Tag: of

  • What my mind can hold.

    Glancing through the book “Truth vs Falsehood” by David Hawkins, I read this headline, “Cultism”…so here it is.

    “Cults ensnare the unwary by their specialness and false promises. Members have ‘insider’ status and a special ‘lingo’. The group leader is charismatic, seductive, and courts the intimate, who is flattered by the attention. The leader is very ‘special’ and treated with adulation, which is quickly turned into control of members, including especially their money and sex lives, as well as lifestyles, diets, clothing, etc. Members must take allegiance and break off relationships with family or even spouses and often associations or groups.”

    “The group often forms a geographic, restrictive enclave and develops a group paranoia as well as a characteristic “cult glaze” (cal. 120) as though in a hypnotic state (the effect of isolation and brainwashing). Once detected, that glaze is easily recognized (the “programmed cult look,” as one observer described it. There is a flatness and automation style to rationalization where content is like a “party line” that is parroted from having been programmed. Cults especially target celebrities and exploit them as showpieces.”

    “The influence of the cult leaders is so strong that large groups of people will willingly kill not only others but also themselves (e.g. Heavens Gate, Jim Jones, Islamic terrorists, suicide bombers, Aum Shinrikyo subway gassers, Bolsheviks, Nazi party, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, White Supremacists, Ku Klux Klan, liberationists etc.”

    “Another characteristic of cultism is proselytizing and insistence of following the party line of a pseudo-religious group belief system by which individuality is scorned or even threatened. Leaders are very power-oriented, and control plus paranoid egoism are dominant themes.”

    “Sometimes a spiritual leader will calibrate as integrous early in their career but then will fall victim to the seduction of prestige, money, sex, or the adulation of followers. Then the original spiritual group degenerates into a cult, or a spiritual technique becomes actually trademarked and then commercialized and marketed by hired publicists. In that case, the technique calibrates above 200 but the organization itself falls below 200 and becomes primarily a marketing organization that trades on the original concept or exclusive technique. The technique is thus only taught for a price and ‘trainees’ are forbidden to reveal the secret teachings (which are usually merely a few simple phrases or sentences with a general application to ‘improve health’, “attract abundance”, “increase love life,” “be more popular”, fulfill your potential success”, “attract a mate”, etc) Some of the promoted techniques can be found in any fortune cookie, e.g. “One smile can change your life forever” (cal. 350), or “Success goes to one who is kind.” (cal. 360)

    “The true value of such workshops is not the magic of the central concept or technique, but the disciplined practice of actually applying it with regularity in the daily life instead of merely quickly dismissing it as “I already know that.” The value of training workshops then lies in the learning of the value of steady application and actually putting a valuable tool into practice and steady focus, e.g., the “faithfulness” of A Course in Miracles workbook.”

    “Another expression of cultism is the cultification of splinter groups from traditional religions, e.g., the far-right “fundamentalism” most prominent and visible in Islam, Christianity and ethnic variations of worldwide religions.”
    David Hawkins

    While I know when you are in the midst of a cult, you can’t see the forest for the trees, but when you step out and find your own freedom to be an individual to feel the open space where the programmed mind used to be, it is mind blowing.

    Most feel and think that a cult is this small hidden special group, but if you look around within many religions, you will see what they are doing to the individual, they are controlling it.

    Any organization that tells you what to wear and what not to wear, what is acceptable and what is not, what you can and cannot do with your own body is a cult. Albeit a milder level for perhaps your religion hasn’t asked you to kill, yet.

    In my childhood religion, there was a phrase that could erase all sins and we literally believed in its power. “Your sins are forgiven in Jesus name and blood…” By believing in this phrase, ‘there was no sin to great to forgive’. All transgressions against others was deleted.

    With this phrase, many criminal behaviors are washed away without ever needing the police, the law or the court of the land.

    It is insanity at its best and what happens to the victims of these crimes? Who is there to protect them, when it is know and approved to have pedophiles preying upon the children, and the only consequences are they have to ‘confess’ and be ‘forgiven’?

    Where are all these sins? Do they really believe that Jesus is carrying the weight of all the tortured children? Is he indeed that forgiving to allow the children to suffer while the adults get a new cloak that is whiter than snow? Come on people wake up the sins are living in your midst, they are the abused, the confused and the broken.

    There are no magic words that will take away the physical act of abuse on a child’s body nor erase the terror and the shattered trust and innocence….

    The most evil words that I can now hear are “Your sins are all forgiven…” For what it means to me, is that the monster has been blessed to abuse again.

    When will the people in the cult wake up and see the bleeding children? When will they understand that the words spoken are destroying the spirits/souls of the children among them?

    As they sit in the pews singing “Bless be the tie that binds us…” I want them to know, they are the chorus in a ring of child abuse!

    I wanted to believe that my family was an oddity that we were not the popular way within the church, yet I fear that I was the tip of the iceberg and what lies beneath is beyond what my mind can hold.

  • Returns to being good.

    What a multifaceted catch 22 it is when society is asking that the children of abuse be the ones to stop it. To be the ones to name their perpetrator, to come out of their cages of captivity and walk freely with courage seems insurmountable.

    What it fails to realize is the condition of the conditioned mind and how it has programmed the child or the adult child to bow down to authority, to keep silent and suffer in silence.

    We have been taught by experiences to go it alone and to keep to ourselves our selves, to not expose or share the feelings part of us, but instead walk around with a veneer finish that covers our truths.

    We have lived mostly as the veneer and have not allowed the real self to peep through and now in order to stop the abuse we have to completely reverse this.

    The veneer has to fade to the back and what comes forth is all we have tried to keep hidden. We have to now present to the world the very thing that terrorized us.

    Imagine? We are the ones who stop the monster, we whose power they took, now have to come forward fearlessly.

    And yet, as odd as this seems, as backwards and as upside down, the very step in sharing your wounds is the very thing you need to begin building your strength and courage, it will help define who you are from the base of truth.

    To speak your truth of who you are and what happened to you, who you fear and why, are truthful utterances of your journey in life, your biography and pathology, what has made you you. You then are able to see and feel that IT isn’t you that is bad, but them. You are not the problem, they are.

    And, by having a veneer, also shows the lack of support and caring you had. It literally shows how untreated you are.

    If, you had to ‘hide’ your abuse, it shows that you lived in an abusive home. For if you lived in a loving caring home, the abuse would have been treated, you would have been lovingly cared for and nurtured and the Bad Man/Woman would have been put away as so not to harm another.

    When the bad man/woman is not put away, we are left to feel bad and actually are told to put away our wounds.

    What an odd show and tell it now requires in order to stop more generations, we have to show who the monster is and then our wounded self returns to being good.

  • My Natural State.

    What struck me as I wrote about the Unbelievers verses the Believers is that we all breathe air and we all have the same bodies, our only striking differences are what we believe, or the thoughts in our heads.

    I had just heard Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor speaking on Sirius and she made reference to the genetic similarities of humanity that I would love to share.

    (My Stroke of Insight)

    “Biological evolution generally occurs from a stat of lesser complexity to a state of greater complexity. Nature ensures her own efficiency by not reinventing the wheel with every new species she creates. Generally, once nature identifies a pattern in the genetic code that works towards the survival of the creature, like a blossom for nectar transmission, a heart to pump blood, a sweat gland to help regulate body temperature or an eyeball for vision, she tends to build that feature into future permutations of that specific code. By adding a new level of programming on top of an already well-established set of instructions, each new species contains a strong foundation of time-tested DNA sequences. This is one of the simple ways through which nature transmits the experience and wisdom bestowed by ancient life to her progeny.

    Another advantage of this type of build-on-top-of-what-already-works genetic engineering strategy is that very small manipulations of the genetic sequencing can result in major revolutionary transformations. In our genetic profile, believe it or not, scientific evidence indicates that we humans share 99.4% of our total DNA sequences with the chimpazee.

    This does not mean, of course, that humans are direct descendants from our tree-swinging friends, but it does emphasize that the genius of our molecular code is supported by eons of nature’s greatest evolutionary effort. Our human code was not a random act, at least not in its entirety, but rather is better construed as nature’s ever-evolving quest for a body of genetic perfection.

    As members of the same human species, you and I share all but 0.01% (1/100th of 1%) of identical genetic sequences. So biologically, as a species, you and I are virtually identical to one another at the level of our genes (99.9%). Looking around at the diversity within our human race, it is obvious that 0.01% accounts for a significant difference in how we look, think and behave.
    Dr. Jill

    What I find so interesting is that we are so alike yet so different in our responses to life, and what we are taught to believe makes a huge difference in how we live.

    Our bodies have similar genetic make up, yet how these bodies experience life is much more dictated by who raised us and their personal beliefs.

    It is very interesting to me to learn about why you live life the way you live it. I always say, I am perfect coming from whence I came. I simply couldn’t have known no better, being taught what I was taught, either by word or deed.

    I am a perfect rendition of a person who traveled as I traveled.

    What I awoke to in December 2004 was the realization that I had no independent beliefs or even person.

    I thought as one part of a big mind controlled religion, my mind wasn’t mine to own.

    What actually woke up in that moment was the awareness of how little of me was actually mine.

    I told my brother today, all I owned in that moment was my breath.

    All the rest seemed to be tainted from the abuse or the religion, there wasn’t a part of me that was free, but my breath.

    I stayed with my breath. I trusted nature and walked with it, seeking its natural independence. Nature became my teacher in learning how to be me.

    Slowly I am returning to my natural state.

  • The Door is Open.

    I listened today to a mother and daughter speaking about a time in their lives where the daughter wanted her freedom to do drugs and the mother wanted her daughter to stop using drugs.

    These opposing desires had them in a battle of the wills.

    Until the mother realized she couldn’t do this anymore and she let her go, allowing her to leave the rehab and set out on her own. She believed that in three weeks the daughter would be back home.

    Three years passed while the daughter went deeper into the drug world, selling her body to buy drugs, being homeless, until she almost died and had a near death experience, did she realize doing drugs wasn’t a good thing.

    What caught my attention was that no matter what the disagreement is, until you both agree, there will be a battle of wills.

    This battle of wills seems to make each person dig deeper and find reasons for their side and tearing up the relationship with each fight.

    I can’t even begin to imagine letting a daughter go to sink deeper into the drug addiction, but I can also see the struggle to keep her out, when everything inside of her screams for drugs and the freedom to do what it is she pleases.

    However, the mother did not allow this behavior to ruin her home; the daughter and her drug habit left her house.

    This exchange I heard this afternoon, shown me that what my daughter and I are going through is mild in a sense, and that the freedom I have given her to make up her own mind is a good thing.

    That she gets to decide what is good for her self.

    While I know my perspective is clear and she knows it, she now has to decide what is good for her, her life, and her future.

    Letting me down is the smallest of affects, for she will have to live with the choices fully just as the daughter who lived with all the things that come with the drugs, my daughter will have to live with all the things that come with a married man; the three kids, and ex-wife and the very beginnings of a divorce.

    My life, my home, my inner peace and happiness are separated.

    I will ‘think’ of her, but not experience her life, she will do that, she will feel the affects of all that comes with this man she has feelings for, he comes with a ton of baggage, all of which will spill into their relationship, but I will not feel it, she will.

    I am willing to let her go.

    Time will tell if the pull to go is strong enough to make her leave…there will be no battle of the wills. The door is open.

    “A woman convinced against her will is of the same opinion still.”

  • Devils in Disguise.

    I am finally seeing how literally birds of a feather flock together, clinging to the same version of heaven and hell, love and fear, good and evil, that depending upon your level of awareness and type of energy you carry, your heaven will reflect that.

    Somehow heaven on earth seemed to be a statement or a flight of fancy, perhaps a daydream or a wishful idea, but we all have our heaven on earth and we all flee from what we think hell on earth would be.

    And sometimes a tragedy happens and you arrive at hell in an instant, your worst fears are realized.

    Walking through hell changed the energies within me, little by little the negative energies were replaced with positive ones, until the balance tipped and I no longer was the same inside.

    Oddly what I called hell was actually the place where I found my positive energies.

    I found pieces of myself I didn’t know were missing, patches of self-esteem long forgotten, newfound love, bits of passion, parts of authenticity, chunks of courage, that slowly arrived as I trudged through hell.

    Hell before was reality, and reality now became my new heaven.

    I am not sure I can articulate this wonderful view that I now have of where I was and where I am, how walking through the ring of fire totally transmuted me inside.

    I know my family came close to the fire, were singed and burned, some came in for a short while, but the heat was too strong, the truth seared their illusion, and they scurried back to safety, to their old life, to old habits and routines, catching a glimpse of hell and retreating.

    When they fled, I went in deeper, and explored all the caves of hell, looking for the self I had lost there.

    Imagine I found myself in hell!

    In the darkest of moments, during the most excruciating sorrow out I popped.

    The me who went into hell and the me who walked out bear little resemblance to each other, we are not the same lady inside.

    It is then no wonder that I respond to my family different and they to me, that our hells don’t match nor do our heavens, for my hell became what I call magical and transforming and filled with grace.

    While I wouldn’t wish my hell on anyone, it is the greatest thing that ever happened in my life, it has transformed me in ways just regular old life can’t do.

    I can’t remember how the country song goes exactly, but something about when your going through hell, keep on going,get out before the devil even knows your there….

    But what if the devil is the truth, and you keep going, not stopping for it and you slip out before the truth catches you…what have you escaped, Heaven or Hell?

    It is so intriguing to me to see that perhaps our heavens and hells do match, but that you haven’t become aware…that you are dancing with angels who are really devils in disguise.

  • Cheering for the Butterfly!

    We would rather be ruined than changed;
    We would rather die in our dread
    Than climb the cross of the moment
    And let our illusions die.

    ~W.H. Auden

     

    As I sit in the graveyard of my illusions, I am left with merging emotions, crashing upon each other, overlapping – sorrow and freedom, sadness and joy, feeling left out and being spared, all swaying within like ghosts.

     

    Memories of happier times try to overpower awareness of reality’s raw experiences; a game of pretend almost arises, like an abused woman who refuses to see the man who beat her, by focusing on the good times.

     

    Hope plans a future that isn’t to be, sorrow knowing you can never go home.

     

    Being sprung free and yearning for the cage.

     

    Celebrating while crying.

     

    Unable to firmly grasp one without feeling the loss of the other.

     

    It feels like I am dying while alive, grieving for my own self.

     

    Having one foot in the grave of my old life, while learning to walk in my new.

     

    The hardest part is to let me die, to be strong and keep killing the illusion, the dysfunctional relationships, letting them go on without me.

     

    I wish I could say I am tough and this is easy to feel the sorrow and pain as another section of my life dies…and I am left in the space of empty.

     

    The wise say that without change we would have no butterflies.

     

    But the time between caterpillar and butterfly is you are neither, suspended in time…

     

    You don’t fit with the caterpillars anymore, and you still have no wings to fly.

     

    In a cocoon I live, one life not finished and new one not fully begun.

     

    Suspended in soup of transition.

     

    Crying for the caterpillar and cheering for the Butterfly!

     

  • Associating with My Truth

    I have been fighting my body for so long, fighting with the feelings I have inside, tormenting myself as I struggle to not do, what it wants to do.

     

    I fought my body to be close to my parents.

    I fought my body to respond better to my parents.

    I fought my body to feel comfortable with my family.

     

    I was frustrated it couldn’t just relax, be normal, chill, and be a normal kid, a loving warm child.

     

    It was like there was an inbred system that didn’t respond correctly to the outside.

     

    It blew cold when it should have blown warm.

    It then blew warm when it should have blown cold.

     

    I felt best when I was far from my family. That is odd to know of yourself.  I could then relax and be myself.

     

    I am a freak of nature, for I don’t have the loving warm comfortable feelings I am supposed to have with family, mine are replaced with a cold standoffish chill. 

     

    So, I had to pretend what wasn’t within me ‘naturally’.

     

    The day that my father was exposed as a pedophile was the day I stopped pretending.  The cold fear within me was not unnatural, it was natural, and I was okay.

     

    I was okay within me. My feelings and my body were acting perfectly.

     

    I am perfectly okay and natural as an abused child can be.

     

    It is perfectly natural to fear those who harm you.

     

    There is annihilation between body/feelings and you when you are abused, and perhaps that is the real meaning of disassociation, we left our feelings behind.

     

    It was either annihilate the feelings or annihilate the parent.

     

    If you annihilate the parent you are out in the cold….

     

    To live in complete annihilation from your feelings and your body, is to live half alive.

     

    There came a fork in the road where I knew the cost that came with my self annihilation, the cost was me and many other little girls to follow. 

     

    When I didn’t speak up in fear of that man, he continued on.

     

    I was the imposter, I was the pretender, I was unnatural, and I went against my feelings to fit in.  I will not do that any more.  I will fit out and be shunned for associating with my truth.

     

     

     

  • Steering Our Own Canoes!

    One definition of codependency; Adult children of alcoholics; people in relationships with emotionally or mentally disturbed; people in relationships with chronically ill peoples; parents of children with behavior problems; people in relationships with irresponsible people; professionals – nurses, social workers and others in ‘helping’ occupations.  Even recovering alcoholics noticed they were codependent and perhaps had been long before becoming chemically dependent.

     

    Melody Beatte goes on to write.

     

    “One fairly common denominator was having a relationship personally or professionally, with troubled, needy, or dependent people.  But a second more common denominator seemed to be the unwritten, silent rules that usually develop in the immediate family and set the pace for relationships. These rules prohibit discussion about problems; open expression of feelings; direct, honest communication; realistic expectations, such as being human, vulnerable or imperfect; selfishness; trust in other people and one’s self; playing and having fun; and rocking the delicately balanced family canoe through growth or change – however healthy and beneficial that movement might be.  These rules are common to alcoholic family systems but can emerge in other families too.

     

    Melody’s personal definition is; A codependent person is one who has let another person’s behavior affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person’s behavior.

                    Melody Beatte

     

    As I sit here 5 ½ years later, I realize that I rocked the family canoe by getting out, I tipped the balance and was seen as crazier than the folks who began steering that canoe long before I was born.

     

    I heard on the radio today, that a family boat is heading down a certain river before a child is born, and our legacy is to pick up an oar and row.

     

    We are taught how to row and in what direction by our parents.  And we don’t start rowing at 18, but at about 1 year old or younger. 

     

    We are taught how to row and where.

     

    It is my opinion that two mentally and emotionally disturbed people were rowing my family’s canoe, and that the only way to save my self was to get out of the boat, and not to just stop rowing.

     

    I was no longer trusting in the elders who steered our family canoe, nor was I going to ride along with the rest, just because we were born in the same boat.

     

    While I couldn’t change the course of the family boat, I could change mine, but in order to do so, I had to jump out.

     

    It is seen as rejection of all who stayed in the boat.

     

    It isn’t seen as healthy or wise, but rather that I have set boundaries to keep them out.

     

    And I guess I have.

     

    I don’t want people in my canoe trying to steer me in a direction I don’t want to go in. 

     

    It has been a long and arduous journey to find the strength and confidence to row myself, to strike out on my own, learning how to row in a direction that is much more healthy than what I was taught.

     

    While the rest may see me as rejecting them, I am only embracing me. 

     

    Embracing my independence, my freedom of choice, my boundaries, and learning what is healthy for me and what causes me pain, what I need to live in peace, love and joy.  Learning how to stay in my canoe and in my business, allowing and honoring each person to ride the river of life as they chose.

    I heartily and cheerfully encourage the rest to jump ship, letting the family’s legacy canoe to finally become empty of dysfunctional codependent folks.  It can happen when one by one each of us begin steering our own canoes!