I M Perfect lady

Tag: life

  • Show and Tell

    The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be. ~Socrates

    I looked up the meaning of the word Integrity and one of its meanings is to be in a state of completeness, undivided.

    My girlfriend said the definition that they are teaching children in elementary school, is that what you say, what you think and what you do all match.

    I had to let go of many relationships of people who were unable to walk the talk they talked.

    I am much more in awe of folks who have integrity and make no excuses even if what they are doing is unkind. At least they are not putting on a friendly face while acting poorly.

    If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it’s a duck.

    We get lulled by words and swayed in fancy sentences when actions are way off base.

    My husband knows a man called Snake, and he asked him how he got that handle? The man said he earned it. I like that. My husband went on to tell me this man spent time in jail for having a relationship with a young girl…

    If only we called folks by their behaviors it would make life a much easier way to navigate.

    “People show us who they are, Believe them,” is Maya Angelou’s quote.

    The key words are Show and Believe… it is as if the world is one big place of Show and Tell, but instead of bring something to show, we bring ourselves.

    We are all showing people who we are and they are showing us.

    It is not a game of pretending to be something different.

    Watch actions, how they display themselves and how they take care of their lives, they are on this stage called life being who they are, it is our job to believe what it is we see.

    How often do you give them the benefit of doubt? Whose doubt? Who doesn’t want to believe and why? What will happen if you believe? What will you lose?

    It is incredible to me now to not believe them. It is like they are screaming their truths and we are blocking our ears and shutting our eyes.

    “People Show you who they are, BELIEVE them.”

    We don’t want to believe who they are, for it will wreck our dream.

    The pain we are afraid of is the sorrow of our broken dreams.
    It isn’t so much that we lose them; we lose our dreams and our future.

    Yet what is the karma we are actually tending to?

    A lifetime of dancing with people who are disappointing, for they can’t measure up to what we hold in our minds, for we refuse to believe who they really are.

    It gets you so confused, that you then lose who you are.

    You are a believer of what is not.

    While extremely painful, it was very liberating to finally be able to believe in what people showed me. I love what is. I stay in step and in tune with the show and tell!

  • Learn to catch it.

    I have missed 12 days in the 32 days that have passed of this 60-Day Yoga Challenge, and I have no desire to try and catch up, but to continue on.

    The days I missed were days when I was too emotionally traumatized to even begin to focus on yoga and my body, what I needed to do was find my balance inside, to seek my peace and find where I stood mentally.

    What these past few weeks have shown me is how far I have come, how close our family is, how when one is suffering it affects us all, and it is at that time it is crucial we all maintain our strength so we can help the wounded.

    I heard a woman speak to Oprah yesterday who wrote the book, “Simple Abundance, Sarah BanBreathnach on you can tell how a woman feels inside by how she feels inside her own home.

    It is interesting to know that how at peace you are in your home, how comfortable and what is allowed in your home all represents your state of self inside.

    It came to me in Yoga today, that my mother didn’t have boundaries and our home didn’t have boundaries, she overlooked or failed to see when bad energies stole in.

    And even when informed of them, she didn’t stand up for integrity of home, for inside of her she lacked her own sense of value.

    Sarah also told Oprah that the greatest wound that women suffer is the lack of self-esteem.

    And this self-esteem seems to be the first tragedy of abuse, that it is stolen in the first act and if you fail to tell, you then commit the next act to yourself.

    You continue to give away your self until there is nothing left to give.

    What I was doing for the past few weeks instead of doing yoga, was to find my way through a sea of abuse, wrestling with my emotional wounded self and the woman I had been, to find a new way of dealing when tragedy strikes.

    To not deal emotionally as a wounded child nor even as cold hearted dictator controlling self, but to reach beyond and find a new way to interact.

    By keeping my view on me, what I can and cannot do, what I can and cannot partake in, and speaking about my feelings and my view of reality, I was able to navigate myself into acting much more reasonable and as an adult.

    I was able to witness myself as a loving adult dealing with abuse, and also as a loving adult dealing with abuse and its affects, seeing how my daughter wasn’t able to stop abusing herself, I stood my ground in not taking responsibility for her actions and handing them back.

    The lessons and gifts I have gotten are so multi-faceted and how my daughter was my greatest teacher.

    She now stands alone and separate a young woman who will now set forth and make choices that will define her life.

    It isn’t the mistakes we make but how we walk from that moment on.

    Each day is a new day to begin making a new choice.

    Choices are the only way the soul grows, is another thing that Sarah said.

    I may have to look up this wise woman and read her words.

    Life isn’t about the big stuff, but in each little choice we make, we are either building up our self or giving it away.

    You know Sarah also stated that the givers have to also receive that if you can’t get something back from those you give to they will eventually drain you.

    So, as we give we have to learn how to receive the same energy back.
    Like a boomerang we have to learn to catch it!

  • My next move.

    As I walked along these past six years, I only ever had two choices, not three, not four but two, and I could only carry forward one.

    Just one, not two, only one!

    Two would have grown me into a multi personality.

    There would have been two aspects of me, two types of me, two sides of me, a multiple me.

    Each side leading totally different lives sailing between and over boundaries like mixing colored water from glass to glass, until I would have been colored murky, muddy undetectable, where you would not know who is the real me.

    This murky colored water is where I believe I sorted myself out from, I had to re-visit each relationship and see who the real me was.

    To see where I moved from glass to glass not paying attention to how it colored me.

    In each glass I had to see what it required of me to swim there, what side of me shone in that space and what side of me lay in the dark?

    It was literally like running around holding up the old side and the reality side looking for a match, seeing what had integrity that could stand test of truth.

    Time and time again, I was surprised and horrified that most of my life was for the darker side, the side of me that came forth from abuse.

    There was very little in my world that was the real deal.

    Those things left standing are few but precious.

    And it is my belief I will grow from here, gain from here, thrive from here, for I was dying in the murky darkness, unable to know me, find me, see me, be me.

    This personal that lived in the murkiness shone in other’s lives and dimmed in my own.

    Now I am a like a dim light bulb, a faint teeny glow to them, but very colorful and bright inside.

    I see my daughter heading into the murky waters, trying to blend herself in both glasses, trying to appease the truth and the dark, the love and the fear, I see how I lost myself as I watch her go.

    What do I say? Do I tell her to stay out of our glass so she is not confused, so she is just one way to her self?

    What did I need to hear back then?

    What was the key that would have stopped me from losing myself in both worlds?

    Is there a shorter path than what I took?

    A less painful one?

    As she loses her self in like/love she doesn’t see the murky waters swallowing her like quick sand…

    But I do. I see her going in where I just left.

    What I find deeply disturbing about all of this, is that while my mother didn’t seem me slip into the quick sand I do, I see her going deeper and deeper. It seems unfair for me to watch this play out.

    To see the innocence blend with deceit, lies, until all that is left standing is this murky sense of self, this dim light.

    Why do I need to see this?

    What is my lesson yet again?

    To see the power and the lack of control, the submissiveness, the equal partnership between abuser and abusee?

    Is it more right to see two folks dancing in the quagmire?

    Will they save themselves while tossing more dirt upon each other?

    Who will save them from themselves?

    It seems in my murkiness, one day I saw the whole scene, the whole dreadful scene of filth and dirt, the lies and the deceit, is that what flips you out?

    Do you have to go in and swim, taste and feel the darkness; you can’t know it from the shore?

    It is like just curing yourself from cancer and turning around and seeing all you tossed off has landed on your child.

    I am just not sure what my next move is.

    “When in doubt, don’t.” Don’t move, don’t speak, don’t act. Just don’t.
    Again, great Universe this is up to you…let me know my next move.

  • Rotting Tree

    We teach people how to treat us, we send out signals as to what is okay and what is not, we literally are teaching the friends and folks we want to hang with.

    They don’t know our boundaries we have to show them.

    When you do that, I tend to move away.

    When you your words and actions don’t match, I learn that you don’t follow what you say, I honor that.

    If I give you the freedom to act with your free will, than I get to react with mine.

    It isn’t a lopsided game of only one having more power; we each get our own set of power tools.

    My husband would teach our children a new thing, like putting on a new roof, and tell them, you have a new talent in our toolbox.

    This toolbox is yours; it is something that you carry with you where ever you go, a skill that makes you more self-sufficient.

    They also have another tool box, a self esteem or self worth tool box, and I wonder what skills and tools I gave them to erect boundaries, set limits, uphold values or define values, be ruled by morals, just what is in their own box when they leave this family.

    Will my values be theirs and should they be?

    Will our morals match?

    Is it possible that the apple does fall far from the tree and roll away?

    If you have done all you can do, if the fruit is ripe to fall, do you have any say as to where it goes and how it grows?

    Is there only so far a parent can take them and the rest they do on their own?

    Experience being their secondary teacher, do they travel onward being led by an inner feeling no matter the source?

    Is it possible that you can build the perfect emotional toolbox, one that resembles reality and truth, and they can kick it aside and set out on their own unlearning all of that?

    A rebel with a cause.

    The cause of doing it my way…
    While I concentrated on healing my limb of the family tree, I may have overlooked the fruits growing on the limb, to see the color changing…to see a new fruit growing.

    In reality I am seeing an orange from an apple tree.

    As she clings to this whole new lifestyle she leaves behind her family tree, just as I left mine.

    She doesn’t want to have to choose, but I am thinking it is pretty hard to mesh the two lives, the two selves, the old and the new into a new one…without see what truly is.

    You have to let go of who you are to become what you wish to be…

    In order to become a whole me, I had to leave the rotting tree…

  • 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?

  • Towing others around.

    Last night I dreamt I was peddling a bike that was pulling a big trailer. On the trailer was my husband a lot of junk. Behind me sharing a seat was an unidentified stranger whose feet kept getting in the way of me peddling, impeding our progress.

    It was sooo frustrating and exacerbating and we stopped and started and started and stopped. The hardest part was getting going again, and I hated stopping.

    I kept my head down watching my peddling feet always alert for those big work boots stopping the pedals.

    It was like that man was unaware of his feet, and I was forever letting him know.

    I am in shock and awe, that I didn’t get off the bike and let the two of them be!

    In another dream a few nights before that I was trying to get my son off the floor, and he was immoveable. The harder I tried the more dead weight he became. And I kept finding him in different places and would try and move him.

    Instead of a rock picker I was forever trying to pick him up and the frustration I felt when I tried to get him to help me, and he cared less! Again, why didn’t I just let him lay?

    The struggles showing up in my dreams seem to carry the energy of me in other’s lives, dragging them around with their un-involvement allowing them to ride my coattails or me totally carrying them.

    It shows me hauling them around, while they sit in a relaxed pose watching the world go by.

    Honest, it was like the two of them were looking for interesting places to stop, and I hated stopping, while I was struggling to keep moving.

    I wonder what this metaphor is all about?

    Am I the big boots getting in the flow?

    Am I dragging others when they could move themselves?

    Am I allowing others to get in my way of doing my life?

    The overview and the feelings of how others can drag you down if you believe you should be dragging them is unreal.

    What an energy zapper!

    And more importantly, how can you live a life of a free spirit while towing others around!

  • Growing Up.

    I heard my own words coming back to me, I listened to what I sounded like, it was a live tape recorder, my son.

    “You are not listening to me.”

    “Why are you being so difficult?”

    “Why do you have to make this so hard, you know what you need to do?”

    He wasn’t screaming, but trying to maintain his polite stance so that I could see he was good.

    I had done this too, I didn’t want him to see the bad side of me, yet after a few times of speaking and no action I would abandon that plan and just go full tilt in the hollering mode.

    I had wanted him to take care of his responsibilities without me having to take care of mine.

    Something had changed within me; he could feel my strong stance and that he had lost his power or rule between him and I.

    I no longer cared about being a ‘nice’ mom.

    I was done.
    I was tired.

    My words, my pleading, my forever telling him what to do and when, my constant directions had me exhausted.

    I had a voice-activated son. If I screamed and hollered, he moved.

    And I was tired of moving this big kid around, for
    I now had to look up at him.

    Perhaps it was his large body or the fact that I was worn down, but I finally had had enough.

    I took his iTouch hostage in exchange for responsible behavior.

    What I want most is a son who is responsible for self.

    What is insane is that I have been spoiling, babying and taking care of him, EXPECTING him to be responsible. Guess there was no need, for I had it!

    I was finally tired of doing his life along with mine.

    I will take away whatever else needs to be taken away to get him to now undo all my years of spoiling.

    It will be a hard and long learning curve for both of us, for I am guilty of over tending since I was so unattended.

    There is a balance in the middle.

    I will continue to find the things that I am responsible for, what a tending mother does, but not a spoiling mother.

    There is a fine line.

    He isn’t a bad kid, but he was teetering on the edge of following his peers and group mentality, for he was so used to following words of others.

    He was perfectly taught by me.

    What is so blatantly obvious is how he treated his superiors at school was the same way he treats me.

    He dances on the line of disrespect, before slipping back into compliance.

    He is approaching the cross roads in life, where he will decide who he is, what behaviors he wants to define himself, will he be responsible or blame those in charge for his circumstances?

    What I know for sure is that I have been a negative influence as far as holding him responsible for being responsible.

    I had taken too many responsibilities away from him and now I am going to have to work harder to give them back.

    And it will be harder on him to learn to follow his own voice inside.

    Perhaps that is called growing up.

  • My own load I can manage.

    What I experienced was the karmic wheel that was much larger than what I seen of my boss’s one day.

    This was an energy that had been repressed and bundled in fear.

    Each moment in my life where I felt the superior was neglectful; I became insubordinate and tried to correct my mother’s behavior by correcting them.

    The Universe has delivered to me various opportunities to attend to myself, but in each of the situations I instead became rebellious to the boss, not wanting to once again endure the treatment of childhood.

    More than once, I have been told I walked a fine line of being insubordinate.

    I looked up the meaning, it means to refuse to obey orders or submit to authority.

    Of course my insubordinate nature was always to protect the unprotected children, no matter if the ‘children’ were my fellow employees.

    I was stuck in the fear of being responsible for things that I wasn’t suppose to be responsible for and for making the supervisor/mother aware of their behaviors while wanting to please them by allowing them to leave for rest, yet resenting the mess they left me in.

    If you look at this without the fear of being unattended, or the fact that I will not be held responsible for things that could/would and may happen, I am just a woman whose only responsibility is to care for my one rural route.

    I can do that.

    I did do that.

    I literally kept bringing the focus back to my mail, my job and tried to ‘not care’ about what was going on in her world.

    The separation is key.

    The knowing what is my business and what is hers.
    What is my responsibility and what is hers.
    Thankfully she didn’t leave behind babies who were in need of much care, babies that I just couldn’t neglect and leave unattended.

    What I see and feel most now is that I have a much broader view and less fear of the lines between what is my responsibility and what is others.
    Picking up others responsibility has weakened my shoulders and weighed heavy in my life.

    I feel the correction and the absence of fear that I am not being a good responsible girl in their absence with a load so much larger than my capabilities.

    My own load I can manage.

  • A new you emerges…

    “When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” ~Tuli Kupferberg

    Somehow this quote paints a scene of great Art, of stepping out of the box and being presented with a wondrous new world.

    In my experience breaking an old pattern requires stamina, fearlessness, standing out and being different, walking away from familiar and entering into the unknown, which I guess is where the new world emerges.

    Even if the new world is much healthier, happier and more peaceful, there is sorrow as the old pattern dies.

    It is a piece of your personality or a fragment of you that is being disposed of.

    If I were to pile up all the old patterns that I broke, you would see a whole person standing there.

    Her pattern had shades and tones of abuse and dysfunction, faint colors of washed out places of low self-esteem, heavy dark corridors of unawareness and brainwashing along with righteously wrong values.

    She was an enigma, a very confusing mystery to unravel, a body of truth and a head of fiction.

    The breaking of the pattern was all headwork, my patterns of thoughts and beliefs that didn’t match reality and I had to work to reconfigure them in my head.

    It was going backwards in time and reworking or removing the patterns I had set in my head.

    Patterns of me that were formed by childhood, patterns that reflect those who raised me, those who cared for me, doing the best they knew how.

    It was their pattern that I was living by, not mine.

    I was a designed for their use not mine.

    When patterns are broken, a new you emerges….

  • Confines of a Well

    There seems to be two perceptions.

    The Perceptions with choices and the perception of no choices or the perceptions of freedom or the perceptions of limited and no choice.

    And depending upon which land you occupy you will have a life that reflects that.

    I lived in both places. The first being the dark narrow hole of perception that I was frozen in, where I had to do what others wanted of me, where my life was led by the wishes of others, I had no free will of my own.

    We can call it a victim hole, and its perception is very one way, or co-dependent, where the quality of my life depended upon another.

    The perception in that land was very limited and the quality of life was at the mercy of another’s good will.

    It was from that darkness I fell out of onto the land of wide open expanse and freedom, where my strings to others were untied, where I was able to walk freely and express myself freely, where the victim chains that held me in place fell free.

    It was equal to walking out of Plato’s cave or the story in Sogyal Rinpoche’s book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, about the frog who climbed out of the well to see the ocean.

    It is like your constraints and perceptions shatter into a million fragments, where you now have access to an unlimited choice.

    There is no common ground between the two worlds.

    I feel that I lived in a place where my boxes of choices were not available to me.
    It seems incredible to me now that I didn’t have access to my own box of choices that I waited for someone to tell me what to do.

    Imagine the difference of perceptions to having access to your own choices or not.
    Living, as a prisoner in your own life is pure hell, its living in a dark well and not knowing what freedom exists outside.

    So while I agree perceptions are a choice, it is way hard to phantom that inside the well.

    If you disagree that perceptions are a choice perhaps you best look around where you are living and see who holds your box of choices.

    You will either find the freedom of the ocean or the confines of a well.