Category Archives: desire

SURVIVING AIN’T LIVING

Posted on by under denial, desire, Divine Truth, Emotional Injury, emotions, Facade, fear, God, God's Love, God's Truth, Mary and Jesus, Nature, self worth, shame, Spirits

fight-or-flight-uncertainty

I had a realisation in early November that I had spent a lot of my life in survival mode. In fact it has become a recognisable bed I was lying in, but not a very safe one. The last 3-4 years have been particularly bad and my external life had reflected that financially, in my home situation, physically via the cancer and emotionally just feeling numb and being okay about having so little.

Living in survival mode means you are always living in fear: fear of death, fear of destruction, fear that the few things you have in life will crumble away and you will fall into the abyss.  That is how I have felt for as long as I can remember. This terrible fear led to becoming a control freak – trying to manage aspects of my life – money, relationships, day to day living, and my son – so as to feel “safe.”  Living in the fear, but pretending to yourself you are not; “its okay you’ve got it all under control Maxine.”

But the fact is in all those aspects of my life, I may have controlled them or felt I did, but they weren’t natural or loving and none were being done very well. Control does not allow for love to flow and controlling addictively to avoid fear is unloving. Avoiding fear, living in fear is unloving, restrictive and self-denying as well as unloving to others as to avoid feeling vulnerable you try to control those around you, sometimes heavily disguised as “taking care” of them, but still controlling them.

Being in survival mode is really bad for your health too. When we are in flight or fright mode we produce adrenalin by the pint and all this adrenalin constantly pumping around our system isn’t good. In the end it creates a toxic environment and it is exhausting. Now that I have started to pay attention to my fear, I have become aware that daily I do so many things to avoid feeling unsafe physically, emotionally and spiritually.

I have become an expert in batting back, ducking, avoiding, distracting myself from feeling fear. In the process I have created a facade that is dull and hard and uncreative. I have lost more and more of myself.

However, compassionately, there are some deep causal events and emotions that started this whole survival mode. John Bradshaw, in his book Homecoming, says “a witness to violence is a victim to violence.” I had a father who was violent, a step father who was even more so both, physically and mentally to my mother. I sat on the stairs or behind my bedroom door many times listening to the shouting and violence going on near me. I even have a memory of standing in my cot and feeling this big dark red cloud coming into the room. It was rage – I think it was my father’s rage, at my mother, I don’t have the details, but I feel panicky and scared…and there is still much I haven’t remembered yet.

Then there is the other violence, of being shouted at, clipped round the ear, blamed and shamed in one way or another as my parents, unable to cope with their own emotions, sent them my way. The terror that comes when you think your mother has killed herself – again and again and again: all these things and so many more.  I wish my experience was unusual, but it isn’t or am I minimizing it? As a small child, all these things shake you to the core and it has left me with the constant feeling that my world will end at any moment, that there is no solid foundation to exist from and at times no real love to be found.

When I hit the wall in November, my body aching from doing a job that was too demanding and pushing myself to the limits with it, and only months after major surgery and cancer and then coming home to live in a place I really don’t like, reduced down to living pretty much in one room with no space to get the things I love out – my art materials and writing materials and no money to buy new clothes when I need to or enjoy things I love, counting every penny and struggling to pay off some debts.

So I started to feel some emotions about it – yes mostly effect emotions – sadness, and some frustration, but mostly sadness, at the situation I was in, and created by my unhealed emotions, my choice to keep suppressing them. A painful realisation, but to be frank to feel something was a good thing and it created some small shifts in me, about what God wants for me and it not this – this small life.

In relation to this, for the last 2-3 of years I have also become aware that I have attracted a large group of spirits who do not want what is best for me, but only want to control my life, zap my energy and keep me small and at times completely destroy me. They have been with me for a good while I feel. By not feeling my emotions I allow that attraction to continue. It has been tough dealing with this. I feel them sitting on my shoulders, at times suffocating and crowded. It has kept me awake at night the last few months and I have felt I have no privacy whatsoever. Every time I try to take a step forward I feel they come for me. It has felt like a real battle for my soul. So I am in the process of feeling more truth about this, bit by bit.

I am letting myself feel that facade, I am returning to long-ignored passions that connect with my real self and I am doing a few things to come outside of my “comfort” zone/prison. They are a few small steps, but I am feeling a shift in some areas. I still have much to learn and feel and discover, but letting that control addiction go is tricky, but I really am beginning to dislike it. It doesn’t feel like me, just like a strange creature that has taken over. Plan A: to turn from rock to river!

I wanted to share this, to help those of you who may be doing the same as I have been. It is so important to be honest with ourselves, to look at our lives and see what it is showing us about our unhealed emotions, our self worth and our denial. We do have the power to change all this and we have much greater power to change all this if we include God in the process.  Step one, for me, is working through blocks to receiving God’s love. (which would so help me soften to emotions).

The blocks I think I have identified about God are (constantly up for review!):

  • Anger that God has made this so difficult (I feel it is very difficult).
  • Fear I will never receive God’s love/lack of faith
  • False beliefs about God judging me and deciding I don’t deserve Love ( parental stuff)
  • An addictive demand that God should give me love despite my lack of desire/fears about receiving or when I am being unloving.
  • Lack of faith that God is good and that her Love will make me happy.
  • I have more faith in my addictions
  • Lack of self worth prevents the openness to receiving.
  • A fear of emotional overwhelm/losing control if I receive God’s love; what will happen?

 

These realisations have created some changes. A week after my meltdown a new job came up and I got it and I am working in a more loving environment – though still having to watch my own self care in it, and with that my finances have improved and I am looking for somewhere new to live, and I am writing more and have joined something called solo autobiographical theatre which is triggering memories and emotions and pulling me out of a comfort zone and challenging me to do it despite fears that come up.

The Divine truth teachings are never far from my mind and heart. The God blocks are still there, but by listening to the videos by Jesus and Mary, I learn about God’s truth and re-educate myself about Love and Truth and error and as always nature is one of my greatest teachers about God and her Love. Also, books like the Robert James Lee trilogy (see the extras page) give such hope and wonder and curiosity to keep searching and investigating the truth about God, and Love and life. I am blessed to have this knowledge and experience at my fingertips and I do not want to walk away from it until I start to really walk it and keep walking it, with no turning back and no fear.

This year is about my moving out of survival mode, of really finding out what being me is about, what loving myself is really about: to move from the pretend love that feeding my addictions gives me and finding out what God’s love really feels like.  To create a blunt analogy I feel I have been clinging to a pile of hard crap that I have convinced myself was a soft cushion: comfortable, but sticky and not allowing me to move much. Clinging because I felt there was this deep bottomless pit below, a drop into the unknown, to a point of meaninglessness and death, very related to childhood fears and flight/fright mode.  Now it is time to let go of clinging to this crap, falling into the abyss…whatever it may. My feeling is instead of nothingness or danger , I will find God’s hands there ready to catch me and lift me up to greater heights, even with wings to fly – just has he planned. I can see even see that knowing smile…… Yes my child, here YOU are… here you truly are…

Oh goodness, now won’t that be wonderful…

Maxine

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WORDSMITH

Posted on by under desire, poetry, self worth, True Self

I AM WRITING

I am writing because I love to

I am writing words on a page,

That dance,

And skip,

And run on paper.

Words that calm,

Excite, enthuse and trigger.

Words that have magic

When strung together,

In rhythm, or wild and free.

 

Words unique to me,

To my expression,

My history,

My emotions.

Words that warm the heart,

Or break it.

Shattering the world

To tears and deep blue sadness,

To gut wrenching fear

And the fiery gate of anger.

Words to ignite,

To aid our flight

Awaken our soul, alive.

 

And words that

Feel too small to tell the truth

Of wonder.

But, words it is and words they are,

That help me

Speak and feel

And learn and create

And feed a passion

Of mine.

 

I write because I long to write

It’s simple really

There black and white.

To write, to write, to write.

sharpen-snoopy-writing

 

When I was young I was a very good reader and had read all the set books by the time I was 7 and so became a “free reader:” a pupil who was able to read anything at all on the shelves. I don’t remember all the books, but I do remember visiting the book shelves time and time again. At home, we hardly had any books. I remember one of my grandmothers’s buying me a whole set of Enid Blyton books one year and I read them again and again. I read anything, even my brother’s “Fantastic Four” annuals or my mother’s Catherine Cookson.

I loved reading and escaping into worlds other than my own, enjoying adventures and imaginary places, away from harsh realities. When I was older, I read a lot of Jane Austen, which were one of many I read out loud in order to hear myself speak differently and experiment with how it felt to talk as they did in the 19th Century. This is something I still like to do. I am fascinated with words and language: how they sound, feel and what they can express. But words are not limitless and I feel there are many things where words are not enough, but words can and do express a whole realm of wonder, information and imagination.

At some point during my childhood and certainly by the time I was 12 I started to write a diary or journal and to this day I continue to do so. It has never really been a daily event and there have been long periods where I wrote nothing at all. When I look back at my diaries aged 12, 13, 14 or 15 I cringe at some of the topics; boys, what my friends are doing, that kind of thing. But in between the normal sort of teenage stuff are painful entries of insecurity, fear, anger, frustration and sadness.

Then as a teenager some of that expression started to form into poetry and is still a form I love as it can be uninhibited by form, structure or grammar. It can flow in any direction, made from three words or three hundred. When I was teaching English for a while, I told the students that everyone is a poet (which I still believe) and then I proceeded to read a short, but powerful seven-word poem by my son. After their exclamations of approval I would tell them Ben has Down’s syndrome and could hardly write when he thought of that poem. All he did was tell his teacher what he saw and felt.

For me, it is that simple, poetry is about your physical senses and most importantly your feelings. What can you see, hear, taste, smell, touch and feel? What colours are in that butterfly? What happens in your heart when you watch her flitter around your face? How do you feel when you see scenes of war on the TV? Or hear that teenagers are lazy? It is human nature to respond to everything around us. We can try to shut it down and do successfully at times, but never completely: there is always a feeling their somewhere.

I recently watched a great documentary on the BBC called “We are Poets” about the Leeds Young Authors.  These are a group of 13-19 year old who are taught how writing can help them find their voice and expression and even discover who they are and want to be. It helps many young people deal with difficult life circumstances and take them away from negative life choices. They performed their poetry, sometimes called Slam Poetry and what impressed me the most was the passion with which they wrote, the passion with which they spoke and also that they never shied away from difficult subject matter. They said it – as it is for them and thanks to the project they have discovered all this at a young age.

For myself, I am nearing 50 and it was only about  5-6 years ago that I started to tell others I liked to write and that maybe I would like to do this more and maybe I had something to write about. It wasn’t easy to say. I felt others would laugh at such a dream or read something I had written and confirm what I felt inside that maybe I couldn’t really write and like a tone deaf singer I didn’t know how terrible my voice truly was.  Starting this blog over two and half years ago was a big step and a big statement. It was the moment when I decided I had to stop worrying less about what others thought and just do what I love.

Robby and I had been to a talk about six months earlier, when Jesus had given an example of a friend who had followed his passion to make music, sing and play his guitar. He had started off just playing for himself, just because of his love for it and over time as he worked through emotions and grew his desire he was now getting paid to do what he loved.  The story stayed with me and so the blog started. Since then, I have cried tears over all the years I didn’t follow my passions and dreams and having cancer really put into perspective the time I had wasted in not writing, not painting and not doing what I love and even discovering other new loves.

A creeping apathy had overtaken my life, a slowly creeping ivy where I had focused more on my son than myself, where I had found it easier to avoid feeling fear and live in it; avoid my feelings of self worth, therefore stifling and strangling my creativity. Suppressing sadness, fear, anger also suppressed joy, creativity, spontaneity and wonder. I had become addicted to struggle and made myself so grey, so small, I was barely there at all. I had sinned against myself, by denying a huge and vital part of who I am and who God designed me to be: creative, colourful, wondrous.

Writing this blog was the beginning of something – a place where I have explored my emotions, uncovered lies, truth and facade. It has been a journey of self doubt and self discovery, but most importantly it has been a place of growing confidence in my own expression. I have made mistakes, ones which devastated me at times, because I have an injury to always get things right, but which over time have taught me to be softer in these mistakes and just enjoy the process of writing. And I have enjoyed  it all and in the last few months my passion to write has grown, along with my confidence.

I have taken the first steps on this yellow brick road and I am loving it! I started writing the other day and a character grew from it, a character with a story. I found and edited a children’s story I wrote six years ago. I continue to write my journal and my poems and I am planning to go back through the boxes now with all the odd bits of paper in them of ideas and bits of writing in them and see what’s there. I have also signed up to a writing magazine and I sent a little article to a local one.

God has heard me and many Law of Attractions are happening to confirm my desire. A book appeared called “Freeing the Writer Within;” I was given a free ticket to a poetry and storytelling event; someone else has offered me a free place on a storytelling and performance workshop; I went to a cafe and got chatting to a lady opposite me and she turned out to be Marcia Willets, who has written 28 successful novels and then I met an amazing group of people who work for and with artists who are migrants or refuges and with the aim to portray a different message and challenge perceptions via music, writing, performance and film. Amazing hey?!

We were made to be passionate about what we love, to be passionate about life and all it can offer us if we allow ourselves to feel all the things that have stopped our passion in the first place and taking action will cause this. Writing and my deepening desire to write more is triggering issues of self worth, also reflected in the work I currently do to survive, rather than do work I love.  Every day I feel the pain of this in some way, but also feeling more will to keep writing and expressing and dancing with words and see where it takes me and what it creates in my life.

So in celebration of this dance here is a little poem I jotted down after watching “We are Poets.”  Thank you to the Leeds Young Authors for the inspiration and for showing me how to slam it, and to Jesus and Mary for helping me know it is good to do what I love and demonstrating to me the joy in doing do. If I could perform this poem it would not be meekly said.

I WROTE

I wrote when my heart was Breaking 

and I was Aching for more.

I wrote when my world was crazy 

and the in- fighting

Never stopped.

I wrote to make sense 

of the times when nothing did.

I wrote to soothe my pain

Or scream insane

When they did, what they did

To hurt me, ignore me, 

confuse me and taught me 

to hate me. 

Words were my only friends

The only honesty

In the lies that burned into

my heart

By the ones who were 

meant to love the most. 

But instead broke

me.

In words I found my strength,

my dance, my ‘I’ again.

In poetry 

I am me. 

 

Maxine Bell @2016

Creating Change by Desire and Action

Posted on by under ACTION, desire, Divine Truth, emotions, fear, God's Laws, God's Truth, humility, REal self

Transform Fear Into Action Concept

 

One of the big things that has changed for me in the last couple of months is my desire and decision to take action. It also means the penny has finally dropped in that regard! Jesus has been talking about taking actions to challenge you fears and I have been listening to that for over 4 years and not really done a thing about it. Fear has been and is my God currently, so I have been bowing to that God, sadly, instead of the better option of God as my God!  I hadn’t even wanted to acknowledge – in fact completely – ignored my total inaction and then wondered why my life wasn’t improving. We think because we get up, breath, eat, sleep, work and say hi to friends sometimes that we are living. I would call that existing and a minuscule image of the life God wants for us. I have been taking action on two levels: Firstly, taking action despite my fear; that is not living in my fear, which would prevent any or very little action.  Secondly, acting on my desires, things I have an interest in or love, or would like to try. On both counts the results have come quickly and amazingly in some cases. So it works!! Another penny drops! I see my guide wiping sweat of his brow with relief as he has been knocking on my door with that one for quite a while.

God has created some universal, unchangeable laws which creates incredible systems that will continuously show us when we are in error, how to correct it and most importantly to bring us back to loving choices and a better life – and relationship with God, if we choose.  These Laws include the Law of Cause and Effect, the Law of Attraction, the Law of Compensation, the Law of Desire and the Law of Forgiveness and Repentance as well as the Law around receiving Divine Love. Jesus and Mary have discussed these laws in many videos and are better qualified to explain in more detail so if you want to know more please check out their website: divinetruth.com.  Today I am focussing on the Law of Desire and its connection with taking action.

An important point for me to reiterate is because I am someone who is also still very suppressed and resistant to allowing all my emotions to flow I would say this is absolutely necessary if anything is going to change and if emotions are going to get triggered.  Having lived in fear for so long and created a large “comfort” zone  to feel safe and followed certain routines, including avoiding people a lot of the time, I wasn’t creating situations that would bring up my emotions. I desired not to feel, not to feel unsafe or unloved and so God, who always listens to our desires allowed me to do that, because He gave me free will. God knew it wasn’t my best choice, but also knew I would need to come to that realisation myself. I know there have been many times in the recent years where I ran away from opportunities and experiences that would have be in line with my soul’s true desires as well as situations that would have allowed my soul to grow because of my fear and subsequent self deception.

I know many of you will relate to this and as I even write it I feel sadness that I did that and sad that so many of us so do. We hide our light under a bushel, run from so many things, on the path of fear of doubt, which shrinks our soul, prevents us from being our real wonderful self that God created. How many times have you not answered the phone, crossed the street from someone or something, desired to do something good or creative for yourself and made excuses and reasons why you can’t, how many times how you “should” yourself because you felt obliged or pressured in doing it the way others expect of you or to avoid their judgement? How many times have you taken the “comfortable” option, the cosy one that reassured yourself it was the right one because it didn’t feel frightening or threatening? So many times….

On reflection, I can look back and see that the feeling I gained was one of safety and comfort, but in a very superficial way because I still felt afraid of people’s anger or disapproval, for instance. I was going on with my life, but with little, if any, real joy. I was waking up, going through my routines, but not doing much of anything I truly wanted to and inside I felt hopeless and confused by my own existence. Was this it? Another episode of Grand Designs?

I am being a bit hard on myself, because I did try new things at different phases and every now and then I did something that made my heart sing and my soul dance.  I did an English degree when I was 30 and loved every minute of it; I did a short Art and Design course in 2007 which I loved. I experimented with self help books and therapies and the new age philosophies. I did keep looking, but then in recent years it all came unstuck as deep inside I still felt unhappy and apathetic.  Now, I know the reason was that my soul is heavy with negative emotions that need to be released to allow joy and passion to exist. There isn’t room in a soul, a damaged soul, for everything. Jesus explains in his FAQs on The Human Soul, that truth and error on the same subject cannot exist in the soul at the same time. So, for example, I love art and when I paint I am content, but for the last 30 years I have done relatively little. Why have I not done something I love? There are a number of reasons and many of them connected to an emotion of not feeling good enough, fear of mistakes and failure and such like. So every time I have started my art again, it doesn’t last for long, because I have had emotions that come up that I don’t want to feel and so I stop again. My soul has been in a battle – trying to feed the desire, but also having a bunch of feelings saying “who do you think you are to paint? To call yourself an artist?”

But it not so much, that I can’t paint without feeling those emotions, it is that I have been denying that those emotions even exist in me. It is the denial and justification, to not act, that come with that that lead me not to paint and create. In the last year, I have felt some grief for the passions and desires I have not followed in my life – such as writing, art and ballet. Many of the reasons go back to my childhood and the limits on my self- expression and needs that were in play. This is more a causal emotion that is pretty big and will take me time to feel, but the top layers – the effects of these limits and the impact on my life I have started to feel. Starting my blog was part of this process – a statement to myself that I was and desired to be a writer.

woman take-action-today

However, since the penny dropped about taking action, I have been experimenting with things. I have been putting myself in situations where I am among new people much more and it has triggered  emotions of low self worth: I constantly feel that people won’t and don’t like me, for instance. I need to allow the flow of the emotion more, but feeling what comes up for me in those situations.

I changed my job to do something completely different and taken out of my comfort zone fear is being triggered constantly.

I have also done something about my art. Last year I was successfully accepted on an Illustration Degree Course. It all happened so quickly. I saw an advert of an open day at a local art college and went to it. During that visit, I got so excited by the Illustration department; I applied for the course, got an interview and was accepted. I deferred the course when I became ill, but could if start this December. Sadly, I do not have enough money to pay the course fees now, but I feel that is to do with issues I still have around money and security. However, despite this, I decided to still pursue my desire to do art and I have and plan to do short courses in art and I applied for an art studio because I really wanted a proper space to paint in. I got accepted and I was very honest in my application about the lack of art I had done, but what I hoped for the future. I also get to work alongside established artists and learn from them.  It all happened so easily too and that is the gift of the taking action and working with the Law of Desire. Whatever happens, being humble to what I am being shown will be the key to progress.

If we take action, it may not always immediately seem to go to plan, but God’s truth is it always goes to plan with the true desire of our soul. So if our desire has some error in it, or an error in our soul affects that desire, God will show us and if we are humble to feeling the emotions, things will change rapidly. We can purify that desire and if it is in harmony with Love then God will co- create instantly with us.

We often are not aware of our true desires and we convince ourselves of ones that may not be so disturbing, but are actually in a facade. We may say we desire a relationship with our mother, for instance, but if she has caused us great harm, our real emotion may be we want to kill her (I certainly recognise this emotion), not love her. I know that seems extreme and is a very dark emotion, and it doesn’t mean we act on that desire, but that feeling of wanting to harm another is real and we need to feel it. It hides a pile of grief.

When I was involved in the New age beliefs I met many “happy” people declaring “All is Well,” but that wasn’t what I felt from them – what I felt was other emotions they were desperately trying to run away from and they didn’t want to see the mess the world or maybe their life was in. Of course, I was doing the same, running away from my emotions, but just not agreeing all was well (and besides seeing them actually made me pray for truth.)

The bonus or natural result of taking some action and acting on my desires has been truly wonderful already  both in day to day life, but also that emotions are rising to the surface – and I have only  just started, but it has now spurred me on to keep taking actions, and each time I do and feel the results, I will get braver, and less in fear and when the scales start to tip in favour of love, not fear, so much is possible and I am sure that God will do a little skip and dance that one of his prodigal children is coming home. He will do it for me and He will do it for you.

So if you have one desire, particularly if you struggle and resist emotions, as I do, then desire to take action and take it. It is enabling me to see and feel some emotions I didn’t know were there, even feel my resistance, sense and start to feel emotions about God, and people and I am getting to experiment with and experience the result of following some desires that I have had all my life.

To see God’s laws in action – all Laws of Love, is also a faith builder and scientific evidence too. The experiment always leads to a result of some sort. No experiment: no result – just stagnation and unhappiness.

I was recently interviewed for a new website www.divinetruthpodcast.com and I said in that I have the gift of knowing about the Divine Truth teachings and I have been looking at the path for over four years now. I like the look of it, I believe it is the truth, but now I think I may be taking my first step… and that I do feel excited about, despite the challenges to come, I do have some faith in it, that I want to build and to get to a point when it not just about my own healing, but also about truly knowing my God – not the fear one , which has only created apathy and despair, but  get to know the real, tangible, feeling God who really wants to know the real me.

Maxine

Previously on.. An Education in Love

Posted on by under desire, love, Mary and Jesus, Uncategorized

I don’t know what to say, but each assistance group get’s better and better. I have listened, but not acted on what I have listened to so far. Current events in my own life, my further suffering and pain, have caused me to confront more truth in myself, step by step and to really try to see that what I understand as love is mostly very wrong and extremely fear based. Fear has and is still my God, but watching these 2016 assistance group videos ( downloaded on divinetruth.com) are truly wonderful. I still have to do all the homework from them, and am just currently jotting down initial feelings and thoughts that arise. As Mary as done, asking myself questions – hopefully the right ones – in order to see truthfully where I am at and where I might like to be. Jesus is, as ever, direct, loving and truthful. This is great, great stuff – more than most of us realise and Mary’s own voice, via her blog, is honest, encouraging and heart-provoking. Go on… experiment… have a peek…

Notes Along The Way

Recapping the ‘Developing My Will to Love’ Group

“I like Homeland, but I don’t think it’s as good as that other show, Previously on Homeland. That thing is action-packed.”—Amy Poehler at the 2013 Golden Globe Awards

Watching Group One

I had so much fun binge watching the recordings of our first Assistance Group – Developing My Will to Love.

Just like when I’ve seriously watched TV programmes in the past (BSG – I mean you) I went through the full gamut of emotions while watching these groups – anticipation, sorrow, laughter, cringes and so on.

I called Jesus on numerous occasions to tell how amazing he was. I wrote down certain things he said verbatim because I want to print them on t-shirts (or maybe tattoo them on my forearm for life-long handy reference).

At various times I talked out loud to the TV screen.

And…

View original post 2,279 more words

PAINTING MYSELF….

Posted on by under desire, Emotional Injury, emotions, God's Truth, Grief, humility, Hurt Self, REal self, Soul, True Self

Image

Much of who I am has been lost much of my life.

Many of you may feel this, I do.

It doesn’t mean we have done nothing with our life, but it can mean much of what we have done in life, work and love has occurred more because of the belief systems we were brought up in: what others made us believe about ourselves and who we are.   With this understanding I wonder how many of us actually follow our true desires and passions? Or are we following what others expect of us or what we feel is responsible, sensible? Or even what reflects our own lack of self worth or an inability to break away from cultural and social expectations? In fact there can be a huge self deception or denial that this has happened: we are so used to be “other” me we forget to even question who we are. I started writing this weeks ago and it has taken time for me to feel what it is I actually want to write as I have a myriad of emotions attached to these thoughts and the journey of self discovery continues.

I have known for years I wasn’t who I really am, but have felt lost in the search, apathetic and despairing at times as I listened to voices in my head saying I wasn’t worth the effort. Thank God in between these moments were  gifts of clarity and a fighting spirit that told me there was something else and to keep searching. I prayed and then I was gifted a wonderful law of attraction when this picture popped up on Facebook a while ago: it grabbed my attention and I never did read any of the words that came with it, as just looking at it, feeling what it meant for me was enough. It sent me into hours of feeling grief: a deep sadness that I didn’t know who I was. I stared at the beautiful lady, an artist’s creation, but asleep and unaware that she was a work in progress. She was alive, but not living. Yet the artist continued to paint, to bring her more alive: maybe one day she would notice and wake from her dreams to dance across the canvas. Maybe one day I will, I thought.

But first I needed to feel, to feel the incredible sadness I felt that at 47 I still couldn’t identify fully which bits of myself were really me, the true me: not wounded me, not facade me, not the me everyone else thought or expected I should be. I have searched before, but now I realised I had been looking with my mind too much: positive thinking, doing, doing, doing, change your thoughts, but all without really feeling so a temporary change followed by denial and frustration with myself. So logically if my mind hadn’t worked it out enough to make a permanent change I needed to experiment with another way. I have been listening to Divine truth talks for just over two years now, but it has taken time to get past some of the confronting emotions they bring up in me. On a soul level I recognised that I had found something beyond what I had known before and that it wouldn’t leave me. I had been asking passionately for truth a year before and I wasn’t going to throw it out when it finally came. In the talks, Jesus constantly says we need to develop humility: a willingness to feel all of our feelings. God made us emotional beings and yet we live in a world of fear: one where the biggest fear is feeling. In fact I think we have a terror of it, so convinced are we that emotions that overwhelm us, might kill us. However, I believe, it is suppressing what we truly feels is what kills us.

So I have and continue to feel what has brought me to this point of not knowing myself and even though I have a good way to go some of the clouds have started to lift. First thing, was at least intellectually accepting first until I feel it, that I am not what those voices have told me. I am not a piece of crap, a worthless person: I am not the only one God can’t save. The voices after all are just the voices of other adults in my childhood and human in spirit form that have similiar beliefs to my parents who join in the emotional abuse: the voices are just other wounded humans, who because they are not willing to feel their own feeling project at children, like I was, and that I/ we carry through to adulthood. Until now I have not known how to quiet the voices. Of course when you see why they are still wounded and still needing to hurt others ( consciously or unconsciously) there is the clue: I NEED TO FEEL MY FEELINGS not to stay like them. I also need to believe GOD’S TRUTH ABOUT ME: I am unconditionally loved and loveable – a wonderful creation. I chose to at least accept these two things intellectually at first, and as I allow my emotions to be  felt I have started to feel these truths more in my soul: a tiny bit right now, but its a start.

So what emotions? Well we will all have our own journey with this, but for me the first part was a life time of suppressed anger. I have for two years been making excuses about feeling my childhood anger: on we haven’t got enough space, what about the neighbours etc etc . However, the truth is I have been so terrified of punishment, of not being seen as a good girl, I chose not to feel and release it. Now I go in my bedroom and beat the crap out of my bed and look I am still alive! AND no one punished me! AND a couple of times it has led me to tears of sadness. Step by step , layer by layer : anger, fear, grief. Praying for God’s help and God’s love. I have stubbornly been very self reliant all of my life ( it felt safer) , but now I am finally surrendering to the idea I want and need help. And if I want help why not go to the top guy/girl. Always better to ask help from someone more loving, more knowing, more truthful than yourself. Stuff self reliance, giving God reliance a go!

This surrender is now uncovering joy I haven’t felt for years, love I didn’t know existed and a gentle blossoming and feeling I matter and I might even have something to contribute. I am allowed to follow my passions and desires!  When I was younger I was made to feel I had to be responsible for others, I became a carer of my mother many times , as she struggled with life,  unhappy in her own unfulfilled dreams.  The projections and expectations were so high I believed I had to care for others, except myself: in fact anything I did for myself was just selfish. Sadly, many of us believe this and the world is full of those who believe they need to self sacrifice themselves versus those who have a deep sense of real self-entitlement. Both are wounded states, from deep insecurities and self- doubt. I shrank in these false beliefs, I got lost, and in recent years have left my shattered dreams at the bottom of an ocean of despair.

There have been times when I pursued dreams and I remember the feeling of aliveness and passion: sheer joy. Yet they didn’t seem to lead anywhere because at the end of them ( like the degree I did when I was 30) I was lost again. My sense of self has been too fragile and I believed I would never be good enough, not matter what I did. I was also filled with an overdeveloped sense of responsiblity to my son and others: it was easier to help others than myself: huge amounts of guilt. If I truly decided to help myself I would need to face the truth of what happened to me as a child, I would need to feel how unloved and unaccepted I felt: that was too painful. Like many of us, I didn’t want to feel that.

Now I do! But now I can feel it  ( work in progress!) , not deny it. If I feel it , it moves and it eventually moves out of me: e-motion. The more I experiment with this, the more I feel the benefits. This really does work. I am healing my relationship with myself  ( which includes my soul mate) and with my creator, my parent: God. I still have a huge amount to discover, but like any good scientist, I now realise, things change because you don’t give up just because you have a bad day.  I feel like a I am crawling out of my chrysalis and God is holding my hand. Still scared, but not trying not to live in my fear.

Every day I grab more moments to find myself. The other day I had to shop for new clothes and as I tried on clothes I went on quite a journey working out what clothes were really me, tuning into feelings of expectations from others, my fears of what others would think and my small wounded self. Interesting how a shopping trip can become a new trip: finding me. Feeling my way round I found some great clothes.

So now I am an artist of myself and God provides the canvas……….. layer by layer, brushstroke by brushstroke……. here I come…..

With love to my brothers and sisters,

Maxine Bell

Popping the Cork..

Posted on by under desire, Divine Truth, Emotional Injury, emotions, Facade, fear, God's Truth, Parenting, suppression

pop the cork

It has been a few weeks since I wrote. I have felt uninspired to write or pursue any other passions, like painting, dancing or the kayaking I have longed to try. I have been so flat and it happened out of the blue. Even writing today feels like I am pulling a heavy stone along with the keyboard: a dense weight is in my system that I didn’t understand until a few days ago. If you follow my posts you will know that Robby and I have a personal spiritual journey: soul journey and we feel we have a found a teacher who really understands God’s truth: Divine Truth. There is a ton of free talks and other resources on their website ( see the links page) and I have been listening to FAQs on the human soul. These talks contain incredible knowledge and I suddenly am getting an understanding of why I feel some things, but hardly anything of the deep causal emotions in me. These are the emotions that create change in our soul when we feel them and release them: when released they open a window for us to receive Gods love if we desire to. These are the ones I have really found hard to access. I understand many of them on an intellectual level. I can recall certain events in my childhood that created them. But feeling them? NO! And getting frustrated or judgmental about not feeling them only blocks the flow further.

We can often believe we have the desire to feel things, but if we did, it would just happen. The truth is I must not have the desire or will to feel these emotions. If I did, I would feel them. This is just fact. The fact is I am terrified to feel these strong emotions, to be overwhelmed. I am terrified of my anger and afraid of the level of my fear and in denial about how deep my grief may go…. and there is not just one causal to clear. It is the same for many of us. From our birth we are blocked from expressing our soul, from expressing full stop. We learn very quickly that to express our emotions can lead to punishment, being ridiculed or humiliated. Our parents do it because it was done to them and so forth. Without judgement, observing an everyday event, I noticed a young mother on the bus with her baby last week. Every time it wimpered the dummy was put in her child’s mouth: it was silenced. I also felt how self conscious she felt if the baby made a noise, as though all eyes were on her and at times many were. I see it in the street too, a toddler yells, people stare and whisper, judging the mothers ability to keep her child quiet. We don’t like the noise, but we are terrified of the emotion. This shutting down of our children is acceptable and is even considered good discipline by the parents in our soceity. Despite outward changes in family life I observe the old belief that children should be seen and not heard running through family life, education and soceity.

In some families this becomes more extreme, where the parents lives dominant and the child is made to feel unloved, unseen and unheard. In mine, there was so much drama going on around the adults in the house, we all felt secondary and fairly invisible and unimportant. It may not have been deliberate but it just was: a sad and painful was. I quickly learned to silence myself. I created a cocoon to protect myself from anger and abuse. Of course it was an imaginary bolt hole. I still experienced the violence and chaos of my youth and sucked in all the emotions and much of myself to please my mother and the other adults around me. As a young adult I continued with this habit and now am an expert at sucking it in, maintaining “control” and avoiding those deep pains. But it has become exhausting. I am tired of the weight I feel in my body, on my shoulders, in my neck and hips. I am drained from holding in my emotions: stuffed full with pain with little room for  joy or love or my passions. It hurts. It hurts bad.

Jesus explains we need huge amounts of humility, desire and will to feel our emotions, especially if we have suppressed them all our life. Two weeks ago my guides gave me a cartoon picture in my third eye. It was me with a narrow topped bottle stuffing in what looked like enough cloth to make a hot air balloon. I was stuffing away trying to keep this “balloon” from escaping. So when I have believed I haven’t had enough will to feel my emotions, that I need to build up those muscles of my will I was shown I have enough will, but I need to change where I am using it: from an unloving ( to myself) suppression and resistance to my emotions into a more loving and freeing feeling of my emotions. I need to use my will to set myself free. I have wasted so much energy resisting and rebelling against my true feelings and nature: it makes no sense. In fact, on reflection I know this holding on to my emotions made me ill in the past.

Well it makes no sense any longer for me. I have listened to how my soul works and I get it all intellectually, but these last two weeks some of it has been hitting my soul; suppression, resistance, presence, dominance. The talk on suppression really hit me and I felt how pointless my suppression was, I felt how tired I had made myself and now I pray and will myself to change this. I am still terrified and unsure of myself in this process, but I know what I have heard is truth. I know God wants this for me and I want this for me and I want to want it more. I do not wish to continue how I lived in the past and present: imprisoned in fear, trapped and caught up in addictions to stop feeling the fear. I know my story: we all have one. Much has happened to us, but it is not permanent. We can change this, we can change ourselves and the world we live in. We can do it the long way: still rebelliously independent from God or we can do the short way with God’s love to help us. The short way may take 20 years, but its better than another 47 years like this or another 1000 years doing it on my own.

I know now that I lost my passions a few weeks ago when I suppressed another emotion. When I shut down one emotion (a painful one) in my soul I helped shut down the rest. So tonight I had to use my will to write: I had to feel how it felt when I tried to write. In the use of my will and my feeling something shifted a couple of paragraphs in as I felt the truth in my soul of what I am learning and experiencing in trying to follow The Way of God’s Love. I felt the passion for that truth and I felt my love of writing, of words, of language, of self expression. This weekend I may paint. Its been too long since I played with the colour palette and pulled out all my boxes of “Stuff”: bits of fabric, paints, glitter, threads, wool, fur, and so on.

Opening up to our passions is one way to feel again. As we allow a feeling, we allow more. God created us as emotional beings: an expression of some of his qualities. This world is emotional. Look at the incredible detail and beauty of nature, of life and our response to it. Who doesn’t sigh at a beautiful view? Who doesn’t feel it stirring something in their soul? In those moments, we feel awe, wonder, love, gratitude, and maybe even a sense of knowing our Parent.

I now know I must do what I can to feel, anything and everything; watching out for my automatic shut down. I do not yet comprehend what it is to really feel. I do not yet comprehend what it is to really love and be loved. My soul knows a little truth, a little love, but I have kept it crammed mostly full of pain. I am now choosing to shift my will to relieve myself of this pain, to learn to experience joy. For now, I am a strange concoction of resistance and fear sitting alongside determination and occasionally love. All I can say is thank God it is God helping me. I am a tough nut to crack so bringing in the big guns really is the only way.

I apologise for the lack of flow in my writing, but at least I wrote because I wanted to. On a final note I want to share a post I saw that inspired me to write tonight. A post that demonstrates the love, imagination and playfulness of our Creator and Parent, but also reminded me I can play too, that I am part of that loving creation. I saw the flowers, I laughed, I felt, I got to see a fragment of God’s love in a photo. Take a peek at these amazing images: what I am calling “The heART of God’s Love.”

http://pulptastic.com/16-flowers-that-look-like-something-else/

With love

Maxine

When Enough is Enough

Posted on by under desire, Divine Truth, emotions, fear, humility, Hurt Self, self worth, Soul, Uncategorized

Image

When you reach that point of enough is enough it is a powerful point of change in your soul if you embrace it. By that I mean embracing all the emotions within and below that feeling: the anger, the fear, the despair, the sadness, the anticipation. Today I reached an “enough is enough” point. Today I felt the fire in my belly as I cried from within and realised what I had been viewing as enough, as ok, was not: what I believed to be alright for me to accept for myself was not good enough anymore. It was small thinking, shrinking violet stuff, that does not reflect the true light God gave me. Instead I have been living the life others told or projected at me and I believed them! I saw myself as unimportant, incapable, untalented, unattractive and without impact, all my efforts unnoticed and irrelevant. But listening to the Divine Truth teaching the last couple of years has taught me that much of what I was thinking was irrational and illogical, from a wounded place and false beliefs. So when I think of these “small” and negative thoughts about myself it does not equate logically with my belief that I am a child of God and loved beyond measure. It is not that God doesn’t love me this “small” me: she does, but that like any true parent, she lovingly rejoices when I am doing what I love, when I grow into the soul She intended. As far as we know God’s plans for us are infinite. They are as wondrous or more wondrous than all her beautiful creations on this planet. Look at detail in a snowflake, the colours in a feather, the various songs of the birds, the individual cells and workings of our physical bodies: God’s creation is intricate, beautiful, fascinating,  and evolving. We are his children and we are all these things and more.

But most of us live in the shadow of ourselves, crawling on the floor, when we were actually made to dance wildly. We continue in our low movements for a long time, until we develop a desire for something else. Sometimes it is a quiet stirring within, a gentle observation of the people and life around you. We start to notice what we are NOT and what we do not want to be; we start to question our lives, our work, our relationships. For many of us there are long periods of numbness, of a feeling of vague questioning of how we live: we have opened our eyes a little wider. In each of these moments we can continue to open our eyes to more or we can close them again out of fear, or swing back and forth between the two. In each of these moments we can decide to feel a bit more than the numbness, the confusion and instead to really feel the other emotions we are hiding.

So enough is enough gives us the opportunity to feel many things. I am still in the middle of it and as I write I can feel anger, frustration, fear and some deep underlying grief. I have had enough of financial struggle, I have had enough of not having a real home, I have had enough of not feeling who I am, I have had enough of not fully embracing my desires, of not living with passion. I have had enough! As I sit and list these a deep sadness arises, one I know I am only touching the surface of, but which I know is a blessing to feel. Not feeling this sadness has kept me stuck and wanting many times: a feeling of being half-alive or less. What low sense of worth kept me living in this way? Kept me from dancing my dance with zest and wonder? So many things, so many suppressed emotions which I am praying to feel and release. I can feel how afraid I have been of coming out of my shell, my little protective bubble, my cocoon as I call it. A cocoon I made way back in my childhood to survive that has now become my prison of fear. I have been trying to knock through the walls of this prison, brick by brick and I know when I hit an “enough” point it can involve me knocking through a whole section of the wall if I desire it with all my heart. And I do. I have reached the end of this particular tether.

Even as I write I feel so many things, but I am glad to feel the emotions in motion. Many times in my life I have felt so little and be so out of tune with what was true for me; what was real; what I desired. Now I know that to feel everything is how God intended me to be. When I shut down  the sad and bad feelings I also shut down to the joy and love. Even though for me to try to feel everything is a rocky road right now I really know deep in my soul this is what I  must do, what we all need to do, to get back, to be as God intended us to be: fully emotional beings and fully alive.

Enough is enough is a crisis point in our journeys and any crisis point is an opportunity and with any opportunity we have a choice. A choice to be more loving or a choice to be unloving. For me there is no choice right now than to be loving to myself, to open inch by inch, millimetre by millimetre to God’s love. In fact “enough is enough” increases my desire more and more, to be more loving, especially to  myself right now. And even though there is some anger to feel and feel below, I also feel passion. Passion to love myself, passion to live my dreams and desires, passion to help others with what I am learning and experiencing and feeling, passion to connect with myself and my soul mate and more passion to connect to my true parent, our mother/father God.

The Narrow way, as Jesus calls it, the Way of building a relationship God through Divine Truth, receiving Divine Love and humility ( the willingness to feel ALL of your emotions) is hard at times. It is so different from anything we have known. It confronts everything we think we know and in its process I have lost friends, confused my family and faced some tough truths about myself. But, I have also discovered how incredibly loving God has made this universe and beyond, for us. It may not appear so to some, but now I have an understanding of God’s laws and more of an understanding of why I have been unhappy and how to change that, I know this is The Way home; this is The Way to heaven. I have a huge way to go to say I have true humility. I resist, I fight, I beg, I jump back in fear, I rage: pulled between what I thought I knew, how I was existing, by not feeling much and the discovery of this new way which wants me to feel everything. But I have tried a million other ways to heal, to be happy and they have only been temporary. This Way is lasting…this Way transforms my soul to how God intended it: pure, innocent, loving, joyful and playful. This Way has become my Way.. not as a follower but as an active participant and creator of my own life. By my own will and desire I choose Love, I choose humility and I choose Truth: God’s truth. I may only just be letting go of the milk bottle in my growth, but I will not give up. I have had enough of what I have known before. Enough is truly enough and I am eternally grateful for the teachings I have listened to, that have now, in time sung their truth in my soul. Now I choose, I desire a new way, the Narrow Way.

So yes enough is enough and now there is more…

With love, Maxine

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