cliodhna’s wave

What is it about confrontation I find so scary. Especially angry males who use their authority to silence me and prove they are right. I had a bit of a confrontation today and I walked away before it became a shouting match where he completely changed the story and flatly denied my question.

It made me a bit shaky afterwards but I thought about how I could have handled it differently. How I went in on some level expecting anger and that this would have made me be on one level on the defensive and so attracted that anger. I thought about how I could have remained calm and asked him calmly how he intended to handle the situation, got the information I needed and once I saw that he was being a bit of a rock in hard place, I could have said thanks very much, left and then taken it to a higher level.

Of course all problems are solved with hindsight and I can only make a lodgment in my energetic body that the next time I come into a situation like that to remember this one and the lesson I learnt from it.

Of course the answer to the question above as to why I find it so scary is because I have anger in me and I turn it on myself and so when I meet with someone outside of me who also carries that anger I connect with my own fear. My fear of my own self judgment and authority figure I spend my life trying to appease by being good and non-confrontational.

I suppose we learn everything from when we were little and to a child an angry adult is a scary thing because the child has no defences and is reliant on the adult for everything and so begins to act in a certain way to make the adult happy and so love the child. My parents weren’t especially angry with me and my childhood was happy and secure but I suppose we still fear this loss of love and a child learns to control its environment in the only way it can.

To not be emotional is to be good, to be the quiet no fuss easy going child, to be the one who doesn´t cry or kick up or assert herself. This is not being emotional. To keep it inside, even though you might cry on your own, hidden away from everyone, because you don´t want them to know.

To be emotional and to cry is to be needy, to be the ´problem´ child, to be the one who makes a fuss and gets what she wants no matter what everyone else thinks.

To be needy is to be sticky and constantly wanting attention and then no one will want to be with you or play with you or love you. A little bit is ok, because we are all human and it is good to cry sometimes, but a lot is not ok and better get controlled.

The trouble is, after a while, all the unsaid emotions get so tangled up inside that I don’t know what’s what anymore, and they all get filed under ‘better get controlled because you don’t want to appear needy’ and then when I want to just take one out to express it they all fall out at the same time in a big mess.

I guess I am starting to get them sorted out now. Express them one by one, little by little as they come up until the mess becomes an interesting tangle to be sorted through patiently.

i am organising workshops here in dublin for Luis Molinar and its fun, I like it and i am learning a lot about advertisng and what works and what doesn’t and the prices of things and what to say to people and how to say it and all sorts like that. Interesting and informative.

What I am also learning is letting go of the outcome. I wrote a post about ‘attachment to the outcome’ and this is the same thing. I am attached to the outcome because of taking it personally and judging my own self worth on the doings of other people. So if they choose not to come to event I have organised then I am a failure and I judge myself and make myself feel bad after and before the event. 

This means sometimes I actually don’t want to do the thing or go to the event because of my fear that it might be a failure according to the ideas my mind has about it and then I will beat myself up afterwards. They (the events) turn out good and I look back at the agonies I put myself through beforehand and see what a waste of energy that was. I could have been happy and enjoyed the time beforehand. 

anyway, onto the trust. I have a set of pieces by jonathan goldman which are the seven chakras, wonderful and a good focus to clear the chakras and meditate on them. I was listening to the heart chakra one and thinking green, peace and then I felt that this chakra was not only the love chakra but the one where trust is. If it is open then we trust and love. 

I sat there for a while feeling this trust and felt how nice it was, how warm and comforting and peaceful it was. How easy it was to be there and comparing to the usual state of anxiousness I am and worry about ‘what if’ and the future how much nicer it was. I made a resolve to stay there more often.

Time is speeding up, at least that what it feels like. The more I take my time and do things slowly and conciously and methodically the more it seems to zip past. Its kinda scary in a way. One of my issues is impatience. I don’t feel like I deserve success so I do things fast and then they don’t work. A cycle of failure which perpetrates itself.

I make a desicion a while ago to really go with the flow. Allow myself to slow down and breathe. Take the time I needed to do the things which make me feel good, do my yoga and my recapitualtion and excercise and plan my next act properly. The upshot? I am sitting with my oatmeal, its half twelve and I am meeting my mother in about an hour to go shopping with her in the dundrum shopping centre. Day is gone.

I do want to meet her, no problem there but I am noticing that the less I try to hang onto time and the less I worry about getting things done within a certain time frame the more it seems to slip past my fingers like water. I suppose I spent a lot of my life worrying about the fact that I was wasting time, I wasn’t young enough anymore to be succesful, I attached succesful onto age and I had failed that, worrying about if I don’t do something NOW I would lose the chance and I would never get another one, if I don’t get something major done everyday the day was a failure. I was really chasing my tail round in circles, agonizing over the moment and feeling like I was failing each one. Getting nowhere very fast.

It is scary to let it go. To say, ‘the gallery can wait till next month or next year when I have something to show them’ or ‘the printing of promo cards can wait until next week until I talk to my artist friend and get some advice on what might be the next best step’ or ‘ I am going to spend my time now getting together a professional proposal together for galleries’. I face my fear of being left behind and forgotton about. I am not as fast as others, not as good.

So now, that time seems to have got loose and taken on its own momentum I am concentrating on letting go and not thinking about it. Go with the flow. I am viewing each day less as 24 hours and more like a heartbeat. Badum Badum Badum……

I got a four day pass to a gym the other day and have been reveling in luxuries hitherto unknown. This place has everything… It has a gym upstairs and a climbing wall and downstairs it has a sea water pool with little jacuzzi seats for differant parts of your back and a stream to buffet the back of your neck and head. It has a steam room and a sauna and a small plunge pool of cold water to wake you up and revitalise you.

I know I am sounding like an advetisement but I have been meaning to join a gym for ages and now I am totally enthused to find some place like this when I return to mexico. There has to be fancy super posh gym somewhere in chihuahua to swim and soak and use the gear.

Water is just amazing. It feels like even my bones are clean and refreshed coming out of those places. My energy is squeaky clean and shiny now. A bath is good but doesn’t really hold a candle to a real spa experience.

This has been around for centuries too, the romans did it, the moroccans had their bath houses, the indians. Every sane sensible civilisation in history has had its bath houses to soak and wallow in misty aromatic clouds of steam. I think when I get my own house I will build a steam room and build a walk in bath. Feed it from a local hot spring (which I have just now decided has to be on the land of the house we get) and spend at least an hour a day there.

ps, the spa is the westwood in sandymount…

to be found at heartworksbylori

I got one of these for my brothers girlfriend-soon-to-be-wife as a kind of welcome into the family present but then according to mum it is her birthday soon so she will have to wait (and daire, if you are reading this before her birthday don’t let her see!)

It arrived in the post I showed it to mum and we both decided we had to have our own. They are soooo yummy actually shine better and more luxuriously in real life than they do in the photo.

These are the photos from her etsy site. I figured she did a very good job of taking them so its better.

They are butterfly wings, (which she assures us do not come from live butterflies but ones which have died naturally) and I can think of at least two other people who would love one. I am wearing mine right now. Its like a precious stone and glows with an intense blue.

totally wonderful….

…it raineth every day

so goes the old song. I know a lot of folk songs that have the word rain in them, I wonder why?

I have been thinking to myself that it would be nicer to be more feminine. Wear pretty clothes and nice shoes and be more elegant. Not to attract men, though I am sure Paul will be pleased but to feel good about myself. I am, and always have been a tomboy. I was the first one up the tree, the first one down the hill on the dodgy bike, I put on a dress and then look in the mirror, think for a second, take it off and put on the jeans. phew, safe again.I get tired sometimes though of the baggy sweats and the jeans and the practical but nice tops and shirts I have. I do have some really nice clothes but they hang waiting for the excuse to wear them.

Its only in recent years I could wear tight clothes, when I was younger I wore huge voluminous dresses and flowing tops and skirts over jeans so my ass wasn’t in view. I am ok about that now but I still am aware of it.

Part of my problem I reckon is the weather. In ireland it is cold and rainy and there are very few days where it is warm enough to venture out in t shirts and short skirts. I like being warm, I like being comfortable and there is no way on earth I am ever ever going outside my front door on a cold december night in a short skirt and heels just to look good in the pub. Not going to  happen.

So, i look out my window at the rain and I wonder is it possible to buy really warm wooly tights to wear under a skirt so i can look more feminine and still be warm. Can I get cool boots with felt lining to keep my tootsies nice and cosy and do I dare go outside without my insulated hat and leave the body warmer with the really nice hood at home.

Paul has just quit smoking after 36 years. his body has gone into shock, I think, as everything the cigarettes were holding down is free and back with a vengeance. He can’t breathe properly and his throat hurts. He says its more than just quitting, he has quit before and this hasn’t happened but I think that maybe he only quit before because he had to and not out of choice and this time his whole mind/spirit/body is involved because it is from a choice to make his life better and more healthy. it is time to purge, the body cries with relief, lets get rid of all of it! i feel for him and I sent him some reiki to loosen some of the stuff.

I remember trying to quit for years, having just the ‘one’ and making myself feel bad about it and then starting again and saying ’some other time’ until I woke up one morning about two years ago and said ‘I’m not going to smoke today’ and I didn’t and haven’t since. A few pangs and my digestive system didn’t work right for a few days but that was that.

The thing is though, I had dealt with the reasons why I was smoking in the first place, my underlying emotional need for a crutch and the fear of facing a future without that crutch. I was staring into an abyss of nothing, an empty landscape where I was lost and forlorn and had no-one to help me. Cigarettes, I reckon, are the sneakiest of the addictive substances, they whisper in your ear and cajole you with thoughts of ‘just the one’ or ‘just a drag’ or they are like the vampire energy sucking ‘friend’ who always wants from you but never gives and uses emotional blackmail and guilt to keep you there.

Paul is also now starting to understand what I was talking about with the smell. Even when I smoked, (and I smoked roll your owns, which didn’t smell the same as ready mades,) I hated the smell of a used ashtray, or the acrid smell of a cigarette burning down on its own. Now that I have quit, I can smell cigarettes off people when they step onto a bus I am sitting in already, or when they smoked, recently or a while ago. I had to get used to it and accept it when I quit. careful not to go the route of the reformed evangelist espousing the cause of the newly converted. Paul has to travel today 8 hours to the mine with his son, who smokes like a chimney, so he will find out exactly what its like!

I still have the occaisional ‘just one’ thoughts, like the other night a friend was smoking the brand of rollies I used to like and I had a moment of wanting and thinking I could just have one, but it passed. I am so glad I don’t anymore, I hated being addicted and depending on them, now I feel so much freer and stronger.

We are subjective beings, even when we think we are being objective we are still looking out from a lifetimes store of experiences and assumptions and learnt behaviours.

I was thinking about this when I was trying to describe the Toltec teachings to people as I wander around putting up posters and leaving fliers and talking to people who are interested. Anything I say about it comes from my experience of having done the work and felt the changes that took place in me. I feel freer and happier and more at ease with myself and others around me. I can say that to people but I can’t show them. Except of course by being who I am.

I was making an ad for the irish independant this morning, small space, vital I choose the right words. At the beginning i put the fact that it is an ancient mexican teaching of warriorship for changing your life. Then I thought about this and I realised that this what appealed to me. I loved the history of the teaching, the fact it has been aound for centuries being passed down from generation to generation, changing and staying the same with each transition. Maybe that won’t interest others, maybe it will but I have to describe it somehow to grab attention in 10 cm of space.

Same with my art work. I was remembering from art college when they taught us to look objectivaly at our work and cut through the padding to get as close as we could to what we wanted to express. I can look at my work objectivaly to a certain point and I am very grateful to have received the training I got but still when all comes to all I am still looking at my own work and there are certain things I cannot see because I am still looking subjectively.

So thats the thing, I really don’t know what someone is thinking about until I ask them and sometimes I don’t even know what I am really thinking about until I sit down and really ask myself. Because as with the art work there are things sometimes about my life I can’t see because I am the one looking at them.

The birds in the photos flew over my head very close and very fast and I could actually feel the noise of their wings. A very cool, very subjective experience.

I was standing on a kerb yesterday waiting for Marie Therese to pick me up to go out to Ballyvaughen. A car passed by with a family who were black. Mother, father and a pile of kids in the back seat, my mind wandered off on little thoughts of immigration, and how ireland is changing and how I am never here either but living in another country to the one I was born in like these folks and then I saw another child in the back of the car and I remembered on long journeys when we were little the back of the car was the best place to lie down and sleep.

Then the next car had a young man in it and I thought about my brother who drives very fast and is trying to acheive something from his life.

The next car had an older woman in it who looked like my aunt and I wondered did she drive the same way as my aunt (my aunt constantly puts her foot on the brake so the car always seems like its trying to go but she stops it with little jerks of the brake)

A few more cars passed by before I pulled myself back and realised this is how projections work. I didn’t know these people at all. I had never spoken to them or met them or probably was never going to meet them but yet seeing them triggered a little story in my head which would change when the next one came into my range of vision. The story triggers an emotion and all of a sudden I am hooked on the emotion and the story and they have become my reality.

This realisation triggered a thought of ‘mm, must write a post about this’ the mind never stops trying to create the world, thoughts are like clouds they shift and change and move and dissapear and create shapes and illusions. They take us out of the moment and into the past and the future.

I shall leave you with a quote from Joni Mitchell

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s cloud’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all