Not in Control of My Beliefs? ? !!! #### !!!??

Dear AZ,

Abraham (thanks to Jerry and Esther Hicks) has said,

"Manic Depressive equals not in control of your beliefs".

BTW, if you enjoy reading what I write, you either know

already; or, er, I guess I'm telling you now; when I look

for knowledge, info, insight, whatever, I look for varied

perspective, clues, hints, notions to help me see some

underbelly of something I'm trying to get a better grip on.

After twenty-five years of looking this particular "beastie"

square in its maw (well, when I was capable of looking),

I either missed this aspect (it could happen) or I never

was told (and that sure as hell has happened before) this

particularly juicy piece of memorabilia.  I say memorabilia

because I'm always trying, in one way or another, to

distance myself from the whole diagnosis, illness, train

wreck; call it what you will, some of us experience as the

(she speaks now sarcastically) dreamboat appellation of

bipolar or manic depression.  Bye, bye.  Scat you!  Begone

or forever hold your peace!

So, if you haven't guessed it, the idea, notion, insight,

perspective, whatever, that "not in control of my beliefs"

might apply to "my own dear self" (that appellation is

thanks to Dr. Abraham A Low, whom I have mentioned

before, and undoubtedly will mention again), that it might

apply to me, to moi, to this gal right here in my lap, did

get me just a tad worked up.

I've actually been aware of it, two, three months, now

and it has definitely been carrying on, on the sly mostly,

in the back of my mind.  I think beliefs may be sort of a

"sticky" kind of issue for many of us.  I know I took

tremendous pride most of my life that I had certain of

the beliefs that I had.  I was aware more people did not

have the same beliefs I took such great pride in than

those who did, so:  I had another belief -- only those who

believed the way I did had the truth.  How convenient!

Looking just at those particular beliefs, (and that was a

trip traveled more unconsciously than in the light of day

of my awareness) has made a tremendous difference in

my life.  I feel fortunate I can say the difference is to the

good.

I have much more to say to the matter.  I'm sure you are

not surprised.  So I will be getting back to you soon.  K

The Magic in the Vortex

I had two ideas I wanted to write about when I got up and going this morning.  I enjoy having money so much!  It is crazy fun making up for every sip of stolen milk, all the pizza I’ve eaten (more that all the rest of my life combined because She could have it delivered or her favorite food is pizza, not sure which), every can of beans my son was kind enough to share with me, the boll weevil filled rice, the bread I thought I was so sneaky as I took a slice one day, another the next day, the cereal I hoped would not raise any questions, raiding the refrigerator time after time usually to come up empty.   

I’ve eaten more questionable food than I can bear to think about, I’ve embarrassed myself many times saying, “What’s going on with that?  Is it sitting there because no one is going to eat anymore of it?”  Now I drop She a few C notes, thank her again, and let her know there are grocery stores that deliver (there still are, aren’t there?) as well as pizza places, just in case she’d enjoy a little variety.  I have much greater thanks in mind for my son.

The real fun adventure as I pictured all this in my mind earlier was all the exercise equipment taking up my breakfast room.  With a back yard to die for with a very nice solid patio cover over ample patio for a good dining set the eating with guests is going to be done outdoors.  With that taking care of “Where do we sit to eat?” it actually did amaze me how quickly peopled with other items the breakfast room became.  

I have not forgotten the Vibrator exercise item I’m pretty sure I saw Ryan O’Neal walking away from in one of the oft viewed segments advertising OWN network.  It didn’t take long to get with the idea of having large exercise balls to sit on to increase balance and posture.  They can be utilized in exercises in their own right as well which brings me to the large flat screened TV for the wall to service all the exercise as well as cooking shows for the kitchen.  Zumba will be one of the first programs to be daily on that TV, but I also want Yoga programs, the exercise ball and mat type exercise programs and the list will grow, no doubt.  

I see it so clearly I had to ogle to notice I had not yet written about the free weights and exercise bench with weights, the punching bag and the sparring bag, recently inspired by R’s newest acquisition.  Rather than giving in to fatigue and napping several times a day, I simply get up off my computer chair, put on some stimulating music and go increase my vibration in that room.  Hoo raw!  

Enjoy your weekend, AZ.  Ah'll B baaaack!

Picture It Picture It Picture It

I feel like I have waited so long and yet it’s really been such a short while.  I hope I will always smile at the memory of manifesting my first $MOOLA$.  I’m pretty sure I will always smile at the memory of realizing thinking of Mae West’s walk in “I’m No Angel” while reading to myself my posts in my realityvbliss blog providing the magic of getting me into the vortex.  What a fun way to point out to me I can easily raise my vibration having simple pleasure.

I knew I had to make manifesting money the priority for me.  Sure, I was manifesting a lot more in manifesting the money because I knew what I had in mind for using the money, spending the money, gifting the money.  It all felt like pretty heady stuff because I’d been going backward such a long time.   

I think there had been some kind of inner knowing in terms of manifesting my life before.  As is often the case, the very act of writing seems to unearth possibilities.  I’m going to shorten what just came up for me to keeping a parent in line for now.  That can be a real big deal in certain circumstances.  It also likely required help from sources outside our usual.  Both those comments will have to wait to be fleshed out in other accounts.

There’s more than enough to write about in telling this tale.  One of the real fun aspects for me has been in not having to figure out the “hows”.  In fact, I required (and lots of us must) many reminders which appeared as I read about it, heard people talk about it, and more fun than all the rest listened to songs about it.  It makes sense to me (actually I confess that seems to go off and on, like a switch) that the process of creating proceeds much more unhampered when focusing on many other aspects of imagination, like simply having it or it just “being”.

One of the sometimes crazy making aspects for me in the process was dealing with being in the same house with a young and super energetic person of an entirely different culture.  It made for many unexpected opportunities to work on finding the happier, better, improved thought.

The fact that I am here, with my money; and mine it truly is and truly feels; is much more than the fantasy, the winged thoughts, the magical thinking I feared (sometimes) it might just end up being.  It marks a meaningful growth process of the finest order.  As happens easily, sometimes, I caught the briefest portion of a program on TV today, as I gave up the TV to another roommate, and I saw traffic, all flowing in to work in some city.  The program had to do (it seemed) with the decline, even death of suburbs, while people reestablished even further beyond.  I found myself thinking of the changes my son and I were making in our lives and concepts that take us out of all that humdrum and thinking that seems to merely be a “when shall we make the proscribed change, ourselves?”.  We have definitely chosen the creative path and withdrawn from the competitive one.

Since none of it is all that easy; I have found life to not be all that easy; I am ever gladder, I have taken on this creative process.  And, taking it on is very apt, for I have learned I need to cover myself with it.  No, a better word is to permeate myself with it.  That makes for real change; not surface, not temporary.  

Now for some fun, at least for me, I shall describe some of what happened.  It seems to be human nature to want to know what happened (I’m thinking of TV’s Mr. Monk, for those who know about him).  Once he figures it out, in every episode, he says, “Here’s how it happened” and my breath is bated.

I felt like I had scored a home run when I found the Tempe home I sit in now (nearly all moved in though now I shall be creating lots of furniture).  I had not even thought of that location, or that near replica closeness to my son, or how much it would mean to me to live in Tempe again.  What really caught my eye (I doubt this will surprise you if you’ve been following along) was that great oval tub with block glass window filling in the length of it and up to the ceiling, and right next to that a super nice, separate glassed in shower – absolutely perfect!

It was late and had been a long day.  I nearly put off “till tomorrow” the merest requisite for keeping track of it.  I’m so glad I didn’t, and that tells me of all my persona's within, there is one strong enough and determined enough that this was the right one for me, the ball was not dropped.  I did end up “showing up” as a “key component” in my home creation.  Abraham has stressed that over and over in “receiving” what we want.  There’s a bonus, too!  The back yard is an oasis.  What a treat!

I love being here most because it is so close to R.  It does happen to be close to some theaters as well, and I’m pretty sure I’ll love that.  I have a lot of movies to catch up on.  It’s also close to the healthiest fast food I can think of, American fast food, that is.  (I look forward to spinach and corn!)  Indeed, the shopping nearby is a large bonus.  The walking, though, is so cool!  And it has matured from when I walked it nearly twenty years ago.  The whole area has matured so much it is like a different backdrop.  And the ease of getting to and on two freeways is superb.  I am truly blessed.  I am truly thankful.  Thanks, Father.

Already, I’m feeling eager to get in touch with my friends.  I once again have my own wheels and my own place “to be”.  Hallelujah!  And now, I want to thank not only Father, but my Guidance Team, and Abraham-Hicks, and so very many people on the web.  I feel reconstituted, remade and made much, much better.  Plus, believe me, I am loving my stuff!  

Feel free to join in, AZ.  Tamale, I expect.

I May Be an Elitist. How about you?

“You’re an elitist,” he said, with civilized effrontery.  “That can’t be good”, thought I.  I wasn’t positive what it meant but those nasty white powdered wigs (Whigs first) appeared on the page of my mind.  Sifting through reams of definitions (and cobwebby memory as that was decades ago), I think he was referring to assumptions of special privileges and responsibilities.  

To me, I guess I did assume certain special privileges in being married.   The occasional door opened for me out of thoughtfulness when my hands were full and he could see my struggle, for instance.  The kind and gentle words, when I came home confused that a man would approach me in a driveway, put his hands around my throat as if to choke me, and then drop his hands when I said “arrrggh” since I’ve never been a screamer.  “Call the police” was his only comment.  Why commiserate with me, I guess.

Friday, I had another glimpse into my peculiar way of thinking.  I had gone to see the Physician’s Assistant who writes the script for my meds again.  I had said to her “I took the questionnaire I found online about codependence and can have no argument about finding myself as such.”  I went on to tell her that what struck me most was learning I had unerringly drawn men to me who were emotionally unavailable.  She joined in with unavailable or “needy”.  My immediate comment was I would never have interest in a “needy” man for having had a “needy” mother, and as the night follows the day, I realized the neediness of the men I drew to me in their social ineptness, in their utter lack of social skills.  I told a tale or two regarding my first husband (as mentioned in first paragraph) thinking in such terms of neediness, and she suggested, neediness or Asperger’s.  OMG!

I’m aware that Asperger’s is a relatively new diagnoses, and complicated by different uses, but I had seen it and dealt with it in a young teen I’d worked with in the Crises Center (serving as full scale live-in and school behavioral treatment center) I’ve mentioned working at in Utah ten to fifteen years ago.  My eyes became teary as I realized how dense I’ve been, even with reading my first husband’s face – “How do you do that” when seeing me join in conversation and laughter with completely total strangers a table away at a restaurant.

The real eye opener was learning about some famous folks with Asberger’s.  Researching again just now to be accurate, why am I not surprised that Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE, is one.  I felt the same with Albert Einstein.  I have to say, what a real eye opener to see that Steven Spielberg had been diagnosed when young.  I couldn’t help but wonder about the end of his marriage to Amy Irving in a possible different light.

Today, as I reflect on my “elitism”, I realize it’s my thinking that resides on a level of elitism.  I have failed to be very open minded.  I want what I want – like any addict does.  I may (it seems) always have vestiges of belief that reside in my (“normal” – not!) childhood and the way things are “supposed to be”, and my record is to be slow on the uptake when it comes to being aware of and understanding other ways of being.  It appears (from where I am) I have a long ways to go.  Dare I ask:  how about you?

I can tell you this, AZ.  You really have no idea how I long to hear from you in response.  Later, K

Yes I Do Need My Conscience n My Sinuses Are Clearing, Thank Thee

I am loving life, so much!  [[Even with, and sometimes, aside from having to deal with spell check/sentence structure help!]]  I read someone else's blog a couple days ago with a streamer, “2012 is going to be my year, you can’t have it.”  I’m pretty sure she meant (with a little more thought), "may it be the year for all of us."

It really does help to be able to breathe easily.  I’m on my second cold so far this winter and I’ve preached to friends and family for years, “you don’t have to have those things.  Just cancel every time you sneeze or cough or feel either one coming on.”  I was wondering if the great internet was going to fail me when I began to try to search why that was no longer working for me after a twenty-five year success experience.

I feel badly about having lost the original material.  I remember it was from a woman in Mesa, Az. and although I found it in a bookstore it wasn’t really in book form.  So many years have passed and I may be way off, but if memory serves it was several pages maybe even stapled together.  She talked openly about her family.  Things were not going well at all.  Either she or her husband had been depressed for months.  A lot of us can relate to that and how crummy that is.  I believe when she wrote all that the refrigerator had gone out and was somewhat like the straw that broke the camel’s back.  Anyway, she had some good stuff in there about the mind, or at least the subconscious, even though I was “leery” at the time.  That was my first real exposure to how we could influence our lives by talking to ourselves, and what we should say if we were going to.

I didn’t put it into practice for some time and don’t know but what it was years that passed before I tried to.  In my first clinical depression, after four months of non-stop suicidal thought and life being nothing I could enjoy, I reached a point where something had to change.  I spent one entire day cancelling suicidal thoughts.  One would come, get put down, and there another would be, like this:  “my family would be so much better off without me” followed by “cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel”.  I’m pretty sure I had the impression I needed to say cancel ten times.

Doing that all day seemed like more than I had planned.  BTW, I didn’t know where that sheaf of papers was, I just remembered what I remembered and knew I was going to make it work if it would.  I had reached my limit of living life in grey and black and numbness and hating my existence.  Lo and behold the next day it seemed I only cancelled three or four times.  I was on my way out of that depression and it was a true and literal miracle.

And, so, of course, keeping colds at bay was no big deal.  I don’t take for granted, at all however, the stairs at CH.  I was working at a crisis center in Utah and the kids and school, well; everything was bunked in a former motel.  Getting to the second level was accomplished by hiking up and down planks of concrete with pebbles mixed in laid across iron strips attached to iron railing.  I found it not a pretty picture and laden with file boxes and over-sized notebooks and etcetera, piled up the front of me where I wanted to look down and watch my step seemed a trip, a hitch or worse, a fall, waiting to happen.  I have no count of how many times I employed my friends, “cancel, cancel” to obliterate that awful thought.

There are things I keep in my personal arsenals that help me through my life.  Sometimes I find myself taking them for granted.  Truth is, though, I know that not all of us has and uses the same things I do.  I did see on a TV episode of Monk some time ago a wealthy (the mansion gave her away) matron who said something derogatory about a family member and followed it by saying, “cancel, cancel”, and said to myself, “I’m not alone, someone else knows about this”.

This has been so valuable to me, not just in the ways I’ve mentioned, that I really hope someone else can benefit, too.  Later, AZ!

Peace, and Getting In to the Vortex or Whatever

Ah, there it is:  The memory of the paper within my chest.   The 8.5 X 11 sheet of paper, plain white; I notice it dangling:  telling me my purse is ok.  Let me explain.  Mania, like bipolar as a whole, has its own spectrum – I’m talking the frenzied, fast talking, mind flittering end of mania; like some of you with too much to drink, or the buzz on from something else.  I had a bunch of new credit cards, for me a bunch could have been one then, but I had more.  And I couldn’t find my purse.  Didn’t I always know exactly where my purse was?  Wasn’t I paranoid enough already to not let it out of my sight?  And yet it seemed to be nowhere.

I was in a cheesy “resort inn” bathroom with what seemed like a literal bevy of other women.  In anxiousness I asked everyone loudly, “have you seen my purse?  I need it right now!”  And that’s when it came.  So odd!  To describe it I finally settled on the dangling paper.  It was such a solid peaceful feeling!  I could no longer feel the anxiety or the mania.  Wow!  It truly seemed a miracle.  No purse, just a conviction I needn’t panic – no need.  Whew!  So now what?  I moved out of the crowded bathroom, went back to the conference room, my mind cleared; I remembered talking with folks in the third row.  There it was, undisturbed, on the floor by the chair I had sat in.  My credit cards were not maligned – until I, myself, tackled them later, as a manic always will.

I tell you that experience for a number of reasons.  One, ‘tis (or has been) the season where we talk peace a lot more than usual.  That experience was many years ago and I have always held on to the memory for the great peace it brought me.  I don’t recall doing anything different than my usual to receive that.  I believe it was an incredible gift.  I believe it was a lesson for me or teaching, somehow.  I’m certain I was meant to remember it and share it.
 

Secondly, I had another experience somewhat like that in reference to one of my sons, many years after.  My son is immeasurably more precious than any purse or any number of credit cards.  There was more even to that experience but the key connection was that feeling – that peace.  I have to say it like this:  the peace that surpasses everything, understanding, indeed.

Those of you who’ve had experiences anything like that; I encourage you to keep them in the forefront of your memory.  Hone the sharpness of your memory of them by talking about those experiences with people you know you can.  Match them together when there’s more than one.  I’m convinced they mean more than we know and they can succor us time and again.

So that what I say next does not seem so abruptly out of context, I’ll let you know that it is in reference to Abraham-Hicks and all the vortex talk.  I never really liked the term vortex too much.  I connected it to destructive forces of nature, the toilet and too many letters at the end of the alphabet, the v and the x, beginning and end:  how about I picture my purse.   I could hang it in the center of my chest cavity (like that piece of paper I spoke of earlier), carry it with me always, know where it is and access it.  Speaking of accessing it – what just now worked for me personally is thinking of Mae West’s walk in “I’m No Angel” and reading my blog posts in realityvbliss – maka me happy – and there I am – I’m in! Voila!  Cool!  Cool!  Cool!

See ya, or I should say, write to you, later, AZ folks.  Be safe.  K

Gonna Make It For Sure Now

Dear AZ (folks A through Z, if this is the first post you’ve read here),

I’ve just watched Mae West in a movie for the first time.  What a kick!  I thoroughly enjoyed her, except for her walk.  I’m pretty sure the movie’s name was “I’m No Angel” and since I’ve not seen her in any other movies I don’t know if she always walked like that.  Plenty of people must have liked it either way.  I loved how she queried the witnesses against her and charmed the judge.  That is confidence and attitude at work.

Those are the things I’m working on to help me this year.  I have a feeling, and it’s a very good feeling, 2012 is going to be the best year I’ve ever had.  Part of it is I believe I am experiencing a consciousness I don’t believe I’ve ever experienced to the degree I feel I am now.

Before I forget, I want to be sure to mention something I think fairly often but hardly ever voice and that is that in all the years I was matriculating through school (and that includes University), I am absolutely certain that I never envisioned in my wildest, dearest, most hopeful dreams that I would enjoy such gifts as I have experienced with the internet.  It absolutely and very much delights me how many complete and total strangers share the most wonderful and valuable information with me, and freely!  Ideas flourish and multiply as a result and I feel fed, nourished, loved, often cherished and more often, raring to get up and take on the world one more time.

I also feel chided, cajoled, challenged, stunned, and eager to check things out.  I learn and learn and learn.  Just earlier today, on an infomercial about brain health, I was reminded that information in the world doubles every four years and how that contributes to stress.  Good thing to think about because most of us overwhelm ourselves day in and day out.  How helpful it is to me to remind myself I’m not alone (you are not either) and there are some basics most all of us need to go back to now and then.  I appreciate everyone who has learned to share of themselves and leads the way for me to do the same.  I’d like to wish everyone the very best year they’ve ever had in the one ahead.  I’ll be back soon.