Denial saved my life

long ago.  At the level I experienced it, it’s called disassociation.  If crazy, abusive, ugly stuff happens when you’re young- you check out.  That didn’t happen.  Nope, no way not to me.

Denial keeps you safe.  Keeps you from losing your mind – literally.  When I was younger I would leave my body during those times.

But that was then – back when denial helped – when it saved my life.  Problem is, that life-saving denial mechanism stuck around long after it outlived its usefulness.  It kept me in situations others would have run from, but not me.  I just kept feeding off the drama, while pretending to myself at the same time that everything was just fine.  It’s so bizarre, yet I understand the source.

I recently uncovered a whole bunch more denial that’s been quietly working away in my life.  I didn’t even see these things.  Now I do.

I’m trying to be kind to myself, like I tell others. Funny thing is, the universe showed me just last week, how far I’ve come. A year ago I would have cried and felt just horrible about myself.  Yesterday I realized immediately what was happening and said oh no you don’t.

All that matters is I am being honest with myself. Yes, these things are true. I have to work on them.

It’s a bit frustrating to see I still have so much work to do on myself.

I know how to work on this. I’m pissed that I have to, but like I’ve been saying it’s my freaking life.  I better heal myself up because no one else will.

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A Valentine Ritual for One – A Self Love Ceremony – Creating New Memories

“To fall in love with yourself is the first secret to happiness.” –Robert Morely

There is nothing in the world that beats the feeling of falling in love and being in love! Many of us fantasize of meeting our perfect match and being swept off our feet … yet more and more of us think of relationships as a life partnership that gives us sustenance and allow us to share our selves and our love in a deep and soulful way. We long for a strong and happy unions and marriages, and home life that offers security and is sturdy enough to be the foundation for all else we do in the world.

With so many people expressing so much desire for true love, why are so many still searching? Why do many people fear love may never come? The reasons are many, and as complex as each individual who desires true love.  In my experience here are two things that crop up time and time again. One is that many people tend to think magically about love without doing the practical and emotional work to draw a relationship to them … and keep it healthy and alive. And second is that many of us skip important steps to creating the relationship of their dreams by forgetting the cardinal rule of love relationships — in order to experience genuine, mature love with another we first must love ourselves.

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Friendship – Simple vs Real

Anyone can stand by you when you are right, but a Friend will stand by you even when you are wrong.
A simple friend identifies himself when he calls.  A real friend doesn’t have to.
A simple friend opens a conversation with a full news bulletin on his life.
A real friend says, “What’s new with you?”
A simple friend thinks the problems you whine about are recent.
A real friend says, “You’ve been whining about the same thing for 14 years.  Get off your duff and do something about it.”
A simple friend has never seen you cry.  A real friend has shoulders soggy from your tears.
A simple friend doesn’t know your parents’ first names.  A real friend has their phone numbers in his address book.
A simple friend hates it when you call after he has gone to bed.  A real friend asks you why you took so long to call.
A simple friend seeks to talk with you about your problems.  A real friend seeks to help you with your problems.
A simple friend, when visiting, acts like a guest.  A real friend opens your refrigerator and helps himself.
A simple friend thinks the friendship is over when you have an argument.
A real friend knows that it’s not a friendship until after you’ve had a fight.
A simple friend expects you to always be there for them.  A real friend expects to always be there for you!

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Listening – the difference between intuition and chit chat

“Listening to Spirit”

How do you know the difference between intuition and chit-chat?

No one can tell you what your intuition sounds like or looks like or feels like. Only you can figure it out. Sometimes it’s so strong and unmistakable, almost like a burning bush. Other times it’s like a gentle breeze that you could miss if you are too active.

When I decided that I wanted to follow inner guidance, but could not distinguish between Spirit and self, I figured I would just follow everything. For a long time that led to wild goose chases, and lots of frustration. I would evaluate my choices after they came into manifestation. When I started to do this it would take me 6-12 months to even realize I needed to evaluate the choice. It took me 3 years to get down to 1-2 days. I noticed, through my evaluations, that guidance from self almost always required me to push and force. While guidance from Spirit had me moving through life in a dance. The contrast was remarkable.

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Choosing a path

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you. . . . Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. . . . Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use.

Carlos Castaneda

What will I be doing tomorrow? Where will I be? With whom will I be? While I can’t predict the future, of course, I do know that the answers to these questions to a great extent depend on what I do today, on decisions I make about which road to get on right here, right now. There is, of course, no right or wrong road, and we may end up going down several different roads for different aspects of our lives, but we do have many decisions to make.

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Create your own life and then go out and live it.

Sometimes people come into your life and you know right away that they were meant to be there… to serve some sort of purpose, teach you a lesson or help figure out who you are or who you want to become. You never know who these people may be but when you lock eyes with them, you know at that very moment that they will affect your life in some profound way.

And sometimes things happen to you that may seem horrible, painful and unfair, but in reflection you realize that without overcoming those obstacles you would have never realized your potential, strength, willpower or heart.

Nothing happens by chance or by means of good luck.

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Trust, trusting ourselves

In a world in which we are exposed to more information, more options, more philosophies, more perspectives than ever before, in which we must choose the values by which we will live (rather than unquestioningly follow some tradition for no better reason than that our own parents did), we need to be willing to stand on our own judgment and trust our own intelligence—to look at the world through our own eyes—to chart our course and think through how to achieve the future we want, to commit ourselves to continuous questioning and learning—to be, in a word, self-responsible.

Nathaniel Branden

Trusting ourselves–what a concept that is! In a world in which there are hundreds of people every day in our media, in ads, and in our personal lives telling us that we should trust their judgment and do as they say, it’s quite a novel concept to trust ourselves and to trust what we learn and what that learning means to us. But you see, we have to live our own lives and make our own ways through this world, so it’s up to us–and only us–to determine who we become and how we interact with the world, its people, and its nature.

We all were given intelligence, and we all have our own unique conscience. We were given our own sets of desires and wishes and wants, and we were given our unique gifts that will allow us to make the best of our lives if we use them to their fullest potential. We choose the values we live by, and we choose how we treat others. Far too often, though, the criterion for our choices is simply, “Well, that’s how everyone else does it.” This criterion, needless to say, doesn’t take into account our uniqueness or our own judgment. It’s an easy way out of having to make decisions that may be fairly difficult to make.

But those are the decisions that make you who you are, and that help you to become the person you’re meant to be. If you don’t make them, you’re standing in place or treading water, however you wish to look at it. That’s not fair to you as a person, and you deserve to be treated fairly, especially by yourself.

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Using negative angry feelings

If we face our unpleasant feelings with care, affection, and nonviolence, we can transform them into a kind of energy that is healthy and has the capacity to nourish us. By the work of mindful observation, our unpleasant feelings can illuminate so much for us, offering us insight and understanding into ourselves and society.

Thich Nhat Hanh

More often than not, we’re taught to “banish” unpleasant feelings, because of course, they make us feel bad. So let’s get rid of them, get them out of our lives and out of our minds and out of our hearts so that we can live healthy, positive, pleasant lives.

But what if there’s something to learn from those unpleasant feelings? What if the fear that we’re feeling has a deeper message? What if the discomfort we have when we’re in the presence of a particular person has something to teach us about our own prejudices, biases, or instinct? Ignoring the feeling and trying to push it away will do nothing to help us to learn whatever it is that the feeling is trying to teach us.

It would be much like going to a class and disliking the content, and thus never reading the text because we didn’t like it. We may avoid more unpleasant feelings of dislike by avoiding the text, but what have we learned? Of course, we’ve learned nothing, and we’ve made an obvious choice to learn nothing.

Unpleasant feelings can be a part of who we are. When they’re caused by something specific, they can be a part of us for as long as that something is a part of our lives. But what can we learn from them? How can we face those feelings and accept them and actually learn to care for them, no matter how unpleasant they are? Until we find out how we can do so, we may be losing some of the most important lessons of our lives by trying to banish the unpleasant feelings just to feel a bit better in the moment.

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Living in the NOW

The present moment is never intolerable. It is always what is coming in five minutes or five days that makes people despair. The Law of Life is
to live in the present, and this applies to both time and place. Keep your attention to the present moment, and in the place where your body is now. Emmet Fox

As I live more and more, I’m slowly learning how to live in the present moment. I’m learning what it means to truly be in the right here, right now, rather than thinking about the past or wondering about the future. In my life, this is one of the most important things that I’ve ever learned, for my days are much fuller, much richer, as I learn to see, to notice, to feel, and to appreciate all that’s here in this world with me in the now.

This is one of those concepts that I used to wonder what people meant when they talked about it. After all, I am alive right now, so of course I’m living in the moment. But even though my body’s here, where is my mind? Where is my attention? What am I focused on? And if I’m focused on something other than right now, how can I take advantage of all the gifts and possibilities that the right now is offering me? My body is here, and if I can keep my attention here, also, I can get much more out of the present moment. Not only that, but I can give much more to the present moment, also.

I had a friend once who almost always talked about the past, mostly about her high school years. At times it was very difficult to be with her because it seemed that she was actually living in the past, and no matter what we might be talking about in our current lives, the conversation always would turn to her past. It got to be kind of sad, for I could see that people started to avoid being with her–she chose to focus on parts of her life that she knew but no one else was familiar with, and no one was really interested in constantly reliving her past with her.

Right now. What powerful words those can be if we recognize them for what they are: truly the only time we have for sure, and every single right now is the most important moment of our lives, for it’s the only moment in which we can act and make choices that will affect our future right nows.

A further thought:

At the level of mind, you exist as a collection of memories from the past. The mind is like a curtain which acts as a barrier between you and the reality of the present moment. When you are in the mind, you are somewhere in the past. You are not in the reality of the present moment.

Leonard Jacobson

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Adding change to my life

Today’s world needs change, alteration, renewal, and corrections of errors. It needs new ideas, new approaches, methods, plans, procedures, and new ways of doing things. Maybe you should think of going — literally or symbolically — to a circus today, where you’ll see stunts you never dreamed possible. The novelty and originality there may stimulate what you need more of in this life. Have the daring to take a flight for the idea you believe in! Wilferd A. Peterson

So much of what we do in our lives, we do by rote. We do much of what we do because it’s “tradition” or because it seems safe and risk-free, or simply because that’s the way we’ve always done things. This way of approaching our lives is fine if we live in a cage and have no options, but for free people who are trying to forge their individual ways through life, it’s no way to live. Life is about risk and trying new things. So many new things get pushed our way all the time that there’s never any real reason for us to continue to do things over and over again in the same ways.

When we get caught in ruts, we stagnate and we don’t allow ourselves to learn. This year’s flowers are much different than last year’s were, no matter how much alike they seem, and this year’s life for us is full of new opportunities and potential, if only we take the time to look at what we have available to us in new ways so that we can discover the exciting possibilities that are there for us.

I used to have a friend who impressed me with the way he looked at the world. The only way that I could explain it was that he didn’t just look at things and situations head-on; rather, he walked around them, under them, through them, and looked at them from many different ways. And his view of them always differed from the “standard” view, the one that most other people shared. I want to be like that. I want to learn about things by seeing the possibilities in them.

I want to make my life rich by trying new and different things without having preconceived notions of what outcomes should be. I want to be daring enough that at the end of my life, I’ll be able to say to myself “No matter how it turned out, I feel good about my life because I was always willing to take chances and to learn more about life than I would have if I had done the same things over and over again.” If I’m able to take my leave of this planet with that idea as part of who I am, then I know that I will have contributed also to the lives of others. ~~~~~

A further thought; If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. . . Søren Kierkegaard

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