I M Perfect lady

Tag: reality

  • One Real Me

    “How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?  Four.  Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.”   

    ~Abraham Lincoln

     

    I love the simplicity of how this shows you can name anything you want, but that doesn’t make it so.

     

    I have been learning about my self, a part of me that I didn’t even know existed, it was like I was a tail, but was called a leg.

     

    I knew myself the best as a leg, and I created a life as a leg, learned how to live and be and love and enjoy life, as a leg and I was really a tail.

     

    It isn’t that neither is wrong or right, except that if you are one thing and think you are something else, then it is.

     

    That is where the psychological damage is done.

     

    Somehow it slipped my attention for 46 years that I was not who I knew myself to be.

     

    It is beyond what a thought can hold to not know that you didn’t know that you are not what you thought you were.

     

    Its like my only normal was to be two things, yet could only see one of them, I saw me as a leg, yet I acted like a tail.

     

    The two were never fully in my awareness at one time. 

     

    I am now working to merge the two selves inside so that I become one real me.

     

  • Building me on Reality

    What has stayed with me from reading “The Four Agreements” the companion book, by Don Miguel Ruiz, is that our faith in something means more than the ‘something’.

     

    Simply holding tightly to faith at all costs.

     

    I had to look up the meaning of Faith.

     

    A belief in, devotion to, or trust in somebody or something, especially without logical proof

     

    “Trust in somebody or something without LOGICAL proof.”

     

    It isn’t even logical, but we hold on to our faith and many times it is a fog that stands separated from reality, that when you dissect it, you find nothing.

     

    My strong sense of faith that I had for 46 years melted away when I discovered that what I had been faithful to, was a figment of my imagination and it didn't hold up in reality.

     

    In reality, in the cold glare of truth, my faith in them didn’t change them; it actually shielded reality from me.

     

    Faith stood in the way of me seeing what I needed to see.

     

    In my experience, my faith stood between reality and me.  I built a wall that I could not see beyond, it kept me blind to what I needed to see.

     

    Blind Faith.

     

    My faith in my parents overshadowed who my parents were, in fact my faith in them didn’t allow me to investigate or question, I simply focused on my faith. 

     

    I had faith in my mother. 

    I had faith in my father.

    I had faith in my family. 

    I had a deep unquestioning faith.

     

    What came crashing down that winter day in 2004 was my faith.

     

    I lost my faith.

     

    I lost what I trusted.

     

    I lost what I had built up around me.

     

    When my faith evaporated, all that I was left with was stark reality.

     

    It is like taking off the rosy glasses, eliminating the fluffy white cotton that surrounds your feelings, and to be stripped to the bear raw nerves of what is real, without sugar coating to see where you placed your faith in.

     

    I was irresponsible with my faith.

     

    The only place for my faith now, is in reality.

     

    I have faith with reality, I trust reality, I want to sit square with it, to feel its beauty no matter what it is.

     

    Aligning my faith with reality seems like such a no-brainer.  But it wasn’t until my faith was shattered that I discovered how false I was, and then I had to begin the task of rebuilding me.

     

    This time I am building me on reality.

     

     

  • A Mother who Walks in Reality.

    Last night I read, “Hannah’s Gift” by Maria Housden, Lessons from a Life Fully Lived. 

     

    What a great gift they gave each other as they bravely faced life as it unfolded for each of them, in truth.

     

    For a mother to be truthful in the face of death allowed her daughter to fully accept with grace who she was, for her son to walk step by step, hand to hand, eye to eye sharing her journey full on.

     

    ‘Sparing’ the truth may seem kinder at times; I am once again affirmed that truth is the only way to be.

     

    There is grace and peace in an odd way when you are able to set your fears and selfish wishes aside, when you can disregard your dreams, and instead stand bravely in what is.

     

    Even when the what is, is the death of your child. 

     

    It allowed this little girl to live her life honorably, for her mother honored her just as she was, in each moment, fully embracing what she had, now.

     

    Her intuition in giving her daughter a voice, allowing her to be who she needed to be to live a life that was hers, no matter its length is remarkable to me.

     

    The courage to let go of the pretend reins we all believe we have in controlling our worlds, our children’s world and gracefully succumbing to reality’s power, to ride the ride no mother wants to take, but do so with her eyes on the child’s desires, is what I believe makes a truly remarkable mother.

     

    Thanks so much for showing me the walk of truth.

     

    Coming from a child whose mother couldn’t face the truth, I know that it was you who gave your child the greatest gift on earth, seeing her truth!

     

    Allowing her to be okay and be fully her self, even while life seemed to stealing her away, she was able to live completely as herself until her very last day.

     

    She never, not once had to pretend to pretend to be anything other than herself in your eyes. 

     

    What a gift you gave her, she was allowed to Live as her self.

     

    Your journey shows me that a mother can literally change a child by their reaction to the child’s truths, if you can’t see it, they will pretend not to see it either, but if you can, you both will be enriched.

     

    Truth sets you free to be you in reality.

     

    Thanks Maria for sharing the wonderful journey being a mother who walks in truth.

     

     

     

  • The Land of Pretend.

    “Notice When Your Thoughts Argue With Reality”

                Byron Katie

     

    I know as I approach working full time, my head has to be on board; my thoughts have to agree with where I am.

     

    If I am riding around in the mail car, ‘wishing’ I were at home, it will be hellish working. My attitude at work will be affected by how I am thinking, and my demeanor will reflect my thoughts.

     

    Tossing mail will not make me suffer, but the thought that I should not be tossing mail while I am tossing mail, will.

     

    It is amazing it is never where you are that makes you suffer, but ‘thinking’ you shouldn’t be there that does.

     

    Accepting where you are at all times seems like a no brainer, but Notice When Your Thoughts Argue With Reality.

     

    Notice how many times a day you say, ‘I should be…, this shouldn’t be, I wish it didn’t, I don’t want….

     

    Those little phrases are the doorway to hell or illusion.

     

    Each time something happens and your first thought is, ‘it shouldn’t be, you are attaching to a thought that is arguing with reality.

     

    “It shouldn’t be is a thought…it is a ticket out of what is.  It is hailing you to come on board, to leave the scene of what is, to walk away, to escape into the land of pretend.

     

  • Caught

    One last section from ‘Sickened’…by Julie Gregory.

     

    Spring thaws the farmhouse, and in front of the mirrors, my breasts begin to form. They get white, tigerlike stretch marks on their sides from a burst of growth.  My hipbones expand like a time-lapsed flower in bloom.  I grow like a girl in puberty. The pod I was stuffed into has perforated breaks in the skin, and I, ever so painfully, am unlacing myself from the tight shell.  I use my fingertips to tug and pull laces loose, unfurling myself from the cocoon I’ve been kept in, folding and falling, jutting the angles of crooked atrophied limbs out of its hold.

     

    I touch my face in the mirror, study it for hours.  I need to see what my face says.  What my expressions look like to others, what my eyes do, whether my face twitches, like hers.

     

    Away from the mirror, I do not register that I am pretty.  I cannot comprehend I have an attractive body.  Or that it holds in its untapped wisdom the potential to heal itself.  My instincts are wound tightly into a ball of fishing line, so tangled and knotted that it will take months of daily, delicate picking to see loops in the line and pull them free.

     

    I curl my body up in front of the mirror; skin and bones, the ribs of my back casting curved shadows over my thin skin.  I study tiny blue veins, fascinated by the light pulse that pushes blood through on its own; an affirmation that I am living.  I do not have to pump the blood myself; it is my heart that keeps me alive.

     

    I look at every part of myself through the mirror, wanting to see what anyone outside my skin would see.  My hands, they look so beautiful, I turn them around and around in the mirror mesmerized.  I look at my face again, soft and childlike, my body lean and lithe.  I step away from the mirror but nothing comes with me. The moment I lose contact with my reflection, I lose touch with what I see there.

     

    My mind is imprinted with images of a sickly reverberation of what I felt like inside and believed to be true of myself for all of my twenty-six years: That I am some bizarre, frail creature, destined to die early.  My mind’s eye sees me as a stooped and wasted, with dark greasy hair, a slaughterhouse horse’s long, sunken face, drooping bottom lip, absent eyes.  Since that is what I believe, that is how I feel. Since that is how I feel, that is how I act. And since that is how I act, that is how the world treats me.

     

    So I step back to the mirror and there she is again, that girl, that strange girl that everyone else sees.  I reach my fingers out to feel her face.  My eyes cannot get over it.  They peer at her suspiciously. Surely this is not me staring back?  Truth in my mind and truth in the mirror are completely opposites. And I am split down the middle, straddling the chasm between two worlds, flitting back and forth between the world I know and the one that exists in the glass.  It will take me three years of pacing between the two before I can finally bring them together.

                    Julie Gregory

     

    My mother had a magical mirror and words would allow her world to remain perfect, sins could be erased with the magical phrase, and it would erase all blemishes that may other wise appear, returning him always to be whiter than snow.

     

    It is horrifying and shocking to see the damage he was able to do, while she continued to stare dreamily into her cracked mirror of dreams.

     

    Behind the wall, lay many broken little girls whose wounds could not be erased so easily.

     

    There are no simple phrases that will return your world upright, restore trust and love and give you back faith.

     

    When we are taught that words can erase deeds, we are left in twisted place in our minds.

     

    In our minds a mirror appears that switches things around, but in reality nothing changes.  Nothing.

     

    It feels like the magic mirror was the release hatch my father needed, the escape door…. Her words allowed him to change magically into a kind man, always.

     

    Her catch and release program allowed another little girl to be caught.

     

     

  • Awareness of Self

    It is interesting to me that when you see someone in denial you automatically think that they just need to see reality.

     

    What is a much deeper problem is the ways in which they have lived to ‘not see reality’.

     

    And it is from there that you begin.

     

    You don’t need to see what is in reality; you need to see what you are doing to cover up reality.

     

    It is the cover up that needs to be explored.

     

    The cover-ups can be dismantled by doing as Martha Beck suggested, begin telling the truth no matter what.

     

    Instead of ‘hiding’ the fact that your eating is out of control, face the fact that it is.  Name it to claim it, is a term Dr. Phil has used.

     

    As I explored the affects that sweets had on my body, and how I overindulged them, and how they left me empty of the very thing I thought I was getting, love, I knew I was on to something.

     

    I loved sweet treats.  I felt good eating them, yet the final out come was not love or good.  I had an overweight body that was sluggish and one that I didn’t like.

     

    My life style of indulging in sweets and looking for opportunities to ‘treat’ myself, and them giving me something wonderful, really gave me the opposite.

     

    Denial is not recognizing what the affects of ‘treating’ your self is actually doing.

     

    You somehow just have a thirst for sweets, and feel you deserve the treat, but never look at the actual almost scientific reading of the outcome.

     

    Denial is a twisting rope that never allows you to see all sides at once.  You can either see the thirst or the bloated body….

     

    Once I decide to stay awake for both parts, to watch the sweets going in and I didn’t tell myself a limit, I ate as many as I could, but I also had to monitor myself during and after.

     

    Denial seems be cured by being truthful on all sides, there is no side that will slip away.

     

    It is refreshing to be honest, to expose the secrets of understanding how you operate and why, it allows you to be free of the unexplored agendas that you have somehow overlooked.

     

    Once I understood that the sweets didn’t really bring me good feelings, I was able to sit with what they really were.  What they were comprised of and what they really did to the body.

     

    Denial is the doorway that will lead you to full awareness of self.

     

     

     

     

  • Reality has no Delete Buttons

     

    I am way confused about the applications of religion, the way religion believes that you can hand over your burdens to God, that Jesus will carry the things you don’t want to deal with, that he is a dumping off place.

     

    How can you literally hand the “bad stuff” over?

     

    Like what do you do actually?

     

    How do you take experiences and actions and bundle them up and hand them over?

     

    How do you remove them from your past?

     

    Isn’t it odd that this ‘forgiving and forgetting’ technique is only used for things that are troubling about other people; you never remove the ‘good things’ only the bad things you don’t want to deal with.

     

    It reminds me a huge delete button.

     

    When a person’s action hurts or makes you feel bad, and you don’t really want to address it, you can hit this button.

     

    When an incident happens that changes the original picture of someone, you can just hit the “I forgive you button” and like magic they continue to be ‘good’.

     

    This button will allow the other person not to have the hassle of changing, or making corrections; you are just agreeing to not see them.

     

    Agreeing to not see them does not make them disappear.  You are just two people pretending something is no longer there.

     

    It is like living in a world where hurtful things happen, but you are denying they are there, you are determined not to see/hear and feel them.

     

    I am amazed and blown back that many actually believe this works.

     

    This delete button is in your head; it really doesn’t work in reality.

     

    You simply can’t walk along and hit this button when people’s behavior is unkind.

     

    You can’t create a new version of someone by overlooking his or her behaviors/actions! It simply doesn’t work in reality.  In reality the person continues on doing that which he does and you are just overlooking it.

     

    How supposedly intelligent individuals cannot see this NOT working puzzles me.

     

    The only delete button is actions.

    They have to act different.

    They have to walk a new walk to change their behavior.

     

    You simply can’t forgive and forget enough times to make the other person change.

     

    My mother tried this repeatedly and my father continued to abuse little girls.  Her forgiving and forgetting allowed him to not have to change.

     

    Oh MY God you simply can’t stuff this stuff into a belief in your head and make the world a better place!  You have to deal in the real.

     

    What is so insane to me is I am seen as the one with the issues for I have no delete button anymore!  I am the problem, because I will not forgive and forget.

     

    My delete button is broken.

     

    I am out of my mind and into reality.

     

    Reality has no delete buttons!

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Reality’s Parade

    While a friend continues each day enduring the affects of cancer treatment, I had told her I would yoga along with her until she was done.

     

    She thought she had until August, and while that seemed a long ways off, I said I would do yoga each day. 

     

    We then found out our finish line was pushed way back until it is now January 2011.

     

    It seems to be a pile of days, a bunch of effort and a hill full of energy needed to make it that far, but if you break it down to this day, this day you can do.

     

    It is a parade of This Days, and if you just focus on this day, this day is way doable, or this moment, and not look so far ahead that you miss this step you are on.

     

    I would love a cool name for “This Day Parade” one that has an interesting phrase, one that suggests we all are on a journey of just this day.

     

    We all are in places in our lives where there are difficulties to face, challenges to overcome and a life to live. 

     

    It just seems to feel better to know you have other souls marching along learning and overcoming their own life lessons, that you are not alone, that it is indeed a life parade.

     

    In the life parade, we need to keep up with the music of reality, to hear the drums of truth, to adhere as life changes direction, after all we are just the participants of Reality’s Parade!

     

     

  • Indifferent to Love.

    “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool.”         

        Richard Feynman

     

    It is amazing to me how a fool will take my place, how the mental lady slips into my awareness and shields me from the truth and unbeknownst to me, a different view of reality is transposed upon a kind world.

     

    This happens when I am wide-awake, it happens slyly as I bend back into an old relationship, I revert back to my old persona and with it comes tricky glasses and my awareness turns the opposites into truths.

     

    I am the fool and the fooled, which seems the weirdest of all circus tricks!

     

    What is even weirder is that I believe the foolish tricks and lose sight and faith in reality, while focused on the trick being played out in front.

     

    The trick feeds upon my fears, each lending themselves to each other in a whirlwind or a cyclone spinning madness upon my reality, neither stops to see if there is evidence to the contrary in reality, just whirling around false truths and replacing good with bad and bad with good, like flipping a switch, my whole world becomes hostile and I am immediately tossed the coat of armor to stand in defense.

     

    My enemies are those that love me, my friends those who are indifferent, flopped upside down again, I am mad.

     

    Not mad in anger, but a mad woman who focuses her energies to change what is; breaking reality once again, by not seeing the truth as it lays naked.

     

    This mad woman doesn’t accept what is but stands with potential of change.  She believes in potential of change, not in what is right in front of her.

     

    How would you hold on to the potential for change?  Does potential for change have roots?  How does one know the direction potential of change is heading?  Is that a spot to sit upon?

     

    If I sat in the spot of “potential to change” what am I doing at that moment?  Am I moving or acting in reality, or am I just simply evading change.

     

    This land ‘potential for change’ is where I stored my whole family (childhood family).  And in doing so it spared me from feeling reality.

     

    If there is potential for change, there is hope.

    And where there is hope, reality slips away.

     

    (I had to go back to an old post to grab this quote that I loved, and I still do.)

     

    “If you give up hope, you will likely find your life is infinitely richer.  Here’s why:  When you live in hope, it’s usually because you’re avoiding reality.”  Gay Hendricks

     

    I was avoiding the finality of indifference. 

     

    While I was hoping their indifference would change, I was indifferent to the love at hand.

     

    In my reality my home has love where indifference once stood. 

     

    When mad, I am indifferent to love.

     

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  • Welcome to Reality.

    “Meditation is running into reality.  It does not insulate you from the pain of life.  It allows you to delve so deeply into life and all its aspects that you pierce the pain barrier and go beyond suffering.”   Henepola Gunaratana

     

    Mediation is running into reality.  Not running from reality, but into the here and the now.

     

    In delving deeply into my life and all its aspects I have experienced pain and broken the barrier to be in the land beyond.

     

    What I used to think is that if you headed in the direction of pain, you would just get more and more pain that it would literally not end.

     

    What I learned is that beyond all the pain is a place of peace.

     

    Between you and that peace is a sea of pain that has to be acknowledged, felt and understood, it is your past coming to be reconciled.

     

    I sit in reality and deal with what is in all moments.  Even if past feelings come to the now to be dealt with, I am here now.

     

    No more tucking disturbing things into the suitcase called, later, or not now, instead I meet each new situation as it arises.

     

    I am the greeter of the present moment, like a wal-mart greeter, “Welcome to Reality.”