories, sewed into projects, knitted into scarves, pulled from lives…

    You can’t take your heart back without ruining the old memories, when you take your heart back; they fall in a discarded heap.

    Heartless.

    The memories turn cold without a heart.

  • In Peace I Lay Down

    As I lay in a floor pose in yoga today, I became aware of the lump in my chest, and I wondered what they would find at my sonogram today.

     

    My doctor thought that perhaps it is an infected milk duct, and I thought while on the floor, how odd that is, since I am not nursing, I wonder how that could happen.

     

    My next thought, what have I been nurturing or holding close like a baby to my chest and what energy is in this area?

     

    The energy in this area is my heart, where I feel my feelings, where I express my self.

     

    My next thought was that I have been holding close to me things that hurt me. 

     

    Holding and wanting to nurture hurtful people, allowing them close into my space, opening my heart, and then getting hurt emotionally when I am misunderstood and once again and set outside.

     

    There is not only an emotional toll, but also a physical toll this is taking on my body.

     

    Today as I lay there I knew I had to let them out of my heart, let go of hanging on and release them…and the line in a hymn came in “God will take care of you…”

     

    In tears and in peace I lay down.