Loving Presence Surround Yourself with Love

Even though it might not always seem like we have much control over who we are with in our life – we do.
In our everyday life we are surrounded by a variety of people.  Some of the people we deal with on a daily basis are a joy to be with, and their loving presence nurtures and encourages us.  Others may have the opposite effect, draining us of our energy, making us feel tired and exhausted.  Our well-being can be easily influenced by those around us, and if we can keep this in mind, we will have greater insights into the quality of our social interactions and their energetic effect on us.

Once we think more deeply about the people we interact with, it becomes easier for us to work toward filling our lives with people who help us cultivate healthy and positive relationships.  Even though it might not always seem like we have much control over who we are with, we do.  The power to step back from toxicity lies within us.

All we have to do is take a few moments to reflect on how another person makes you feel.  Assessing the people we spend the most time with allows us to see if they add something constructive to, or subtract from, our lives.  Should a friend sap our strength, for example, we can simply set the intention to tell them how we feel or simply spend less time with them.  We will find that the moment we are honest with ourselves about our own feelings, the more candid we can be with others about how they make us feel.  While this may involve some drastic changes to our social life it can bring about a personal transformation that will truly empower us, since the decision to live our truth will infuse our lives with greater happiness.

When we surround ourselves with positive people, we clear away the negativity that exists around us and create more room to welcome nurturing energy.  Doing this not only enriches our lives but also envelopes us in a supportive and healing space that fosters greater growth, understanding, and love of ourselves as well as those we care about.

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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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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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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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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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Not looking back…..

Putting Foundations Under Castles
–by Henry David Thoreau

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so the paths with which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! […]

I learned this, at least, by my experiment that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

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Yellow stickies from the kitchen

I have a huge collection of yellow stickies – on my fridge, in my purse and car.  Today I’ve put them all well some of them here.

“Do you really want to look back on your life and see how wonderful it could have been had you not been afraid to live it?”
Caroline Myss

“Unforgiveness is the poison you drink every day hoping that the other person will die.”
Debbie Ford

“And finally the day will come when the risk it takes to remain tight in the bud will be more painful than the risk it takes to blossom.”
Anais Nin

“Once you become aware of what stands in your way and become willing to release it, you signal the universe that you are ready to manifest the life you were meant to live.”
Chérie Carter-Scott

“The closer we get to uncovering ourselves, the more difficult it becomes to face the truth. Sooner or later we stop running, out of sheer exhaustion and desperation, and turn around to face our image. The pain that we go through during this revelation is negligible compared to the state of grace that we enter into when we have finally moved on.”
Dr. Christiane Northrup

“Always go with the choice that scares you the most,
because that’s the one that is going to require the most from you. ”
Caroline Myss

“When we harbor negative emotions toward others or toward ourselves,
or when we intentionally create pain for others,
we poison our own physical and spiritual systems.
By far the strongest poison to the human spirit
is the inability to forgive oneself or another person.
It disables a person’s emotional resources.
The challenge is to refine our capacity to love others as well as ourselves
and to develop the power of forgiveness. ”
Caroline Myss

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

‘It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.’

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Albert Einstein quote

When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.
Helen Keller

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Emotional Intimacy

Letting Go of Unavailable People
By Robert Burney

“In our disease defense system we build up huge walls to protect ourselves and then – as soon as we meet someone who will help us to repeat our patterns of abuse, abandonment, betrayal, and/or deprivation – we lower the drawbridge and invite them in. We, in our Codependence, have radar systems which cause us to be attracted to, and attract to us, the people, who for us personally, are exactly the most untrustworthy (or unavailable or smothering or abusive or whatever we need to repeat our patterns) individuals – exactly the ones who will “push our buttons.”

This happens because those people feel familiar. Unfortunately in childhood the people whom we trusted the most – were the most familiar – hurt us the most. So the effect is that we keep repeating our patterns and being given the reminder that it is not safe to trust ourselves or other people .

Once we begin healing we can see that the Truth is that it is not safe to trust as long as we are reacting out of the emotional wounds and attitudes of our childhoods. Once we start Recovering, then we can begin to see that on a Spiritual level these repeating behavior patterns are opportunities to heal the childhood wounds.”

“I spent most of my life being the victim of my own thoughts, my own emotions, my own behaviors. I was consistently picking untrustworthy people to trust and unavailable people to love. I could not trust my own emotions because I was incapable of being honest with myself emotionally – which made me incapable of Truly being honest on any level.”
(from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls)

Codependency is an incredibly insidious, treacherous dis-ease. It is a compulsively reactive condition in which our ego programming from childhood dictates how we live our lives today. As long as we are not in recovery from our codependency, we are powerless to make clear choices in discerning rather someone we are attracted to is a available for a healthy relationship – we are in fact, doomed to keep repeating patterns.

Emotionally we are drawn to people who feel familiar on an energetic level. That is, people who, on an emotional vibrational level, resonate with us as being familiar. It feels to us as if we have a strong connection to those people. In other words, we have an inner radar system that causes us to be attracted to people who resonate vibrationally in a way that is familiar on an emotionally intimate level. We are attracted to people whose inner emotional dynamic is similar to our most powerful and earliest experience of emotional intimacy and love – our parents.

No matter how much we are making an effort on a conscious level to not pick anyone like our parents, energetically we feel a strong attraction to people whose inner emotional dynamic is similar to our first experience of love. It was very important for me to get aware of the reality that if I met someone who felt like my soul mate, I had better watch out. Those are exactly the people who will fit my patterns – recreate my wounding.

It was very important for me to recognize the power of this type of attraction. And also to realize, that on a Spiritual level, these people were teachers who were in my life to help me get in touch with my childhood wounds. It was vital for me to start being aware that if I met someone who felt like my soul mate it did not mean we were going to live happily ever after. What it meant was that I was being given another wonderful, and painful, opportunity for growth.

Becoming conscious of these emotional energetic dynamics was a very important part of owning my power. My power to make choices, to accept consequences, to take responsibility for my choices and consequences – and to not buy into the belief that I was being victimized by the other person, or my own defectiveness.

Recognizing unavailability in the other person does not mean that I have to let go of the relationship – at least not immediately, it could be something I will decide to do eventually.

What is so important, is to let go of focusing on that person as the cause of, or solution to, my problems. As long as we are focusing on the other person and buying into the illusion that if we just: work a little harder; lose some more weight; make some more money; do and/or say the right things; whatever; that person will change and be everything we want them to be.

Codependents focus on others to keep from looking at self. We need to let go of focusing on the other person and start focusing inside to understand what is happening. Our adult patterns, the people we have been in relationship with, are symptoms – effects of our childhood wounding. We cannot solve a problem without looking at the cause. Focusing on symptoms (which our society is famous for: war on drugs; war on poverty: etc.) will not heal the cause.

The reason that we get involved with people who are unavailable, is because we are unavailable. We are attracted to people who feel familiar because on some level we are still trying to prove our worth by earning the Love and respect of our unavailable parents. We think we are going to rescue the other person which will prove our worth – or that we need them to rescue us because of our lack of worth. The princess will kiss me and turn me from a frog into a prince, the prince will rescue me and take me to live in the castle, syndrome.

We need to own our own worth – our own “Prince or Princess” ness – before we can be available for a healthy relationship with some one who has owned their own worth.

It is not possible to love someone enough to get them to stop hating, and being unavailable, to them self. We need to let go of that delusion. We need to focus on healing our self – on understanding and healing the emotional wounds that have driven us to pick people who could not give us what we want emotionally. We need to develop some healthy emotional intimacy with ourselves before we are capable of being available for a healthy relationships with someone who is also available.

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I’ve divorced my Alcoholic husband and my life has really started

Hi everyone, it’s been a long time since I have posted about this. A year and a half ago I told my EXAH that I would be leaving him.  Our relationship over a 20 year period included periods of being in and out of rehab, dry drunk behavior and all the subsequent fallout. We were both very unhealthy people. There is no need to elaborate on his behavior, you have all been exposed to similar people and this post is a positive one.

When I left I was truly devastated, I have never felt so much physical gut wrenching throw yourself on the floor and assume the fetal position type of pain. I was totally broken and shattered. In the past I never really worked on MY issues, it was always easier to blame the A – just put a band aid on it and worse ignore and stuff the feelings down. I found out that I was an addict, addicted to him, the drama, the control that I thought I had. I now really felt pain for the first time. I was alone, with me! I didn’t like what I saw but I vowed to change. I posted and read a lot, talked and cried on the shoulder of my dearest friend – the sister of my heart,  and started to change my whole life.

The man I married does not exist anymore, there is an empty shell haunting the streets using his name but I don’t know him. He no longer haunts my mind or my heart. I had a funeral for Bob – invited a very few close friends, played “our” favorite music and our friends spoke about him – shared their feelings and said good bye.

I am not going to lie…the journey was tear-filled, stressful, frustrating, scary…as well as…knowing why I was doing what I was, continuing to work towards my goal of breaking the cycle of alcoholism and co-dependency in my family, knowing that “this too shall pass”, having a strong faith and relying on that daily for strength, having an amazing network of friends who supported me through the worst and the best…knowing that my journey was worth the pain, as I am now living the life I am meant to!

The universe opened up and welcomed me. I lost weight, I started snowshoeing, hiking and belly dancing, I go to yoga 2 times a week, practice daily meditation. My world has become such a beautiful place.

Every time I read posts on here about the pain, the grieving, the process, my journey comes back to me. There is light and hope after being involved with a addict. Work your program ‘cause you’re worth it.

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