I M Perfect lady

Tag: life

  • Life Unfolds.

    Well, I quit the yoga challenge. It became more about the numbers and less about me, somehow I got lost behind the counting, the doing and forgot about me.

    The me that needs the yoga, my body, mind and soul. I forgot to view this from me; instead I was outside of me doing the yoga.

    It was a step ahead of me and I was nowhere in yoga.

    I have taken a few days off, to cleanse myself from the doing of a challenge to get back into being a lady whose body loves yoga.

    Whose body needs the yoga to feel flexible and strong, whose mind opens and breathes, and my life has a balance with yoga.

    It is about me and yoga, not yoga and me.

    This is true in all levels of my life.

    I am not sure if I can explain this correctly, but in the past all that I did created who I was, without doing I was nothing.

    I was defined daily by what I did, the doings created me.

    What I have now discovered is if I do something for reasons that are not birthed within me, I am lost from my life and in some foreign land most likely called your business.

    I believe that when my daughter’s life was in crisis, I hopped out of mine and into hers and it way threw off my balance. And during this time the yoga challenge beckoned me daily to join it, no matter my inner state of being.

    One thing led to another and it led me away from me.

    I had fallen out of my life.

    Now I am gathering me back to me.
    Letting my daughter have her life, her choices, her responsibilities and at the same time refocusing on regaining the balance within me.

    I know that my body and my day run better when I take the time at the top of the morning and breathe and work my body.

    I know that I feel best when I stay in my life and live from the inside out.

    I will selfishly bring me to my life and I will selfishly bring me to yoga.

    I arrive and life unfolds.

  • Using Words.

    I went to my first night of the Writers on Location series held in the little white church on Finlandia’s campus.

    The topic this week was singer/songwriters. Eric Koskinen and Mike LaBeau entertained us and shared their experience about putting words and music together.

    How music is used to back up a word, how it can change the meaning of the word by how the music flows behind it, swirls around it and carries it away.

    They spoke of the Business of song writing, how you write for a hit record, for a catchy tune, to be the one that makes the money, and how sunshiny bright tunes sell better than the dark renderings of pain and sorrow.

    Seeing how there is a market for ‘lightness’ and how the more poignant journeys of the soul are of lesser value in the market place seemed sad to me.

    I came away knowing it would not be fun to write for an audience or for a buck, to have to force words of a certain flavor forward.

    They did sing their songs and you could hear their hearts and souls wind around the words and music, perhaps not a best seller, but songs with feelings and longings, words sharing with us who they are.

    Most singers today do not write their own songs, they are actually acting out what someone else has wrote; someone in a room with a few other folks, playing on instruments and tossing around words to frame up a song. The singer than gets the song and uses their voice, but the words are not from their soul, but a collaboration, bits and pieces strung together to make a story to be sung.

    Listening to all the different writers, authors, storytellers, songwriters, singers I see that we all use whatever avenue we are comfortable with to share our journeys. That we each have an outlet for expression, an Art form that we happen upon that is our vessel to express what is in our souls.

    Words are words and how we arrange them in ways that leave a trail for others to follow what we feel is the magic to writing.

    Perhaps it is getting in touch with feelings, digging down deep into the caverns of our soul’s journey, and then using the words to deliver their message by laying them out in a poem or a song, in a book or a blog that connects us together.

    It is the longing to be heard, to be understood, to know that we are not alone, that we are not the only ones who have suffered, known sorrow, lived through confusion and angst, to be carried away by overwhelming pain or bursting with joy or engulfed in love that leaves you breathless.

    Connecting souls on this journey called life, using words.

  • The Only Place I Can Be.

    I am wondering about the Bug called Worry and how it can bite at anytime, how it can sneak up and take you out of any enjoyment you may be experiencing or perhaps not even let you go to enjoyment, instead you dance and waltz with Worry.

    My brother spoke of a Panic Attack, would this be an attack from the Worry Bug?

    That out of nowhere this bug sneaks in and steals your peace, attacking this moment of time?

    When I found myself right side up in what felt like my upside down world, it was a world that opposed what the bug dreamed up.

    It seemed like there were two worlds, the Mind Bug and Reality.

    This Mind/Worry Bug was relentless, and what I did was to take that bug and slam it with Reality over and over again, showing it what is.

    I literally had to put pen to paper to see what this Damn Bug wanted me to do.

    Mostly it pulled me away from my life and into lives I had no control over, it ripped me away from my peaceful home doing what I loved to do, to go into someone’s life I had no business being in. It painted people in colors that were so off color from what they were actually like and then had me worrying about letting them go.

    Maybe its nickname could also be Meddling or Hell.

    Even today I may take a quick trip with it and see a future fear or horrid life, a sad and lonely existence, but it feels so bad, I yank myself back and hold on to something in my nowadays world.

    If you had to pick this Worry Bug out of a lineup what would it look like, where does it live, how does it operate and who invented this???

    I am sure some religions call this Bug the Devil.

    What I think it is an untrained mind. A mind that is totally out of your control and one that hates reality.

    This bug lives anywhere but in the here and now.

    In the past six years I have been treating this mind like an unruly child, and find that I can oppose many of its thoughts and when it comes in and tromps into a moment of enjoyment, I can listen for a moment, but can make the choice as to what to believe.

    As a woman who lived for many years in the land of pretend, I find great comfort and peace in the land called reality.

    It is here that the Bug has a hard time beating; it usually falls down when faced with what is.

    Byron Katie says, “Reality wins only but 100% of the time!”

    I welcome this bug into my reality, but I usually have a dialogue with it before I head out into the land of unknown.

    When I find myself powerless, stressed and out of sorts, you can be damn sure that the Mind/Worry Bug has led me astray from reality.

    What I do to bring me back is grab on to anything that I can hold onto and be with my breath. For where my breath is the bug can’t be.

    Where am I breathing, who is here now, what is going on, feeling my reality as a blind person uses Braille; I settle back into Now.

    For Now…is the only place I can be.

  • The Artist Way

    On the CD of “Romancing the Ordinary” by Sara Ban Breathnach, she mentions Julia Cameron a few times. She is the author of the book, “The Artist Way”.

    My brother sent me the book and notebook that went along with it a little over six years ago to begin discovering the Artist within me.

    Julia wanted us to write “Morning Pages” just a simple practice of writing a few pages each morning, putting to paper our thoughts.

    They could be just stating what we had to do that day, how we were feeling, just ramblings but getting them out of our heads and on to the pages, cleaning up the space to be creative.

    I was a beginning student to this Way, when all hell broke lose in my life, and what surprised me greatly, is that I clung to these morning pages, which often grew to day long pages, for sometimes I wrote morning, noon and night.

    I filled that first book in a short time and then bought my first journal and after four years of writing longhand, I began a blog.

    I still write most days, sometimes more depending upon the unsettledness of my soul; writing is now part of who I am.

    What is so synchronistic is this book came to me just a week or so shy of a major event in my life, and it helped me find my way.

    What also has happened simultaneously my Artist arrived, she is having a ball playing with ladies, fabric, colors, designs, and is going places Artists go and her work is in an Art Gallery.

    I don’t know the way, but it seems to happen anyway.

    Perhaps that is the Artist Way.

    (I will have to go back and read in her book to see the marks I hit unbeknownst to me.)

  • While waiting…

    What came to me today while mindlessly tossing mail, was that the reason I was so sorely affected by my daughter’s life, was that her life was in my life, that we didn’t have a clear and separate space between what is hers and what is mine, the apron string was still connected.

    The impact upon my body and psyche was equal to it happening to me, where my inner wounded child responded, my ‘mental lady’ mom came out ready to fight battle, and the Loving awareness arrived all fully engaged in her life as soon as she spoke of her crisis.

    What was so beautiful and tragically displayed were how all the parts of me felt and responded and finally released her to be on her own, a completely felt separation and liberation for myself but more importantly for her.

    She was given her life without any strings attached to me.

    While it was the hardest thing for me to do, to let my child go it was almost like a second birth, but this time a birth of freedom.

    And a three-week labor of intense inner working and letting go.

    As long as I feel the strain or worry of what her actions will be, there is a string attached into my world, and I have to snip it to let her be fully and completely free.

    It is not to say, I will no longer give word of wisdom or point out what I see in reality, or how I see changes happening between her and I, I will. But the greatest thing is, that our bodies and psyches are separated.

    It almost seems like this was my last co-dependent exam, a lesson with huge consequences one that my old co-dependent self would have longed to get wrapped up in like an old cozy blanket.

    Yet this time it felt like I was being possessed by another’s life, that their choices had the power to make or break my life, take my peace, destroy my inner sanctity of love and joy and that I was once again riding shotgun in another’s life.

    It was the ultimate life review of how it feels to be a victim in a co-dependent relationship.

    When I look at my daughter there are no strings attached to my happiness or my unhappiness, instead I am sitting in a place of wonder.

    I wonder what it is she will do.
    I wonder how it will affect her.
    I wonder, but my life isn’t totally eclipsed by her life, I feel space opening up and distance coming in.

    A place where If she is to suffer, I can be there as the non-suffering one, we are no longer one big animal of two.

    Today, I was listening to a CD by Sarah Ban Breathnach called, “Romancing the Ordinary.” What she is teaching and talking about is how to romance your self and be fully engaged and in love with you and your life.

    It is simply delightful in the very simple ways we can look around where we are and see what is all there. How we can listen instead of just hear, how we can use all our senses to connect to the Universe.

    I am thinking as long as I was connected to the lives of so many, there wasn’t space or feelings of my senses left for me to use in my life, for me to feel for me, to see for me, to be for me, for so long my life has been used by others.

    Sarah spoke of the waiting. And in my case I have been waiting for my daughter to make a choice, breathlessly waiting, life stopping waiting.

    What Sarah suggests is to make use of the time while we wait, while the Universe and her soul converse and decide, I can use this time in a million little ways.

    While I wait, I can quilt, I can read, I can sit and watch the sunrise, I can sip tea and watch the fire, feel the warmth of a quilt, smell the scent of a candle, and the waiting will pass by…in delight.

    I can’t know tomorrow or what or when or if, how her life will go, but I can get busy in my life while I wait.

    I love this.

    I already listened to a few CD’s while I waited.

    I enjoyed a bowl of soup and homemade bread, while I waited.

    I love that I am free to pass the time while I wait, instead of sitting and worrying while I wait.

    What a huge gift to live my life while I wait to see what transpires in hers. When she needs me, I can stop enjoying the waiting and act.

    I can’t tell you how this simple idea freed me or gave me permission to enjoy my time while waiting.

  • Find Their Own Way…

    The battle of the wills end when you allow the other to have free will, it is pretty hard to fight with freedom.

    The tighter you hold and the more you force, the less the other person can feel and find their own sense of what it is they want to do.

    When I was in the beginning stages of my mental breakdown, my husband and I found a place to stand that left us both in total freedom, a place called “I love you today.”

    In this spot, it allowed each of us to change our minds and to gauge our own feelings about whether we wanted to stay together. This free space to be yourself, to feel that which you feel and to express it daily allowed us the time to re-configure a new normal in our relationship.

    We fell into this spot after weeks and months of feeling the instability each of us had during the most stressful event in our marriage, Me not knowing who I was.

    Pretty hard to promise tomorrow, when today is unknown.

    It felt so much easier to breathe when we embraced the unknown and lived presently with each day and even each moment.

    “I love you today” is an honest and alive relationship and we both promised the other that if and when we didn’t want to be here we would tell the other.

    It isn’t a piece of paper, the ‘happiness’ of our children, or a million other reasons that folks stay together, but instead we individually get to choose if we fit together, if we are happy here, if we enjoy this place, if we are at peace here, if it is a spot for us to grow and change….

    It is like a free-range relationship, where each has the freedom to be who we are, and when who we are no longer works together, we will be brave enough and honest enough to let the other know.

    I just don’t feel then, that we can blame the other; we will always hold the power within us.

    I love you today, and if it changes I will let you know.

    I am thinking this same idea can be used upon our children. Instead of raising children who must remain in our pen (religion, mind set, pathway, etc), where we tell them how to be and grow, that we instead open the gate and let them roam free.

    Let their will be done.

    Let them decide which way to go and how to be.

    It releases both of us to be who it is we were meant to be.

    This reminds me of the paragraph from one of Bryon Katie’s books,

    “I don’t know what is best for me, or you, or the world. I don’t try to impose my will on you or anyone else. I don’t want to change you or improve you of convert you or help you or heal you. I just welcome things as they come and go. That’s true love. The best way of leading people is to let them find their own way.”

  • Our Door in the Future…

    I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate. ~ Arthur Wing Pinero

    I read this quote a few times and now I believe I understand it, that our karma or our lessons continue until we change how we greet them, they enter back into our lives perhaps in another body or similar relationship.

    Is it possible that how we act today will bring to us this in another gate?

    That if we act in love and awareness, we will greet love and awareness in our future?

    What we sow we reap.

    When we allow others to mistreat us, we will get more folks who want to mistreat.

    It seems the wonderful Universe gives back to us that which we sow without fail.

    The old saying, “God helps those who help themselves…” He waits for us to help ourselves.

    Many will beseech God to help them, to fix them, to do this and that for them, while they are the ones who hold the power.

    I was waiting for people to learn how to treat me better when it was I who had to learn this lesson. And in another gate flowed volumes of folks to teach me how to treat me better.

    They were not different folks, but the same ones coming in as they usually did and it was up to me to stand up and put a stop to the way they were treating me.

    I had to stop using myself to please them.

    I had to start using myself to please me.

    Most of who entered into my gate of now were surprised at this new response, this new me, this new voice and most turned around and left no longer interested in playing this new game with me.

    The new game of fair trade, this equal partnership or freedom to be a sovereign nation co-existing with them, where the boundaries don’t overlap, where we are not holding each other up, but rather supporting each other to be one strong individual unit, was not a game for co-dependents.

    What we do, what we say, how we treat ourselves today will come a knocking on our door in the future.

  • My mind’s point of view.

    Byron Katie says, “There are no mistakes” and I have to agree. We do that which we do with the knowledge and awareness we have at the time, when we know better or believe differently we do better.

    It isn’t a mistake it is a level of understanding.

    I even looked up the word Mistake and here is the definition,

    An error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness. 2. A misconception or misunderstanding.

    Some how we were taught that mistakes were bad, yet in reality it is a case of deficient knowledge and defective jugement.

    We can only act at the level of understanding, it is impossible to be above your level of knowing, it simply can’t happen.

    Byron Katie’s passion is to question stressful thoughts, to go after the thoughts that make us suffer.

    Mostly I think we suffer believing we are supposed to be where we are not, doing things we didn’t know how to do.

    We are where we are.

    We know what we know.

    And we can’t know what we don’t know.

    And once we know we can’t not know.

    It seems that life is all about being here and agreeing with what you know now, accepting yourself in this moment fully.

    Looking backwards you can see with your new found wisdom the places you missed the mark, but due to your level of understanding in that moment, it makes perfect sense, so no mistake, just the lack of knowing.

    On that dreadful day when I woke up to the fact that all I knew was not all there was to know, I found that I knew much less than there was to know.

    My greatest strength was being able to let go of all I knew to begin to learn about the things I didn’t.

    I simply sat down in the fact that I lived a life at the tip of the iceberg and it was to my own benefit to get to know me. Imagine living as me but knowing me.
    An incredible frightful place to find yourself living as someone you don’t know.

    My first step was to admit to myself I didn’t know me, know where I came from who the people I called family were, I began looking at my life as a stranger would.

    I began from the stance of I know nothing.

    And by doing so was able to be open to everything.

    I had lost confidence in all I knew and had no pre-sets or standards to adhere to, I was standing naked in an open space willing to see reality without my minds concepts.

    Mindless I stood.

    The landscape I then discovered didn’t match my old mind at all.

    We then danced this dance between reality and my old mind, like a game of old maid, trying to see what matched and what did not.

    In the end my mind lost only but 100% of the time.

    As Byron Katie says, reality is God and God is reality.

    I guess we could say the only mistake is believing an unchallenged mind.

    For I challenged my mind against reality, nothing was too sacred for the test, no family member, no title, no past cute deeds, all I dragged into the game of matching mind to reality.

    My mind was so far off the mark, that I began to understand that I fell into reality with a broken mind.

    Or you could say I went out of my mind on that day when I discovered a pedophile instead of a dad.

    And I did.

    My mind had a story that didn’t match reality, a story that I held sacred was an illusion, it couldn’t walk in reality.

    All my love, my life and my way was poured into an illusion that wasn’t even true.

    At 46 I awoke in the middle of a nightmare, in a play where I was the star but it was based upon lies, lies that I called truth. My fantasy world crumbled and a nightmare slid in place.

    Harsh reality boldly took over where my pretend mind stood.

    Yet this reality was actually kind to me, it affirmed my path, it resonated with my body, and it set me free from the mental mind.

    If your mind is not clear and you can’t see reality, you are then living in a foreign land, once removed from reality.

    You can live there for a lifetime and not touch reality.

    I know this seems insane and it is, to be in reality and not know it.

    I lived for 46 years in a mind that was blind to what is.

    Doing things that no one in their right mind would do.
    Saying and believing things that only an insane person would do.

    Yet there are no mistakes in my past.

    My past life was lived from my mind’s point of view.

  • In the Ditches of Life.

    Promises and commitments seem to only have real power when they are used for self, when they are used for others we become their slave.

    I want my daughter’s decision and commitment to be for her self and not for me, for it to be something she feels obligated to do for her own morals and values, leaving me out of the picture.

    If she were to make choices based on what makes me happy, she has just transferred herself over to me for me to rule.

    Promises and commitments when made for another seem on the surface to be a nice and friendly thing, yet if you look closer, they become silk chains that now keep you dancing for their happiness.

    I do not want my children to live a life that has them chained to my happiness, I want their lives to be driven from the inside out, to do what pleases them and makes them happy.

    Defining their own morals and values, owning their responsibility as individuals, being their own character sets them free to make promises to themselves, commitments they want to live by, that leaves us both free.

    My actions can’t define her and hers can’t define me.

    It is the freedom that is both liberating and scary as hell.

    Letting them go to crash and burn or to grow and become strong and independent.

    Kicking them out of the nest in my head, letting them grow and stretch into their own lives.

    I can no longer catch them when they fall; their falls are much bigger. They have to get back up and travel on.

    I think the threads and ties are for the mother’s benefit, I am thinking that our children are much stronger and more resilient than we believe.

    While there is freedom when the silk apron strings are cut, there is fear that did we teach them all they need to know?

    Are they strong enough to fly?

    Life isn’t lived in a straight line without failures; it looks more like a drunkard path.

    We all will fall, and stumble, make a bad judgment call, fall off the path and go in the ditch to gather a morsel of wisdom, it isn’t the mistakes we make but how we pick ourselves back up.

    We are not born with wisdom we find it in the ditches of life.

  • Live in this Moment of Time.

    I think as parents we believe we are riding shotgun in our children’s lives, while in reality they are flying solo.

    Our children are separate individuals doing their lives and we are spectators not operators of their lives.

    New souls in a new body landing on earth and they get to learn how life flows down here.

    It is all new for them, and we as parents are wanting to spare them the pain and suffering, when in actuality it is by walking through different experiences that gives them character.

    My view is much broader and I am living out front of where they are, a trail guide hollering out what is up ahead.

    Yet how can I know for sure?

    It is my challenge to walk besides, not up ahead.

    Our lives unfold as they will, and it takes energy to be in the future while living in today.

    Today, what do I do today?

    What is going on right here right now?

    I will return to living on a short time frame.

    I also learned that if you take care of the people the people will take care of the rest.

    And if you do right today, the tomorrows will also take care of themselves.

    All we are asked is to live in this moment of time.