IMPERFECT Lady

Resolve who I am.

It is New Year’s Eve, the day we all sit down and look at the balance sheets of life, pour over our faults and choose one or two that we feel must go, and then declare to everyone we will no longer do those things.

How many of us take the time to really sit with the affect, the trouble spot and see where it came from, why it was formed?

What we call bad habits are usually coverings over some pain.

They are the lids that keep us from feeling the feelings too severe to feel.

Usually what happens is we just exchange habits, we seldom delve deeply into what lays beneath, to dive below and feel the pain.

As I approach this New Year, instead of making resolutions to get rid of bad habits, I want to explore beneath the habits.

The definition of resolution is the process of resolving something.

The act of answering, solving…

Perhaps if we looked at the coming year as the year of the answers, we will look at each day differently; we look to be enlightened about our behaviors, instead of running from them.

Vowing that we will sit down in the middle of our habit and sort through it looking for answers.

It is my belief that beneath the habit lays our true self.

My resolution is to resolve who I am.

Confines of a Well

There seems to be two perceptions.

The Perceptions with choices and the perception of no choices or the perceptions of freedom or the perceptions of limited and no choice.

And depending upon which land you occupy you will have a life that reflects that.

I lived in both places. The first being the dark narrow hole of perception that I was frozen in, where I had to do what others wanted of me, where my life was led by the wishes of others, I had no free will of my own.

We can call it a victim hole, and its perception is very one way, or co-dependent, where the quality of my life depended upon another.

The perception in that land was very limited and the quality of life was at the mercy of another’s good will.

It was from that darkness I fell out of onto the land of wide open expanse and freedom, where my strings to others were untied, where I was able to walk freely and express myself freely, where the victim chains that held me in place fell free.

It was equal to walking out of Plato’s cave or the story in Sogyal Rinpoche’s book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, about the frog who climbed out of the well to see the ocean.

It is like your constraints and perceptions shatter into a million fragments, where you now have access to an unlimited choice.

There is no common ground between the two worlds.

I feel that I lived in a place where my boxes of choices were not available to me.
It seems incredible to me now that I didn’t have access to my own box of choices that I waited for someone to tell me what to do.

Imagine the difference of perceptions to having access to your own choices or not.
Living, as a prisoner in your own life is pure hell, its living in a dark well and not knowing what freedom exists outside.

So while I agree perceptions are a choice, it is way hard to phantom that inside the well.

If you disagree that perceptions are a choice perhaps you best look around where you are living and see who holds your box of choices.

You will either find the freedom of the ocean or the confines of a well.

Perception is a choice.

Chapter nine, Perception is a choice, from “You are What you Love,” by Vaishali

Perception is the magic carpet that either elevates us into Heaven or plummets us into hell. Perception is how we behold the divine in everything and everyone, or how the relentlessly tight grasp of hell demolishes us. Perception is a gift of free will from Heaven. Where we focus our attention determines whether we freely return perception to its rightful place, Heaven, or whether we surrender it to hell. We choose on a moment–to-moment basis.

We do not choose according to our experiences or what our parents may have taught us. Nor do we choose according to how much money we have. We choose according to our Ruling Love, because it is our Ruling Love that creates our experiences. It is what we are giving our attention to that determines the outcome of what we have learned here. It is what we do with our love that is our true wealth, security, and happiness.

To illustrate the power of perception, consider the story of two children who grew up with alcoholic parents. One child grew up to be a teetotaler. The other child grew up to be an alcoholic. When asked why they chose the path that they did, they both gave the same response, “With parents like that, what else could I be?”

Dr. Phil McGraw, on his television program, The Dr. Phil Show, uses and interesting technique while working with a guest. He directly addresses the person’s perception of self. Dr. Phil will walk the person through a complete examination of their perception. One of his guests was re-creating great turmoil within the family due to the deliberate, insensitive overspending of the family’s financial resources. Dr. Phil walked this person through her perceptual trap. He explained to her that when she is driving around, and it hits her to go to the mall and shop, she should stop and shift perception instead to something more life-sustaining, such as spending time with her kids and spouse, or going to the gym and doing something nice for her body. Dr. Phil explains that each person has sovereignty over his/her perception. So if life, relationships or anything else is not working for you, then you and only you can shift your perception to something that does work.

All of our suffering is held together by our perception or mis-perception of self and what is. Right relationship with perception is an inner event. It happens in the Heart, not the head. Right relationship with perception has nothing to do with the body’s physical visual ability. Perception based on what we think and believe, based on mind the projections of mind we are here to get over, is the basis of mis-perception or polluted thinking. Unrealized waves are coming from the head and not the Heart, so the perception of self and what is becomes highly distorted and extremely limited. All unrealized waves perceive no hope, no possibility for growth, no good faith in life and love in their story about what is.

Once again, that is why the third rock from the Sun is here, so that we can as spiritual creatures have a place to come to practice right relationship with perception. This is the place in the universe to come and practice realizing what you are dong with your attention, because this is where we feel it. Having to feel the quality of our perceptions is the lesson we came here for. Most of us re-create very confining perceptual stories that keep us living narrow and severely restricted lives, compared to our potential as God conscious made manifest. Most of us live our perceptual lives within “the box” of duality. Perception is like a stamped envelope. We could perceptually live on the envelope that has the potential to go anywhere at anytime. But instead we choose perceptually to live on the stamp, and we let the “stamped perception” define our value, power and worth and tell us where we can do and when. How does one free oneself from the limiting perception that one is not even aware is holding them hostage?

The following is a delightful story about an old frog who lived in a dark well, who is visited by an old frog who lived in the ocean. This story is from Sogyal Rinpoche’s book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying?

“Where do you come from?” asked the frog in the well.
“From the great ocean,” he replied.
“How big is your ocean?”
“It’s gigantic.”
“You mean about a quarter of the size of my well here?”
“Bigger.”
“Bigger? You mean half as big?”
“No, even bigger.”
“Is it…as big as this well?”
“There is no comparison.”
“That is impossible! I’ve got to see this for myself.”

They set off together. When the frog from the well saw the ocean, it was such a shock that his head just exploded into pieces.

We are just like the old well frog. We are so familiar with living in the dark hole of our perceptions – that we are the body, money, experiences, thoughts, and emotions, all things limited – that when confronted with the truth that we are in fact love, that we are in fact God consciousness realizing itself, our head just explodes into a million pieces.

The good news is that it is not up to the government, it is not up to large corporations, it is not up to your family or co-workers to create a life worth living from the power of right relationship with perception. It is up to you. No one can eat for you. No one can sleep for you. No one can breathe for you. And no one can watch your mind for you. No one else can shift your perception from temporal to eternal, from lies to truth, except you. You re-created all your limiting perceptions. Therefore only you can create an end these limitations. It is up to you, and what you are freely giving your attention to on a moment-to-moment basis. No matter where you go or what you do, you cannot escape the truth: you are what you love and you love whatever you are giving your attention to.

Perception is as unique and imaginative as whatever you are giving your attention to and choose to love. You cannot change your life for the better without changing your outdated illusions. You cannot change your outdated illusions without changing what you are giving your attention to. Perception…Change…Growth. They are all perceptual choices. The illusory perception tree produces only illusory fruit. You will find nothing life-sustaining there, only the un-ripe fruit of greater disappointment.

We have all experienced the magical healing qualities of perception. Everyone has met someone for the first time that initially did not appear very attractive. However, over time you see and share their Ruling Love, and you grow to deeply love the person as authentically beautiful. Historically speaking Quasimodo and the elephant-man were perfect examples of this.

You also know the opposite. You meet someone who appears in the temporal world to be very attractive. But over time you see their Ruling Love. They are strongly loyal to hell and inflicting pain. When this happens, the initial illusory perception falls away and the other person is then seen for the true ugliness that they give their attention to. It is then that we honestly perceive the deformed nature of the other. It is the Ruling Love of each wave that ultimately determines our perception of ugly or beauty in ourselves and everything and everyone around us.

You are your perception. Not just physically or mentally, but emotionally as well as metaphorically. The ultimate goal of all self-witnessing, and the purpose behind all of the created reality is to master clear perception. Divine intelligence has given us all free will in our use of perception. You choose your perception and you are One with your choice. Due to the divine law that you are what you love and you love whatever you are giving your attention to, everything in this world is going to continue to go out of its way to keep you honest about what you are doing with your love. Contemplate this the next time your perception informs you that you have no value, power or worth. Not exactly a program you want repeated on the “inner syndicated” airwaves.

To establish right divine relationship with perception, look back to Swedenborg. When he was alive, people would ask him, “What do you do to be such an actualized person?” Swedenborg would tell them, “It has nothing to do with doing. It is not a doing thing.” It is a remembering to give attention to truth, and forget everything else, it is a perceptual thing.

To Be or Not to Be in the Present moment.

The world at large values, even worships doing. The world perceives doing as the highest purpose of all created life. We reflect that perception back to ourselves in our language. We ask children, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” The first bit of information we get from people we meet for the first time is, “What do you do for a living?” We have a bad habit of measuring our happiness by what we can and cannot do. We perceive advancing age with great fear of all the things we may lose the ability to do. We as individuals, as a nation, as a planet, loving giving endless attention to doing and the value of doing. Anyone who has ever spent more than five minutes in America knows that American worships productivity. In America if you do not work unrealistically hard at doing something, if you are not producing, you are dead weight. Goals and quotas are the name of the game, and your worth is only as good as the last thing you produced.

Being Simple – Simple Being. – Argisle

The Eastern perception of mind, Ayurvedic psychology and Taoism, suggests a completely different perception on doing. These masters suggest that being is a higher state of mind than doing. Being in the present moment with an open Heart is the very purpose and nature of mind dreaming itself in a material arena. We are human beings not human doings. Nothing will ultimately work for us until we surrender to being here now. These ancient philosophies indicated that there is a way to stop all the problems and limitations, struggles and suffering. There is a way to simply end these in our lives. There is a way to create a final resolution to the on-going drama. How? To be. The instant we are willing to be with what is in the present moment, we are in a the feeling place, the Heart, not the doing place, the head. This is a self-corrective place, the place where the human and the divine become One.

Ayurveda and Taoism warn us that all of the most menacing acts against life and love happen in the name of defending what we think and believe, and in the name of doing. Why did Hitler do what he did? To become the next world leader, of course. Why did Charles Manson do what he did? To lead what he thought and believed was the next Cultural Revolution. Why do large corporations squeeze the lifeblood out of their employees, and then fire them when their bodies can’t keep up with the pressure? Why do they replace these loyal workers with someone half their age at half the salary? It is done in the name of productivity – becoming more work efficient and cost effective. That is all that matters. It is truly an ugly attack on equability. This vicious cycle of ignorance and pain will unendingly feed upon itself until doing perception is broken.

We have discussed at length the disease of duality. This disease infects our perception. Once the disease enters mind through the doorway of perception, it then immediately infects the frontal lobe with deep loyalty to subject/object orientation. I am over here- the subject. And everything not me is the object. A wave must be giving attention to duality; it must love subject/object in order to develop such a strong and abiding love for doing. In order to do there must be a you to start the action, and an object in order to for the doing action to become complete. If there is no subject/object, no duality, there would be no love for doing or doing to become. Instead everything would simply be about being here now.

No wave can serve two masters. A wave cannot be giving attention to being and doing at the same time. The Eastern studies of mind say that being is One with eternal consciousness. Doing is one with the ego. The ego wants, needs to do. Without doing how could the ego tyrannize you with not good enough, and did not do it right? Doing is how we define our value, power and worth. Doing is the camouflage we wear to distract us from how we are treating other people. After all, isn’t getting the job done more important than how we treat others and ourselves in the process? Doing is the doorway to hell that comparison and judgment charge right through. We have trained the ego that we will rely on doing to define our identity. The ego will decide according to when and how the doing gets done what value, power and worth we are allowed to accept, if any. Doing gets more attention than sex. There is something just not right about that.

Doing to become is our very most beloved demon of destruction. If the purpose of life were doing to become, then every workaholic in history of mankind would have reached enlightenment by now. But as we have all noticed, it does not happen that way. No one could produce enough temporal anything to evolve their way into an eternal place like Heaven. We did not come here to do things in our mind. We came here to be with our mind. We did not come here to do things to our relationships. We came here to be with our relationships. It is in being with what is in the present moment with an open Heart that true enlightenment is realized. Jesus did not come to the planet to model doing for us. He came here to model being with what is in the present moment with an open Heart. He came here to model an inner space of complete innocence form any thought or belief.

In the life of the historic Buddha, when he left home, he scaled the walls of the palace leaving behind his wife, children and his parents, the King and Queen. The Buddha set forth upon a path of full awakening. The journey he set upon had nothing to do with doing. That is what he left behind. That is the false king he would not serve. This is the first thing he separated from his attention. The Buddha’s path was bout being fully awake, not doing to become fully awake. The famous Tibetan Buddhist master Sogyal Rinpoche says it like this, “When you realize the nature of the mind, layers of confusion peel away. You don’t actually ‘become’ a Buddha, you simply cease, slowly to be deluded.

I Can

As I look backwards on this year I am happy with the way that I stayed the course in yoga, by not succumbing to the voice that wanted me to give it up.

Between the voice and the lazy feelings that would sometimes overwhelm me, I stayed the course for the greater balance of the year, and I am proud of that.

What I intended when I began was to take better care of myself, to do something that would begin a change and to do it for 60 days.

The sixty days turned into 120, than 180 and then 240, it was then I faltered a bit and began missing a few days.

Yet even in the last month, I have done more yoga than not.

Tomorrow is the last day of the year, and the tally stands at 331 days of yoga done, (after I do today’s, which I best get going on soon) and 33 days no yoga.

I am feeling it was a successful yoga year.

A year of not listening to the voice and feelings that would have me believe, I can’t.

Learning to overcome the voice by doing, and changing the tone to I can.

Tamper with Reality.

I was asked after my last blog, if others will think I am crazy, and perhaps they will. However, unless you have lived a life deeply in denial where your head view of life is not what is actually going on, where you body is experiencing one thing and you are telling yourself something totally different, you will not get my post, my blog or my experiences.

What I feel happened to me was that when I found out my father was a pedophile my body’s feelings made sense, although in my head there was no evidence of it.

The totally extreme opposites of what I thought life was compared to what it really was was mind blowing.

It blew all my beliefs, thoughts and views to pieces and I was left with a head that had to relearn how to see reality.

I taught my head by how my body felt, instead of allowing it access to create a scenario that opposed reality.

If I sound crazy, well that is okay for I was for 46 years, and it is crazy to go back and discover the way I was formed, how my mind made things up, how it was detached, how it and my body saw life drastically different.

I feel that the root of all madness or insanity is to live a life where the mind and body are not aligned.

In cases of child abuse or where the adult says one thing but does another, is where insanity or madness begins.

Love hurts is an example.
Relying on someone who repeatedly lets you down.
Where we are unable to put up boundaries we then make up stories to live with instead.

So much so, that we live in an alternative reality.

If at anytime you let your feelings down, by not voicing them, by fooling your self that you don’t feel what you feel, you are dabbling in insanity.

What I learned most in these 6 years, is that I not only have the right, it is best if I walk hand and hand with my feelings, and my thoughts and beliefs will follow.

I have learned that by watching actions and feeling the sensations in my body, I can navigate myself in reality and be authentic in words, thoughts, feelings and actions, we all agree.

Sanity does not have to pretend a feeling doesn’t exist.

What some call social niceties are close to insane allowances, pretending to pretend not to see/feel/know what you know.

I again feel that some of what we call ‘Mentally Handicapped’, are actually more sane than most, for they don’t seem to have the flipping switch to pretend.

They call life as they see it, as do little children, they are not looking to spare another’s feelings; they are just calling it like it is.

Sparing another’s feelings by making up a lie…just seems odd to me, are we not making up a new reality?

Anyway, call me crazy I don’t mind, but I am no longer interested in sparing someone’s feelings.

I spared my father, I didn’t want to disappoint him, to make him unhappy, and look where it led?

I would rather hurt your feelings than tamper with reality.

A Life Review of Feelings

While in yoga yesterday, I wondered if the body could express itself without a head, is there a way to vent your feelings below the neck?

It seems to me that the head holds all the valves of release.

Our tears are shed through our eyes, our mouths speak words, our beliefs and thoughts either match our feelings or deny them, but all the expressions are done above the neck, yet the feelings seem to be below.

We feel deeply with our heart, our gut has instincts and intuitively knows, we feel ‘something’ deeply in our bones, and the truth of our experiences seems to reside in the torso.

Yet the head is where we can articulate what the body feels.

It is like the head needs to tune into the body, open a line, and form a connection.

When the two are joined as one, we can live a life that is steered by feelings and emotions allowing us to express specifically our needs, wants and desires.

Living totally in the head leaves you separated from feelings and emotions.

I am not certain you can release emotions with out a head.

The vents are in the head as far as I can tell.

If a body is detached from the head, it just fills up with unexpressed emotions, which grows into rage, rage that explodes and subsides all without ever delving into their formation. I believe the root of disease.

A head that is detached from the body, is a senseless head.

A head that is making choices based on whims of others, for it has no roots, nothing to anchor it down, it is not grounded in feelings or emotions connected to your life, it floats a few feet ahead of your body.

Amazing to witness this, live this way and then get the opportunity to experience the rejoining of head to body, to feel feelings that have long been stuffed down, to go back in a life review of feelings.

Joined them back together.

The way I described this past Christmas was an ugly beautiful one, where inside I was so dark and the outside so light, how mental psyche steers my world, not the decorations on the outside.

I was clearly shown that no matter how I orchestrated and decorated and baked and made perfect the outside, it had no influence upon my inner world.

It wasn’t even a blue Christmas it was black.

Frozen darkness inside…is that called depression?

Yet it was a moving depression where I was working on the outside to cheer me up inside.

I always pictured depression as sitting in a stupor, unable to move. Is there a moving depression or a fallacy that if you can create a warm peaceful atmosphere you will have the same inside?

What I think I thought, was that if you were dark inside you could change it up on the outside to help alleviate the feelings, yet what needs to happen is that you have to go deeper into the feelings, leaving the outside alone.

When I started to spiral into darker feelings, I kept
cleaning, instead I should have stopped and sat with my feelings.

Writing and exploring why I felt the way I felt.

I wonder if depression is repressed feelings, if denying them and focusing on changing the environment you live in, instead of investigating your feelings and relationships is the cause?

What I feel is I was given a real life experience, situations and feelings that represented the flavor of my childhood, and then a dream to show where the seed was planted, how my mental psyche was developed.

A main piece of the puzzle was cleared up for me.

My father was happy and desiring me.
And I was happy to please him.

The sheer terror wasn’t there, perhaps too young to know…in my mind no terror.
And my head seemed detached from my body.

My body and head separated.
Hence, no memory in my head, but my body held on tight to the trauma.

I am filled with admiration for the little girl who so bravely withstood such trauma, who did her best to please in the most horrific of circumstances, all she wanted was her daddy to be happy.

When it is over, and the child seems ‘unaffected’ it is because they no longer are one.

The mind and the body separated.

The body holds the truth while the mind was elsewhere.

Bikram Yoga is about bringing the mind back to the body.

In the 360 days that have passed, I have missed 32 days, days in which I was working so hard to reconnect my head to the rest of my body.

To live as mind body and soul.

Yoga is the yoke that joined them back together.

Where I stopped caring for me.

As I read back a few days in my blog, I saw where the trimmings had a hold of me and almost ruined Christmas, and then the actions and expectations did the job the trimmings had started.

It is like negative energy travels from item to person to thing, to any place in my world to latch on, and if I am not aware where my power is, it slips in and takes over.

What I believe happens as well, as the busier you are the more unaware you become, so busy doing you forget to be.

My Christmases of past were very busy doings, they wore me out to the last drop of energy, it was what I thought was needed to make a great Christmas to do over and beyond what you normally do.

To put your self into trimming the house, oodles of gifts, baking, card sending, wrapping your self up into a dozen places until there is no you left.

Exhausted and depleted.

A manic Christmas cheer.

Taking the season of giving into a manic state of doing and overdoing and then doing yet more.

This holiday season is a playground for those of us who have ‘responsibility addictions’ who feel we carry the power to make others happy. It is like a drugstore of places for us to get our hits.

There should be a warning label on Christmas.

“Be careful not to give your self away.”

I had a very odd dream on Christmas Eve, well actually very early Christmas morning, as I awoke from it, it left me knowing its content was a metaphor for how I lived my life.

It isn’t a nice dream, but I will state it here anyway.

I became aware I was in the back of a station wagon, face down, naked from the waist down, I was a young girl and I was watching a man approaching the side of the car, the windows are open and I hear him say my maiden name. In the middle seats are young kids, and the feeling I have is that I will offer my body to him to spare them. He climbs on my back and does his thing. I don’t feel anything, except that I am making him happy.

When I awoke from this dream it seemed like a complete metaphor for my life.

How I will be a whore for another and I will do so to spare another pain, I will abuse my body for the sake of others.

It stayed with me this ugly dream on Christmas day.

Its contents a visual of how I navigated life in co-dependency, how I will use my body in two ways for the pleasure of others and to spare pain for the innocent, to protect them I will abuse to my body.

How others use my body was clearly displayed with my approval and willingness.

Perhaps I needed that shocking dream to wake me up to how I get lost in another’s life.

And what was so telling was the age of this young girl, as I caught sight of her in the rearview mirror, very blonde hair and young body, her flat chest, being strong beyond her years, willing to suffer for another.

Courageously selflessly boldly the sacrificial lamb.

Perhaps I don’t have images of my child abuse, but this is as close as it gets.

And what I feel was that I truly didn’t focus on his deed and my pain, but his happiness and who I spared.

What began at the moment of abuse was the fragmentation of living life for self.

It is there my responsibility gene was developed and pruned, where I became the pleaser and the saver.

Where I stopped caring for me.

Against my Mind.

What an odd Christmas I had, it was almost like an out of body experience, certainly out of control, where Christmas joy seemed to mock me outside, yet inside lay a storm of hurt, anger, sorrow, confusion, resentment, more confusion a mess of wires all tangled up with beauty everywhere.

It is odd to be so riled up inside and the outside appearing picture perfect.

Looking inside our home last night, you would see a beautiful family and a wonderful Christmas scene; the only dark cloud was fuming around me.

Today I didn’t know how my day would go, if I would be able to get out from under the cloud, if the fog would leave so I could sit in peace.

Sit and just breathe in the day.

My family watched me cautiously, wary and on tippy toes and eggshells, as I did my self.

Wondering at my own sense of mental balance.

This mental dysfunction of co-dependency can strike at any time, a hook is caught upon another’s action and blame and resentment ensue.

If I could know that a snag was coming, I could head it off at the pass, but I am surprised as the ones I am snagged onto, unconsciously a lesson is arriving unbeknownst to me.

I stay hooked as long as I blame the other, the only way I can work my way free is to see where my responsibility and actions led to the hookup.

My freedom comes when I can stay aware in the midst of the snag and wise enough to know it isn’t all their fault, that it takes two to tangle.

And what I usually find, is that they are doing their thing and I hop on wanting, wishing, dreaming that they will drop their life to satisfy mine.

Oddly enough while it may have been the worst Christmas Eve ever, it also is a template to model the rest by, using it to design free Christmas activities in the future.

Today, as the dinner preps were needed, I asked.

I asked for help.
I asked for specifics.
I asked and it was met with no resistance, no complaints.

Now this can’t be a real test, for they were so not wanting a Johnny raincloud on Christmas day or at the dinner table.

My tone was different, the manic need was gone, there seemed to be a team spirit, a tone of many helping hands.

Again, I know that they were coming, that we were coming off of a bad experience, where my manic mood stole Christmas joy, so I can’t be sure the atmosphere changed permanently, but a change was from deep dark fear to neutral.

I will not say I was filled with joy or filled with gratitude or love or peace, but I was out of the depths of hell.

Even in neutral the rest could feel their own joy, I wasn’t stealing their peace.

How awful to witness the affects one dark rain cloud can have on a party, and to be it.

It’s like the party planner; the event coordinator creates this wonderful display, great food, and then sits and stews in the midst like a bad stench spreading it everywhere.

Like Dr. Jill Bolte says, “you are responsible for the energy you bring into the room.”

Yet I felt so out of control.

What I can do next time is just state how out of control, how angry, hurt, confused, resentful I am and it is best that I be excused.

Taking my dark insides with me.

Christmas for me was seeing the damage that darkness of co-dependency can do, how it changes the feelings of the others in the room, how it takes out joy.

It is scary that I still have episodes of this.

Yet I feel that each time I learn more about myself and hopefully be wiser next time.

It left us all happy with neutral, no over joyful or dreaded darkness, just an idle.

My mental dysfunctional co-dependency bouts start with a small item and pick up speed and volume if left unchecked, its almost like I got drunk on negative energy.

Today I felt hung over and depleted from being strung so tight my head and jaw in a vice, muscles taunt, breath shallow, vision clouded.

Braced to fight my misconstrued expectations to the death, while wanting desperately to be free and relaxed and calm and accepting, bending to the change in plans.

Instead I put support beams of thoughts around the expectations built upon nothing.

Like fluff on a cloud.

Nothing supporting nothing.

Mental thoughts being planned by a mental mind.

The left side of my head is bruised, my jaw in pain, my left neck and shoulder ache, all a stiff from my struggle with reality.

What I want most is to relax, to breathe, and to process this episode to my DNA.

What I caught a few hour glimpse of is my old life, a spirit of Christmas pasts.

My life review brought to life in reality.
I had just been thinking a few weeks ago, that our home hasn’t had me go ‘crazy’ in a long while, and there I was in full living color, out of reality, crazy.

Tonight I am grateful that I visit this state now, but don’t live there full time.

How incredibly hard that life is.
How separated, how desolate, how fearful, how lonely…

What I think now is that this mental dysfunctional co-dependency, is something to manage, never cured.

That it can sneak in and steal my peace at any time, that the more I set the stage, by voicing my concerns, needs, desires, the less opportunity it has to grab on and hijack my life.

My antidote is flexibility and freedom.
Theirs and mine, against my mind.

Keep My Merry Inside.

My expectations got the best of me, my innocent belief and assumptions had me sitting in a pile of resentment, a pile I had made myself.

My greatest failings are to ask questions to see how their plans will affect mine. It is all the things unsaid that clutter up the moment of now, and perhaps my wanting to be available.

So accommodating for them, that I forget to remember doing what I need for me.

Christmas Eve day started out fine, talking to one of my friends, making last minute gifts with my daughter, tossing packages at the post office for a few hours and then coming home to do my last minute baking.

Everyone but one daughter with a bad cold was home, the rest had gone to a party I no longer attended. I was okay with them going, or so I thought.

I guess I wanted them to put in an appearance, to make a quick stop by, and then come home.

Instead I got the quick stop by.

My afternoon was spent baking and cleaning, in hopes that they would be home soon to help. As the hours continued to click by, the resentment began to pile up.

By the time we all were together again, I was beat and filled with the absence of Christmas spirit.

I tried to sort out what I was most angry at, and knowing anger was hurt, what I was so hurt about.

The list seemed long.

The list of things I failed to do for myself.
I failed to ask if we were going to meet as a family on Christmas eve and what time to expect them all home.

Failed to elicit help with the clothes and cleaning.

Failure to prepare for a party of one and to have something special for me to do while they were gone.

Failure to put up boundaries and limits as to what I will do and when.

What I didn’t want to happen happened.

I didn’t want to spend my Christmas Eve doing work, to have the day slip by without me feeling the joys of Christmas, and it did.

It was like the Christmas train had left the station and I was running behind trying to catch up, and by the time I caught it was too tired to enjoy.

The rest of my family, except for my daughter who wasn’t feeling well, had a nice day. They did what they wanted and were happy.

I on the other hand was miserable.

Miserable tossed in the wake of their choices.

My failure to take control of my world left me being tossed around behind theirs; I just couldn’t get out of their wake.

What I want the least is to be an obligation, and even worse to be left out and forgotten, to be at the end of the list.

And yet I do it to myself time and time again.

So busy doing and being there for others that time slips by with me unnoticed.

The resentment and hurt feelings was my lack of care for me.

Taking care to sit with my feelings.
Stopping the doing when I am tired and honoring my body.

Neglecting to plan something special for me.

A Christmas eve to remember, where I sat drained and empty of me.

Pouring myself out and then resenting them.

This has been my common theme in life.

Waiting for them to say, ‘enough’ instead of saying it myself.

Inside I must feel inadequate that I keep giving and giving and giving, to fill up the hole inside.

Wouldn’t have it been better for them to have a full mom and an empty Christmas list? To have me sitting there full of myself, instead of being drained, to have me happy instead of prune tarts, a clean house, baked bread, clothes done.

Sitting like a beaten woman, beaten by her own demands, her own hands, her own expectations.

Today, Christmas Morning, I will watch that I don’t abuse me.

And keep my Merry inside.