anger

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.

a white christmas

I am sitting in montana in snow country for my first White christmas ever! Its so cold here, a big drop from Chihuahua where when the sun was out it could actually be hot and then at night it got a bit nippy. There is a big mountain straight out the back window and the snow flakes are gently gliding their way downwards. I bought a North face coat yesterday, the big buy of the year, I have wanted one for a couple of years now so took the plunge and went for it. It was expensive but it is an investment, I have found in the past that sometimes its worth it to buy something expensive that is well made and actually works. Years later I expect I will still be wearing this coat and still be warm and cozy. I feel the cold and I am tired of coats that look amazing but when you go outside you are still cold.

In about two hours my boyfriends daughter is going to take us up in her helicopter. She is training to be a helicopter pilot and I think that is the coolest thing ever. I always wanted to do something like that but just never really went for it and now she is totally intent on this. She has found her passion and she is focused and happy and going for it. Working her brain too, studying flight trajectories and weight versus fuel ratio and lift and all sorts. Good for her.

What else, it seems a while since I have actually sat down and wrote something. Oh yes Ariana and iron man. Ariana is at a wonderful age of three years and is adorable, she is obsessed by Iron man and Paul got her an iron man costume and play figure. Its wonderful being around small kids, even on the flight over here there were a few really cute children on the flight and it surprised me that they were on quite happy and cheerful and only cried when we were landing and the air pressure started making our ears hurt. It makes me broody actually, I want one of my own. Sitting at three in the morning stuck in seattle airport watching people go by and being at one with the universe and all I saw a woman pass with a child about that age, a girl. There was a man sitting opposite with a tired stressed look on his face (weather was delaying and cancelling loads of flights so there were a lot of strays lying on floors and wandering around with lost looks) and when the woman passed the girl waved at him and then blew him a kiss. It was so beautiful, his face lit up and he waved back at her and when she had passed and gone with her mother he was still smiling. It was a gift of innocent love and it changed everything around it.

That’s the lesson from children this age, how to be innocent and open and see love everywhere and have it reflected back to us, before we teach them to be afraid of strangers and instill them with our fear of what might happen if they live that way always. I don´t have children but even so I can feel the struggle I would have between wanting to teach them how to be careful about the world and be wary of strangers because I know they would cheerfully wander off with anyone and then not wanting to spoil that wonderful innocence and love.

On the flip side of that Ariana woke us up this morning screaming her head off and when I asked Rachel later what had happened she said she (Rachel) got out of bed and Ariana wanted her to stay there longer! That is the other lesson for me from this age, that the world doesn’t comply to my wants, it doesn’t stop turning just because I say so. My mother is not attached to me by a remote control held in my hands and she has a will of her own. I suppose there must have been fear in this realization (I don’t remember but I am guessing) that I didn’t control my surroundings. How was I to make sure I had enough of everything if I wasn’t in control? I guess at this point in where the manipulation starts, who do I have to be to get what I (think I) need to survive?

It is this manipulation I am picking through now 36 years later. What agreements did I make with myself then that don’t serve me now? To not manipulate and control my world brought huge fear and a feeling of panic and resentment. Everyone else was doing it, if I didn’t I would get left behind and ignored. Scream for attention in any way I could. I am learning to see it and I have ditched a lot of it and it gets easier as it goes along.

past the known… (or what I think I know)

So I have come to a place where I cannot move past with my mind. My mind stops, comes to a halt and says ‘hold on there, where do you think you are going? This ain’t possible and you know it’ and suddenly I do know I and I am stuck again right back in the mind. Like a flying dream when you suddenly remember you can’t fly.

Looking back I have done this a lot in my life. Got to a certain point and then got scared of the unknowingness past the mind and pulled back from the brink of stepping over. My mind controls how I live my life, it puts meaning and certainty and boundaries on reality and is the police of my understanding and expansion. Even when trying to release it I have realized the mind has stayed in control and given me tricks to make me think I was going somewhere but in reality I was making it happy.

Also, avoidance. Avoidance of my doubts and fears, keeping moving, keep doing, keep practicing, keep judging and I am in a maze of no exit that twists and changes every turn I make. There is no way out of the maze, it is a maze of mirrors and illusion that only exists because I make it real and feed it. Don’t see who I really am because I might not like her but keep feeding the mirrors and I will spend a whole lifetime looking at endless reflections.

The thing is which brings me to a full stop is that I have no idea how to get past this. The mind has no idea of what else could be past it so it is no help. What is on the other side of doing? Well, I suppose I wrote about it in my last post, putting up the reiki posters and then realizing I didn’t have to worry about anything or do anything, the universe would look after all that.

I don’t think I ever quite saw so clearly though just how much my mind has been telling me what to do and think and work its way past problems and I am at a loss as to what to do. I simply don’t know. This is a good thing, I tell myself. It is exactly what I would tell anyone else who posed this dilemma to me so I say to myself that this is a good thing, when the mind is stuck then the rest of me can start emerging. I am not my mind, I am much more than that and the mind has no clue about any of it.

the food I eat versus the food I think I should be eating

I have been thinking about food recently. I am living in a camp where all my food is cooked for me and I have no access to my own kitchen. This is hard for me. I am used to cooking my own food. I have been thinking about all the judgments I have about food. All the ideas and preconceptions I have about food and whether they are true or not.

In the spirit of questioning everything I have to ask is our mental and physical health really dependant on the food we eat or is it just that we think it is and so our intention produces bad health when we eat bad food. Now, I have always been of the school of the food I eat= who I am and I have fallen into control many times around food. I remember being in a supermarket and looking around thinking ‘I can’t eat any of this food’. I think I was off dairy, wheat and sugar at the time.

I grew up in a house of allergies and the basic root cause of any behavior disorder was the food. The food was always the culprit. Stop eating this or that and you will be fine. So by the time I left my family house and moved into my own little flat I had a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of allergy/food intolerance/celiac/lactose intolerant/ calories/ carbohydrates v protein and all about controlling the food I ate to produce a given result.

Now, the interesting thing about not eating one of society’s food staples is that you are out of the loop. You realize, as I did in that supermarket just how much of our diet is dairy/cow milk, refined sugar and white flour. How much we as a society blindly eat what is given us not questioning anything and out of touch with our own bodies. I worked in a health store for a while and I remember in particular one man who wanted something to make him sleep at night yet didn’t want to stop drinking his twenty cups of tea a day.

So I had the thought that maybe my control around food is me not accepting what society is feeding me. I don’t want to be a part of it. My own anger at my part in victim stance turns against the system and I want out. So maybe it is these unrecognized emotions that produce indigestion, bad health and a wish for other food in me and not the food itself, and to be in balance I need to balance myself with everyone around me and the world that I choose to be born into. That all my control around food and not eating this or needing to eat that is me seeking to control myself because without control we are lost in a sea of unpredictability…. and that’s just too scary.

Of course, I am not about to start eating Mc Donald’s everyday. I still have a choice and I choose good food that nourishes me in body and mind and spirit. But to heal myself I need to heal myself from inside out and find those judgments that don’t let me be happy as who I am right now and reassess them. I choose good health for myself and if, as at the moment, I don’t have access to the food I think I need to keep me healthy I will not let my intention produce bad health but accept that that is where I have found myself right now in my life and within the limited choices I have I can still eat well and be happy.

Sorrow/Happiness

I was doing a tarot reading with Paul last night, the osho zen tarot, I love them. They have a directness and a simplicity and a connection with here and now that I like. Anyway, I asked for me and ’sorrow’ came up and I was explaining to Paul that, for me, to really release sorrow you have to go into it and experience it and not try to run from it into control (whatever form that takes.. television, books, cigarettes, food, anger, however) and also what was I hanging onto in my life that I didn’t want to let go of, didn’t want to fully mourn and accept that it was gone. For me also tears are about the fear of letting go, the mind goes to fear and out come the tears.

I started a path about three years ago working with the toltec teachings and I don’t think I have ever cried so much and in front of people too! Its my first port of call and sometimes I hate it and try not to and other times I accept it and accept the fact that it will pass in time.

I know when I am in control because I feel a pushing in my solar plexus, a frustration, a want that cannot be satisfied, anger, a feeling of wanting to pick a fight, a need to make someone else wrong or make them little. It is my flag, this feeling, that it is time to relax, let myself fall into truth of here and now, stop trying to twist the world into my idea of how it should be and let it flower in its own time. I think I have been feeling this way recently, I have been doing so much administration, getting the past in order, setting up structures (like this blog and my shop) looking at other amazing blogs, making a web of myself on the ephemeral world that is cyberspace, that I fell into the illusion of control, I could, by much action, shape my world into happy and successful.

This is my fear, an old one, to control how others see me, to make them like me, to manipulate the world so I get what (i think) I need. The fear of really truly being exactly who I am right now because it might not be enough and the sorrow is to let go of the facade and let truth shine through. There is only truth.

The second card I got was ’sharing’, the image of a woman offering a bowl of fruits. She has so much she can give and she gives from endless abundance. This is the way past my fear, to share with the world what I have because each of us has a unique path and wisdom to give to the world and there is always enough for everyone. My mum used to say that we each born with our own packet of love and each child had his/her own.

I have been connecting with others who are on the same path as I. I got a wonderful email this morning from A Fanciful Twist (a really cool blog I discovered recently) which gave me a smile and encouragement. And of course Paul, the ever present love, with his own viewpoint on life. Sometimes we are completely in sync with each other and sometimes it’s immovable force meets unstoppable object! He got ‘the master’ card in this reading last night, but you know, I think I am going to ask him to write something from himself for that!

So, a deep breath, relax, time to put the admin in perspective and stop organising for a while. I am going to get the oil paints out this morning. I ADORE the smell of oil paints, they surround me in a cloud of magic or possibility, don’t know why but they do. Start creating and letting it flow once more. If anyone is feeling too much ‘doing’ and trying to control this morning, sit back, have a cup of tea, get a piece of paper maybe and doodle or write or hum a tune or sit under a tree or ring a friend you haven’t talked to in ages. These are the things which make us happy!

x cliodhna

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