BY OUR PAST CHOICES hoo ha!

We created our circumstances by our past choices.  Warren Buffet

Sometimes it seems I cannot get enough variety in my life, and that includes with font choices.  I happened to try all three Wingdings on "we created our circumstances by our past choices" and thought the third one would be fun to play with interpreting how bipolar has contributed to me creating circumstances different than if I had not been dealing with that too. Now, of course, the trick will be "can blogger post this up without scrambling?"

WORDS                                          SPECIAL

What we ponder

and what we think about

sets the course of our life.

ANY DAY WE WISH,

we can discipline ourselves to change it all.

ANY DAY WE WISH,

we can open our mind to new knowledge.

ANY DAY WE WISH,

we can start a new activity.

ANY DAY WE WISH,

we can start the process of life change.

We can do it immediately, or next week, or next month,  or next year.

      We can also do nothing.


          We can pretend rather than perform.


And if the idea of having to change ourselves makes us uncomfortable, we can remain as we are.


We can choose rest over labor, entertainment over education, delusion over truth, & doubt over confidence.


The choices are ours to make.

But while we curse the effect,  we continue to nourish the cause.

As Shakespeare uniquely observed, "The fault is not in the stars,  but in ourselves."  [[The fault is in us!]]

We created our circumstances by our past choices.  We created our circumstances by our past choices.  We have both the ability and the responsibility to make better choices.

"You must keep both eyes on your target  and not the ever moving mark.

Remember that success is never about the chosen few,  but always about the few who choose.

You get to choose and 
your life builds from there."
Warren Buffet

W	a hiccup, any hiccup
e	I'm moving forward, but whanged, like people in the leaning commercial
c	I'm just gonna go with that I'm evening out.
r	Whoa, the glimpse I get of me is just a little too real.
e	I whang a little too easily.
a	Ok.  Back on the forward path.  Whew!  Feels better.
t	This doesn't feel good while it's happening but                                           I won't begin to acknowledge the dark place it is until years later.                    Notice how I have no base to stand on?
ed	The conflict is internal, and generally only external when I'm manic.
o	Lots of blather on the brain.  Please tell me, you know blather.

We created our circumstances by our past choices.  

It seems I am forever learning that I am not so unique but that there are always others like me in thinking, knowledge, ideas, ideals, quirks, weirdities (watch spell check in spasms), beliefs, false beliefs, rightness, wrongness; ok, I'm getting OCD, all I wanted to say is I know that I am not alone in believing I existed before this life and had a few choices there before here.  That to preface my saying, I'm even willing to consider I chose to be bipolar, for whatever reason.  I can think of a platter of ailments, disorders, illnesses, diseases and whatever else that could make that look pretty good to me assuming we all had to have something.  I do find, however, that I have howled considerably about there being things left undisclosed that I fail to appreciate, now that I am here.  And in that mindset I have the most difficult time "understanding", "getting it", and all that, as to why anybody "in their right mind" would "create" the circumstances I've created.  In other words, why the f______, f______, f_______ would I be living this push pull of reality, when all I want is bliss?


Hmmm.  I've got to admit there's a part of me that's not really sure how much bliss I really want, but I bet you get my drift.


I am wanting to make a life online, so yes, I'm probably more aware than those who are not, how many people who've made successes of themselves online credit learning to get the right mindset.  Before the majority of us had a notion what a computer was, what it could do and how much smaller it could get; I was ripening up my life experience to need to sort it out with mindsets.  


I'm trying to not get all butt hurt here, I do know it's a process, it's timing, it's traffic, etc., etc.  (BTW how do you like the traffic feed I put on today -- Feedjit?)


Now, Back to  my 
butt, I'd love comments  on your glee over your choices evidencing in  your circumstances.  
Next time, then -- moi

  

Learning, learning, learning

I have learned some ways that get me into the vortex.  I want to be in the vortex as I write this so I want to practice some of what has worked for me and make sure I’m in.  Laughter, fun giggles of appreciation for another’s personality works.  I thought of D saying that he worked nude in the house.  He was talking of acting as chef, and I know he knew that would throw me.  (Of course, I never let on, except in all those subtle ways I need better practice controlling.)  And, less than an hour ago as I was nearly asleep in a nap, this picture came to mind of R lying beside me, nose to nose, to talk.  He’s one of my Guidance Team (on the other side) so I have to believe he can get in any position he wants, any time he wants.  He often cracks me up!

This morning I wanted to work on getting into the vortex before I got up and got into prayer first.  I haven’t done that for the longest time because my earliest prayer is usually the one on my knees.  As a child I learned the four steps of prayer are greeting, thanks, asking, and closing.  The last three or four weeks, I’ve made it a conscious act to list at least ten things I’m thankful for right then.  Wow, did that get me in this morning!  I’m blessed to know I can lie there and speak out loud because I’ve found that for me in my experience I focus better when I hear myself.  Abraham says that focus and concentration is work and it certainly is for me.

Things have changed quite drastically for my son in the last two or three days.  I feel the very best thing that I can do is manifest my vision.  So, am I in the vortex?  It seems not or I would not feel so hesitant.

I’m going to write about my son.  I am so grateful for him.  Leave it to a mother to think about giving him birth.  I remember thinking about how hard he worked turning himself in the womb preparing to exit.  It seemed unimaginable and yet I could feel him.  I was a day short of turning twenty-five years old, he was my first, he was still a fetus and yet I could feel him working.

When he had just turned eight we learned he had a chronic illness – a plague for anyone else who has it also.  He learned how to deal with it and care for himself with no complaints, no self-pity.

He is no saint, my son.  Far from it and I’ve mentioned already he tends and leans towards those younger, behaving younger, etcetera.  But he has proven to me how much he’s willing to do and give to me when I am in need.  He made an eight hour drive at the sacrifice of his job and his wife and children to take me out of a hospital in another state and extricated me from my home when I could not function well enough to tell him what to get for me.  He convinced me to drive my little Toyota back with him, following him when I was in that scared place of clinical depression when many (or am I the only one; surely not) can only wring their hands and moan.  As frightening as driving in the mountains in the dark in that state was, the most horrifyingly, agonizingly fearful part was driving into Phoenix with the sun rising directly into our eyes.  I had been gone nearly ten years, and damned if it didn’t seem all different.  I begged him, I must have had a cell phone though I don’t remember it; I begged and begged and pleaded and pleaded for him to not lose me.  I was completely useless trying to distinguish another car at that time.  Have I told you he loves to drive like a bat out of hell (wherever did that phrase come from, anyway?)  My little Toyota, nearly twenty years old, was a five speed hampered by my foot ever ready to mash on the brakes.  OMG, that was without question one of the most trying times of my life.  What’s really astounding is that a young man in his early thirties with immense stress in his own life, his wife had left, now that I think about it; could, would, did put up with it in someone he’d always known to handle all those things before.  I felt and behaved the invalid – not just the sick person definition, but the opposite of valid type of mom.

And that was just the beginning as I basically took over my granddaughter’s bed for another six months.  Once when he determined I must take a shower (many who are in a clinical depression have no interest in any type of grooming) he turned his Bose with speakers at scream-screech pitch with rap.  Hell hath finally found fury to compete with that of a woman scorned!  An unwell brain met with that; well, not really.  I consented to shower, and then fought my demons that accompany that when I suffer the state I was in.

I really got the message, even in my state of “mental disorder”, that my son truly and mightily loved me even while I could barely eat enough to stay conscious and could not feel worth seeing or talking to, when he told me of reading a story about the death of a young woman who wasn’t eating enough to stay alive.  It wasn’t just the telling of the story.  It was the emotion that threatened to overcome him.

My desires are great to do what I can for him.  What’s a little vortex work?

Hope all you folks are doing well, AZ.  I’ll talk with you again.

So . . . have I created a VISION?

So . . . have I created a vision?  I have been creating one for some time now.  It is a work in process.  That is why I’ve been to bed and am back up to do some more now.  I realize I have not made it clear enough, specific enough.  I’ve come a long way but I also have a long way to go.  I am determined to obtain it so I’d better clarify it.  I’d hate to miss it for lack of me totally knowing, totally recognizing it when it comes, when it’s right there in front of me.

I picked up an article yesterday.  The author was writing about how she thinks the very worst she possibly can about a situation to keep it from happening.  Her dog had to be taken to the vet with a lump so she was envisioning cancer, death, burial; all in the name of doing her best to protect her dog.  She followed that up with a facetious account of how she hadn’t been paying attention to her son playing baseball and his lousy scores and what they would have been if she had only been projecting thoughts even more lousy.

She proceeded then to the meat of the article and how she really knows, when she’s in the right mood and of the right mindset that her thoughts really have no effect on events.  It set me off to thinking as I have been working to learn to affect my life by changing a lifetime’s habits of the way I think.

Sadly, my first thoughts were of giving up.  “I’m wrong again, might as well throw in the towel”, I thought.  Soon, though, I had another thought:  “What I’m learning is how to change my inner environment and as a consequence my vibration so as to daily experience being higher on the emotional scale, to more often “be” in my vortex (my stream of consciousness in Source Energy and all “life has caused me to become”).  This would all connect to my studying Abraham-Hicks, if you need the reminder.

Let me take this last paragraph and place it more squarely in the experiences of my life.  A little over twenty years ago I realized I was entertaining thoughts of desiring to be rid of my husband, the father of my children.  This was so utterly antithetical to all I’d ever told myself my life would be like that I acknowledge a deep schism with regards to it to this day.  

Quick aside:  I happened across a video night before last about some Christians finding the rock Moses struck for water for his people in the wilderness.  My mind brought me the picture back of this massive rock, rendered top to bottom with scripture containing the word “clave” superimposed upon it.  I can see everything having to do with my divorcing my first husband relating to that picture.

Just in anticipation, I began to have an inner apparition of myself throwing my hands up in the air, saying “I give up”.  It was visual and the feeling was one of defeat.  I knew that would not allow me to move forward and since I could not see remaining in the status quo (which I was pretty sure was leading me down the road towards another clinical depression five years after the first one), I was constantly on the watch for it and ways to make it retreat.  It’s surely time to leave that apparition (which can reappear on occasion) behind me forever, forever, forever.

However . . . I have not found it an easy matter to “change” what goes on in my head – primarily by habit, I presume.  I rode horses, on occasion, when I was a girl.  I’ve often thought how difficult it could seem (especially as a skinny lightweight girl) to rein those large animals in a direction they were not eager to go.  I’d try to move those reins a little lower and then a little higher on the horses’ neck and apply what arm muscle I had.  Sometimes it seems they just decided to cooperate.  Other times it was definitely a “no go”.  And, so it seems with being in charge of my thoughts.

I opened with, do I have a mission?  Reviewing all this with my thoughts and knowing my aims, I thought I want to picture (and write, writing’s so key for me) with more visualizing placement within me.  I mentioned (in an earlier post) wanting to replace the word vortex with purse.  I now understand all that much better now and see how silly an idea that was. It is the picturing, whether right or wrong, that helps me best to learn and remember.

That’s it for now, AZ.  Sayonara.

I Manifested First Thing This Morning!

I Manifested First Thing This Morning!  Everything was uphill from there – and does that ever feel good!  Probably the last several years or so, when I’ve used the word manifested (or variable), it has been to point out that I am aware I haven’t manifested yet what I am saying I believe in or want to accomplish.  That all turns around today.

It’s pretty simple really, and yet it is not.  I’ve told two people very special to me in the last couple of days what I am about to tell you in this post.  If anything I’m talking about here today rings a chord with you at all, let me encourage you to find a way to relate it to yourself so that you can carry it around with you.  Saying that reminds me of a little phrase that has come to mean a great deal to me since I first learned about it just barely less than a half century ago:  recognize, relate, assimilate and use.  I haven’t thought about it consciously for a while so bear with me sharing what it means to me.  I make it a point to recognize myself in something I hear or read so I can then relate to it personally.  I take some time to assimilate (think in terms of digesting) it so I can and hopefully will use it.

Now, for me, my thinking about whether or not I am actually manifesting in my life, the way I want to be in my life, or not, has seemed to focus around my attempts to learn lessons from demonstrating being bipolar.  With that foundation laid, let me convey first what I have heard me tell both one of my sons and my best friend just in the last couple of days.  I had been saying that the two (more and more devastating) sets of episodes I’d had with bipolar since I was diagnosed had been when I’d been trying to make it through life without lithium.  Each of them (in separate times and places) then asked me (as everyone seems wont to do), “if I had learned I needed to always take my meds.”

Now the more astute among you will realize soon that I pretty much deflect that question with what I have to share but fear not, the lesson is very plain and clear that I have failed to prove myself amongst the miniscule minority in life who outgrow their need for taming chemicals ingested to fight the evil forces within.  (I am being just slightly facetious.)

What I then said (in effect, since I am not among those with a memory such as is now being played out in the TV drama, “Unforgettables”) was that not only was that important, but also I am really beginning to “take in” to my head and my inner being that “for my own dear self’s” benefit, I must take responsibility for the way I feel.

I’ve noticed (and there is a degree of aging as bipolar at play here, too, I think) more subtle aspects of the disorder when I am not in an episode.  Those aspects are nasty little buggers, which have been sapping my life a lot longer than I’ve been aware of.  I realized a couple weeks ago when I finally plowed into a Picasso type painting of horrendously piled high dishes that it wasn’t because of all the reasons I’d been telling myself that I hadn’t done it before, but rather I’d been vibrating at a level too low to “deal” with it.

I pretty much have to believe my ability to make showering one of my favorite daily musts (in my “off” seasons) has a degree of reliance on where I am vibrating at as well.  Those are simple examples and possibly you may have to be bipolar or suffer another mental illness to even believe them but they fit for me to be able to understand the concept.  My first manifestation today was a shower (much needed, much worth the “feel good”).  You may trust there are other manifestations to come – worth true excitement.  Stay tuned!

Hoisted on my own Pitard QUAARRRKKKK

Hi, AZ!  Lovely Weather, eh?

I did a search in the last few days:  not in control of my beliefs.  My jaw dropped when I ran across a site called Thrive with bipolar disorder.  And it dropped further when the site administrator talked about “how my beliefs about not getting my needs met, got in the way of asking for what I need in life: strategies for thriving with bipolar disorder”.

She talked about events/circumstances in life are not what cause us the difficulties we associate with them, but rather the stories we tell ourselves about those events/circumstances.  I’ve been hearing and picking up on that a number of years now.  I’ve even matured in the concept enough to grasp (sometimes) “gee, I need to change the story I’m telling myself about this”.  Processing that just now makes me think the old adage “your folks (whomever you think wronged you, spouse or siblings or . . .) did the best they could with what they had” came about as an attempt to assuage the harm of some of those stories we end up tell ourselves with regards to these people who bear such sway in our lives.  Anyway, I’m to the point in my life where it sounds like a good idea to me to post a sign “what’s the story I’m running through my brain now” so I can change it, various place in my home kind of like a par course.

She, her name is Robin Mohilner, related a story about her mother going back to work after she was born and how that has affected her all her life.  The thing is:  she realized she'd been wrong, but she hadn't known she was wrong.  Imagine that?  Imagine the breakthrough that is to realize, better to accept!  Who'd a thunk it that in her case an infant is coming to the conclusion "I'm not worth it" and in my case another infant decides "I'm not interesting or fun enough to be around"?  Never underestimate the infant cognitive skills, nor the ability beliefs (merely thoughts thought over and over and over) have to parade as truths.  Seeds are meant to grow and generally do, given the basics. I had already begun writing my experience following birth with my mom but I couldn’t think how to fit in anywhere.  Now I can, so here goes:

If neediness on my part arises out of insecurities, that’s one thing.  How many of us would be unscathed by emerging from the womb only to have that womb disappear for three months before appearing again?  So as to not leave you with mixed messages and lack of info necessary to determine what I just said, let me just briefly explain that my mother went back into the hospital for three months right after I was born.  I claim no memory of that time but I am willing to guess at how I might have received that little push pull of reality.  Perhaps you notice I did not name this particular experience as bliss.

As I wrote the sentence before last, I nearly ended it with – rejection, rather than” that little push pull of reality.”  It’s likely difficult for all of us to imagine a newborn infant pondering being rejected by its mother; not so difficult to imagine it crying inconsolably for reasons we can’t fathom or flailing its arms in absolute disagreement with its world.  I wouldn’t really know if I experienced any of that.  According to aunts and an uncle, my mother’s younger siblings, they all delighted in running home from high school to see the new “awesome” baby and the worst event that occurred was my being dumped on my head when my uncle over zealously did something to cause the bassinet to revolt.  I sincerely cannot imagine three high school students giving up the greater enjoyment of all sorts of other things that normally occupy their time to peer in at a grumpy, squalling, red faced and ill tempered infant, no matter how reasoned might her mood be.

Ahh, though.  As I wrote that last, I pictured my mother.  My view of her is one of a woman who would willingly change inside out if she could so long as that allowed her to present her pleasing side.  I wonder the chances that as her firstborn I knew how to present myself from the get go as “baby 'pleaser' -- turn those smiles on”.  Can an infant who is suffering insecurities do that?

I had a new (as far as I recall) thought, too, about that hospitalization and the length of it.  Subconsciously, did my mother find herself wondering about attention needs and how to get hers met with a new baby in the family?  I was her first.   My father was fourteen years older than she.  This hospitalization was quite the anomaly, too.  (Anomaly is an exceptionally busy word in multiple subject areas so I’ll just quote Miriam-Webster online, their third definition 3: something anomalous : something different, abnormal, peculiar, or not easily classified as what I am meaning when I say that.)  I’m not sure I was aware before High School that my mother had spent that time (the background noise in my brain is saying: “my mother abandoned me”) in the hospital until, for some reason – unknown; my mother and my typing teacher compared notes and became aware they were the only two people in their known world who had had similar experiences with similar unknown and unexplained problems.  She related the wonder of that to me and maybe I was just old enough to remember it as something significant; that’s when I became aware of that piece of my history.

Truth be told, the more I try to think of these things and see how they figure in (or might figure in) to my life not being all the bliss I’m sure I’d absolutely love, the more I realize I’d be better off without them.  Well, that’s not totally true.  More true, though, would be my “manning” (how about “woman-ing”?) up, changing those stories and giving them a positive, maybe even powerful ending.  Now, there’s a project I could get behind.  I’m going to invoke the life work I see on YouTube of Robert G Smith and Faster EFT.  I’ve done enough to know that can work for me and I already know I’m a hard nut to crack so I need to go with what works.

Not for the Faint of Heart! Sorry in Advance

Dear Father,

I am angry, so angry, and really, really very angry and I do not WANT to be going backwards like this.  I could go bury my head in bed and say  some things by rote and try to get unconscious and go to sleep and hope I feel better after but that didn’t happen between last night      and this morning.  I don’t know what I should be doing.  I feel like a pawn again in my prayers.  Pray, pray, pray I was taught, we humans are taught.  Ask and I shall receive, I am taught, read in the scriptures, see on the web, read in books and talks and article titles; oh, yeah, “ask” and I “shall receive”.  That has always worked between me and Thee, now then, hasn’t it?  Too bad I don’t discern better what Thou dost want to give me, n’est pas?  But, let me say thanks, Father.  Let me say thanks.  (Trust me; He does not need me to hold up the sign:  Sarcasm!)

I do hope I have not bitten off more than I can chew!  I need to step up to the plate and say will chew.  At least I know for certain I am not the only individual on planet earth to find it difficult to change my mindset, change my thinking, and change how I do my life.  But, OMG, must it be so hard?  It is so much more than changing just a habit, although it is that as well.

The opening paragraph is a watered down version of how totally out of control my thinking and attitude can become.  I’ve come to realize I go straight for blaming God.  I pray on my knees every day and have for well over thirty years.  (You thought I’d give my age away there, didn’t you?)  My conversations with God have been a staple through all but a portion of one mood episode in my life and so if I feel something with more power than I can handle at the moment, who am I most used to talking to?  Unfortunately, that’s true even when I’m talking smack.  I honestly don’t think I could stop talking to God, no matter how ugly I can be about my attitude.  I know that’s offensive and I apologize to those who cannot relate.  I share so openly because I know there are people who can relate and when I can take more time, I will share what I am learning and have learned so that life needn’t be so painful.