My love for you is a flat screen TV

Tags

Anger, concrete, flat screen TV, Forgiveness, highly sensitive person, Kinesiology, Love, Repression, thyroid, unicorn sightings

Forgiveness. I’ve written about it before, both in terms of forgiving myself and others. For ages it was a very nice concept but like the top shelf in your wardrobe, out of reach. Seems that understanding how to forgive is about as elusive as unicorn sightings.

I’ve worked out why though. It’s because forgiveness isn’t so much about getting over stuff that’s happened. Instead it’s about seeing things as they really are. Like, really. Down to the bones, with no elaborations.

Like a lot of the work I’m doing lately, it’s all been going down on the kinesiology table. That’s where I was when I saw for myself how it’s always been and why.

A few weeks ago, I lay there on the treatment table staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at my kinesiologist. Joining the dots and dropping pennies in slots.

Fuck! So THAT’S why I’ve never been able to forgive my parents for anything, my whole life!

Clarity provides space and understanding and suddenly forgiveness isn’t even an issue any more.

So what happened, I hear you ask? Something came up in that session around the idea of “feeling overlooked and betrayed”. Immediately I knew this was OLD. Sure enough, back we went (back… back… back) and further again, to four year old me.

What do I recall about being four? Not much really. I was in kindergarten, I guess. I remember painting, the sandpit, story time, and the room with the hooks for our wee bags. The odd flash of kindergarten kid faces. My sister was two, my brother was six. This represents the sum total of my conscious four year old knowledge and memories.

But the conscious mind knows jack-shit sometimes, yeah?

Without a doubt, I’m what they call a highly sensitive person.

Highly sensitive people are born with fewer filters between themselves and the world than “regular” people-types. We feel everything more intensely. Our highs and lows are more extreme because that’s the way we’re built. There’s nothing wrong with us. It’s just a slightly different way of being.

For example, today the fact that I live in a place where there’s too much concrete was causing me a great deal of pain. Yeah, I know. It sounds stupid, right? But a lot of creative types are like this, and I suspect most people with mental health problems are, too.

My parents are NOT highly sensitive. A thousand and one times while growing up, I was labelled “too sensitive/emotional” and made to feel as though my reactions and experiences weren’t acceptable.

What I learned in my kinesiology session is that four year old me was both enraged and deeply saddened at being overlooked like this. At having her feelings belittled and constantly being told she was “too much”.

That rage? I’m pretty sure it’s fuelled all the anger I’ve ever felt in this lifetime.

The way my parents dealt with me must’ve been similar to what they told me about how they deal with my eldest niece. She’s like me – extra-sensitive – and to my horror, they calmly explained how they tell her “don’t be so silly”, or to “shake it off” when she’s “in a mood”. I saw major red flags right there, both for myself and my niece (I’ve had words with my sister since then)!

Of course, I was born to a mother who began grieving for my stolen half-brother way before I was born and a father who is so emotionally shut down that he remains a mystery to me, even today.

Knowing all of this, and working on my shit with kinesiology allowed thirty-nine year old me and four year old me to put all the pieces together. We finally got it!

Four-year-old me never felt acceptable just as she was and this set the stage for feeling like an alien pretty much my whole damn life.

My parents, despite their own emotionally crippled natures, did the best they could (I know – such a cliché right?). They never meant to wound me the way that they did. They didn’t know any better. However, that four year old girl has been seething in anger ever since.

Until now.

I was telling my neighbour about this and she asked – so how do you let something like that go? It’s like this: seeing things clearly and getting kinesiology work done just clears it the heck out.

This has allowed me to transform my relationship with my parents. No, we’re not best buddies all the sudden but I find I’m just not triggered by their actions the way I used to be. Even my sister has noticed the difference.

My folks don’t really do “I love you”. They also don’t do love and caring the way I do. They’re not so much into affection or the cooking of meals or the offering of lifts – the sort of practical things that would’ve been so beneficial to me when I was very sick earlier this year, not to mention all of the years I lived in PTSD-landia.

Instead, they’ll do stuff like give me a flat screen TV.

Yep. You heard that right. I might not see or hear from them for weeks or months, but I’m the first person they thought of when they wanted to off-load their old (but not actually that old) one; they’ve bought a monster-sized replacement (looking at their new TV makes my brain dizzy).

It should be said that spending money on a TV is possibly one of the lowest priorities in my life. But the gift was welcome enough, if only because I now watch DVDs on a better screen.

If this was a different time in my life I’d be cynical and bitter about inappropriate gift giving instead of more useful and supportive actions.

Now, I just see it for what it is: its love.

A few weeks back they also gave me their old digital video camera and I couldn’t really turn it down because I get that it’s their way of showing me they care in lieu of hugs or conversations.

And I’m good with that.

As my thyroid heals, so do many other things. After all, our minds, immune system, physical body, our sense of well-being – none of it is separate.

~ Svasti

A little more on forgiveness…

Tags

demon folk, Forgiveness, gut feel, Intuition, Kinesiology, omniscient, self-forgiveness, shouty, sociopath, wholeness

Some of y’all wrote in the comments of this post that when it comes to forgiveness, we need to forgive the action rather than the person. And I agree. But actually, I forgave my abuser quite a while ago now.

I was able to see that he was a deeply flawed and wounded person, and that his need to control things caused his desire to assault women (I wasn’t the first one he’d beaten up, I found out later). And I also know and accept that what happened wasn’t personal – none of it. What he did… he did out of his own pain.

Others commented that forgiveness is one of the hardest things to deal with. And I say abso-freaking-lutely! It really, really is.

The required forgiveness I mentioned in my last post was all about me.

I’m the one I have to forgive.

Somehow I have to find a way to stop blaming myself for not seeing him clearly enough.

I carry around a lot of blame about those things, even though I know I’m only human, that mistakes get made, and I’m not omniscient or a mind reader. I certainly don’t know everything AND particularly, I didn’t know something that I really wish I had.

I’ve rationalised and discussed it endlessly. I know the story inside out on a whole bunch of levels, too. All those people who almost automatically say “it’s not your fault” aren’t really helping. Because in some ways I really get that. I do.

But the seed of the thought remains: how come I didn’t know he was a violent and manipulative sociopath?

Generally I have a razor-sharp gut feel for the “rightness” or “wrongness” of someone in my world. Yet at the time when that particular skill really mattered, I let myself down.

Or so a very unforgiving part of me says, anyhow.

While I don’t have a 100% strike rate with my instincts, it’s right up there in the high 90% range. Mostly I listen very carefully, because those messages are always right. So… my inner debate has been about whether I just didn’t know that time (and if so, why not?!) OR if I knew and somehow ignored the red flags (blame, blame, blame!).

The other thing I have to forgive is “the past” – as a tangible thing, and something that has (from a certain perspective) been stolen from me. Stolen away years of my life. But then I ask myself, who did the stealing? Certain answers might suggest that it was me and not him. Sure, I wasn’t the one who turned my face into a bruised (and so NOT hot) mess, and I definitely had little to do with my (probably but never confirmed) cracked cheekbone that hurt for weeks and weeks afterwards.

But I was the one who didn’t get the help I needed. Who hid all of the pain as best as I could. So others couldn’t see, because heck, it was just too embarrassing. Yeah, I’m the loser who was beaten up in my own home… I couldn’t stand the pity. People looking at me as if I was weak or stupid.

It would be too raw, too hard, too much to ask when I could barely keep myself from falling apart. (Of course, if someone else told me about something like this, I would NEVER think of them that way. But it doesn’t stop my mind from telling me what I loser I was!)

After a while, I guess I did know that I needed help but I just couldn’t make myself go and get it. And I wouldn’t let anyone else close enough to see what was going on. Just like a wounded animal.

I was pretty good at the hiding all of that apparently, because lots of people, including my own family claim not to have noticed that anything was up with me. Or they simply ascribed my behaviour to other things… *shrugs* It’s impossible to say now.

Anyway. Those stories of blame are the voices of some of the nasty little demon folk I have to contend with. They like to get all shouty and geez, but they can be persistent.

The kinder, wiser, more yogic part of my being (who is doing her best to forgive the shouty demons, the parts of me that won’t forgive other parts and everything else)… she gets it, that none of it matters. That in some ways, there’s nothing to forgive.

That yogi-part is all: hey, so life hasn’t turned out the way we wanted it to. So what? There’s so much to do and learn! And while it’s meant to be easy to let things go, in the real world with it’s thousand and one inputs, sometimes it just isn’t. So, we do what we can to heal, and then go and search for happiness! Because sure, life has sucked an awful lot, but it doesn’t have to keep sucking. And yeah, it hurts that in all likelihood we’ve missed our chance at being a mother. That just blows in so many ways! Still, there are plenty of things left to do in this life…

And so on.

I called this blog “A journey from assault to wholeness” because when all this began, I felt like I was in a million little pieces scattered all over the floor. These days, I am much more whole than I used to be, AND I know my life isn’t as terrible as many others. I really do know that.

But to be very truthful, there’s only a handful of things that keep me going when those shouty demons get extra loud: the notion of transforming my life into one of service to others, practicing and teaching yoga, riding my push bike and giggles and kisses from my little nieces.

That’s all I have. They are the thoughts and experiences that actually kept me alive when I was rather seriously thinking about the alternative. And now… they help keep me focused on creating a new life for myself.

Things are better now… much better, actually. Heck, it’s all relative, right? But still, forgiving the events that sucked me into an alternate reality for so many years? And forgiving myself for allowing things to stay like that for so long?

Uhhh… that’s still a work in progress.

So thank goodness for things like kinesiology, yeah?

~Svasti

Kick-ass kinesiology ftw

Tags

affirmations, Anger, bush flower essences, cheated, confession, crystals, finger-in-the-pie, Forgiveness, giggles, Kali, Kinesiology, lost years, muscle testing, rape, Shiva, spring clean, tuning forks, unstuck, Zombie

So here’s a confession for you, although not a particularly juicy one: I have no freakin’ idea how kinesiology works. I just know that it does.

Perhaps it functions as a channel to communicate directly with the body, or the higher self, our guides or even the universe. Or perhaps all of those things are really just one and the same and it doesn’t matter what you think you’re communicating with. What matters is that it gets to the heart of things. The truth. The stuff that needs to be heard and dealt with – kinesiology connects with all of that beautifully. Intuitively.

Also, by way of a secondary confession: I giggled heartily throughout of Monday’s kinesiology session, tears seeping from the corners of my eyes! I giggled at myself and at the very, ummm… finger-in-the-pie spot-on-ness of stuff that was coming up. I’m pretty sure I didn’t become hysterical in my laughter (right, Kerry?), but it was probably close.

I knew, totally KNEW without a doubt, there was more to do in my inner world. More to clear out. More to resolve. Because I want to become as functional a human being as I possibly can. I have no idea how much work there is to do still – and of course, that’s not counting any gunk I’d accumulated before the last five years. But hey, if I can even spring clean those last five years from my body, heart and mind then I’ll be an extremely happy lady…

My very first encounter with kinesiology was years back, when I worked for a chiropractor. She’d use it in practical ways to assist her chiropractic treatments, but then she also once used it to help me clear out a really bad dream (that was, if you like, related to a past life). And yep, that’s a story I haven’t written here.

I had a little more kinesiology several years after that to combat yet another traumatic dream memory – but that one was related to experiences from this life time.

Then there was a little kinesiology about four months after I was assaulted – still living in a daze, still thinking that I could wait out all of the nightmarish things that made life so unbearable… The treatments I had at that time, however, were about just getting me to a somewhat functional state. The months preceding that, I was little more than a zombie. Floating through my days, and trying not to feel. Trying to ignore the photo negative imprint of his eyes seared onto my retinas… trying to sleep my days away as obliviously as I could. Wishing for all the world that I’d just stop existing.

My kinesiologist at that point related her own horror story: being raped by someone who’d become infatuated with her. Raped at knife point, over and over. I remember being amazed that she could speak so calmly about it. It’s only been in the last year that I’ve been able to talk about my own experiences without completely losing my shit.

It was through the lovely Nadine that I learned of Kerry. I went to Kerry and Nadine’s first Unstuck workshop (which was awesome, by the way) and through the synchronicity of these experiences, I knew I’d end up going to see Kerry at some stage. I just wasn’t sure when.

Well, the ‘when‘ is right now. So turn up the heat, baby!

Monday night included much head nodding, many ‘doh’ moments, and the aforementioned hilarity. Kerry would do her thing with the muscle testing and speak words that couldn’t have been more spot on if she’d been inside my head. Lots of my ‘stuff’ was demanding to be heard and in no uncertain terms. Very blunt, it was.

We’d talked about what I wanted to do with these sessions, and Kerry wrote a series of affirmations for us to work with. I think the list went something like this:

• I trust myself
• I trust my decisions
• I trust that I’m headed in the right direction
• I find my perfect weight
• I forgive myself
• I can forgive the past

Uhhh… say WHAT?

I. Can. Forgive. The. Past?!?!?!?!

Ermmm, well not really, actually. Not right now.

I could barely get the words out of my mouth when Kerry asked me to say them. And right then I wasn’t laughing any more. In fact I was choking a little, the way I used to in therapy when working on something really difficult.

Oh. Apparently, forgiving the past wasn’t okay with me. And perhaps for the first time, I explained it out loud and in fully formed sentences…

I feel that in some really important ways, the last five years were stolen. Wasted. Despite what I’ve learned and how much I’ve grown and had to come to terms with myself, there’s a part of me that would trade ALL of that to get those years back. To be as fit and healthy as I was then. To still possess the same level of happiness and confidence. To have been in a position to date and/or be in a relationship. To have possibly met someone I wanted to have kids with.

That last one is HUGE. I’ve been grieving for those lost years.

And I love kids, really, really, really. I wanted and STILL want the opportunity to be a mother. Like a lot of women, and I know I’m far from alone in that. I’m thirty-eight, and in December I’ll be thirty-nine. While I know that some women are fortunate enough to meet their partner and have babies at this age and later, I feel… good god but I feel so ANGRY and CHEATED out of those years! Prime years, where the chances of me being able to get pregnant were better than they are now. Better than they’ll ever be again.

Those years are gone and I can not get them back. There’s nothing I can do about it. And the person I’m angry at of course, is me. Kali and Shiva help me!

And so we worked those affirmations, and a whole bunch of other stuff I probably can’t remember correctly. In addition to muscle testing, kinesiology uses some awesome tools – like bush flower essences, tuning forks, crystals (apparently I need to acquire a blue lace agate) and prayer cards (cheeky things!). And there’s a bunch of stuff associated with the results of whatever comes up and those words as I mentioned were cutting right through. No messing about!

But we weren’t done yet. There was another message for me – seems I’m not doing enough to satisfy my creativity. Apparently the blogging and the yoga teaching are good, but my body/higher self/guides/the universe wants more. Wants me to write more!

Say what?!!

Which is, y’know, terrifying. I like my little blog here, and the idea of drawing more attention to myself by getting stuff published makes my mind turn to mush. In fact, I don’t have the faintest idea how I’d go about getting published! Or what I’d write or for what sort of publications.

Kerry did suggest perhaps writing more about what I know – perhaps stuff that would’ve been helpful to me five years ago if I’d come across it… and that’s a great idea because back then, it wasn’t easy to find support groups or even websites that were specific to people in my shoes.

For now, I’m just putting it out there that I plan to make inquiries, see what I can find out and perhaps even plan a few pieces. Which still sounds scary but actually, somewhat manageable.

So Monday was AMAZING (and that’s not even counting the two calls I had about upcoming yoga teaching work!). We shifted a lot of energy and made a good start on the spring cleaning. Even if I looked and felt a little fried when we were done!

There’s more to do though, but that’s for next month…

~Svasti

P.S. ftw = for the win

Nothing’s ever the same

Tags

Change, Forgiveness, Growth, Guru, Impasse, Nothing’s ever the same, Water under the bridge, Where to?

We say – it’s not the same as it used to be – or – it’ll never be the same again – about stuff we don’t like. Rarely do we say it about anything that makes us happy, right?

But actually nothing is ever, in fact, quite the same.

You’re not the same as you were yesterday – a gazillion cells in your body have died and been replaced (or not), the day is a different day, everything has grown or decayed just a little more, it’s a little older (never younger) or more decrepit, things move closer together or further apart, or something’s been completed.

Nothing is ever the same.

A little while back I pulled a quote out from a recorded lecture by my Guru. Soon as I heard it, bells rang and I quickly wrote it down, then tweeted it. Then wrote it here. But it rings truer and truer all the time.

Things don’t get better, they just get different.

Right. Different. Last week was different, and this week again, is very different.

So, things are different all the time. But they don’t have to be totally different, do they? I mean, they can be. But they don’t have to be…

Which brings me to these questions… Where do we go from here? How do we break this impasse? Can we get to that point of water under the bridge?

Of course, eventually it will be (water under the bridge) but what kind of water?

Nothing is ever the same, but that can be a good thing, too.

At least, that’s what I’m hoping. Let’s not give up, okay?

~Svasti