I M Perfect lady

Tag: self-love

  • The Mastery of Love, by Don Miguel Ruiz

    “Truth”

    When we look at our wounds with the eyes of truth, we can finally heal these wounds. YOu begin by practicing the truth with your self. When you are truthful with yourself, you start to see everything as it is, not the way you want to see it.

    Don’t believe all the lies you tell yourself – all those lies that you never chose to believe, but have been programmed to believe.

    Don’t believe yourself when you say you are not good enough, you are not strong enough, you are not intelligent enough. Don’t believe you are not beautiful. Don’t believe whatever makes you suffer.

    You can chose how you want to live your life. And if you are honest with yourself, you will know you are always free to make new choices.

    “Forgiveness”

    There is no other way but forgiveness to clean emotional wounds. Forgive those who hurt you, even if whatever they did was unforgivable in your mind. You will forgive them not because they deserve to be forgiven, but because you don’t want to suffer every time you remember what they did to you. When you can touch a wound and it doesn’t hurt, then you know you have truly forgiven. Forgive others, and you will see miracles start to happen in your life.

    Forgive yourself also – for everything you have done in your whole life. When you forgive yourself, self-acceptance begins and self-love grows. That is the supreme forgiveness – when you can finally forgive yourself.

    “Self-Love”

    Love is the medicine that accelerates the process of healing. There is no other medicine but unconditional love. There are millions of ways to express your happiness, but there is only one way to really be happy, and that is to love.

  • You can feel its worth.

    While tossing around in my head conversations about the differences between going into the Light and heading into the Darkness boggle my mind.

    How it is that a person loses direction, how do their maps get turned upside down, how instead of growing brighter they can actually become very dark and NOT even know it or maybe more true, is not know how to stop it.

    That their life blood is drained and they are actively involved in the letting go and letting it drip out, drip by drip, bit by bit.

    Their vital life energy leaves and they don’t even know it.

    The passions die, the love changes, inside of them has been an energy transplant and they are totally unaware.

    This is very scary to me and yet very much understandable.

    For if a perpetrator or abuser does his job well, you will not even feel your self leave, his sweet words and wonderful attention dances before your eyes, and like a magician, he switches your energy to his.

    Once the switch has been made, you have to work like Hell to bring back your bright energy, your innocence, your passions, good energy, self worth, self esteem, love.

    I see my daughter now as one who is lost in the sea of darkness inside of her, and she doesn’t even know who is the bad man who stole this, who came in and courted her while draining all that was good from her.

    If after the first time you do not tell, you believe you are now his equal, and his lure and charm hard to resist, his needing you a drug that keeps you dumping more and more good into.

    I am not certain, but feel that only abuse does this.

    That you come in as Light and can have it stolen away…

    The little boy with Oprah who was overly sensitive to the darkness, knew that Darkness FEEDS off of the Light.

    This sounded weird to me, but it literally swallows whole, kindness, love, compassion, caring, it has a voracious appetite.

    Darkness doesn’t see who you are, just your good energy that it needs to survive.

    I had to stop feeding the monster, to stop giving up my life for its happiness, its peace and its joy.

    The Light energies try feeding the monster to make it brighter, to make it happier; to make it more loving, and all it does is suck you dry.

    That little boy also said that the dark energies can come to you as Father, brother, sister, friend, that it isn’t some monster.

    Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor also suggests that we are responsible for the energies we bring into a room.

    I believe that abused people abuse people, that hurt people hurt people.

    What seems we need is to heal our own pain, to be the one, to be the caretaker of our own energies, to stop blaming others for how we feel, and to harness our own Light.

    As well as being responsible for another’s happiness, peace, love or joy.

    If we can separate ourselves and not be sucking the life blood from each other, and instead be Light keepers within ourselves, the world would be a much brighter place.

    My daughter seems to have allowed another to extinguish her Light and what I want most is for her to be her own Light keeper.

    To hold it dear.

    Yet, maybe you have to lose something before you can feel its worth.

  • Our Door in the Future…

    I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate. ~ Arthur Wing Pinero

    I read this quote a few times and now I believe I understand it, that our karma or our lessons continue until we change how we greet them, they enter back into our lives perhaps in another body or similar relationship.

    Is it possible that how we act today will bring to us this in another gate?

    That if we act in love and awareness, we will greet love and awareness in our future?

    What we sow we reap.

    When we allow others to mistreat us, we will get more folks who want to mistreat.

    It seems the wonderful Universe gives back to us that which we sow without fail.

    The old saying, “God helps those who help themselves…” He waits for us to help ourselves.

    Many will beseech God to help them, to fix them, to do this and that for them, while they are the ones who hold the power.

    I was waiting for people to learn how to treat me better when it was I who had to learn this lesson. And in another gate flowed volumes of folks to teach me how to treat me better.

    They were not different folks, but the same ones coming in as they usually did and it was up to me to stand up and put a stop to the way they were treating me.

    I had to stop using myself to please them.

    I had to start using myself to please me.

    Most of who entered into my gate of now were surprised at this new response, this new me, this new voice and most turned around and left no longer interested in playing this new game with me.

    The new game of fair trade, this equal partnership or freedom to be a sovereign nation co-existing with them, where the boundaries don’t overlap, where we are not holding each other up, but rather supporting each other to be one strong individual unit, was not a game for co-dependents.

    What we do, what we say, how we treat ourselves today will come a knocking on our door in the future.

  • Yoga Heals a Loveless Self

    “The purpose of yoga is to heal.

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

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

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

    If they loved me, I was okay.

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

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

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

    I was worthless unless I was doing.

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

    Giving to get love?

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

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

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

    Yoga heals a loveless self.

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  • Being Irresponsible With Me.

    My failure to respond for me has led me to live a life that mirrored what others wanted of me, and each time I responded for another I walked away from me.

     

    Being irresponsible for my own self, while being overly responsible for others, is living outside of my self.

     

    I respond and move in harmony and accordance to how the other feels, not how I feel.

     

    If my movements brought sadness, I adjusted my movements, if it brought anger, I changed course. 

     

    My whole life as far back as I can remember was lived in accordance to the wishes and desires of another, a term I used was…”I was a whore for love and peace”

     

    What this means is my feelings were never in the picture, I had to grin and bear it, put my feelings and emotions aside and focus on another.

     

    And somehow I must have been rewarded for whoring this way.

     

    Perhaps being a good girl, for not making waves, for keeping peace…or as I now know, keeping sweet.

     

    Even keeping me sweet, or viewed as sweet for not resisting, for always responding to their wishes, for being the best people pleaser (or whore).

     

    My respond for me button lost its connection; I became disconnected to my feelings and was more connected to how another feels.

     

    The tragedy in all of this is while I was out there whoring for love and peace, with a broken respond for me button, I didn’t feel me.

     

    I didn’t feel.

     

    I didn’t feel that I had the right to speak up, to stop, to not do…I had to.

     

    I had to in order to be loved.

    I had to in order for peace.

    I had to in order to keep me sweet.

     

    I am shocked that it was to keep me sweet and not seen as the villain here.

     

    Yet I felt it.  What a traitor am I to think of my self!

     

    How selfish and cold to not continue responding as they need me to respond.  How dare I disconnect from the outside and reconnect to the inside.

     

    How dare I stop being a whore for their use!

     

    While celebrating on the inside I feel the wrath on the outside, but understandably so.

     

    I stopped using my body for their feelings.

     

    I stopped being irresponsible with me.

     

  • The Girl She Was Meant To Be.

    I found myself seeing myself but with my old perception and then with my new perception could see my old self.

     

    It is like looking in a two-way mirror seeing your self on both sides. 

     

    Amazing to see such contrasts between the two.

     

    It dawned on me that I am a crazy, daring, bold lady, a woman of courage who tossed aside 46 years of rules and regulations to follow her own truth. 

     

    I am in awe of the distance between these two women, and they both are Me.

     

    The lady I used to be didn’t break rules, she followed along obediently even if she didn’t want to, people pleasing was her full time job, and choice making wasn’t her strong suit, her sense of self was gotten from the multitude of labels she covered her self with.

     

    My new lady tossed out all the rulebooks, and set out on her own, using her own body as her guide, for the first time ever.

     

    I remember stating, “It was like I was going to find myself, I didn’t know who I was or even that I was missing.”

     

    And it was the truth.

     

    I left my old me and I walked away, for the old me was a combination of other peoples ideas of me, their needs of me, their wishes of me, I was a me of their dreams, but not of my own.

     

    The old me was built up for reasons that had little or nothing to do with me.  Even if I didn’t know who I was, I knew for sure who I wasn’t.

     

    A child molester once said, “I changed who she would have been,” and he is right.

     

    A little girl who has been molested loses her way, her passions, and her spirit. 

     

    Her life is only about surviving.

     

    In this two-way mirror on my journey I see how the same courage she had to survive, she used to set herself free. 

     

    From the wide view I see a fearlessly bold lady who has taken her life back.  Who will no longer just survive, but she will live.

     

    She will live her own dreams, have her own ideas, make her own wishes and suit her own needs.

     

    Self lovingly at last, she is free to be the girl she was meant to be.

     

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  • How I Treat My Body.

    “There are many ways to deprive yourself:  You can deprive yourself of cookies or you can deprive yourself of feeling well after eating them.  You can deprive yourself of feeling your sadness or you can deprive yourself of the confidence and well-being that come from knowing you won’t be destroyed by feeling it.”  Geneen Roth

     

    It really struck me that we are deprived one way or the other, and you get to decide what you want to deprive yourself of.

     

    I love that there are two choices, which you can either feel good or not feel good. 

     

    When I do yoga I feel good, that I am taking care of this body, moving it and stretching it, and making it stronger. I am depriving myself the opportunity to beat me up.

     

    I have begun to also be aware of what I am putting in my body, most of the time.  When I eat whole foods, I deprive myself of feeling bad about myself.

     

    Here is another section that caught my attention.

     

    “My mother had spent years telling me I was selfish, and it was upon that nub of information that I built a monument of deficiency.  But as I widened the myopic gaze on I-me-mine, I saw my mother at age twenty-five with two small children, a loveless marriage and a desperate need to have a different life.  With the little information she had, and doing the best she could do, she called me selfish for wanting more that she could give.  And since I would have died for her, and since every child needs her parents to be right, I took myself to be the sum of her limitations.  I saw myself through the eyes of a lonely, depressed, troubled woman – and never questioned my loyalty to her vision.  And then there was my father who saw me as a ditzy dumb blonde. Add ditzy dumb blonde to “selfish, fat, and unlovable” and you have who I took myself to be for almost fifty years.

     

    Psychologists and spiritual teachers alike call this learned version of our selves “ego” or “personality” or “false self”.  It’s false because your idea of yourself is based on who your mother took you to be, and her idea of herself was based on who her mother took her to be, which was based on who her mother took her to be, your idea of yourself – the person whose feelings get hurt, who takes offense at being criticized, who is webbed to her opinions and preferences or ideas- is based on those of someone who’s never met you.  Your self-image is refracted so many times – with learned inferences and memories and conditioning- that it is nothing more than a hall of mirrors.

     

    Talk about a hoax.  You are not who you think you are.  Hardly anyone is.  Because although kids come into this world with an implicit understanding of who they are, they have no self-reflective consciousness.  They know who they are, but they don’t know that they know.  And the only way to find out is by seeing themselves in their parent’s eyes.  We become what and who are parents saw.  Figments of their imagination. 

     

    Then, as my teacher Jeanne says, we spend our lives following instructions given to us ten or thirty or fifty years ago by people we wouldn’t ask for street directions from today.”  Geneen

     

    In my experience my whole self was designed from my mother’s point of view and how my father treated me.

     

    Here is more from Woman Food and God,  “The obsession will end when you love discovering your true nature more than you love being loyal to your mother or father.  The obsession will end because you care enough about yourself to stop damaging yourself with food.  Because you love yourself enough to stop hurting yourself.  Who doesn’t want to take care of what they love?

     

    If you pay attention to when you are hungry, what your body wants, what you are eating, when you’ve had enough, you end the obsession because obsessions and awareness can’t co-exist.  When you pay attention to yourself, you notice the difference between being tired and being hungry.  Between being satisfied and being full.  Between wanting to scream and wanting to eat.

     

    The more you pay attention, the more you fall in love with that which is not obsessed: that which is blazing itself through you.  The life force that animates your body.  Food becomes a way to sustain the blaze, and way of eating that keeps you depressed or spaced out or uncomfortable loses its appeal.  When that happens, you slowly realize that you are being lived by that which is God and you wouldn’t have it any other way.”  Geneen

     

    I love how she writes this, for it is exactly true in my experience…. Once I had redefined myself, I then began to treat myself better to the point I love myself enough to take care of how I treat my body.

     

     

  • From Feeling Bad To Feeling Good!

     

     

    I awoke shortly after 6am and in no mood for yoga, the sun was just lightening the horizon, I couldn’t find a reason to begin.

     

    In a place between doing it and not, I think I would have felt perfectly fine just sitting and waiting for the sun to shine in my face, starring mindlessly without having to expend one ounce of energy, suspended in a land where yoga never lived.

     

    After letting my yoga buddies know that I would be taking their energy, down the stairs I went.

     

    I wondered how this would work, me empty but willing to try.

     

    Bikram didn’t know my feelings at all, he began with his full energy and didn’t spare me a bit, and I followed along, perhaps better than ever, just about doing every pose until he said, ‘change’ or ‘enough’.  Incredible!  I didn’t have the energy to protest.

     

    In the Eagle, a thought came in, that without pain what would keep me doing this, what is the purpose for me doing this, if not to alleviate pain?

     

    “Feeling good” landed in my body, to feel good?  Wow. 

     

    It felt odd to acknowledge that I was doing something for me that felt good for me, that I felt good carrying around the rest of the day, and it was also sad, that I haven’t done things simply to feel good.

     

    I am almost positive that I have never done something where the agenda was for ME to Feel Good, only ME! 

     

    Somehow before Eagle I was wondering what it would take to maintain this daily grind, what kind of energy I would need to keep up this regiment.

     

    This regiment is to keep feeling good!

    Isn’t that insane?

     

    I call it a regiment, a hardship, a struggle, when what I am doing each morning is setting the tone, I am working to keep a set point of feeling good!

     

    How in world is this so twisted upside down and backwards, that I am feeling a struggle to maintain a feeling good feeling?

     

    And let me tell you all, I am feeling good, I am feeling a body that has muscles, that is stronger and looks better, clothes fit better, I walk straighter, head held high, and with good energy! 

     

    I have stated, that there is no ill side affects to this yoga.

     

    And here is the deal, yoga makes you feel better, gives you a new body, a new mind and a new life, according to Bikram and I!

     

    Yoga is the counterbalance to feeling bad, it will spring you ahead, not drag you back, even if it feels like you are going against the magnetic pull to begin, that all forces are against you starting, it is then that it is most critical in order to continue to feel good.

     

    My maintenance routine or ‘regiment’ is to keep back the bad feelings, the dragging body, and no energy weighing down my life.

     

    Inside I feel good about my inside and outside body!

    I made it over the line, from feeling bad to feeling good!

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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  • Me.

    “Greatness is not in where we stand, but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it — but sail we must and not drift, nor lie at anchor.”  Oliver Wendell Holmes 

     

    I am surprising myself that I have continued to sail, although I haven’t met really strong head winds, just a few strong breezes in the past 50 days.

     

    I have 50 more to go and I don’t know what each new day brings, what winds will blow into my day, but so far I get my sailing done first thing in the morning, I make that leg of the journey perhaps before the winds begin to blow in the calm waters of the dawn.

     

    This is so not like me, I used to be the martyr and nibble on the leftovers of the day, the few crumbs of time and the bottom of energy tank, and those I chose for mine.

     

    Usually there wasn’t much there to do anything with, but sleep.  I slept to be a martyr again.

     

    As I now take from the top of the tank, I feel that I am stronger within myself and that is what I now bring to each situation that arises.

    I used to have a shame muscle that would operate if I were to focus so much on my self, to take the time off the top for me, to use my time and my energy for me.  How dare you, it would say!

     

    How dare I not.  My body is so much better, my disposition feels calmer, and my whole life feels more in control when I am in control of me in my life.

     

    It has taken me 51 years to realize the only one who can take care of me is me and if I drain my tank without first filling me up, we all suffer.

     

    My tank is full, the day has begun, I now have something to give to my day, Me!

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  • I Love so I can Live.

    Love and its application, how does each person apply love?

    How do they know what to love and what not to love, or how to love and how not to love?

     

    The choice in love is not a given.  Are we able to chose or not chose to love our parents, our siblings, even what we love to wear at an early age?

     

    The freedom in the Love is the key to if love is dysfunctional or not.

     

    If we can love from the self-view, or we can call it self-loving view, if we can decide ‘I love you’ or ‘I don’t love you’ then it is love from the inside.

     

    If it is love that is decided for us, demanded or expected of us, then it is not real love, but a commanded love.

     

    Unless you have experienced the free love, the choice love, you will feel that we walk away in anger.

     

    It is so not the case.  I walk away with love inside, with approval of self, with my self esteem held firmly in place with all my no’s and yes’s coming along for the ride.  I am a total package of freedom.

     

    This kind of love allows the other person to do and be what it is they want to be, but it gives us the right or privilege to move away.

     

    When you love yourself enough, was a title of a small book I read once, a book where there were just a few words on a page, more like quotes, and that term stuck with me.

     

    When you love yourself, you will not put yourself in harmful places, you will walk away from those who blindly hurt you.

     

    When you love yourself, you don’t need others to fill you up or prop you up, or do this or that. 

     

    Love isn’t about what you can give to the other, to complete the other; instead love is about letting the other be free to do the job of being themselves.

     

    I used to be in other’s businesses, but now I stay in my own.

     

    Each of us come with the same advantages or challenges along the way, and if we are seeking to learn, there are a million opportunities to learn each day.

     

    Opportunities to learn about our self and how we, love both others and ourselves.  It isn’t about changing the other to make them more loveable, but rather finding someone that matches our meaning of love.

     

    Of course the most optimal thing is to find this among your family, your sisters and brothers, but often we have to leave them in order to find love.

     

    I used to have a set of love rules that did not apply to family, family had a free pass, and it required nothing of them.

    It allowed them to less of themselves.  What I called love was actually love of enabling lower standards.

     

    I was in support of those doing and being less, remaining at lower level so I could ‘help’ them.

     

    But my going in and helping was enabling them not to help themselves.

    When I became responsible for just me, it freed them to be responsible for just themselves, I was the one to set them free.

     

    If I continued to believe that they couldn’t live a life without me, that is co-dependent, and it has me thinking less of them.

     

    I do believe to the depth of my being that each and every one of us comes into this life to learn what love is, to learn what self is, to be separate and whole.

     

    I also believe that we are given daily ways in order to do that, chances to make a new choice.  That there is a subtle or loud voice in our heads that is seeking for us to change, sometimes it is actual life being played out in front of us.

     

    Look around and see what is going right or what is going wrong, how often you are at peace with your voice or when you suppress what you feel and why.

     

    I lived longer silently and ignorant of using my own voice.

    I talked lots, but mostly I was a mouthpiece for others.

    I now only speak for myself.

     

    If I can find my voice, I know others can too.

     

    I heard my voice whispering in the backgrounds always, but I was too fearful of the consequences to speak.

     

    Now I am fearful of the consequences if I don’t speak.

    In the past my body and inner feeling was to move away from my father, but I stayed close.

     

    We all know the cost of that silence.

    I will never Not listen to my inner voice, my inner feelings, no matter at what cost to the other person.

     

    Love is being brave enough to move away.

    Love knows you can.

     

    When I moved away all my love came with.

    My love moves with me where ever I go, what ever I do, my love is like my breath now.

     

    Without my Love I would not want to live.

     

    It isn’t living without love it is simply surviving.

     

    Surviving isn’t living it is trying not to die.

     

    How many people are just trying not to die instead of really living? 

     

    I Love so I can Live.

     

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