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.

Yours, Theirs and My Reality -- Shall We?

You Folks Still Got Yer Eyes In?

I told you I'd be back.

I love learning, especially when it explains to me

something about me that I hope will help me make

things better in my life.  Like many of you, I hope

to be able to set a good example for a few of the

folks I know and love.  When I depart for higher

(hopefully) realms I'm hoping they'll be hoping . . .

(I'm possibly overusing hope in this sentence -- just

about done.  Whoa!  I'm going hog wild with it all

paragraph long!  It looks like I need to expand the

range of emotions I've got going here.)

It's really just too darned easy to interrupt myself,

distract myself!  What I wanted to say there was

that it is a very fond desire of mine that I leave

folks wanting more of me.  Did you pick up on that

I was talking about after I'm gone -- when they can't

have it?  I'm joking, although I don't doubt you may

have a hard time following me.  I know folks who've

gone on before who are still giving to me, and not

just in the legacy sense.  Right now, though, I am

mainly talking in the legacy sense.

Part of why I (more often than not) have seemingly

and progressively felt more and more a loser, a

failure, a deadbeat, a persona non grata whose

best place to be is isolated and hidden and feeling

shame, especially in recent years, lies in knowing

what I want and want to be that I don't have and

am not.

And so, for the briefest of moments I recognized my

state of being, rose to the level of civility that gave

me "push pull of reality" for my title here rather

than the very gross, very down to earth, frustrated

just about for sure literally out of my gourd terms

I'd been using when I could even talk about it (or

pray about it).

I believe I've been aware of the disparity of reality

in my mind and what I live with far longer than I

have realized how much disparity there can be with

others reality and mine.  It's a matter of focus and

it feels like forced focus at that.  It has often, way,

way, way often felt like a bully pressing my whole

head into a cow pie after disabling with a stun gun

any muscle mass that could be found in my limbs.

It may be highly unlikely that you might be able to

relate to my upcoming example even if you, too,

are bipolar/manic-depressive but it also might be

fun to try.  Once I'd gotten through my first set of

named as such bipolar episodes, I found I was

experiencing an almost unbelievable amount of

self-distrust.  This was, of course, twenty-five years

ago when at least my conscious awareness seemed

sunny, confident, "the world was my oyster", diaper

days with my sons were behind me, et al.  That's

a "fur piece" from the "dog days" and dark night

of the soul conscious awareness I've been talking

about more usually in this blog.

As I tried to get a grip on trusting myself again,

because always second guessing every tremor of

self-hood was not in the least bit fun, I realized I

had demonstrated to myself I was NOT who I was

when I was clinically depressed (not by any stretch

of the imagination) AND I was NOT who I learned I

could be (now that really was a little trip-py because

I had always been a serious prude, overly endowed

with conscience -"let's only do the right thing" type)

person.

A good lengthy manic high can cure a frightful

number of brownie points anywhere they ever

mattered.  So, perhaps you see my dilemma.  No

one with a vestige of common sense would choose

to opt to work out a new life with either of those

well-demonstrated selections.  And again, if the

common sense really was on the premises one

would have to admit to having no accountable

control over that anyway.  It's not like I have the

backbone to "act" either manic or depressed.  My

family has their own set of failings like we all do,

but nary a member is that easily fooled.

Besides, the story I ran in my head, having behaved

as I had in the one state or the other kept me in

shame at least five years.  I let no one in on my

"secret" and I've already admitted to you my 100%

propensity toward men emotionally unavailable.

My life had become a tangle of confusion, shame

and trying, always trying to figure it out with no one

to really talk to.  I'm sure I needn't say to you that

I am someone who likes to talk -- and talk.  And, I

bet you can already guess I was way off the charts

with regards to matching anyone's reality.  That

can become an even greater problem when no one

can tell the turmoil from the outside.

Now, let me share an example of two people having

realities unmatched more like your experiences.

I shared a post some time ago where I had walked

a couple of hours after "blowing up" at one of the

female roommates, and still felt like I could not be

civil, let alone apologize.

My son has a rationale whereby he never turns on

the heater in his house.  You might feel the same

after the raping, pillaging and burning of the utility

company combined with often 100 or so days of

temperatures, all over 100 degrees, much of the

time the majority being over 110, even up to 120.

It was impossible to not notice everyone had a

hacking cough both day and night.  Lest you come

to the conclusion, I'm a die hard old school thinker

of not going out in the rain, cold creates colds, well

think what you will.  I am aware a lot of that is

considered myth today -- fine by me.  But I have

built and slept in an ice cave in my day (OK, fair

enough, yes, we're talking salad days era).  Even

with my frigid experiences  -- my long hair was like

multiple ice cycles, long after getting back to my

dorm room --  acting as foundation, I am damned

cold at night.  Not that I want the noisy maxi-digit

money drainer on myself.   I, too, think the utility

company would eat all our children if allowed to.

I kid you not I slept with flannel sheets, at least

six blankets fit for igloo sleeping and a pet bed

a St. Bernard could fit on at the bottom of the bed

hoping my toes and feet would never feel a draft.

And, I was still, like I said, damned cold at night.

The next morning when She's little one and two

year old girls appeared (unaccompanied) in the

family room buck naked save a diaper for one and

panties for the other, bare feet!, I had meself a

little hiss-y fit.  Several days later (so honorable

am I) when I finally apologized she said her girls

are warm blooded and like to go without clothes.

What's real for me just may not be real for someone

else, and by gummy, what's real for you just may

not be real for me.  Truce?  I'll try if you will.  In fact,

I'm trying anyway.  I've got to, for me.

Peace?