I M Perfect lady

Tag: pain

  • Only Way Through It.

    I am back doing yoga on a fairly regular basis…and in the last few weeks, my left hip seemed to straighten out, allowing me to walk straighter.  However, with this adjustment, it seems that my left lower back now is feeling the pressure.  It reminds me how connected we are.

    The lower left back seems to be out of alignment and in many postures it is very uncomfortable.  Yet, if I relax with my breath in them, it seems to release the tight muscles.  It almost feels like these muscles have been clenched and balled tight, and now I am asking them to release and strengthen.

    Instinctively, I want to either back out of the pose or grip even tighter, when what really works is to relax, breath and go deeper.

    I am sure this is how we are in all of life's tight spots. It seems un-natural to be with, and to find comfort in pain…to push in further, to breathe and to engage with the pain.  

    In yoga, my tender back and jolting nerves are a bit skittish going into poses, but if I take my time, go steady and slow, and enter into the painful spots, I loosen them up and my flexibility expands and my muscles grow stronger.

    If I were to follow my fear, I would turn away from my pain.  Doing so would leave me with a body that isn't in alignment and would even deteriorate further.  

    Going into the pain is the only way through it…

  • Acknowledgement of Hurting.

    "Unintended hurt is as common as branches snapped in wind. But it is the unacknowledged hurt that becomes a wound."  Mark Nepo

    I believe we all will hurt others and be hurt…as long as we are living and in relationships.  It is the unacknowledged hurt that wounds us.

    "Even if our awareness of being hurtful comes years after delivering the hurt, the smallest word or gesture – owning what we've done – can reopen the heart."  Mark Nepo

    I was sexually abused as a child, but no one ever acknowledged that they hurt me.  It is the unacknowledged hurt that wounded me.

    Even when it all came to light 40 years later, silence stood in the place of acknowledgement.

    I have often felt it wasn't enough to acknowledge how I mistreated and hurt my children with my angry words and general dysfunctional mothering…this lesson today has shown me, that in owning how I hurt them, began the closing of the wound and opening of our hearts.

    This is the opening I was waiting to enter…the acknowledgement of the pain they caused me…would have allowed my heart to reopen.  

    That is the difference, the dividing factor between estrangement and growing closer…Acknowledgement of hurting.

     

  • Many years of pain.

    Yoga is the opposite of junk food for the soul and when done, I get left with a wonderful feeling, a relaxed stretched out calmness…a great way to begin my day.

     

    What I marvel at is that I drag my body to the mat, I slowly exit the bed, and begrudgingly tossing the quilt aside, I almost angrily put the heater going, like preparing for my death or torture. 

     

    And it is torture to take this neglected body and bring it back to life, to make the muscles strong, as they should be, or the joints as flexible and mobile as is their nature.

     

    I have noticed in the past few months, when I have been doing just a few yoga sessions a week, that I have fallen backwards in how my body moves.

     

    I can see how we become stiff and weak.  It is by far easier to stay beneath the covers and not make the effort.  But we will have pain either way… as Bikram says, “90 minutes or 90 years.”

     

    By making the difficult choice of getting out of bed, I struggle or suffer for 90 minutes and that will save me many years of pain. 

     

  • Stop the Pain

    Tolerance – ability to endure hardship: the ability to put up with harsh or difficult conditions.

    The cycle of abuse spins due to this abnormal tolerance, it allows children to become so desensitized to pain and harsh conditions, that soon they can’t even feel it.

    Their tolerance allows them to overlook a difficult condition and the more they overlook, the more tolerable they become and the more abnormal.

    Painlessly tolerant to harsh conditions, you can literally call it home, family, and love.

    I know it has been hard to explain, how I could not have known, how can you live in dysfunction and not know it, but having a high tolerance you have a distorted view.

    In fact the more you suffer the higher the tolerance and the more pain you can suffer and the more you can suffer the less harsh it seems.

    Your tolerance level allows lots in before your pain meter beeps.

    I often wondered myself how a child can continue to endure or how I was able to withstand the conditions being so young and unskilled, but I wasn’t aware we grow our tolerance muscles when we are asked to continually and repeatedly put up with harsh conditions.

    You become accustomed to the behavior…

    I had felt that I was out of touch or numb or my feelings seemed to be out of reach, but in fact it just took lots to get my pain meter from registering.

    As I lost my tolerance for pain I have been able to open the valve on the love meter.

    I am not certain, but it seems probable, that you can’t have both the love meter and the pain meter running together.

    Who knew that by shutting off the tolerance for pain, love would appear?

    What I had to do was love myself enough to stop the pain.

  • Perfectly you!

    The reason I began this blog or writing for that matter, was that I found myself upside down in an upright world, my insides didn’t match reality, my dysfunction led me around the world not me.

    This me, I called the mental woman and she resided in me, in my thoughts and in my beliefs, she had ownership of this vessel and steered my actions from a fear based setting.

    I lived governed by fear and did most things to ward off the impending doom, for if and when the doom arrived, I would die.

    You see, once upon a time, a little girl was in a delightful safe world and out of nowhere, in the midst of her caring kindness an ugly monster appeared, plunging her into a state of terror.

    Once this terror is felt and no one releases you from it, you then set forth with the Fight or Flight Switch always on ON.

    My past six years has been to re-set that switch, to not respond in terror, but in love.

    When my daughter’s psyche hung in the balance, when I could see the abuse’s affects, my Mental Lady, my Wounded child, and My Loving Awareness all arose.

    It was the epic battle within me.

    One moment I was writhing in terror, frozen, feet ice cold dripping in sweat, a child without a way out.

    The next I was a mental woman taking control with needs that overshadow my daughter, fear that I had somehow allowed this to happen, it was my fault.

    And the most wonderful delightful experience I have ever felt was to be present with my child, to sit with her and her pain and see nothing but innocence, feel nothing but love.

    The contrast of these three individuals that I vacillated between had me swing to the highest of highs to the lowest of lows.

    It was like my past ghosts and my present awareness engaged in many battles, taking me on a wild life review.

    My views of her, my views of self, my extraordinary view of my husband, was like an epic play and I played each role.

    I feel utterly blessed and filled with gratitude that the most predominate woman within me is Loving Awareness.

    To live the rest of my life in this mode, riding behind
    Big as a house Heart, means to me that the Universal love, the essence of nature, the God Spirit, is leading me forward, that the clutches of evil and fear have been released.

    I am a woman who has been to the depths of hell and have emerged brighter, more loving and kind to my self.

    I know if I can travel this road, than my daughter and all girls and women who find them selves like I did, can do it.

    You do it by loving your Imperfections until they become perfectly you!

  • A Course In Weight Loss

    I am browsing through “A Course in Weight Loss” by Marianne Williamson, some parts I gloss over, and others parts catch my attention.

    This book and Geneen Roth’s “Woman, Food, and God” both are searching beneath the food and looking at the root cause, understanding that the food is a cover-up.

    We all know less food equals weight loss, but it also is removing the cotton between feelings and us.

    We fear feelings.

    We fear feeling feelings.

    Marianne writes,

    “ With any spiritual journey – and the journey to conscious weight loss is a spiritual journey – things often seem to get worse before they get better. Love’s light is being shined on many places heretofore not visible to your conscious mind, revealing toxic feelings that were there already but cleverly hidden.

    It’s all right if this part of your journey is not pleasant. Parts of your repatterning is learning to be with unpleasantness in a healthy way. The mature and sober person knows that on some days things simply feel rotten, and that is okay. You are learning to move through distress by simply being with it, without the need to overeat or to act out in any other way.

    How could it not be unpleasant, having to refeel feelings that you’ve been eating for years? Now having to confront them, deal with them, and ultimately accept them feels like a fever within your soul.

    But a spiritual fever, like a physical fever, actually has a productive function: it burns disease. Think of your pain as a feverish burning up of fear. As you heal physically, extreme fever can lead to delirium. And as you know heal spiritually, your fever can lead to delirium as well – a quiet delirium of the soul. This too shall pass.

    This lesson concerns itself with the human despair and the consistency of the body’s cells. Man has looked beneath the surface of the skin for centuries, probing the internal workings of the human body. During the last century, science has developed the ability to view even the tiniest of cells that make up our physical tissue. Yet science has not yet discovered an explanation for how emotional change produces physical change, and it is particularly blind to the malleability of fat.
    In fact, there are many levels of understanding – even of our physical selves – that science has not yet penetrated. An electron microscope reveals the entire picture of our cellular system, but within the cells themselves, there are storehouses of information not yet understood.

    For instance, there are tears and then there are tears. Some varieties are toxic to the body, while others healing. The distinction between the two is not just an emotional difference but a physical one as well. Even materially, there are aspects to tears – including functions that affect the workings of the brain – that have not yet been scientifically identified.

    Sometimes it’s only through crying tears that need to be shed that we dissolve the unhappiness that caused them. That is why suppressing unhappiness doesn’t tend to end it. How many times have we said that someone ‘needs a good cry.” Indeed. Toxicity is often released through tear ducts as part of the body’s natural genius of flushing itself out. Casual use of antidepressants is unwise for just this reason- feeling the full extent of your sadness is sometimes the only way to heal it. In the absence of the feeling, you miss out on the healing. The body does not make distinctions among physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual stresses. It is equipped with the natural intelligence to address them all.

    You are mistaken if you think that you can fundamentally and permanently change bodily symptoms by physical means alone. Problems must leave through the same door they came in. If mistaken thoughts have created a problem, then righting those thoughts is essential for healing it. And if toxic feelings created a problem, they can only leave through a detox process by which they come up again in order to be released.

    Fat is not just inert cellular tissue. It is a repository of twisted, distorted thoughts and feelings that didn’t have anywhere else to go. If you remove the fat tissue but do not remove the psychic cause, the fat might go but the causal imprint remains. And the imprint, in time, will attract more substance with which to materially express itself.

    It’s not enough to just “lose the weight.” You must lose the emotional weight that lurks behind it. This you have already begun to do. Remember that your food compulsion is a way to cope with painful feelings. As you begin to heal from those feelings –removing their “imprint” from your consciousness – they are necessarily refelt on their way out.

    Problems that seem to have nothing to do with your weight issues might rise up and in particularly challenging forms. You might doubt yourself in ways you have not done before, or have not done for a very long time. But this part of the process is not a bad period; it is actually a good one, for it is necessary. There is no spiritual rehabilitation without this kind of detoxification.

    When any pain, difficulty, frustration, or challenge emerges, try to see it, honor it, bear witness to it and receive it as part of your healing. The situation carries within it important information for you. It is not just randomly happening at this time. It presents the opportunity to examine critically important issues in your life. Looking at your pain, feeling the feelings, learning whatever lessons are being brought up for review – these are ultimately the only ways to get the pain to burn away.

    The Universe will never leave you alone at such a time as this. Angels are all around you, as they gather without fail whenever a soul is seeking its wholeness. This absolutely not the time to isolate; rather despite whatever resistance you feel, allow yourself to join with at least one other human being who might possibly be able to help you. You will learn the serious value of sacred friendship and/or professional counseling.

    Sometimes you just need to make space for sadness. You do not need an excuse for why you feel sad; you do not need to ‘fix’ it; and, most important, you do not need to run from it. What you need is to let it come up and simply be with it.

    Your task with this lesson is to make space in your life, just as you make space in your heart, for any sadness you need to honor. Perhaps take a walk each evening, or a stroll on the beach each morning. Allow yourself to grieve.

    You will learn in time to be with the void, addressing it with a bubble bath rather than with a sandwich, and with prayer time rather than a candy bar. Your task is to inhabit the emptiness, breathe through it, learn its lessons, and hear the message it conveys. There is no hole for you to try and fill with food or anything else; there is only the primal void within every human being when we feel we cannot find God.
    Marianne

  • Activating Inner Compassion.

    “The Presence Process” by Michael Brown

    Activating Inner Compassion

    The Intent to re-establish a loving relationship with our child self activates the procedure of learning how to become our own parent. Connecting with our child self calls us to step onto the pathway of self-nurturing, a pathway that is paved with compassion. This pathway invites us to overcome issues we unconsciously have with our own parents by reaching into a place where only forgiveness can take us. Every effort that we make to re-establish a loving relationship with our child self is rewarded with an every-increasing sense of present moment awareness.

    Many of us in this world appear to be very helpful, but when it comes to the necessary ability of knowing how to nurture ourselves, we discover that we are at a loss. We also realize that we tend to feel a deep sense of guilt whenever we attempt to do anything real and loving for ourselves. This is because it is only our unconscious sense of helplessness and neediness that drives us to sacrifice ourselves in the name of helping others. The behavior of running around and trying to help everyone to our own detriment is always fueled by the reflection we see of our own helpless plight mirrored in the world around us. We cannot give away what we do not have, so only when we learned how to truly nurture and unconditionally love ourselves do we develop the propensity for authentic service. Unless we consciously step into the present moment and own our life, our ability to be truly of assistance in this world will remain shallow and ineffectual. The first step in learning how to nurture and unconditionally love ourselves is to understand which aspect of our being is really suffering and needing our attention.”

    As adults, we experience myriad physical, mental and emotional states of imbalance, and when we do, we usually do everything in our power to numb, or distract ourselves from our plight. Or else we run to someone for attention. When we live in a time-based paradigm, what we are unable to see is that none of our physical, mental, and emotional difficulties stem from what is happening to us right now, even though they are clearly reflected in and by what is happening to us right now.

    During Session Four, we were encouraged to allow ourselves to feel all our pains and discomforts without fear or judgment. By allowing ourselves to have this experience, the realization to which we are opening ourselves is that all our pain and discomforts carry and emotional signature. The identity of this emotional signature will be one of the many emotions that arise from the trinity of fear, anger and grief.”

    Throughout The Presence Process, we call this emotional signature “the emotional charge”. We may identify this emotional charge by a variety of names ranging from fear to rage to grief. This emotional charge is an unpleasant feeling that we will literally do anything not to feel. As we progress through The Presence Process, it will become clearer to us that it is the emotional charge crouched behind our pains and discomforts that fuels our compulsion to metaphorically run from the present moment and into distraction. By reacting to this emotional charge, we lunge free Presence to pretence. We sidestep from authenticity to drama.

    We also know by now where this emotional charge is really anchored. We have already been shown how to track it back in time. To recap: if we look back over our life, and instead of viewing our past experiences as physical circumstances we choose instead to see them as a re-occurrence of emotional signatures, we will see a clear pathway of similar emotional signatures extending all the way back into our childhood. This pathway reveals to us that the imbalances that we feel today, be they physical, mental or emotional, have nothing to do with our present adult life. They are merely reflected in it. This pathway shows us that all our experiences of imbalance were initiated by encounters that we had before we turned seven. And so one of the biggest revelations we can have at this point is:

    It is not our adult experience that requires healing: it is our childhood.

    From the moment we turned our backs on our childhood so that we might become acceptable in the adult world, our child self has been using physical, mental, and emotional states of imbalance to attempt to attract our attention. Our child self has been attempting to attract our attention so that we can consciously and compassionately attend to the unintegrated emotional state in which we left it. Until we consciously attend to the unintegrated experiences of our childhood, our adult experiences will continue to be an unconscious unfolding “effect” of our unintegrated childhood.

    In “time”, our adult experience is an echo of our childhood.

    Until we integrate our childhood, our adult life will continue to be an seemingly chaotic and disconnected experience sewn together with what appears to be randomly occurring physical, mental and emotional imbalance. It is crucial at this point in The Presence Process that we understand that an unbalanced adult experience is “an effect”, not a cause of anything. It is crucial that we understand this because it is futile tampering with an effect of anything, as it is only at the point of cause that any real change can be initiated. The only value our adult symptoms of imbalance is that we can use them as clues to successfully navigate our awareness to their childhood causes. Unless we embark on such a journey, we remain ineffectual.

    The pursuit of happiness, in other words, the drive to control and sedate external circumstances so that we can feel at ease within ourselves, is nothing more that a behavior that stems form attempting to fiddle with an effect to adjust the cause. This is impossible. Such behavior leads us further and further away from our inherent joy that is already available and waiting for us within our child self. The child self is our harbor of innocence, joy and creativity. When we ignore its state of imbalance, we trade our inherent innocence, joy and creativity, and instead invest our energy in attempting to be happy by “making something of ourselves”. And so we are faced with another major revelation:

    Unless we are prepared to reach back through time and space and rescue our child self by bringing it into the safety of the present moment, where we can give it unconditional love and attention it is calling for, we as adults will never experience authentic peace.

    The intention to metaphorically reach back and rescue our own child self can be thought of as a form of time travel. However, this form of time travel is not science fiction. It does not take place “out there”, and its purpose is not to visit other far-off places. It takes place within us, and its Soul purpose is for us to compassionately reconnect with a particular attribute of our own Being from which we have become separated and alienated. This is an inside job that consciously connects our present moment with our past. It invites unconscious behaviors triggered by our past experiences to the surface of our present life so that we can consciously attend to them right now. If approached with commitment, consistency, and sincerity, this inner work releases our child self of its pain and discomfort. The unfolding consequences of rescuing our child self is that our present adult self will gradually be released from the emotional charge that is the source of all our distraction and imbalance. In other words, it is our child self that is the caretaker of our emotional charge. Emotionally it is in charge.
    Michael Brown.

    One more paragraph….

    If we have not done work with our child self prior to this moment, then it is important to realize that our relationship with our child self right now will be similar to that of a parent who has for many years abandoned their own child. At about the age of seven, most urbanized humans begin preparing to enter the adult world. This requires a willingness to turn around and walk away from our childhood. As the years unfold, it is very unlikely that we choose to look back or even consider the state of the child we once were. In most cases, we lay a blanket of forgetfulness over that aspect of our Being and openly admit that we cannot remember much of what happened when we were children. We can no longer see our child self, yet it sees everything. We seemingly no longer feel its pain, yet all our adult pain is a mirror of its unresolved feelings. We may ask, “Why must we now go back and deal with the past? Can we not just leave it alone and carry on with life?”

    Our unfortunate predicament is that the pain and suffering of our unresolved childhood issues follow us as an emotional trail of imbalance that pollutes our adult experiences in an ongoing patter that is as regular and punctual as a time piece. And this timepiece is not neutral, as the mechanical watches we wear on our wrists. The ticking of this childhood timepiece and the effects it has on our present life is what maybe thought of as “emotional time”. Wearing a watch and using it as an instrument to navigate the present moment of our life is different. It is a conscious experience. We can choose to remove the watch at any moment and no longer be exposed to its influence. However, the debris of “emotional time” is constantly invading our present moment and distracting our attention. For years, we can sedate and control the effects of the childhood debris which leak out into our adult experiences, but sooner or later it will rear up like an angry snake and challenge the very fiber of our Being. It is not necessary to get to a crisis point in our life before we begin paying attention to it, but sometimes a crisis is exactly what it takes for our desperate abandoned child self to harness our attention.

    Yet the moment we turn inward and start sincerely attending to our child self with the unconditional love, compassion, and the devotion it deserves, our physical, mental and emotional states of imbalance gradually begin subsiding. This is the real work, and it realizes very real consequences. Once our child self comes to peace, so do we. It is that simple and that powerful. If we are not at peace, it is our child self that is in conflict. There is nowhere else to look, and there is no other solution but to compassionately reach inward and lovingly attend to this precious part of our Being. Only when we begin to accomplish this task, we will be able to truly understand what it is meant by the words:

    “Only when we become as children again, can we enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 18:2-4)

  • Yoga is the Winner this year.

    I began this year with a promise to do 60 days of yoga in a row, and I did. I then decided to do another 60 days in a row and I did, I believe I did 4 back-to-back 60-day challenges before my streak began developing holes.

    Today I am down 20 for the year.

    As I approached the mat today my body was stiff and weak and just not in the mood.

    Each posture I did my best, but my best looked like a beginners effort. I felt I was being asked to perform something far beyond my level of effort.

    What continues to surprise me is that the pain in my joints, my hips and lower back still persist.

    And along with the pain come the tears.

    You wonder how much a body can hold.

    What I wanted most was to be wrapped in a cotton blanket and swaddled in a quilt with a fluffy pillow and suck my thumb…to not move to make another joint scream.

    It still surprises me that I go to the mat for this torture, for the blanky option is available each day as well.

    I am not stopping on December 31st I will continue to yoga along, in hopes that one day I will come to the end of the body’s pain.

    339 days have passed by and I have tossed my blanket aside and stood on the torture mat for 319 times.

    He says, you can either suffer for 90 minutes or 90 years, pick one.

    Yoga is the winner this year.

  • Die in peace.

    A horrifying thought flittered across my mind, “ I need to write a letter to my father,” and it is like a thorn that won’t leave me alone, a bug, a thought I can’t swipe away, or flick back to where it came.

    It arrived like an unwanted guest and refuses to leave until I entertain the idea.

    I am not sure I will send the letter or if I can write it, but it seems that just as I silently left my mother, I also stopped cold any interactions with my father on December 4, 2004.

    My letter to my mother had to inspire this thought.

    My body trembled in terror back then and I haven’t addressed this man in any way, other than honoring the feelings of wanting to remain far far away.

    I haven’t explored in writing the dynamics between him and I, instead letting the words abuse and rape gloss over and suffice.

    Just not sitting down in the middle of what that feels like to a little girl.

    What will I say?
    What needs to be said?
    What thread needs to be followed through to its completion?

    What is odd to me, is that I have never once thought of writing a letter to him, yet in the past I had a few letters started to my mother, but never ever have I begun one to him or even considered one, until today.

    And I even thought to the point of sending it and finding the address to my sister’s house where he lives.

    I am sure this is the natural progression that follows the one I sent my mother, although perhaps this could be one to both of them, the final good-bye, a swan song to my parents.

    Part of me is afraid to write this.
    There is a part of me that is afraid not to write it as well, for a gift may get left there unopened.

    Many years ago I began a letter but it so enraged me I had to
    stop.

    Is there something I feel needs to be said to give me peace?

    I wonder if the swan sings to die in peace?

  • A safe place for Me.

    The sentiments, feelings, expressions, emotions of this blog may appear childlike and perhaps unbecoming of a big lady like me, but what I have just realized, is that the healing I am doing isn’t about a big lady, rather that of a little girl.

    The wounds that happened to me, happened as a young child, and what happens then the body grows big, but inside of me I am stunted and remain emotionally immature.

    Expressing my feelings now, about events long ago, sound like I am lost in my past, but what is really going on is that I am healing me in my past and allowing my emotional body to catch up with my big lady body.

    What is also very incredible is that an event today is orchestrated perfectly to heal a part of me that was hurt a long time ago.

    The gifts that I received by my mother leaving a message on my daughter’s phone, is multifaceted.

    Empowering, grieving, to seeing things I failed to notice, nothing happens by mistake.

    Each event that stirs up emotions is here to teach, to bring a part of me back to me.
    Just so you all know the little girl voice is a voice of little girl who had no voice growing up, and I am thrilled beyond words, that I have the opportunity and the vessel for her to heard.

    Whether another soul reads this or not, I am reading it as I write.

    It is an incredible experience to speak as me and to hear me, to feel the sorrow and be the one to comfort, to allow tears to fall that have been repressed for years, to feel after so many years of being afraid to, I am talking to or as the little girl in each post.

    What sacred space this is.

    A safe place for me.