IMPERFECT Lady

A spot of nothing.

My mother is a nomad, a homeless person who keeps all her possessions in her car instead of grocery cart, she doesn't use shelters, she uses her children's homes; home to her is to keep moving, to not be rooted anywhere to have no responsibilities, to be free to roam; a nomad.

It is like a game of 'button button whose got the button'. I am not certain how it is decided. Is it the weather that draws her to your house, a guest room, who invites and who declines or is declining an option?

My father is homeless too, but he isn't roaming he is sitting.  Sitting at his son's home.  My mother is enroute to that house or perhaps already there.  Interesting she makes this a 'must see' stop, a place to stay awhile.

I wonder how the meeting will go, what is said or more importantly what is not. 

Our parents are not divorced nor are they together.

That is the metaphor to our childhood.

It was a spot of nothing. 

Bridge of Understanding.

“Do you think his death will bring the other’s closer” was a comment I heard to today.

 

I know that this sentiment is common and that many believe that time will erase all wounds and death is a reminder that we ‘must’ get along for time is fleeting.

 

It is a fallacy that we must all get along, that we are somehow flawed if we don’t agree and want to spend time with everyone.  And God forbid it be a family member. 

 

What happened to the simple fact that lives don’t match, that we don’t get along, that we don’t agree on the way each lives their lives, how they deal or not deal, be or not be. 

 

Isn’t it okay to not get along? 

 

Isn’t it more honorable to agree that ‘nope we don’t match’?

 

Why are we so afraid to stand up and face the facts that we don’t get along and find more peace being apart? 

 

That when death arrives we will see someone pass that we didn’t get along with, that neither of us were the cause, but perhaps our pasts just didn’t lend themselves to gel a future.

 

A looming death will not make us match and get along, no matter if death is a day or two away or a lifetime, the simple fact is that the distance between our beliefs are too wide for the bridge of understanding.

 

  

 

 

The Sunny Side of Life!

“Nothing we can do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future.”

          Ashleigh Brilliant

 

Living life forward is all we can do, and the power that lies in each action sets in motion the whole Universe.

 

Once you start to focus on actions today or in this moment, by simply making one change today, you will begin a momentum that changes the course of your life.

 

Doing yoga each day has changed my body’s future, the aches and pains are receding, and instead of discovering new things I can no longer do, I am undoing damage of old wounds.

 

My leg, hip and back have been the area of focus, it seems that there lies years of misuse. 

 

By continuing through the pain I come out on the sunny side of life!

 

(Day 140 of doing bikram yoga in a row)

 

"This Little Light of Mine..."

Debbie Ford in “The Shadow Affect” is talking about embracing your Light Shadow.

 

She had gone to see Marianne Williamson speak...

 

"... as I sat in the audience I was stunned.  I watched as Marianne boldly called people to a higher version of themselves and the world.  I heard her unabashedly implore us to step out of the smallness of your own ego-centered lives and into the grandness of serving as part of a divine mission.  Although I was listening intently to the words she spoke, I was more overcome by her presence.  I left there completely in love with Marianne Williamson.

 

I returned to my apartment, intent to discover the parts of myself that I so clearly saw in her.  I loved that she had the courage to speak the truth, even if it meant shocking people in order to wake them up.  Also I admired the way she was able to clearly articulate a difficult message, speaking with such eloquence that her words penetrated into people's minds and hearts.  I was enamored with the depth of concern she seemed to feel for humanity and the sense that she was dedicated to something larger than just her individual life.  I also envied her beauty, her sense of style and her willingness to look like a hot, sexy woman and not one of the many stereotypical frumpy spiritual teachers. She took to the stage looking gorgeous and sophisticated, yet her holiness came through loud and clear.

 

As a dedicated student of projection, I looked beyond her behaviors and tried to discover the underlying characteristics that gave rise to those behaviors.  I asked myself, “What kind of person is able to just be herself on stage?”  Clearly, an authentic person.  “What kind of person would care so deeply for the rest of the world?”  A selfless person.  “What is the quality that allows Marianne to speak up, to tell the truth even when it is shocking or scary?”  I heard very clearly – a bold person.

 

I looked at my list of qualities, which read, “Bold, Authentic, and Selfless.”  None of them were characteristics that I owned or acknowledged within myself.  Those who know me now may find this hard to believe, but back then I was not somebody who told it like it is.  Afraid of losing approval of those I loved, I skirted around issues and lacked the self-confidence to even stand in front of a room without shaking. I was more concerned with looking good that I was with saying something that would change people’s lives.  I was more concerned with saying it nicely than being straight or authentic.  Yet I know that if I saw strengths in Marianne, the potential for them must exist also within me.

 

I began practicing being more authentic with people and challenging myself to speak up even when I wanted to be silent….”  Debbie Ford

 

How fun to see our potentials in others, to see what we are lacking within ourselves, to admire truth and authenticity and being comfortable in our own lives and selves.

 

Watch for your Light Shadow, for the part of you that has yet to shine!

 

“This Little Light of mine, I going to let it shine….”

 

 

 

Future Us!

Here is a great concept that I had never considered in a book called, “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert.

 

“We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat In The Hat so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps. Even plunking down a dollar at the convenience store is an act of charity intended to ensure that the person we are about to become will enjoy the Twinkie we are paying for now. In fact, just about any time we want something – a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger, we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, a minute, or a decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance.

 

Yeah, Yeah.  Don’t hold your breath.  Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could have been so stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.  Even that person who takes a bite of the Twinkie we purchased a few minutes earlier may make a sour face and accuse us of having bought the wrong snack.  No one likes to be criticized, of course, but if the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell were we thinking.  They may recognize our good intentions and begrudgingly acknowledge that we did the best we could, but they will inevitably whine to their therapists about how our best just wasn’t good enough for them.

 

How can this happen?  Shouldn’t we know that tastes, preferences, needs and desires of the people we will be next year – or at least later this afternoon?  Shouldn’t we understand our future selves well enough to shape their lives – to find careers and lovers whom they will cherish, to buy slip covers for the sofa that they will treasure for years to come?  So why do they end up with attics and lives that are full of stuff that we considered indispensable and that they consider painful, embarrassing or useless?  Why do they criticize our choice of romantic partners, second-guess our strategies for professional advancement, and pay good money to remove tattoos that we paid good money to get?  Why do they experience regret and relief when they think about us, rather than pride and appreciation?  We might understand all of this if we had neglected them, ignored them, mistreated them in some fundamental way – but damn it, we gave them the best years of our lives!  How can they be disappointed when we accomplished our coveted goals, and why are they so damned giddy when they end up in precisely the spot we worked so hard to steer them clear of?  Is something wrong with them? 

Or is something wrong with us?”  Daniel Gilbert

 

I love this concept that we are making choices today so that the US of our future will be happy, when we can’t possible know that the US in the future will be like, want, need or anything!  And we work harder to please the US we don’t know than we do on please the US of today!

 

I say do today what you love.

Do it each day for the rest of your life and give up on the future US. 

 

 

A habit of taking care of me!

If you have a bad habit, you automatically pass it on to your children, and it becomes their habit.  Your lifestyle becomes theirs, your relationships will echo in them. 

 

Now that I have begun to unlearn my bad ways, to correct many places where I was upside down and backwards, what happens to my children?  Do they get left where I started them off wrong? 

 

It is like I bought them a ticket for a train bound for Good and Normal only to find it is a train of dysfunction. 

 

When and if I get off do they continue on?

 

I feel like I set them on a course and now that it has become their normal; I am abandoning them by jumping off.

 

It feels like I am up against the habits within me but now they are within another.  How to convince them I was wrong, that I put them heading in the wrong direction?

 

It is like a trainload of sleeping people heading in the direction of a cliff and I can’t wake them up. 

 

Saving myself and jumping off seems so selfish.

 

How will they change course, how will they become aware of where they are headed?  Is it up to me to tell them where they are going, where I was wrong, that I dealt in life poorly and now they are living the results of that?

 

As I sit near the tracks of their lives, I do not know what I can do for them.

 

Is it possible that they too will switch trains when I do?  Is it possible that they will eventually echo my new changes?  As they witness the changes within me, will they then dapple in a new habit.

 

A habit of taking care of me!

 

Spotting Ourselves

I am reading The Shadow Affect written by Deepak Chopra, Debbie Ford and Marianne Williamson. 

 

Below is from Debbie Ford’s section.

 

“Our projections usually shock us.  When we are judging another, we never really think we are talking about ourselves.  But once we understand our finger pointing, we can start to untangle ourselves from our perceptions and fierce judgment of others.  We must remember the old saying, ‘You spot it, you got it.’

 

The parts of ourselves we try to avoid may be hidden from our view, but they exist as part of our energy field regardless.  The behaviors and feelings we are not at peace with will always find a screen to project themselves on, and we can be sure this is happening when we feel an emotional charge in the presence of someone else.  Imagine having a hundred different electrical outlets on your chest.  Each outlet represents a different quality.  The qualities you acknowledge and embrace have cover plates over them. They are safe- no electricity runs through them.  But the qualities you’re not okay with, the ones you have not yet owned, do have a charge.  So when other’s come along and reflect back to you an image of a self you don’t want to be, you become reactive...

 

Ken Wilber makes a great distinction.  He says, if a person or thing in the environment informs us, if we receive what is happening as information or a point of interest, we probably aren’t projecting.  If it affects us, if we’re pointing our finger in judgment, if we’re plugged in, chances are we are a victim of our own projections.”  Debbie Ford

 

This explains to me the difference between being informed in my environment and being affected.

 

And if someone gets my goat so to speak it is because there is an inlet into a part of me that I am not aware of. 

 

Interesting to note, that those who get a rise out of us, we are spotting ourselves!

 

 

Universe Plan

In this month’s O Magazine, “Catherine Price took off for Tokyo with no guidebook and a wacky idea: Let strangers decide every detail of her trip. Four days, 29 brief encounters, one collapsible bicycle, eight octopus balls, 600 flesh-eating fish, one goma fire ceremony, and too much fried food later, she’d discovered the joy in letting go.”

 

I wonder how many would dare to do this, to just arrive?

 

To arrive and not know where you are going to eat, sleep and what you are going to do.

 

It seems that we plan and plan to orchestrate ourselves lives right out of any surprises and wall off any unusual experiences, by needing to know and thus eliminating all unknown avenues.

 

I wonder if the only surprises we get in life are bad ones, that we don’t even allow ourselves the luxury of delightful surprises by just ambling through life unplanned and stumbling upon an experience we never even heard about, an unplanned Special.

 

When my husband and I take a road trip, we just head in a certain direction, we have no idea where we will go, what we will do, where we will sleep, what we will eat, we just let what we see decide.

 

We have happened upon Folk Festivals, Art Fairs, deserted beaches, old fashioned Drive In Theaters, to name a few.

 

You are more aware, more curious and more inclined to be daring and spontaneous, when you have no map to follow and no guideline to adhere to.

 

Arrive in each day the same way.  Sure we need to work, but what if we look for differences in our day instead of the same ole same ole? 

 

When there are spaces, do something different in that space. 

 

I didn’t know that today I would do yoga in the late afternoon, do lunch with my husband, it seemed my day was flipped around, and I am still fine.

 

I am fine because I didn’t begin with a guideline.

 

A guideline is like a string that won’t allow you to venture off the beaten trail; it is like a harness to routine, a rope to hold you back from an exciting life.

 

I say cut the line and float!

 

Float along in reality’s river not knowing what is coming around the bend, being comfortable in the unknown and let the Universe plan!

 

The Truth of who we are.

 

 

Annihilate.

destroy something: to destroy something completely, especially so that it ceases to exist.

defeat somebody: to defeat somebody easily and decisively.

This definition wasn’t what I expected, somehow when people spoke of being annihilated, they were speaking of being put aside, a feeling of disconnection.  Not that they were defeated, destroyed, and that you cease to exist, wow this changes the meaning for me.

Oprah spoke of feeling annihilated, that her grandmother used to beat her and after giving her a whipping her grandmother didn’t want to see an expression of pain. Oprah wasn’t allowed to express that or show how painful it was.  So she annihilated the experience from herself.

 

The whippings had to be destroyed or cease to exist and she had to annihilate herself from feelings, to disconnect from the sensations of her body, to not feel what she felt.

 

Her grandmother also annihilated the little girl.

 

It is so easy for an adult to do this to a child, to easily and decisively defeat someone that is half your size and to destroy completely their innocence so it ceases to exist, to leave the child annihilated from being a child.

 

How tragic this application of annihilation is when applied to children who suffer under the hands of confused adults, how they are literally disconnecting the child from its own body, its feelings and sets them upside down with their feelings.

 

We love and fear and respect those who hurt us for we are not allowed to express what our bodies are speaking.

 

Annihilation is the perfect word for abuse.  It destroys who we would have been, that person ceases to exist.

 

We are annihilated from the truth of who we are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where I want to go...

“Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it.  I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.” 

   ~Charles F. Kettering

 

Today was my 132^nd day of doing yoga and my whole body and mind seem to be screaming to let it go, let it be, just relax you have come far enough.  Yet another voice of knowing, the silent motivator who has seen great improvements countered these excuses.

 

I am thinking it was a fantasy to believe that one voice would grow silent, and a fallacy to think you will silence forever one voice.

 

One voice this morning had lots of great reasons to stay in bed, the rain, a cool room, a warm bed, a long week of work, a tired body, while the other voice spoke of strong muscles, yoga gives energy, feeling good, etc.

 

I feel better knowing that I have two voices and two choices and I can follow either, there isn’t one right voice, just two voices leading to two different places.

 

Each day it is up to me to decide where I want to go!