Reflections

Life is a journey, not a destination. My personal journey has been about self-discovery and I titled my first memoir, "Appearances: A Journey of Self-Discovery". I titled the sequel, "Love, Life, & God: Getting Past the Pain".

For the last year, I've been listening to a number of personal development seminars, book marketing seminars, and relationship seminars. The common denominator seems to be the necessity of developing self-confidence and self-esteem, areas I've struggled with for most of my life. In the area of relationships, I really wanted to identify the core blocks I knew were still lingering in my subconscious... and the only way to do this was to face them.

Many of my past relationships were abusive ones, and according to Law of Attraction, we attract to us a reflection of how we feel about ourselves. While I have been making strides in self-confidence with exercising, friendships, writing, and music, I became aware that I still was doing some self-loathing for allowing situations with some of the men I've been with to happen, which included rape and molestation. I knew self-loathing had to go, but how?

In listening to about half a dozen dating coaches talk about the issues many women face (and men, too), I kept asking myself, why did I allow those things to happen? 

I contemplated whether energetically, if I disliked myself that much, perhaps the men were doing what they felt they were supposed to do, which was treat me like crap because I believed I was crap. And I couldn't help wonder if I would have been treated the same way had I loved and accepted myself, physical challenges and all. 

I had agreed to doing things I didn't want to do out of the fear of being rejected. I let the resulting injuries linger for way too many years... and emotional baggage gets stored in your muscles. I swallowed a lot of pills to cope with pain in my muscles that I didn't realize were non-physical energetic emotional memories. 

Several years ago, I discovered EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). I did a 20 minute tapping sequence with Carol Tuttle to work through the symtoms of fibromyalgia relating to the car accident I was in when I was 21. A boy I was in love with had just broken up with me and I was devastated. When I was driving home, the fatique of the event along with CFS (after a bout of mono) resulted in my dozing at the wheel and I woke up just in time to see the car I was about to crash into.

In the EFT exercise, I tapped through all the emotions I was experiencing at the time of the car accident which released some of the emotional memory from my muscles. I definitely felt the difference. 

However, I couldn't find any EFT sequences for the other traumatic experiences... and so they lingered... until recently, when one of my sisters told me about Robert Smith's work with people who had been traumatized using a method called Faster EFT (Emotionally Focused Transformations). There are a number of YouTube videos demonstrating how Robert works with people on a variety of topics, including PTSD and rape. I copied the following paragraph from the FasterEFT website:

"FasterEFT is a methodology developed by Robert G. Smith after many years of studying and working with thousands of people. It is a collection of new cutting-edge techniques and processes that integrates the most effective elements of EFT, BSFF, NLP, spiritual understanding, science and the mind’s great ability to transform itself. One of the greatest aspects in FasterEFT is that it is fast, direct and to the point. It has a healthy and logical belief system that is easily accepted. With this great mix of understandings, FasterEFT can quickly transform how you represent your past, shift your emotional disruptions and restore your physical health."

In the meantime, I've been writing Fairy Tales. The most recent one is titled, "Twin Flame". I often experience the magic of spirit (God) talking to me through my fingers while they type on the keyboard. In this tale, an elder tells a soul who is in "heaven", that humans have to live certain life cycles to become mature souls, and we make contracts with other souls before we are born to work out relationship issues. 

And so I wondered... perhaps I had made contracts with the men who had hurt me and they were only doing what I had previously agreed to do. It's definitely time for me to let the pain of the past go and move on to new experiences.

What's in a Label?

Whenever I felt that there was something wrong with me, I wanted a label for it to feel validated. I accumulated a lot of labels (mostly with abbreviated letters) such as “PMS” for Premenstrual Syndrome, “EBV” for Epstein Barr Virus, “CFS” for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, “FMS” for Fibromyalgia, “ABS” for Adrenal Burnout Syndrome, & “PTSD” for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Maybe someone was onto something that by saying the entire words it would have too much of a negative effect on a person. Some of the labels I acquired were too complex to be abbreviated such as “Spondylolisthesis” and “Osteoporosis”. There is currently no abbreviation for High Cholesterol or Mitral Valve Prolapse.

Every body part has been labeled. Every function of our bodies has been labeled. Did you ever stop to think about how perfectly our bodies were formed? That each cell in our bodies has their own intelligence? That individual groups of cells form organs? That all these organs form our human body? That our bodies are not solid? How many times did you read that our bodies were something like 80% water? And that our bodies express themselves physically just like they express themselves emotionally? And that the adverse labels we get for our symptoms has a negative psychological affect? This was a huge wake-up call for me.

According to the holistic doctors I started to go to, most of the symptoms which I got labels for were secondary to energetic and organ imbalances in my body. The goal in Holistic medicine is to treat the CAUSE vs. the symptoms. Menopause? How about hormone imbalances that affect my mind, emotions, and my ability to cope. I started on a grand experiment after being told that all the ‘afflictions’ I had been labeled with were merely symptoms of underlying nutritional needs, eating foods that did not harmonize with my body, and energy imbalances. Just by strengthening my body’s ability to handle STRESS, and learning to replace the old dysfunctional psychological tapes with empowering ones, a lot of symptoms would go away. Didn’t I write about this in ‘Appearances’?

Then I let challenging events in my life pull the rug out from under me every time because I had not learned how to balance and empower my inner spirit. And while I type this, how better to explain it than the repetitive accidents I kept having… beginning with the fall off the stool in Delano when Dennis up and left, followed by all the accidents I kept having on the farm and at Silvia’s house.

I had tried many different avenues in the pursuit of optimum health, including Ayurvedic, Chinese Medicine, and nutrition in combination with Kinesiology. Each one of these avenues were focused on balancing physical in-balances which still kept me focused on what was wrong that I needed to make right. What DIDN’T work was the conventional medicine route that found labels for the symptoms of every different ailment I was dealing with and getting medications for each of them. And then I realized that the Holistic approach was doing practically the same thing… for me, anyway.

What I really needed to do was get on a regular exercise program, meditate, do Reiki on myself, eat wholesome foods, drink more water, and visualize the cells of my body as happy colorful orbs floating freely through space; and TRUST my body to heal itself. And while I was doing all of this, get some real true-grit psychological counseling to change the emotional/mental dysfunctional patterns I felt were imprisoning me (yes, Bo Lozoff’s ‘We’re All Doing Time’).

But do you know there is a detriment in doing that, too? There are labels for those of us who don’t seem to fit into the mainstream of society. We so want desperately to belong somewhere that when we don’t fit in, we look for a reason why. One example is Aspergers (which runs in my family) and the chain of reactions that comes with it. I believed I was unlovable because my father, who displayed Asperger personality traits, couldn’t love. We figured this out when my nephew was diagnosed with this genetic “abnormal” trait and we were able to link it back to my father and his relatives. Perhaps in this case, the label was a cure, because my nephew got some awesome therapy and counseling. Then there is ‘bi-polar’, a term used to describe people who are moody or alternate between being super energetic and exhausted. I think I was a blend of both.

Do you have any idea how many afflictions a person can end up with because of the simple belief that they are unlovable? Add to that how many failed relationships they participate in, like I did. Ultimately I have to give myself credit (something Wayne told me to do) for enduring all that I’ve endured and trust that I am much stronger than I ever thought I was. I’m still here. I survived.

Now the biggest challenge of my life is not physical. It is EMOTIONAL/SPIRITUAL. Unless I learn to love myself the way God loves me, my cells will not feel loved and I will not be able to fully heal. And because I have a stubborn streak in pursuit of perfectionism, I WANT TO LEARN HOW TO DO THIS AND I WANT SOMEONE TO SHOW ME HOW, and because patience is not one of my virtues, I want someone to show me NOW!

“I WANT TO KNOW WHAT LOVE IS AND I WANT YOU TO SHOW ME” (Foreigner)

From page 198 of "Love, Life, & God: Getting Past the Pain"

What are some of the labels you have acquired in your life? Are you willing to release them? Click on the "comments" below and share some of yours.

Uncovering Cognitive Distortions

Throughout the years of dealing with chronic pain in my muscles and joints, I read in numerous medical journals, the Arthritis Magazine, and books about chronic pain, that CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) was the key to improving your life and your ability to cope with pain. Not so oddly (after all, our government hasn't figured out what is best for us), I didn't have access to Psychological care. You see, if you have Medicare, free clinics won't help you. Between the steep co-pays and gas money I didn't have, I was left on my own. About the time I began this blog, I also began to research CBT. Life Coaching had become the new Psychologists, promoting positive psychology.

One day, someone in my apartment complex scheduled a vacation and asked me to take care of their cat. It turned out that both Mr. & Mrs. had majored in Psychology and still had all their school books. One of them was Dr. David Burns' "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy". In this book, I found the thinking errors I had acquired over the years ... and the way to transform them. Ones like "all or nothing thinking", "Overgeneralization", "Magnification", and "Jumping to Conclusions", were often the ways I dealt with daily life. This is a big fat book loaded with lots of exercises to do to work on transforming the cognitive distortions ingrained in your mind.

If I had woken up in the morning with pain all over my body, I used to tell myself I'll never be able to do anything with my life or go to any of the places I wanted to go. In the book, an exercise would include "Negative Thoughts" and the Distortions". Further on, is "Automatic Thoughts", "Distortions", and "Rational Responses". It wasn't long before I began catching myself when negative thoughts rushed through my mind and began to rephrase them. And as you can see by this blog, I am now a much happier person, living a much more meaningful life.

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT BELOW BY CLICKING ON THE WORD 'COMMENTS'.