I M Perfect lady

Tag: learning

  • Learning Life by Soul

    Here is another section of Kim Rosen’s book, “Saved by a Poem” that I loved.

    “Have you ever had the experience of a friendship or a romance where it seemed like life had finally brought you the perfect person, whose tastes and beliefs and dreams matched yours, whom you were so connected with that you didn’t even have to speak? And then, after a month or three of this Eden, you inevitably began to realize your differences. It turned out that when it came right down to it, he didn’t actually share the same beliefs as you, and what matter most to you made him very nervous. Maybe she seemed to like your kind of music in the beginning, but later admitted it gave her the creeps. Suddenly one morning you wake up, look your beloved in the face and say, “Who are you? You weren’t like this when we fell in love!”

    At this point, the difference is sometimes too great to survive. You separate from each other. Or you deaden the aliveness of the relationship, relegating your togetherness to what small corner of the connection does not rock the boat.

    If you hand in there without fleeing or numbing your heart you may discover more about who you really are than you ever imagined. Your beliefs may be shaken and your masks may crumble. You might discover a connection with your partner that is not contingent on harmony and agreement.

    The same is true of a relationship with a poem. If you are willing to get curious about what is triggering your judgments instead of abandoning the poem or changing it to fit your comfort zone, you may find that the very lines that give you trouble hold the key to undiscovered layers of your own nature.

    Gina’s favorite poem was from Rilke’s Book of Hours. She carried it on a tattered index card in her purse and often pulled it out to read to friends. She was excited about deepening her relationship with it and came to my workshop with the intention of doing so.

    But as she began the process, she balked. Suddenly she decided she didn’t like the poem anymore. Another poem, Robert Frost’s “West-running Brook,” got very attractive to her. “The whole song of that poem is rushing through me,” she said. “I can’t concentrate on the Rilke.” She felt torn, drawn to the Frost poem but trapped by her commitment to the Rilke, even though she was no longer in love with it.

    She could have been describing a romantic struggle. She admitted that this feeling of being torn was a familiar refrain in her life, played out again and again in her relationships with men: as soon as the time came to do the work of going deeper, someone else showed up who became very compelling.

    I asked Gina where she was stuck in the Rilke poem. She pointed to the lines “Each thing -/ each stone, blossom, child-/ is held in place.”

    “Was that your experience as a child?” I asked.

    “No. I didn’t feel held. Each stone, blossom, child is not held in place,” she whimpered. “The poem is lying!” She and I both knew this was a deeply buried voice, drawn to surface by the poem.

    “Why did you originally love this poem?” I asked her.
    “Because I so long to be held like that. I long for that feeling of being safe on earth. But right now, I don’t believe in it.” She was choking back sobs. “I was so alone as a child. My great uncle abused me and nobody knew. I felt like I was living behind an invisible shield. My mom didn’t notice because she was so self-involved and distracted. I ended up taking care of her, hoping I could make her strong enough to take care of me.”

    Gina was rocking back and forth, her own arms wrapped tightly around her.

    “To really make this poem your own,” I said to her, “you may need to let yourself go through these feelings. Are you willing?”

    Reluctantly Gina began to repeat the line over and over. At first we could barely hear her. But as she allowed the waves of pain to come to surface, her voice became stronger.

    “It’s true, I have such a longing to be ‘held in place’ by something bigger than me,” she whispered. “I want to know what Rilke felt when he wrote this line.”

    “So I invite you to be ‘held in place’ by your commitment to this poem. Don’t get distracted like your mother did. Don’t go off to another poem. Hold yourself right here, as a healing to the unheld one within you.”

    Even through her tears, Gina knew that this poem was the exact medicine she needed to heal the heartbroken child who was so disillusioned by what had happened to her. She had unconsciously prescribed it for herself. Now it was drawing out a trauma that had been buried since she was very young. And even as this poem opened Gina’s wound, it gave her the perfect balm to heal it.

    Kim Rosen

    The line I love is I ended up taking care of her, hoping I could make her strong enough to take care of me.

    This is the ditch that most abused victims fall into, where they are diligently caring for people in order for them to eventually become strong enough to take care of us, become our heroes, bring us the love we know is there IF only they were strong enough to show it.

    Imagine the little one trying to take care of the adult, while the child needs to be held in place by someone bigger.

    The world is a scary place where you the child is the caretaker.

    Love this book….

    She speaks of the poems first settling in the mind being memorized, then moving into the heart and then unearthing feelings deep within, speaking the soul’s language.

    During my journey I too felt that I would get things first in my head, then my heart would recognize it, and then finally my soul resounded in knowing.

    She calls this knowing them by heart.

    I feel I am knowing life by 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!)

  • Postal Pressure Cooker

    My five days of work is done this week, my weekend begins on Sunday. Yesterday the man who will begin doing Saturdays for me rode along on the mail route.

    It is interesting to see how a man looks at the route, compared to a woman. He sees the route, but not what his is going to be delivering.

    He is a bus driver during the week, so he was concentrating on the route, thinking that knowing the route and learning to drive on the right is the hardest part of the job.

    He failed to understand you don’t get to do the driving until you get all the mail sorted, and in order to sort quickly, you practice and practice and memorize and memorize.

    He kept going back to his strengths… his knowing bus routes and driving a bus.

    And I would focus on what he doesn’t know yet…sorting mail.

    The sorting sets the tone, sets the pace and will slurp up many hours of daylight, if you don’t know where the letter in your hand goes, and you have three trays of mail, each holding 300 plus pieces.

    Overlooking this part puzzled me, and I quickly learned that the only way he will learn is by doing, so I left him at the end of the day with a tub of catalogs, each needing to find their home in the 469 slots.

    Nothing teaches like experience.

    Nothing shows you how much you don’t know than by standing with one small catalog searching for its home, and watching the time slip away, while you hunt and hunt and hunt again, the name not meaning anything, the road seeming lost among the many small dirt roads, and you trying to remember which part of the route it was on, the beginning middle or end, and looking upon the pile yet to go…the 469 slots all seem alike, the names printed below unfamiliar, the five digit fire numbers mocking with a mysterious sequence, the roads failing to click in route formation, now you know what you don’t know!

    The stance of ineptness is so clear it feels overwhelming. And the knowing that you have 469 houses waiting for their mail.

    We are one of the small offices who get their mail that is mixed up and needs to be sorted, most mail comes to the carrier presorted to the route, and you just take it out and deliver.

    In our office you can only deliver what you know.
    Isn’t that a great metaphor for life that we have to be willing to not know until we know, and that we can’t give out what we don’t know?

    It takes a certain person to be able to do this job, and we don’t know until they are placed in the postal pressure cooker.

  • Both and And…

    ‎"To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path."

    Pema Chodron

     

    The path to enlightenment isn’t a slide of joy, love and bliss, perhaps once you have untangled all the crossed wires and unhooked all the addictive tendencies, connected love of self, but until then…when you feel that it is hopeless, when it seems so upside down and backwards, head in.

     

    Head directly in what is giving you stress and angst, and look about inside and outside, see it all as an experiment in humankind.

     

    I used to look at others and see all the places they were backwards, where they made actions blindly and sat befuddled in the outcome, now I look at how I affect the world around me.

     

    I am not excited or feeling blissful as I delve deeply into how my all or none actions are affecting me, my mothering skills, and how this all affects my children’s sense self, but in the moments when I feel so out of control, I usually am.

     

    I usually have taken a learned behavior and never questioned its application.  Not only on me, but those around me.

     

    It leaves you breathless to see how your words and actions can literally change the way another feels about themselves.

     

    One of the biggest challenges in all of this is to be the changeling mom, to be the one to undo and correct generations of useless tools.

     

    I am never certain what will work, but I am always certain that if I don’t change, the legacy will continue on, a legacy of all or none living.

     

    The perspective alone from all or none, to both-and leaves everyone with multiple options and the gates open wide in allowing different opinions to enter, for new ideas to be born, a change of the landscape as well as the people who live upon it.

     

    It leaves me hopeful, always.

    Hopeful that the damage I have inflicted can be turned around, that when I finally learn a new way, they will instantly feel the affects.

     

    The affects of being accepted, of allowing their true selves to shine forth, their voices to be heard, a life to be noticed, hopeful they will be in a reality of Both and And.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Follow an Impulse Fearlessly.

    “Every day we slaughter our finest impulses.  That is why we get heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognizes them as our own, as the tender shoots, which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.  Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.  We all derive from the same source.  There is no mystery about the origin of things.  We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.” 

     ~Henry Miller, Sexus

     

    Slaughtering our finest impulses…is what leads us to not doing what we feel inside.

     

    What stops us? 

     

    I am learning to follow the impulse, to listen to the voice inside, whether it be to steer away from things or to be drawn towards them.

     

    Our lives are lived from the tiny impulses that happen as we move along each day.

     

    Impulses to take a new path, to speak to a new friend, to call an old one, to send a card, to make a call, to say words we fear, to try a new idea, a new hobby; all are sparked by an impulse within.

     

    It isn’t so much that we don’t have impulses, but fear quickly comes between the impulse and us halting it from happening.

     

    To follow the lead of the impulse fearlessly, knowing you are in fear, but to feel the excitement of doing something new, daring to express or share a part of you that needs to be voiced, to be a playmate with the impulse. 

     

    Be a willing playmate, stop sitting on the sidelines of your life…get up and follow an impulse fearlessly. 

     

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