I M Perfect lady

Tag: mental

  • A pocket of Unreality.

    What I think I have been doing in an odd way is by only looking at the criminal, I spared my ‘dad’.

    By focusing so much on the criminal aspects, I negated joining them with my father. I left the father part pushed far away, in a spot where crimes can’t touch him.

    I didn’t want my criminal to intertwine with my dad.

    I didn’t want the combo, the molesting dad.
    I wanted the criminal called Ray.

    This is a reverse of what I did as a child.

    The time has come to join the two together and make them one, a criminal dad.

    Then I become the daughter that he hurt.

    Not just a random girl, and he not a random man.

    The two parts merge as one; the disassociation now associates with both sides of the same mirror, no more trickery.

    I didn’t know that I had slipped the dad in a special spot, and only focused on the criminal, that I had still kept them separated inside.
    In my heart of hearts, in the fiber of my being I had separated them and never spoke of dad crime, just Ray crime.

    This is incredible to me that I had flipped and exchanged into my mental hiding spot, a dad.

    I hadn’t brought them together inside of me for reconciliation.

    Which is why in order to write a letter they will become one.

    A criminal dad.

    Even resorting to his given name or using the word father, removing the familiar comfortable name while addressing his crimes kept the dad safe inside.

    I would not have known that I was hanging on to a dad inside, that I immediately changed his name when the crime came in, yet there is no way to quickly alter the mind’s beliefs and thoughts attached to him.

    Now the time has come to drop the divider and let them hook up together.

    A little girl sits with a criminal dad; there is no separation or pretend space he can sit in, nor I.

    The restraining letter should have been addressed to my mom accomplice.

    What I failed to realize is I was separating them inside by addressing them by their given names, so that I wasn’t saying my mom did this or my dad did that…I was making my familiar into strangers for the crimes.

    This is unreal to me that I protected the child in me by not joining the two together, reversed from my childhood days, but nonetheless kept them separated.

    Perhaps a letter addressed to Mom and Dad is what is needed, to speak my peace now standing in a spot where there is no veil between the roles of mom and dad and criminal and accomplice.

    I never knew that you could do reverse disassociation, switching the good for bad or the bad for good, that the mechanism worked both ways.

    A pocket of unreality. Where real could hide and not be seen by me.

  • Yoga Heals a Loveless Self

    “The purpose of yoga is to heal.

    Most people start practicing Bikram Yoga to flatten our stomachs, stretch our tight hamstrings, and/or to prevent future injuries. And yes it will do all of that, but those are the secondary benefits to practicing Bikram Yoga. The purpose of this yoga is TO HEAL and that healing takes place from the inside out. It works on a mental level (and spiritual level) to heal our minds. Only then can we begin to change our self on the outside.

    Bikram says, the yoga practice teaches us how to like our self and we start taking better take care of our self then we fall in LOVE with our self!”
    Karen Buckner

    What I didn’t know when I began this practice was how out of love I was with myself, and how my love of my self depended upon another.

    If they loved me, I was okay.

    I never loved me alone, by myself without doing for another.

    It is shocking how dependent we are taught to be on another’s good opinion, how we act/be/live/think/believe to be loved.
    To have another love us, yet we don’t stop and think what it would take for us to love us, alone.

    Doing was my self worth, which I mistook for love.

    I was worthless unless I was doing.

    Imagine this type of self-love where you give and give and give until there isn’t any energy left, until you are filled with resentment of the takers who are your love givers.

    Giving to get love?

    My damaged body is what drove me to doing yoga, with an arm hanging limply at my side, my upper shoulders and neck one huge knotted ball, I began to work on self.

    What I didn’t know was that I was actually filling up my empty tank inside and dumping out all the past beliefs about how to love, changing my inner beliefs of my self, one-second at a time, as I paid attention to my breath and body.

    Each day I brought my body to the mat, and focused on my breathing, as I twisted and bent this constricted body into unimaginable poses, I was changing deeply inside.
    It is a like strenuous physical magic, while I was concentrating so hard to change my body, my insides were healing, my sense of self blossomed, my inner strength to be me became strong, my mind sought clarity and the willingness to face what is…the list goes on and on.

    Yoga heals a loveless self.

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  • The Voices are Silent

    I finished the Quiet Room by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett. What an inspiring story of girl with a broken mind; a schizophrenia mind.

    She had voices in her head that were finally silenced with the proper medication, treatment and her tenacity to continue working on herself.

    She explains, “I still hear the Voices from time to time. I try to take my own advice. I distract myself, lecture myself, and focus on the outside world. I have taught myself to use a little mantra when they reappear: “These Voices are not real. Don’t be frightened. Don’t get upset. They are not real. Don’t let them overcome you. Try and think of what happened just before you heard them. Is there some emotion you can isolate that will help explain why they are here now? They are not real. It’s okay. Don’t be afraid.”

    “When I hear the Voices, I shake myself back to reality by using all my senses. If I am riding the train to Manhattan for example, I concentrate on the taste of Diet Coke and the smell of the perfume I am wearing. I look out the window at the changing view, and listen carefully to the sound of the conductor collecting tickets. I feel my own ticket flipping back and forth between my fingers.”
    Lori Schiller

    Even though I am not schizophrenic, I can relate to using reality to keep me on the path to wellness, how my voices were alive and walking in reality, voices of the dysfunctional family I left behind.

    Medication was able to reduce the voices mostly and when they returned, she formulated ways to not believe them.

    My experiences of walking out a dysfunctional family had the Voices on the outside in reality that were beckoning me backwards, and there wasn’t medication that would silence them, instead I had to be silent.

    My Voices were sisters, brothers and mother, my father’s voice never appeared.

    Voices and laughter, seemingly vanilla requests urging me to stop being so mental, so frightened, so weird, so odd, so standoffish, so separated, so cold, so heartless, so mean, so unkind…just like her voices in Lori’s head, mine too rose against me.

    The only medication I have to silence their voices is my truth; it seems to keep them far away.

    It is odd that my Voices are real and in living color and they too can threaten my newfound wellness, and perhaps tear little holes in my confidences, eroding newfound peace, as they bounce around like hysterical laughter, wanting me to join in the false hilarity.

    There is a small part of me that longs for the old group, yet a much larger part of me overcomes that, knowing what I would be joining.

    It is almost like I was raised in a Mental Hospital, and that I escaped into normal, and the old patients are beckoning me back.

    And the patients in the Mental Hospital were told that they were living normal, and see me as going into a land of total insanity.

    There are even times that I like Lori, have to concentrate on the smells, sights and sounds around me to keep me with reality, to know that I am okay, I am not the one with mental issues or dysfunctional patterns controlling my life, that I have done the due diligence to get me here.

    Here the voices are silent.

  • The Quiet Room

    I am reading “The Quiet Room” by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett.

    What is so interesting is that her parents don’t want to accept her illness, and deny it by looking repeatedly for ‘normal’ behavior and are more concerned about how she ‘got’ this illness, they are fearful they caused it.

    Yet the mother had a mother with the same illness and didn’t know it until her daughter displayed the same behavior, then her mother made sense.

    She was mentally ill.

    I know how odd this is that you can’t recognize sickness, especially if you called it normal all along and it is only after the fact that looking back the red flags are waving wildly all about.

    Even Lori herself, believes we all have manic voices in our heads telling us to do things, bad talking esteem wrecking talk…and we do, just not to the degree she did.

    The first half of the book is about looking for normal when normal is nowhere to be found, how everyone wants her to not be sick while she is.

    How awful to have to live pretending or working hard to pretend, that nothing is wrong, how much kinder a ride to be a mentally ill person as you are mentally ill.

    To stand in the truth, no matter what truth you have to stand in is much easier, than trying to be something you can’t be.

    Even if her family didn’t accept it, it was there.
    She was expected to be the one to be the strongest to lead the way, while being mentally ill.

    Like having the blind lead, the deaf listen for us.

    I can’t wait to compete the story and see how she was finally able to see that she was sick and then to convince others of this fact.

    How much easier to just be yourself in whatever state you find yourself in…

  • Upset the Arrangement.

    There is a land called, “It would be Nice” and it is full of wonderful well-intentioned dreamers, folks who are stolen from reality in a fraction of a second.

     

    One second you are here, and before you even see yourself leave you are there, and once you are there; you can only know it by how you feel.

     

    In the land of it would be nice, you feel unhappy, unsatisfied, discontent no longer wanting to be where you are, but someplace else doing something else, with someone else. 

     

    While sounding like a nice place, it leaves you uneasy.

     

    No one warned me of this phrase and how it doesn’t allow you to feel what is going on right here and right now, for as soon as you say the words, “it would be nice,” you change locations and your feelings follow.

     

    As Byron Katie stated in one of her books, you can be sitting on a couch and feel like it is heaven, until you think, “It would be nice to have a pillow”, and then you are uncomfortable with just the couch.

     

    From Heaven to Hell without moving anywhere except in your mind.

     

    The three words Byron Katie says cause the most suffering are, would, should and could.

     

    What I didn’t know is that these words are the expressways out of reality, an escape route to a place far from where you are standing.

     

    You mind leaves reality, and takes your feelings with, and all that is left is the physical body, but it can’t feel or know it is in the here and now, for the mind and awareness are gone.

     

    Have you ever driven a car and can’t recall passing things, like ‘mindless driving’.  Your driving but your mind is elsewhere, that is leaving reality.

     

    Once you are aware of how much you are not aware, it is scary to know how little in a day you are actually present and fully connected to what is.

     

    Often times it is when you are doing ‘mindless’ tasks, or when you are where you don’t want to be, you visualize yourself to be elsewhere. 

     

    Most often you are unhappy with how life is operating at this moment and want to affect change, and do…but all you really change is leaving the scene in your mind.

     

    Leaving what is for what should be.

     

    Not wanting what is there or wanting more than what is there and even less, forever trying to arrange life to suit your mind.

     

    I can visualize three islands, Would be, Should be, and Could be, the islands of life’s discontent!

     

    It takes practice and sheer determination to not try and rearrange life as it appears, to just sit softly in acceptance being bent by life, instead of trying to bend life into what you feel would be better.

     

    It’s to go from being a duck on a river trying to direct the flow, to being a duck floating in total submission.

     

    Floating in total submission doesn’t take away from the duck or the river; it shows them in perfect harmony.

     

    It seems insane that the mind wants to make corrections to what is happening right now, but it does, and perhaps that is the meaning of insanity.

     

    Insanity is the mind trying to control the Universe.

     

    I had to look up the word Insane.

    It means, pertaining to, or characteristic of a person who is mentally deranged.

     

    So, I had to look up the word deranged.

     

    Transitive verb deranged-·ranged′, deranging-·rang′·ing. to upset the arrangement.

     

    To upset the arrangement.

     

    Does that mean to Upset arrangement of reality?

    To be upset with life?

    To want to arrange things better, different, more to your liking, to be forever at war with reality?

     

    If it is true then we all are insane in various degrees, with mild or extreme tendencies, and perhaps the tougher reality is to swallow, the more extreme the Upset.

     

    So when people get upset, due to the fact they don’t like arrangement of life, they are mentally derranged or insane.

     

    The opposite of insanity is total acceptance to what is.

     

    Is that right?  That if you are not mentally with reality you are arranging it differently in your mind, you upset the arrangement to suit your needs, then you are insane.

     

    If this is the case, then I truly was insane and mentally deranged for most of my life, and still fall into this position from time to time.

     

    Insanity is to upset the arrangement.

     

     

  • Posing as me.

    “The Toltec compare the Judge, the Victim and the belief system to a Parasite that invades the human mind. The parasite is a living being made of psychic or emotional energy.  It can also be compared to a program that dreams through our mind and lives through our body. From the Toltec point of view, all humans who are domesticated are sick because we have a Parasite that thrives on the emotions that come from fear and suffering.”

                   Don Miguel Ruiz

     

    Unless and until you have noticed that your mind has control over you and not you over it, you will not believe that a parasite is living your life for you.

     

    Or if you can’t stop your suffering, a parasite is using your body to be alive.

     

    If you are in fear or suffering, you know that a parasite is living your life, it has taken over the motherboard.

     

    When you are unable to sit in the now moment and find peace with all that is around you, no matter what it is, you know that the parasite has gotten a hold of a thought in your mind and is replaying it over and over.

     

    Like a bad DJ, it doesn’t offer up a new peaceful reason to drop that worrisome thought that keeps you out of the now moment.

     

    Or it has gotten a hold of your emotions and playing tunes on them that have nothing to do with reality, but perhaps an echo from the long long ago past.

     

    Emotions, thought, thoughts emotion, around and around they go… false events appearing real, stealing away your life from you.

     

    The dance of the parasite in your mind.

     

    If you are not in the now moment hearing what is playing in reality, you are listening to the parasite strumming a mournful tune.

     

    I called my parasite “My Mental Lady”.

     

    I could literally tell when she overtook me, my whole body reverberated with tension and stress, and I was fighting with reality, going against it and what would bring me peace.

     

    It truly does seem that she enjoyed my suffering, like it was dessert for her, while hell for me. 

     

    A dance of opposites, she owned my body until I was aware I wasn’t here.

     

    Imagine aware I wasn’t here.

     

    Unaware I was lost.

     

    I was living my life but not aware.

    Not even aware I wasn’t aware that I should be more aware.

     

    It was quite embarrassing to note that I wasn’t aware of my life.

    Like I didn’t even know I was allowed to be part of my life.

    My life was running without me.

     

    I recall when I woke up to the fact that I was unaware of being aware, and I looked around my house, there was no part of me there.

     

    Nothing I loved, no reflection on me, it was like my life, minus me everywhere. 

     

    I woke up in my life but didn’t know who I was, and as I took my life back, I found me.

     

    I wouldn’t have believed this book five years ago, for at the time I was a parasite without awareness, it was all I knew of me.

     

    Me as a mental lady without awareness, a parasite posing as me.

     

     

  • A Willing Witness

    “…grateful for your willingness to witness our loss” is part of a sentence I read on Facebook tonight, which struck me as odd that there are two kinds of witnesses.

     

    I never thought that there could be willing witnesses and non-willing witnesses.

     

    Yet the two drastically different witnesses are exactly what I have experienced. 

     

    One is so courageous and brave, will stand by and allow you to express the darkest of fears, the emptiest of sorrows, will listen endlessly as the truth flows and the madness is wrung from your soul and not shudder and turn away.

     

    A willing witness treads into the deepest trauma’s the most anxious anxieties, and wades through sorrows crushing blows, and still is able to remain connected, eyes, ears and soul.

     

    A willing witness never turns away. 

     

    It is this courageous witness that allows us to stand taller, dig deeper and find a small thread to continue on.  They remind us we are not alone.  That our mental state is ‘normal’ coming from whence we came.

     

    I am blessed and forever grateful for my brother who has been my most willing of willing witnesses.

     

    I also have had willing witnesses that are friends, strangers, writers, renewed old friends and new friends. Ladies whose walk equals mine or are even much worse. I am filled with great warmth and loving energy knowing that I have so many wonderfully willing witnesses.

     

    The greatest gift we can give another is to be a willing witness.