I M Perfect lady

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  • Outside of the Mind.

    I went on a tour of The House on The Rocks in Wisconsin.

     

    At a distance it looks like a needle jutting outwards towards a rock formation, and the view from the garden seem architecturally intriguing, the surrounding landscape held trees of various sizes and types all growing on a hilly terrain… right in the middle of nature.

    We spent time in the gardens, taking pictures of the flowers and the fishes that swam in the lily ponds.  If this was the outside, we couldn’t imagine what the inside would be!

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    Our first entry was narrow and tight with low ceilings, dark and airless, carpeting lined the walls and floors and small windows let in a bit of light.

    As we exited into a transitional hallway, where we were able to walk out on the needle we had seen in the distance, we did then see we were above the trees or in the trees and nature surrounded us.  Once again we could see the sunshine and trees.

    And then the tour led us back inside, into dark mazelike rooms and hallways, were we couldn’t turn back and couldn’t get out.  We had no choice but go forward following the signs, “Tour continues”.

    The walls and interiors were lined with a collection of odd things, mismatched and yet similar in feeling.  From masks, to old dolls…their eye staring wildly…stuck behind the glass with lights shining upon them, the rest of the room dark. 

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     And placed in even darker corners imitation tiffany lamps.  It was said he kept the house dark to show off their colorful light. Interesting he honored them more than the brilliant nature right outside.

    The windows coverings were a dark blue, so we never glimpsed the light of outside. 

    And then came the windowless rooms, and in this darkened maze we walked, trying to neutralize the overwhelming heaviness of insanity…a carousel played its circus music, which added to the crazy energy, spinning around and around. 

    We went downward into a huge room that held a wale its innards exposed an octopus draped over it; one huge eye bore down on us.  Even in this huge cavernous room you felt stuck.  A narrow sidewalk kept us walking single file forward.

    Lining the walls was a collection of old toys, like forgotten memories neglected and hidden from children or remnants and artifacts of children.

    In the darkness and cave like atmosphere all things took on a sinister glow…perhaps each cried out from their prison. 

    I have seen old things reverently kept in museums, and these treasures were locked away in the darken bowels of this man’s creation, taking on his energy by how he displayed them.

    Our next stop the ‘house’ café, where fumes of cooking overwhelmed our already churning insides.  Amazingly there were folks dining, we walked by their tables, anxious to be set free.

    As we exited the dining room we met two young workers and asked how much longer the tour was. To which they replied 25 more minutes.  I asked if they could lead us back to the Zen gardens, and one replied he could, and we followed.

    My brother said that the inside of this structure was like taking a physical tour into his abused mind…

    In the years he and I have talked together, we have been trying to get him free from that confused maze like mind.

    He has a picture of himself prior to the abuse, and in it stands a little boy with a red sweater. So we always speak of his inner voice, his creative voice, his Spirit as the little boy in the red sweater.

    It was so incredible that it was a young lad in a red tee shirt that led us out and back to the Zen Garden…just like in my brother’s life.

    I was able to see and feel the energies of a mind gone insane, and see how there appears to be no way out and nowhere to sit down and be at peace, no way to find Light and freedom inside the mind.

    The tour was worth so much more than they charged, for it showed us a walking tour on how it feels to be lost in the abused mind and to see it sitting in reality surrounded by nature.

    It is encapsulated in the midst of splendid reality, shut out to itself, like a huge pocket in the land of sunlight, air and splendor, it is secluded and dark, narrow and airless…it again is like the mind…without the access to the right side.

    And the juxtaposition, Zen Garden – Dark airless rooms, maze like hallways, dead-end corridors…even the fake tiffany lamps could be seen as a false sense of hope or false prophets…just steps away are flowers, waterfalls, lily ponds and peace.

    A young woman we shared our experience with said it sounded like the religion she just exited.  On the outside it has a Zen Garden like look, but once you get in you are lost and in the darkness.

    What was so amazing and telling to me, were the reactions of others, some were doing jigs to the carousel music not feeling the energies there, for it they matched their own levels.  Others were like us anxious and feeling suffocating and needing to get out.

    It was a great gift to see the overall picture of the abused mind, a mind caught up in the crazy making of a dark religion lying in the middle of a Zen Garden.

    For it is literally true, that nature is our own natural state unless your sense of self gets caught up in the left side of your mind…

    We were able to see the insides of the man who created The House on The Rocks.  How scary to build this monstrosity in the midst of nature’s grandness, totally blocking it out.

    Just seeing the close proximity of the wide-open expanse of nature, the brightness, the airy breezes, the smells and sounds of nature, just outside of the darkened maze was profound.

    How like the human experience of either being in reality or lost in the confused mind.  Reality is always here; we just have to find our pathway. 

    The road that leads us back to being our self, to self expression, self awareness, to being the self we were meant to be, our unique expression of who we are…is found outside of the mind.

    “In order to experience the Ultimate Reality you have to be out of your mind.”  Neale Donald Walsh

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    Nature's brilliance!!!

     

  • Growing Lifeless.

    It seems that there is a side of change that continues to catch me off guard, while I eagerly lean towards growth and transformation, I fail to see I am outgrowing friends.

     

    My flippant quote that I clung to was, “Birds of a feather flock together…”  I just failed to appreciate that in changing the colors of my feathers, I would no longer feel drawn to being with certain people and then have to seek new feathers that matched the new me.

     

    There should be a warning label on all the self-realization books, that by becoming more aware, more truthful, more in alignment with your soul’s purpose, you may lose friends if they are not on the same journey.

     

    You arrive to the same group or have lunch with an old friend only to find you don’t sway to the same tune, that your music is no longer in sync…you both feel it and perhaps try and not notice, but eventually the ‘meetings’ become less and less attractive.

     

    We are attracted to similar energies and if our energies rise and theirs remain the same, the growing apart naturally takes place, you don’t have to orchestrate it, facilitate it, you just have to honor it.

     

    What I have failed to consider each time I get a great hit of new insights and understandings, when I burst forth in a new way, that I leave behind my old energy patterns which match my friends.

     

    I also believe that many are stopped on the journey towards living a full spiritual soulful life, is that it may mean leaving behind relationships of long standing.

     

    What I also have great confidence in is that many friendships are like a curvy path; we meet and go away only to meet again, for we are all heading in the same direction, but at our own pace.

     

    So I don’t see the leaving as in forever, but that our journeys are set at a different speed.

     

    What I need most is to pay attention to what I need, what excites me and makes me come alive…it serves no one to sit and idle growing lifeless.

     

  • A Liar too.

    There seems to come a time in each relationship where the titles and names do not matter, where instead lies the meat of the relationship, the giving and the taking, the feelings we feel in the wake of their actions, the way we are treated or the lack thereof, it is like we can finally see what it is we are tasting.

    I asked myself if lies was an ingredient in love and could not find one recipe of Love that included lies.

    Not the love of parents, friends, lovers or self. Lies and Love don’t match.

    I also know that all relationships no matter what kind are subject to renegotiations if and when the ingredients change of one party.

    There isn’t a relationship out there, as far as I can see, that holds this sacred space of no negotiation.

    To me, all relationships are fluid and are living breathing exchanges between two people, that will change as the individuals in them change, and in fact the relationship is only as good as the weakest one.

    The weaker one is the sum total of the relationship, for if the stronger one settles, so goes the relationship down to the lowest denominator.

    My experiences with dysfunction is the strong lower themselves to be okay with dropping down to the low level, it is seen as kind and loving and accepting, and to forgive all actions, and call it unconditional love.

    Unconditional love to some is allowing all types of negative behaviors to messy up a relationship and you are to love no matter what.

    The ingredients of dysfunctional love is that anything goes and all must be forgiven, and relationships are made of steel there is no renegotiation, and you and I are locked behind the wall of our relationship.

    The relationship between sister and sister in some is non negotiable.

    Between parent and child…

    That what started out has to remain, we are locked in forever, like a steel cage within there is no way out, we must forever and a day be held together, withstanding bad behavior for the cause of Relationship.

    Two victims behind the relationship cage.

    I say, that if one in the cage changes, the other gets to leave if the changes can’t be reversed.

    When one changes, the whole relationship changes. It isn’t a cage, but rather the dance within the cage.

    Some put high regard on the titles, Mom, sister, daughter, father, and I see the individual behind the title, and I believe that the sister is only as good as her actions in the cage.

    Lies are lies no matter whose mouth utters them.
    Abuse is abuse no matter whose bodies are delivering it. It is convenient only for the one who is doing the bad behavior to use the trump card sister, to put that out in front of the poor behavior.

    Well, in my world I have taken down the cages that held me in and I am free.

    I no longer will be victimized or blinded by a title.

    Actions are actions, lies are lies, and deceit is deceit.

    Setting aside the relationship and seeing you as you, lies are not becoming.

    No good can be grown from a lie.
    No self worth can be gained from a lie.
    No love can be sown from a lie.

    In my childhood family they live among the lies and are not even aware that who they are playing with isn’t so, raised in the darkness full of lies, it is their normal. They don’t even know they live a lie for they never lived outside of it. Lies is all they ever knew. They have said and do say, that my parents did the best they could, and they did. But their best is to present one thing to the front while doing something else behind the scenes.

    A lie I call it.

    Most will not deal with the ‘thing’ behind the scenes; they would rather just play with what is in front, the pretend relationship label. Father, Mother instead of really looking at the actions within the cage.

    What happens in the cage is what you have a relationship with.

    Action to action is how we dance and relate to each other.
    If one says a lie and the other does not see it, the lie still happens, one is just denying it.

    It changes the dance from love to love and trust to trust… to lie to love and what they want is for us to continue to trust them while they lie.

    How?

    What is the point?

    Who trusts someone who lies?

    I can trust that I will not trust you when you lie.

    I trust that I will tell you I don’t believe you.

    I will say love doesn’t lie.

    I wonder why you lie?

    I wonder if you know that our relationship can’t hold what you do?

    It almost seems that if you have to lie, you know that if you spoke the truth, that it would change what we have.

    Yet sadly the lie does the same thing.

    Whether you do something that would jeopardize our relationship or you lie about doing it, it matters not.

    You have breeched its integrity, you have changed its value.

    As a child, my relationship with both my parents changed at a very young age, the seed of mistrust, conditional love was planted. In order to remain in the relationship, I had to keep their lies.

    Keeping lies changes who you are.
    Keeping lies of another doesn’t make them better, brighter, loving, happy, kind and compassionate.

    Holding a bag full of lies makes you a liar too.

  • 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.”

  • 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…