I have just read a wonderful story, written by a sister also trying to follow the Way. It is a lovely analogy of all of our stories and the hope we have to do things differently. Please check out the link below:
https://divinetruthhub.com/a-story-about-hurt-in-wolfdom/
We live in a world where we say “there are plenty more fish in the sea;” where we console ourselves over lost love by imagining another person is out there and that our perfect mate is our choice. We just have to find the “right” one and often these days we have a list of requirements: tall, slim, happy, positive, makes me laugh, kindness, takes care of me, nice eyes, long legs, large breasts, intelligent, sexy, a good cook and so the list goes on.
In the process of looking for a good match, we make mistakes and kiss many “frogs” before we find out prince or princess. This is the same whether straight or gay. We keep looking for that other half to fulfil our lives, that person who will make us happy and whom we can share our lives with and yet we don’t want to admit there is maybe just one other half. The truth is we are told there is not just one special person, that there are many who we could match with and we just look for that best match. A few people believe in finding “The One”, but are often mocked about this. Our ideas about love and relationships is very confused and contradictory.
In the western world, at least, our ears are constantly filled with songs of broken hearts and lost love. The other side of the coin is the number of programmes about dating, finding dates, and even weddings. We are certainly looking, but in fact many of us are pretty confused about the whole thing. I recently watched a few episodes of a programme in the in the UK called first dates. I felt it was a bit of escapism, but I also think inside I am also trying to work out this love/relationship stuff, just like the rest of you. Before the dates they are the participants what they are looking for and in so many people I notice the first things people list are physical, even down the type of teeth, the next most common thing is “fun,” “make me laugh” and “be positive and happy.” ( to me this indicates how afraid we are of each other’s sadness) .For women the other frequent request is be a gentleman and be big/strong; keep me safe and take care of me. There is very little mentioned about personality, qualities, ethics, morals, or much of any real depth. It may possibly be there, but they don’t say it.
Between the lines there is a lot of disappointment, confusion and hurt about love and relationships as well as a huge amount of fears about not being loved and accepted and safe. I too have these emotions, but what I have realised lately is that I have never felt truly seen or loved for myself. I always had this feeling that any mistake I made I would be punished and rejected. My belief is that to be loved I had to be perfect.
Then it hit me that the other side of this was that I had never allowed myself to be truly seen and that I didn’t even love or know myself so how could expect anyone else to love the real me. I don’t even know the real me, myself yet. I learnt early on in my childhood, like many of us, that to receive “love” I had to become the person that was acceptable to my parents and other adults around me. I had to be “good girl” or “helper” or “servant” or any other role that fitted their beliefs about me. I don’t remember my mother ever asking what dreams I had or what I would like to be. I just remember if I showed an emotion she didn’t like or expressed something she didn’t understand or want to hear or was too busy to listen too I was shut down, screamed at or ignored. So to not get punished or yelled at or ignored or rejected by my parents I became what they wanted and the feeling I have now is that “I” fragmented across the universe somewhere; went into hiding and quickly formed a facade that helped me survive, but in the long-term was and is deeply painful and got the point until recently where I really believe my facade is me.
This is the truth for most of us in one form or another and so we grow into adulthood with roles. For men is could be provider; strong; capable; husband; lover ( who knows what he’s doing) or “DIY-er, for example. For women there are many roles: carer; mother; nurturer; helper; virgin; sexy; sister; friend; multi-tasker and these days we are often expected to be able to and expected to be all of them plus have a career. It is pretty exhausting. But which one or any of them is us, the real us?
We can’t find love, I haven’t found love because I haven’t found me, and I haven’t found love because I haven’t even understood love. When I watched that dating programme I saw clearly, what Jesus has been teaching, that most relationships are based on co-dependency and we think that is love. We think that someone who fulfils all our needs or more truthfully, the “holes” in us is someone who loves us and we love someone if we fulfil all their needs: it is an emotionally addictive bartering system.The trouble with having a list of wants is that we are often never satisfied and is based on someone or both people sacrificing themselves or parts of themselves.
I can look back on all my relationships and see in each one I became who they wanted me to be. I fitted into their life, rather than discover what I wanted and when their were times I started to seek something for myself the relationship would start to break down: the bartering system started to shatter. In this process, I compromised myself in so many ways: self-love, sexually, ethically and morally. Over time, my disappointments and hurts and pain got deeper and my demands to them got greater. I tried to have control over everything and I got angry and more in addiction. My fear and sadness got greater and the things I did and the things I wanted partners to do to stop me feeling my sadness and fear got darker.
Co-dependency is a sticky, thick, ugly thing. It is all about facade and it may feel “comfortable” or “safe” because it helps us avoid painful emotions, but is does not lead us to love. How can we be intimate when we are not being our true selves? We are being a lie and living a lie. I feel very sad about the lie I have lived for so long and because it has been lived for so long there is a lot of lies/facade to break down and a lot of unlovingness to myself and others to face.
So how to do we change it? How do I change it? For me, apart from a lot of self-reflection and increasing my longing to understand and know the truth I have also been trying to learn about love; the real truth about love – God’s truth about love. It isn’t easy and I find myself confused at times, fighting between old belief systems, the world’s belief systems, versus what Jesus and Mary are teaching. The facts are there though – look at the world – if we knew love, it would not be as it is. If we knew about love, we would not be so obsessed with our version of romantic love that seems to go wrong constantly. We are not being honest that we just don’t know. The fact is I think we just have to start again – look at the whole thing again.
Something else has hit me in recent years and listening to Divine Truth is the idea that I have a soulmate – THE other half of my soul: the perfect partner for me, created for me by God. Yep, despite free will, it seems that we don’t have a choice in who our soulmate is! That is pretty confronting if you compare it with the world’s view. We can of course reject our soulmate and try to defy what God created for us, but for me it is a fact I can’t ignore. I am not sure if I have accepted it 100%, but I do know that I can’t just look at any man anymore. As those of you who have followed my blog you will know I have suspicion who my soul mate is, but because of all my emotional injuries I really don’t know for sure and to be honest, not even sure how I could have attracted him into my life even temporarily. I have some deep emotions to heal around gender and sexuality and other things.
But, logically, it makes sense that to know the other half of me, I need to start knowing who I am. If I want to be intimate with my other half, I have to find that intimacy with myself: fearlessly and I have to start challenging my beliefs about love because they sure haven’t worked so far. The “love” I have known has been conditional and in God’s eyes that isn’t love. Jesus teaches, love is a gift: unconditionally and in my heart I don’t know that yet.
I have been reading a book called “Loveability: how to love and to be loved” by Robert Holden and he talks about our deep fear that we are unloveable and it has led to our obsession with falling in love. This obsession is about being loved rather than being loving, indicating that fear of unloveablity. He says we need to stop falling and start thinking what real love is. This is what Jesus has been saying for 2000 years – what is real love and indicating that real love is demonstrated constantly by God in so many ways in our lives.
In the book, unconditional love is summarised and is very similar to what Jesus teaches so I like what was written:
I think hearing that Love is a gift has been one of the most important things I have heard. It really made me think about my demands, my fears and truly how loving or not I have been over the years. From this point, I can ask myself: do I really love this person freely, without condition? Am I willing to gift my love without expectation or demand? Then if I feel any demand or expectation I know in that moment I am not loving them.
Also, do I really want to know them? Do I really want them to know me? Am I prepared to be vulnerable and open and humble to the errors and fears in me? This is intimacy – being prepared to be completely vulnerable and it scares the crap out of me and yet I am also curious. I have tried the other way and it has brought me much unhappiness, and suffering.
We need to be prepared to see the mountain of evidence that we know little about love and that’s okay. Just be honest about where we are at and build a desire to know the truth. When I was a child I had this feeling, among all the chaos around me, that if they just loved more things would be better: that love would be the answer. When we are kids we do know much more than the adults around us often. I grew up sadly, feeling my heart had been very badly battered and bruised – but it wasn’t and isn’t love that does that. It is not-love that does that. So to find love, to know love, we need to look at the not-love in the world: the not-love in ourselves, our false beliefs, our neediness, our fear, our grief.
We can’t change things we are lying about – because a lie isn’t a reality: it is a lie. Only the truth can create change, because it is truth and logically truth is real. For me, my personal truth is too impacted by emotional baggage at the moments so I look for a greater truth – a higher truth and only God has that. That is what makes God, God – she knows more than us – about love and about what is true. Jesus says to learn about love we have to learn about Love from someone who obviously knows more about love than us. Weirdly, we often try to learn from others around us who know as little or less than we do: we all scramble around in the dark together. So stop scrambling and look for someone who carries the torch. Only they can show us the way: the ones who carry the light: there are a few on earth, but a more guaranteed source in God. Praying for the faith to really know that in my heart – what a day that will be!
@2017 Maxine x
I haven’t written for a while as there are some changes happening and I am re-evaluating my blog – well my life actually. I have been taking some actions to help myself follow my desires, find work I love, find out more of who I am. I have been very busy and struggling at times with my 9-5, Monday to Friday job. Also, the last 15 months have been intense with things I have had to do for my son, who is an adult with Down’s syndrome. That story is a whole new post, but needless to say it has impacted life greatly and I have to look at my law of attraction and what it is really saying to me – not what I think it is saying.
I don’t find that easy, but the fact is I haven’t created much time to think about God or the Divine Truth teachings. I haven’t been able to help with the transcribing or watch many videos. What I have been doing is to keep challenging some comfort zones and have done a course to help me discover my desires and give me some tools for that. It has been really good. I have done some performance poetry, which I have loved and wrote to people I never would have done before. There has been fear and battles with apathy and/or addictions, but I keep finding a step to take and it feels good.
I am also connecting with people again and boy that brings you lots to learn about yourself, your fears, your addictions and your fears. Much more effective than hiding away – which I was doing for a few years.
I haven’t found time for everything and certainly still not spending enough time on things I love, and still emotionally resistance to feeling the deep stuff. I have discovered how important being present in my body is to feeling and realised how long I have been escaping out of my body to avoid feeling so now have some spinal work to see if that will help me unlock some emotions and of course I have to be willing.
I haven’t heard my guides for a while ( I don’t feel worthy a lot/resistance or in addiction, which prevents them helping me), but today I was sitting knitting ( a new hobby) and it stops me thinking and opens up another part of me and I started to write what I was “hearing” and got reminded that in all my busyness, my doing and trying, my intellectual working out of my issues, that I am still avoiding the big one: my relationship with God. Every time I have tried to do it, I stop as soon as I hit something, so my guides said that I need to prioritise above all else my relationship to God and all the things I am trying to and weighed down by will become clearer and easier. God’s love above all else will help me change my life. To feel my lack of faith, my blocks to God’s love are the biggest thing to focus on.
I have listened to this so many times from the DT talks, but like many, I keep going for the easier stuff ( or so it seems) as I don’t really know or have faith in the power of God’s love and I am afraid of it too. My guides gave me 4 pages of advice about this and then this is how it works. The law of attraction brought me a conversation with a friend, it triggered some emotions about men. I immediately went out for a walk, found a quiet country lane and stomped along swearing and ranting at God – so pissed at Him. I was rambling on like a mad woman until I actually ended up talking to my human father and crying about him and the feeling of never being good enough to be loved: touching the side of that deep fear that I am not lovable.
The funny thing is, I think of Divine Truth every day in some way and I wanted to write about the difference it has made in my life and I am not even on the Way yet, not properly. I haven’t opened to God’s love and I have lacked humility so many times. Yet, it has impacted my life hugely. What will it do when I really let God in?
So I thought I would write a list of how I feel Divine Truth teachings have helped me and changed my life already. For those of you who are curious maybe this will make you more curious. What I do want to do is acknowledge what it has done, with gratitude to Mary and Jesus (That’s me in 2013 – yellow top, just behind Mary and Jesus) for sharing what they know, with so much patience and compassion and for God, for creating such a system, that doesn’t let us get away with anything, but takes us to a place, a path, to our real, amazing selves. I am getting an inkling of me, a twinkling out of the corner of my eye, enough to make me look further. There are others such as Jesus and Mary, and the people like Aphraar ( see Robert James Lee trilogy on the extras page) who know more than me so do look there. In the meantime, here is what the DT teachings have done for me:
Many of these statements are just intellectual understandings for me at the moment, some are hopes that they may be true and a few have really hit home. When I first listened to Secrets of the Universe back in 2012 it really hit my soul that truth I had been seeking was here. I didn’t anticipate how much it would rock my world and uproot every belief and everything I thought I knew. Until recently, I built any self worth I had on my intellect and then to learn that my intellect meant so little and in fact I honestly had to admit my intellect alone had not found the answers or healing I was seeking. I have been and continue to be confronted with my own unlovingness, my own lies and self-delusion: in fact most of the things I have known have been shown to be wrong and boy do I resist the change, the challenge to my belief structures and hold onto fears and anger: anything to feel safe.
BUT I have not been happy in my so-called “safe” zones. I have been a shrivelled mask of my self, disconnected and disassociated from real love and life. With Divine truth I have seen things differently, experimented with new ways and admitted truths to myself and it has made me now think more carefully about my choices and my behaviour: asking what is really loving in this moment? What would Love do? What is God’s truth?
It turns out that God’s truth is that we are all very, very important; very, very loved and with a ton of potential to be amazing ten times over, once we choose to seek true Love. Divine truth has and is changing my life and this is with only small steps on my part. I observe others doing better on the path than me and so the changes in their lives are greater and for some reason I can never and do not want to let it go. There is nothing like these truths. This is not meant arrogantly: I have tried many other things and beliefs and nothing sparkles in my soul like this.
It has gifted me so much already and I don’t think I know it fully yet, but it has. My outlook on life has changed and now my actions are starting to follow in certain areas, at least. What we are seeking is already here. I hope in the next few years I can demonstrate more, and be walking my talk more than I am now. But whatever I do, you can choose to check it out for yourself and if you do I hope some of the things on these pages help you.
In gratitude,
Maxine
Dennis Arthur Falloon (My Dad/ Big brother)
My father recently passed and even though I know he continues his life, in his spirit body and that he is still the same man, really in the early stages of a life that will continue for a long time, I felt so many emotions because the story of me and my dad is complicated. I have gone from angry, confused, very sad and grieving and full of regret. I am still in the process of unravelling and allowing all this to move through me. It is coming in fits and starts. Not a river, but more like someone turning the tap on and then off again.
The other part of this is that lately God has been showing me in many law of attraction events that working through my block to Him in relation to how I feel about men and myself in relation to men is really vital right now, if I am to progress. The emotions and beliefs I currently hold are blocking me from my true Father. God’s truth is that the person I understand as my father is in fact an older brother, who had the role of caring and teaching me. I can say and understand this intellectually, but I don’t know this in my heart, which means I don’t know this at all. To think God is my father, to read this, to hear this from Jesus (in fact my dad stuff also affects how I feel about Jesus) – and Mary, is one thing, but to know this truth deep in my heart is really knowing it, really feeling it and that is an emotion I don’t have and in fact I am not yet truly convinced emotions will help me. It is in my thoughts a lot and maybe a few times in my life I have opened the door of my heart slightly to feel what this means, but mostly I can’t and I can’t because my experience of “father” has been difficult, confusing, frustrating and mostly painful and I have held on to the emotions, either in denial, resistance and/or fear.
How we feel about father, about men comes through the belief systems of our parents and environment. So how my mother feels about men, how my father feels about himself as well as other prominent people in our younger lives, whether it is grandparents, teachers or others. Some of these beliefs are generational and some from our parents experiences. Then to add to that are our experiences with our fathers and other men around as children, and how that effects future relationships with men. From those causes come the effects of how we relate to male relationships and how we view ourselves in those relationships. The most powerful effects come from us holding onto these emotions, suppressing them as children and then as adults. Sadly, most of us are trained to suppress our emotion, which means most of us are living in the fear and other negative emotions created from our childhood. Even if you think your childhood was okay, you may only have to examine your current life and your relationships to get an idea if you are carrying mistaken beliefs or error-based emotions in you.
For myself, I have a number of things I am clearly aware of and many others that have yet to come to light for me to fully understand and Jesus teaches that these awareness’s all need to be feelings and not just thoughts for me to really know why I do what I do.
My father was 22 when he married my mother, who was just turning 18 and most of my life I have heard my mother’s version of what happened in that marriage. She claimed my father was distant and violent. She described him pulling her down the stairs by her hair and other such stories all culminating in the day he left, well abandoned us, leaving my mum a single parent with two small children. This was about 8-9 years after they married. After he left at some point, mum and I and my younger brother, Dean moved into a caravan. We had very little money and I can remember mum begging the lady in the shop for some bread to give us some toast. My mum’s family did not help and apparently not my father either. During that period my mum had a male friend visit. He had been one of our neighbours in our previous house and was going through a divorce himself. It wasn’t too long before they decided to get married and within a year or so mum had had my other brother.
Mum was married to him for about 5 years or so and it was not a good time. I don’t remember my father’s violence, but I do remember my step-father’s. I remember my mother’s breakdown and suicide attempts were during this time ( probably what would now be post natal depression on top of the abuse that went on). We were all vigilant when he was there. He ruled the house through fear. At that time I was very grateful that we lived in the countryside and could roam out of the house most of the day. Also, at that time mum was friends with the vicar from our previous home. He was regular visitor and I went on brownie camps with him and others. There was something odd about him and I can remember some uncomfortable feelings around him and even writing this brings up fear in me.
This whole period wasn’t good, and many things happened: some I remember and a lot of it is still blanked out. I started to have regular nightmares, repetitive and frightening and ones that I felt I had to cope with alone. My mum got away from this marriage, when she met someone else and with his help and a couple of friends we were woken one night, put in a car in our night clothes and moved out of our home. We slept in the home of my mother’s new partner, who was to become my second step father and with two new step sisters. Like many in those days, we were not really told anything or asked how we were. We just had to accept the changes.
Out of all of my mother’s relationships this was probably the best. He wasn’t violent, but they were very focused on each other. Life did not settle and my mum still seemed affected, histrionic and unpredictable. I do not need to go into all that happened, but all I knew was I felt very alone, was often and continuing from my younger years, the parent/carer to my mother. I couldn’t wait to leave home.
My step father was very hot and cold and I never knew where I stood with him and there was period where he disappeared, left my mum in a meltdown and me caring for her and my two brothers. He had a strong belief that we all needed to earn our keep and when I was 10, in the first year we knew him I was cooking bar food in the kitchens of a pub we lived in and ran. It felt like we had to earn “love.”
So I could summarise my experiences of fathers as distant, disapproving, untrustworthy, weak, angry, frightening, abandoning, emotionally and physically absent, and never feeling good enough to be loved, love was very conditional on me being “good” in their eyes and earning the right to it. I felt very unseen and unheard and lost. I now realise this is how I feel about God. I have projected all my dad emotions onto Him, feeling his disapproval, distance, anger and feeling totally unloved and unlovable, like I am the only child he will never accept. So I think about wanting to receive God’s love, but with all these negative emotions I am too frightened to open my heart to my version of God.
On top of that I felt and heard all of my mother’s feelings and beliefs about men: they are weak, useless, selfish. A good man would provide for a woman, make her feel safe and secure. Mum was never satisfied with the finances we had. Being married was seen as proof of your “alrightness” as a woman. She indicated that sex was unpleasant and their physical bits ugly. Yet at the same time I had to act like a lady. I was not allowed to pass wind or swear and had to sit nicely, have long hair (that’s what men preferred). Lot’s of messages that I had to perform and present a facade of nice, good. Her ideal man for me would be someone earning a good amount of money and demonstrate his love to me with gifts and holidays etc. That was her dream really, one she never got.
I have told you all this just to give an example of some of the beliefs and emotions that effected me and many of you will relate to too and it was through all these filters, all these beliefs and all the damaging emotions from these experiences that I went out into the world with. I had also gone to an all girls school, had no confidence in myself and so the idea of men and relationship terrified me. I was too terrified to touch myself, let alone let someone do it. Mum had made me feel ashamed and scared of my own body and feelings and other childhood experiences had left me with no real sense of myself or my boundaries and many dark moments happened from that space.
My father had left when I was 4 or 5 and I didn’t hear from him until I had left home, was living in London aged 19. I had a call out of the blue. We met up. I remember two visits and some letters and I can’t remember what happened, but at some point he disappeared from my life again. As the years went by there were two occasions when I turned up at his house out of the blue. One time, when my brother wanted to meet him, and another when my son was about 2 or 3. Each time we would have contact for a while and for one reason or another he seemed to disappear again. So the last time I saw him physically was about 20 years ago. In the last 3 years my brother contacted him and met up with him and he and his family even went to stay with my father for a few days. I wasn’t asked to join them, but I did start an email communication with my father. The last email was last summer when I told him I had had the all clear from cancer, he replied and I replied to him, but then he didn’t reply back. What I didn’t know was that about that time he was being diagnosed with cancer, but one that he never recovered from and so he passed just over two weeks ago.
After my father left us, he did meet someone, remarried and had two more sons. These two sons were the ones who decided we needed to be told our father had passed and they have been truly kind and understanding and invited Dean and I to the funeral last week. It has been a rollercoaster of emotions and also we have discovered lots about our father we didn’t know. He had many friends and family at his funeral and he was described as gentle, loving children and nature. I felt immense grief and still do. I am very sad that we didn’t get to know each other better; I am very sad that many years were wasted because of my fears and hurt, but also because of my father’s hurt too. He would come towards us, but then for whatever reason back away again so that I felt unloved and unaccepted again and again. I also felt that because I look like my mother, he could not see beyond that to ME. He was very traumatised by what happened with my mother and is the reason he said that he could not maintain contact with us – it was like he was afraid of her and her behaviour.
The information we have had about dad certainly changes the story my mother has relayed all these years and she did not respond well to knowing we wanted to go to his funeral, meaning that my father’s passing has also triggered some dark emotions about my mother and how much she was a block to us getting to know and have some sort of relationship with our father and how she may have manipulated the truth because of her own fears and anger. I am struggling to put all the pieces together, and can only now continue to let myself fall into the emotions that arise from all this. I am switching between romanticising my father, to trying to see the truth and to find the balance, as well as not blaming myself for not contacting him, even though I can see I was avoiding another “rejection.” But it has been really good to find out more, to feel things and to want to continue to.
It has made me acutely aware of the filters through which we see and feel things and how as children we absorb emotionally so much, so many beliefs and so many emotions from our parents: all of it obscuring the truth. I want to be able to separate God (as father) from my father as my father (rather than the older brother who was given the opportunity to be my temporary father, guide and teacher). I want to be able to separate my feelings about my earthly father from my heavenly Father, but I can’t right now. It is all overlapping and difficult, but it is just as it is and until I feel more about my father and my relationship with him and my step-fathers it won’t happen.
I am also learning that thinking something really doesn’t work. I am a great thinker, I have spent much of my life in my head, trying to figure things out and getting exhausted in the process so I know it doesn’t work. It may give a temporary fix- up, but it is a plaster over a gaping wound and the only thing that will heal that gaping wound will be to open up that wound and let all the pus (feelings) out so that it is clean and ready to let in truth and heal. I was a nurse and I know how wounds heal; I know we have to clean them to allow the new cells to grow. If we don’t clean out the yucky stuff there is no room for the new. It is the same with the error/emotional damage in us; it is the pus, that once removed allows us to feel the truth of a situation and that is what sets us free.
So through the process of allowing feelings to move through us, however long they may have been in us. If I allow this now about my father, I will find out the truth about him, but also most powerfully, I will understand better who my true Father is and then and only then will I develop trust that he loves me and wants to give me His love and then I will let it in.
It is very easy to look at this spiritual path I have found – The Way of God’s Love, and say yes I want to feel God’s love, but the truth is I don’t right now. Because of the injuries I have around fathers (and subsequently men) I feel too afraid to let God’s love in, or even trust that God loves me and wants to give me His Love.
Today I heard Jesus say that we are often putting all our energy into trying to change ourselves in order to receive God’s love. We have got it all wrong, because it is receiving God’s Love that will change us, transform us. So starting with trying to change ourselves – which is bloody hard work, exhausting and often pointless, because we are often coming from our minds and willpower – we should be looking at what stops us emotionally from letting God’s love in NOW and then working through those beliefs and emotions so that we can then let this Love in and let God transform us.
The penny finally dropped with me today on that! I have been so addicted to trying to improve myself, to be perfect so that my parents might love me and accept me, I have not seen the truth of allowing God’s power to transform me and therefore not seen the true power of humility (having a passionate longing to feel all my beliefs and emotions all of the time, no matter what anyone else thinks or feels).
The other wonderful thing is that God knows which emotions I am able to deal with right now and shows me daily by the law of attraction what ones to focus on, so I don’t even need to mentally work that out! All I need to do is pay attention and be willing to feel what comes up.
So for me this time with my dad and about my dad is an incredible opportunity to experience emotions I have had buried for a long time. I have gained some understanding this week about my father, but I can feel I have much more inside. So I pray to go there, to have the courage to do it and be grateful for all that comes.
So if you are struggling to with how you feel about God – that you doubt He is even there; that if He is he is just to awful or frightening, take time to list all the things you feel about Him and then have the honesty and willingness to see that all the things you feel are how you may feel about your parents or other adults around you (including religious ones) and try to separate God from that as you do. I have longed all my life for a father who loved me totally and unconditionally, who found something special in me, accepted me, and wanted the best for me. Because of my emotional injuries, I have tried to make my father something he wasn’t or even in the times he may have tried to do this not believed he did and I do need to find some peace through this by releasing emotions. However, the crazy thing is my dream father does exist and has done all along: my true Father God and when I get to feel this truly – wow! What a day that will be!
But in the meantime, I continue to search emotionally with and for my earthly father (probably in error and truth in different moments) and I hope through my own mediumship and emotions that I may talk to him again at some point. Or maybe I won’t need to if I feel the emotions, who knows? And I have a process of forgiveness and repentance to go through too. I do wish him well though, and I do hope he seeks his true Father too. I am still dreaming I can feel… that is where I am at…
Dennis Arthur Falloon, may you ask and it will be given to you: seek and you will find: knock and the door will be opened for you. Have courage and walk with the light ones.
For me, softening, desire, honesty and courage are required. I am fortunate enough to even have an awareness of all these different things as taught by Jesus and Mary: they have given detailed instruction on how to clean that wound – it’s all a case of whether I really listen and act accordingly, or even want to. I feel my journey with my father/Father will continue for some time, all dependent on my own will, but in the meantime I hope my own reflections help you with your own.
FATHER
When I was 5 you came to bring us gifts of love
Made with your own two hands.
A garage for my brother and a dolls house for me,
But I had a sinking feeling,
A look on your face, I didn’t want to see.
You knelt and spoke and I felt so sad,
Like my heart would break in two
As you walked back to your car.
My heart cried out, “Do you feel it too?”
I lost you that day for a further 15 years,
But I am sure I didn’t even cry or let out tears.
Because life got tough and no one replaced you.
In fact, I spent my time hoping it wasn’t all true.
So after 15 years you called me on the phone,
I was shocked, afraid, but hopeful,
I’d been feeling so alone.
We met, we talked, but it wasn’t simple.
I carried my scars and fears on the way,
You didn’t really understand
And you disappeared again one day.
This happened again and again through all my adult years.
I didn’t know how to be myself;
I longed for acceptance from you.
But I constantly felt rejected,
Even if it wasn’t true.
I wish you had persevered
And not given up on me.
I wish we could talk right now,
Because I can finally see.
I saw our story through my mother’s eyes
And other hurt that happened,
Didn’t make me wise.
You also had your story so you sometimes locked up your heart
And now I struggle to understand
What happened, what wasted times
Were spent apart.
Cause a part of me from long ago
The little me I feel
Turned into woman now, is still not able to heal.
Because I still wish for you and hold you in my heart
Mixed up with bewilderment
Of why we were kept apart.
So now you have passed through the mists
To the other side,
I pray to feel the emotions
I have kept locked up inside.
To grieve all the broken dreams of you,
And set myself free,
So that maybe one day
We can talk again and you will sit with me.
That we will find peace with this,
And can let each other go,
And be as God intended
As only He can know.
May we know our brother-sisterhood,
Instead of clinging on to pain.
And knowing our true Father
Can love each other freely,
Without self-gain.
I’m sorry that it couldn’t be
What it was meant to be,
But I have some faith, that one day I will know
That God loves me truly
As he does you too:
Where-ever we go,
Whatever we do.
We are both his children.
And to feel that deep inside,
Will be the greatest gift of all.
Where true love does reside.
@Maxine Bell 2017
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!):
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
This is a topic I have been thinking and feeling about for a few weeks and I had a big fear about writing it and being “wrong” and there is still some fear there, but in the process of feeling about the topic of Robby, so to speak, I have come to some new awareness. Robby and I are currently apart. We have not lived together for over a year now. During that year we been apart, and then drifted back together, tried to make a go of it, but it has not worked. It has been very confusing, sad, scary and at times frustrating. By October, Robby had had enough of the to-ing and fro-ing – and over the next few weeks it became apparent that we were not resolving anything and going round in circles, nothing was clear except that and so we are now just friends. However, for me, in my own pondering and feeling about all this, no matter what seems to happen, and unlike other relationships I have been in, there is something about Robby that I cannot shake off. When we are apart, I never feel quite separate from him …there is a pull in my heart in his direction that in many ways makes no sense when I look at what our relationship has been so far. So what is this strange and curious journey we have been on and in some ways are still on?
In the ‘About Me’ section of my blog I talk a little about my relationship with Robby and the feeling that we may be soulmates, but also that we don’t know that because we both have a large amount of emotional injuries that impacted our relationship and in fact any relationship we may try to have still. We have been on a roller coaster over the last 4 years a bit of good, but a fair bit of bad and ugly too. Robby has given me permission to talk openly about our relationship and he has a strong belief in the power of my writing to help others and discover my true self along the way.
The issue of soulmates, sexuality and gender wounds is a massive one for all of us and it impacts our world greatly. Jesus and Mary teach about soulmates, but they have also experienced their journey together and so talk very much from personal experience. I will give a brief explanation of soulmates, as taught by Jesus and Mary, before talking more about Robby and I. I highly recommend listening to the Soulmate Relationship talks from 2010 on the Divine Truth website (or go to the Divine Truth YouTube channel and search under soul mate) for a fuller understanding of what I write. I also found the talks on Sex and Sexuality very helpful. There are also shorter talks on Partnerships on the Divine Truth FAQ channel.
Jesus teaches that God created billions of souls (her children), who before they incarnate on earth are not conscious of themselves as individuals and it is the incarnation process that allows us to discover our individuation. Each soul has a unique personality and quality that is a gift to our life. When the time is right to incarnate a soul is drawn to a parent in a law of attraction for the parents so that they can progress in love: the child reflecting back unhealed emotions, (that is the current situation in our state of error). Before it incarnates a soul splits in half and one half incarnates first to one set of parents. The second half incarnates sometime after, anytime from a short time up to about 20 years after.
God, our parent, has both male and female qualities. Each whole soul can have a mixture of male and female qualities to a varying degree. Most souls are fairly even so that one half will be born into a male body and one half into a female body (heterosexual). Some complete souls will be predominantly male and will split into two males bodies (homosexual) and some will be predominantly female and will split into two female bodies (lesbian).
Our soul represents the true us, containing such things as our personality, emotions, memories, intentions, passions and desires. Incarnation is the time we individualise and learn about love. When we incarnate we gain two bodies: a physical body and a spirit body that exist at the same time and are encompassed by our half of the soul. Currently, when we “die” our physical body dies, but we continue to live in our spirit body and we continue to live our lives as we have, making choices, experiencing and living. Spirit world contains many spheres, from the lowest to the celestials. We move up the spheres by progressing in love: some through the natural love path, reaching the sixth sphere – the highest sphere attainable through that path. Others choose the Divine Love Path and can pass into the celestial spheres, of which, there are currently 36, but development there is infinite so there may be more in the future.
During our life on earth we can all meet and be with our soulmate. However, because our current soul condition on the earth is nearly all equivalent to the first sphere because we have so many emotional injuries we may never meet our soulmate whilst on earth, or we do and don’t recognise them and/or reject them or sometimes we could be married to them and not know they are our soulmate and in fact still have a very co-dependent addictive relationship: so we are in a relationship with them, but it is a damaging one, on a soul level and is not really a soulmate relationship. As I understand it, being in a soulmate relationship requires the main qualities needed on the Divine Love Path (also called The Way of God’s Love): truth, love and humility from God’s perspective as well as desire to progress in love from each half of the soul. In the end, if one half of a soul progresses to a high state of love the other half will automatically be drawn to them.
Currently, on earth, we are not taught about soulmates or it is told incorrectly as it was to me through the Twin Flame teachings, so we grow up not even aware we have one soulmate, one perfectly made mate, just for us: one of God’s gifts to us. Our soulmate will have similar personality traits and in their progression the same main desires and passions. If the soulmate halves choose the Divine Love Path and get beyond the 7th sphere they can continue to progress to the 36th sphere and join again in Soul Union. This is what Mary and Jesus have done and is the only state that allowed them to choose to reincarnate. I don’t think words can convey the state of bliss that must be and it is not something I feel qualified to comment on. The Robert James Lee books and the Padgett messages give some idea of what it is like in the celestial spheres as well as the power of the soulmate relationship. (See the ‘Extra’ section on my website).
So where am I? I can only give the perspective from my current viewpoint, but I do feel that all the information given by Jesus and Mary is correct. It just makes sense to me. It is clear and loving. God created us to innately seek two things: God and our soulmate so we all have this ember burning in us somewhere and many of us have memories of feeling this longing, for the One. These days it is often decorated in Hollywood and Mills & Boon ideas of romance: we meet, we know, we seek, we find and once we really decide then that’s it – happiness with little or no problems: remember that final screen kiss which silently promises all? But we all know from experience it is not that simple and in fact there are more songs and more movies about the loss of relationship than about successful true love. I have come to the truth that with my experience of “love” from my environment as a child, I do not know much, if anything, about real love: love that is unconditionally without demands or expectations, that just exists and lives regardless. We believe we have it for our children, but as a parent, I do not always unconditionally love my son. When I am tired, angry, afraid I do not love him regardless. I do not have that level of development. I want to, but I do not and I know I have little, if any memory, so far of being unconditionally loved as a child, so what do I know of it?
I decided it is better to start from the truth I know so little and try to discover the truth, because the reason I currently struggle to love or to receive love is because the “love “ I have experienced has been very conditional. This is true for many of us, including Robby. He does not remember being loved at all. His father was strict and emotionally distant and his mother was so wrapped up in her own woes and anger at men she could not love as a mother should. They provided a secure physical home and food and clothes, but no affection, only rules and regulations and harshness.
My mother’s emotional injuries mean that she was such a wounded child she could not give us love, but in fact demanded through projections that we love her, make her feel better and provide her with things that no child should have to. As the eldest, I particularly felt this: my mother’s neediness and instability. I felt like her emotional husband and carer/parent. My father left when I was about 4 or 5 and I had two stepfathers all of whom I felt rejected by in various ways. There was domestic violence, alcoholism and day to day drama. Where were lessons in love in any of this?
During my adult life I had relationships of course. The first serious one was just like my father: irresponsible, chauvinistic and at times frightening. After that I has boyfriend the complete opposite: passive, but still wanting looking after and I did it because I had looked after my mother and I knew nothing else. I had a few brief affairs that were painful and finally a more caring relationship, but we were more friends than lovers. Following this was a “big connection” that was just a highly addictive and damaging relationship. (Not coincidental during my interest in New Age ideas that encourage and feed this “I just felt this amazing connection” stuff). By the time Robby had come into my life I really did not want a relationship. In fact I told God I would wait as many years as it needed until I found my soulmate, as that was the only one I wanted. I had the desire, but it was a desire, coming from pain and disappointment and fear of more pain and disappointment, though I don’t think I knew that at the time.
I was working as a healer and doing readings in Glastonbury when Robby and I met. I had just come across Divine Truth, but was still uncertain and still trying to understand why the “big connection” had come crashing round my ears and was still working as healer/ card reader. Robby came thundering into my little room asking for a reading and I remember this feeling of feeling slightly knocked sideways by his presence. I composed myself enough to do a reading and found him to be unusually honest about himself. For him, he had a relationship at the time that was coming to an end, and he had had a feeling, and told her so, that his soulmate was nearby, without having a clue what he was saying. But over the next few weeks, he used to pop in to say hi and we became friends.
During that summer we bumped into each other sometimes and one day he came on a trip with a Dutch friend down to Tintagel. Robby is Flemish so they could chat in Dutch. We had a great day with her and my son and I was touched by Robby’s playfulness. I ran into the sea and Robby joined me and I remember this point when he came towards me, didn’t touch me, but I felt something. Only I was aware of it, but it frightened me and I pushed it aside. There had been other times before that when he would text me, intuitively knowing when something was up and when I saw him, he began to disturb my equilibrium, which I kept trying to ignore and I still like his company.
Then one day I had been to see a friend at the Ashram and afterwards I had a strong urge to go to the orchard behind Glastonbury Tor. All the way there, I kept hearing Robby’s name, “Robby, Robby, Robby,” again and again. Unbeknownst to me he was sitting in that orchard telling God he was ready for his soulmate. A few minutes later I suddenly appeared. He didn’t tell me at that time about his prayer, but we sat together. I did not feel relaxed, (my equilibrium blown again) and he touched my shoulders at one point and it made me really nervous. Nothing was said between us, but I could not shake the feeling that something was going on.
As friends, we had made a deal of honesty right from the start, so after a couple of days of feeling this, I decided I needed to be honest and confront what I felt was happening. I knocked on the door of the caravan where he was staying and asked him if he felt something was happening. He honestly said he didn’t know. However, something did change and we arranged to meet for a coffee the next day before I drove off to a friend’s wedding for a few days. By that time, Robby was often sensing me and he knew before I arrived back a few days later that I was about to appear and I did. This sort of thing continues until today.
For two weeks we had a wonderful time and then he lost his accommodation. Without a doubt I suggested he move in. Not normally what I do, but it felt right. We were big into “signs “ then and numerology and we took the he “sign” of a rainbow and the number 2222 appearing, as well as a love song on the radio as signs this was the right thing. Robby moved in and I think we had another couple weeks of a honeymoon period and then the shit started to hit the fan, so to speak.
Robby’s anger and the issues from his previous relationship with an alcoholic, my sexual issues from my previous relationship – both related to deeper causal emotions. Lots of things got triggered. We made attempts to understand, feel it, but we weren’t very good at the feeling part – still aren’t. We were both heavily suppressed as children and so allowing too much emotion terrifies us. Over time we settled into a pattern, which actually became a heavily co-dependent relationship. So regardless of being soulmates, or not, we not really loving each other. Co-dependence is a bartering system and is never loving and in fact degrades our soul. If we are soulmates, that of course, impacts our whole soul.
One of our big co-dependent emotions was Robby wanted to be rescued and I was addicted to rescuing. Robby’s desire to be rescued created neediness in him, and was part of low self worth and not feeling loved. It meant he often projected a lot of fear. My rescuing was something I have been doing since a child to my own detriment, but I would say in later years has also become part of my horrible control addiction. For me, control feels like security, but it is an unloving and ugly addiction, creating a lot of angry projections.
As you can imagine, this is not the making of an open and passionate relationship. We also, like most, have many gender wounds: layers of anger and hurt. There was and still is so much “Stuff” in the way it is a miracle we are still even friends. But we are and when we decided to try and break that co-dependence things improved individually. Robby learnt to stand on his own two feet more and I felt less drained and demanded of. We have been at least trying to feel what is really loving in some areas.
The other thing we do trigger some deep emotions in each other. For instance, I trigger a lot of Robby’s injuries about his mother. He struggles to see me emotional and I have let him shut me down many times (something I am also used to letting happen and choose to). His mother was constantly sad and crying. He triggers lots of things in me: anger at men, hurt over being used for what I can give rather than whom I am and many things. These triggers are a gift if we have humility – the willingness to feel all of our emotions, but I have not been good at that, though I am getting better in some areas.
But all I know is right now, I look at Robby and I have such compassion for his injuries. I see and feel his struggles – sometimes more than I feel my own. I see both of us blundering along and have compassion and understanding that right now to be intimate is almost impossible until we heal more, but mostly until we have a real desire to be humble in relationships, a real desire for complete truth and a real desire to learn about love, to love and be loved. John Bradshaw, in his book, Homecoming, talks about when we have unmet needs as a child, when we are not validated and accepted and loved for who we truly are, we lose our authentic self, we create a facade and become what our parents and others want us to be. We do it to survive as a child and by the time we are adults we forget and continue with our facade, which grows ever stronger as we continue to live in our hurt. So how can we be intimate, be our true selves with someone when we don’t have a clue who that is. He says it is impossible to be intimate if we have no sense of self. That makes sense in my life and my relationships. Neither Robby nor I have much sense of self.
For me, the other big emotion is abandonment. When Robby recently said he felt open to a relationship with someone else so that he could experience something more loving, I felt numb. I am disassociated, but when I let some feeling come, inside I felt “Well I expect it, they all leave; I will never be the one to be the one that wows them – I am just not enough. I don’t blame them, I am just not lovable. No one will love me forever and I am not surprised.” My wounded child is so hurt she believes it, I believe – emotionally. That is the grief that I am afraid off – it seems so overwhelming still. But there it is.
Normally, through all the difficulties I would have totally given up and not been too bothered about seeing that partner again. But with Robby it is different. The truth is I have some big emotions, a huge amount of fear that is even preventing any desire for a relationship – until I think about Robby. I don’t feel I want to go back to what we had – there was much wrong in how we were doing things. And sometimes, I look at other men, and I find them attractive and I know Robby has felt the same with women. Yet now even, when I do, I often think, “oh but that’s not Robby.” I know I have a ton of stuff to heal and a lot to learn about being loving in a relationship and still a lot of anger, fear and sadness about men to release. That will remain as such, until it doesn’t, but if I try to truly imagine being with someone else, I can’t. I also, don’t know how it could work with Robby, but I can’t break this feeling that he is somehow part of me.
Only time and my willingness to heal my emotions will reveal the truth of him being my soulmate or not, but in the meantime here is the punch line….
Quite separately, Robby got offered a new job and took it. I applied for a new job and took it. It turns out we are now working for the SAME team and work together every day! It is proving hard to get rid of each other… lol!
So watch this space….
This summer has been extremely busy for me. I have been working and selling and packing up my bits to move to a smaller – and more importantly cheaper place to live. But mostly, I have had the task of helping my son set up his new life following his graduation from college where he achieved an NVQ in Hospitality as well as a number of other qualifications and certificates. He has worked hard for three years at the most progressive college in the UK, as far as I can see: Foxes Academy.
I drove round hundreds of miles to check out different colleges, but nothing stood out like Foxes and when we visited I got that feeling right in my gut that lets me know: this is it! This is the place! (Or the person or the thing to do) When it comes to my gut feelings about Ben it has always worked out. I have fought many a professional, found my voice on behalf of him many, many times and followed my gut, listened to my heart, had faith and quietened the fears created by professional opinion and “realism.”
I have spoken up on his behalf much better than I have for myself. I have discovered a strong assertiveness and determination with regards to helping him create a meaningful and happy life more than I have for myself. On reflection, this is an error, as in God’s eyes I am no less important than Ben; in God’s eye’s I am equally loved and equally have the right to a happy and meaningful life. Intellectually I get that; emotionally I have yet to. But that will come – when the error is released.
In the meantime, Ben has not had the ability to speak up as he would have needed to or access to the right information or understanding to fight for his own needs because Ben has Down’s syndrome. He has had to grow and learn and experience in a body and brain messed up by an extra chromosome – well that is the physical cause. The emotional and soul based cause is multi-generational, including myself and his father: error based emotions eventually impacting the physical world so much as to “disable” a potential healthy human body, which in turn impacts the soul. Of course we have the potential to help our children to heal by correcting the emotional error and false beliefs in ourselves.
However, I did want to talk too much about Ben’s dis-ability, but rather his capability. I am not trying to brush over the struggles and pains of having a disability or of being a parent, but this summer, I have just felt the beauty in Ben, the silver lining, the way God uses every situation to Love – and I wanted to share it. I may have been Ben’s voice many times; I may have drudged my way through a ton of paperwork, phone calls and meetings to get basic rights for him whilst ignoring the doctor’s so-called predictions of what he wouldn’t be able to do, but in the end it has been Ben who has done it.
The truth is Ben has proven them wrong many times: crashing through their thinly disguised pessimism. The truth is Ben has a soul based knowing at times uninhibited by fears of looking silly or sounding ridiculous. The truth is he like many people with learning disabilities, smash through our complicated thinking with a simple, heart-felt answer to the big questions about life and love. The truth is I may have helped Ben at times, but he has helped me and others in deeper, more meaningful ways ten-fold over.
What I find amazing is that even though it is human error and arrogance that has caused these problems, a gift has been created for us and in this gift is another demonstration of Love – the love of God: pure, simple and powerful. This is what I want to demonstrate today.
For my son it is not an easy at times: he is frustrated he cannot speak clearly and be understood easily. He has limits on his intelligence that mean he cannot just go out in the world independently – he has to rely on the help of others. His dreams are restricted compared to others of the same age. For instant, he cannot just hop on a plane to Japan if he wishes; he cannot go to the bank and sort out a mortgage.
In our materialistic, economy-based Western world he is unlikely to be seen as a success because he is unable to earn lots of money to plough back into the money market, or become a celebrity, or get a degree in Astro-physics and design a rocket to Mars. We have encountered people who ask what a person like Ben can contribute to society. Are they just not a drain on the economy? (This included a cardiologist we once met in a famous London hospital!).
There are two reasons this is both arrogant and ignorant. Firstly, Ben did not choose this. He did not choose to be born in this body; he did not choose to have a learning disability or a heart defect or poor eyesight or poor speech. It is not his fault. Ben has to try to survive against the odds in many ways and has no choice, but to need help. He is part of the most vulnerable in society – not by choice, not by harming himself or others, but just by being born as he is.
Secondly, not realising what Ben and people like contribute is to really lose touch with what being human is or created to be. To value only the material, the physical, the monetary is empty: a house built on sand. Ben demonstrates every day his humanity, his love, his openness, his free spirit. He is as capable of being inhibited by external forces; including me of course as any person is, but mostly, I have tried to allow him to just be him: loving, cheeky, fun, kind and brave.
Ben demonstrates to me how to let love flow through you, he reminded me how to be silly again. He taught me spontaneity, living in the moment, how to be free in that moment. I let go a bit with him. I happily would sing out loud on my way down and around the shops with him in his buggy. We would make up songs and rhymes to teach him colours, numbers, shapes, animals. I sang “Chitty, chitty, bang, bang” for hours and hours.
He gave me a chance to love freely. My heart skipped a beat to watch him sleep, to wonder at this miracle of life that lay before me. When he was born, it was traumatic – discovering he had Down’s syndrome. It was traumatic that first year before the holes in his heart were repaired. But I always loved him from the womb all the way through. My heart ached, not knowing what he or we were going to go through, but I knew he was innocent and he needed care. I was a single parent, for most of the first ten years. It was tough at times: I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to love myself, so loving someone else wasn’t always possible.
I would struggle, but then the magic would happen. A trip to the supermarket became a dance down the aisles or me running about picking up clothes he was trying to remove. Nothing was “normal” and yet it felt more alive than normal. He walked three years earlier than they predicted: he was out of nappies three years earlier than they predicted. He loved to dance and sing. We had our own secret sign for music. He walked further than they said he would. He was incredibly fit following his surgery; he never got fat and he never had mucus and the hearing loss they predicted.
He was and is a near- fearless climber, loves to free-run, break dance and can drum for hours. He learns the drums by listening to music over and over, repeating it many times until he knows it. He can recognise a song from the first two notes. He is a romantic and loves feeling “in love.” He wants to marry one day. He is a stronger and braver swimmer than I and a good athlete. He is incredibly perceptive about people and his reaction to someone says a lot.
Music, sports and food are his loves. When he eats he does not talk and will not talk with you. Instead, he sits and tastes passionately every mouthful. If he goes out for the day, the first thing he will tell you is what he had to eat.
At college he was challenged to go beyond any previous pre-conceptions of what an adult with a learning disability can do. For years, post 16/18 education has been much the same old thing: life skills, gardening, craft and animal care, possibly a bit of catering. There was no particular goal except to teach some life skills and give them something to do for 3-5 years. Foxes have a different view: they are getting them ready to have a life – to live as independently as possible, to find meaningful work and interests and relationships, including love and sex relationships. Foxes are all about outcomes.
Since he left for college 3 years ago, I went on quite a journey within myself: a grieving and a lot of facing some harsh truths about my parenting. I tried to be the parent I didn’t receive myself, but not having a clue I have made many mistakes. When he left for college I spent a day sorting through the 5 boxes of paperwork from his years in education and the health system. It took over 3 hours to burn it and I cried over most of the papers I read through. I told myself I was letting go, but it took a bit longer than that and in truth, is ongoing.
The first two terms Ben did well, settled in, enjoyed his work and social life, but he also had some problems with a girlfriend who was controlling and bossy and was easily influenced by others. He came home for the holidays and we had some sticky moments. It took a while for the penny to drop, but I started to see that I was micro-managing too much – in fact trying to control his choices, as well as project demands at him. At times he was aggressive with me and/or himself. I was doing too much for him and expecting him to fulfil emotional “holes” I needed to fill myself. I started to see I was harming him and what I was calling love wasn’t.
Over the next few months I focused on “un-hooking”, watching out for my addictions with him and try to own the feelings and fears. It wasn’t all perfect, but goodness a change happened in him. At college, the penny dropped that he was there for himself, for his own aspirations and dreams. He started to do much better and cope much better with the challenges that came. Last year he was second outstanding learner and he has come out more mature, more confident and capable. He is bold and decisive and chose a new life, living with a friend, away from me, with support workers to help him. He was fully involved in interviewing and choosing his support workers and we are currently settling him into his new life.
I still have to watch myself, to step back. I encourage Ben to tell me when I am being to bossy or interfering, when he wants me to not be around or not to help. We are really working on a more honest relationship and he is speaking up more clearly and assertively. His courage is incredible and I am honoured to see this young man grow. He has such character, such a sense of fun and incredible love in him. He also shows a perception about life and talks about wanting to teach others how to have an open heart.
I feel stiff next to him. I can feel the walls around my heart built up from my injuries – from my childhood and what has happened since. Yet I have this son – well God’s son, this soul in my guardianship demonstrating to me that opening is the way forward. He is lighter and freer than I and I long to feel that.
As parents of children with disabilities, the trauma of discovering your child is not quite what you thought, what you may have been through with them – through illness, or schools or other care needs creates a strong protectiveness. We can feel them so vulnerable that our fears and unshed tears drive our actions, which we may think of as love, but isn’t always, especially as emerging adults. We can feel an internal pressure to make them feel okay, to feel better because we don’t want to feel vulnerable about them ourselves – somewhere inside we may know unconsciously we have some responsibility for what has happened. Whatever our feelings, and for their sakes, we need to own our emotions – our fears, our grief, our anger, feeling overwhelmed, exhausted – we need to be brave and honest and unselfish. Like any adult, they need room to breathe, to explore and to experiment. They need room to make mistakes and learn how to cope with that and to learn to live in a world they probably don’t really get, but one they can benefit from given the right help balanced with the right freedom to choose and live.
We must not patronise them, they are great teachers:
Ben’s bravery shows me I need to be braver.
Ben’s openness shows me the freedom in breaking down those walls around my heart.
Ben’s spontaneity and joy is there for my inner child to awaken again.
Ben’s pleasure in simple, everyday things demonstrates an unspoken gratitude and acceptance.
Ben is happy in his own skin, happy to say he is handsome, he is a dude, and he is a good dancer. He is not obsessed in judging his body as I have mine. He is just “this is me and this is okay.”
For Ben, life is now, in this moment – whether it is eating something delicious, doing a cartwheel, drumming to Muse, or singing along to Lazy Town. He is not wasting energy mentally fretting over yesterday or tomorrow. The only real time for him is now and therefore he gains more from the moment than I do.
Ben has compassion. He is not happy to see a man sleeping in a doorway, or a child screaming or a dog yelping. He “feels it in his heart” that something is not okay and he wants to change it – with Love and kindness.
Because of all this, Ben is closer to God than I at the moment. These qualities he demonstrates are qualities and attributes of God. There is the gift: God appears in many ways, through many people and the way they live their lives. Even in what can seem a tragedy to many, God finds ways to express and demonstrate Love, to help us see where we can improve, where we can be more honest and reflective, to create change.
I don’t believe we have to have a world with people with Down’s syndrome or other disabilities to demonstrate all these qualities or to bring out these qualities in ourselves. This is unloving as having a disability is not easy and I have seen grief and confusion in Ben at being “different,” but until we learn we have a choice in all these things, until we turn to God more and our own spirituality and soul, we can be good guardians to these brothers and sisters, whose worth is equal to our own. They often help us open our heart, have more compassion and understanding.
They can give us a taste of our Father, a doorway to heaven, by their own demonstration of love, fun and kindness, but also by what they bring out in us: patience, tolerance, humour, love, compassion and kindness.
In many ways, Ben is a man and in many ways he is Peter Pan – never growing up. But I sense none of us really understand what being grown up is. We live in a world of injured souls, whose need to control their environment and “manage” life is seen as being an adult. So in this way, Ben helps me question my own “adulthood”, my addiction to control, to avoid fear, what true responsibility is.
Maybe the Peter Pan’s of this world remind us of what Jesus said, “Let the children come to me. Don’t stop them! For the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who are like these children.”
(Matthew 19:14)
So thank you Ben, and all the “Ben’s” out there. In adversity, you shine, with no self-pity. In a controlled world obsessed with what others think, you dance and sing, no matter what; you are freer. In a world full of competitiveness and hierarchy you only see equality; no man lesser than yourself. And most importantly, in a harsh world – you love.
love Maxine “mum”
“Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.”
― Susan Pease Banitt, The Trauma Tool Kit: Healing PTSD from the Inside Out
The trauma stuff is difficult… very difficult.
Lately, I have been examining all areas of my life. God’s Law of Attraction has been powerfully indicating to me how very out of harmony with love and truth I have been living. My old habit and still only fading habit is to look at myself judgementally in this – but I am gradually encouraging myself in more compassion for myself. It is very gradual, but I want to alter the harshness and pointless judgement of everything I say and do: that old, old voice that whatever I do isn’t good enough. This voice goes way back to a very young age and runs very deep, but it does not mean it is the truth. It is only what I was led to believe and I constantly have to remind myself that God does not believe this of me, in fact she believes I am able to do so much and waits patiently while I re-educate myself in her truth that I am ” the most wondrous of her creations.” * Besides, self-judgement and self blame is actually a way to avoid how powerless we feel, it cons us into thinking it is just a matter of control, of getting it “right”, then we won’t feel so bad. I notice that if I don’t judge myself, blame or shame myself I am left with a gap of “What do I do now?”
I have a long way to go before I know this in my heart, God’s truth about myself, but I feel lately I resist this truth a bit less, letting it creep very slowly into my soul. I have made mistakes, I have completely misunderstood love and what is right or wrong. Lately, I find myself without a home, little money and a body that is suffering. When are bodies are sick, we have to know that we have been missing all the other signs that our lives, our souls are misaligned and lacking in love: love for ourselves and for others. We are disconnected from our real selves, living in darkness to a certain extent, denial of our own denial, suppressed, suffering, lacking in joy, identity and love. Maybe, this is too frank for some of you, but getting frank and honest with myself, I realise is the only way forward and some of it ain’t pretty and some of it is incredibly sad.
I feel I have nothing and yet I have everything. It is strange, surreal place to be and yet a place of some fear,but also wonder. When are arms are empty, they are ready to be filled. Yet to say my cup is empty is wrong, actually as lately, I have been blessed with incredible kindness from friends and strangers. I realised a few weeks ago that I keep everyone at a very long arm’s length. I walk around with a warning sign flashing “don’t come to too close, keep back, stop!” At the same time I get angry when other’s don’t seem to care, I project my frustrations out in a unspoken demand of ” make me feel better, come on, make me feel better – NOW!” This projected anger helps me avoid the fears and terror and grief that no-one, not one soul, not even God loves me: that I am totally alone, abandoned, hung out to dry, irredeemable and unloved. It helps me avoid that feeling of powerlessness again: I can’t control people or how they feel and I want to on some level so I feel safe. Over the years, I have done so many things to avoid feeling unloved and unsafe, created many physical and emotional addictions. I have been seething with anger, frozen with fear and all hidden ( or I would like to think so) behind my “nice girl” mask. This mask is about control, not letting rip, not expressing my anger – even when alone, not feeling my fear, not breaking into a the million pieces of grief that I sometimes feel rising in my throat.
So I have created a panic button which freezes me when I feel someone is getting too close. I don’t know how to receive love because my beliefs about love are that it is conditional and that if someone “loves” me they will want something from me, take from me, use or abuse me. But, not allowing myself to express my anger, means I just fire it out silently to those who get in the firing line: damaging myself and them. It’s yukky stuff. I have tried to rant or shout or scream when alone, but it doesn’t last long so I always gave up. Now I realise, I am just going to have to practice it, same with the other emotions, practice, desire, desire, desire. And don’t live in the fear! So I have been letting people in a little and received kindness and unexpected love. Instead of ducking out of that tea with a friend, I just go and try to deal with whatever comes up for me and have a desire to be more loving, less demanding.
With all this observing of myself and my habits, my constant freezing in certain situations and sometimes flight/fright reactions I realise what a state of stress and struggle I am constantly in: no wonder my body is sick right now. So now I have to admit, that I have a lot of trauma to release from myself and I need help. I pray to God, I talk to him, I try to talk more and more to him, but still have blocks. I am looking for a trauma therapist too and a dear friend has sent me a little online trauma course. I can feel my resistance. My intellect knows I need this, a bit of my heart is crying out for it, but my fear and resistance in going there still exists. Just writing about it causes my throat to constrict a little and some desire to run a million miles away.
However, I have been doing that for far too long. I am currently blessed to be staying with new friends in a cosy home, where I have a little room and shower room. I gave some of my furniture to a charity and the rest of my stuff is in storage. But I am in a new location, in a beautiful Devon town, surrounded by green hills, currently changing into the golds and reds of autumn. I can walk out my door and be in the countryside within minutes, I can buy wonderful organic food and enjoy this friendly town, which is softer and gentler than where I was living only 2 weeks ago. To me this is a sign of my desire to be softer and gentler, to find God in this “green and pleasant land.” For a while, I will nestle here and learn more about love: loving myself, loving others and loving God…trying to get to know the truth. I pray I can truly start to heal, to stop resisting, to stop being strong and trying to control everything.
I hope I can start to peel the layers of the onion to get to that trauma place. I can feel there are dark places I don’t want to go, memories I am afraid of, truth about my family that is difficult to bear, and truth about how in my own denial, my own survival techniques, I myself have been much more unloving that I have ever liked to admit. I may have been damaged as a child, but I have continued to damage myself dreadfully over the years in every area. I currently have a huge wake up call, God is knocking loudly on my door and for that I am grateful.
The root meaning of crisis is opportunity so for me my current crisis is an opportunity: a great act of love calling me to love more in every area. I can’t say I am aware of the purity/impurity of what I write: I just write, in the hope that we all stop denying what our lives are reflecting back at us. If we are in struggle, we are not facing the truth about something, we are not allowing our feelings to be present: it means we are resistant and fearful, not trusting what God is trying to show us.
How we get so afraid to feel? It is what makes us human, our ability to feel all range of emotions, to dance in the fire and swim in the waters of our feelings. We were meant to be a river and we became rocks. The rock may be long lasting, strong, tough, solid, but it can not create water. Whereas, water can shape and alter the rock in shape and form. A rock is static, rarely moving from one place, restricted. Yet water, can move over any place, it can permeate and move through tiny places, or gush through huge ravines. It connects everything and so much life exists in it. Indeed, the human body is 70-80 percent water. Water is free, ever-changing, sparkling. I love water, whether it’s a hot shower, a wild river or the vast ocean, so it seems mad that I have chosen to be a rock for so long! A stubborn, self reliant rock! I thought it was the only way to be, the only way to survive, but all I chose was an existence, not a life, not living. So can I join the gushing river? I hope so, though my fears make me step into a gentle brook first, dipping my toes in.
God knows I could dive in, I just have to believe it myself.
I do believe that being more compassionate with myself will help me soften to the emotions I need to feel, including those layers of trauma. One of the first things in the online course I am asked to do is to sit everyday for a short period and feel my body. That is become of aware of the feelings and sensations in my body. When we have had trauma we disassociate from ourselves so much. I have lived with various physical pains for years and just become used to it, almost numb. When I did the body exercise yesterday, I became aware of hip pain, knew pain, discomfort in my lower back, thoracic spine and an awful pain in my shoulders and neck: a feeling of someone pulling down my shoulders, but it being so rigid in my neck it was very uncomfortable and stiff, then from that pains in my head. Also, I realised I wasn’t breathing a lot of the time. So I am doing a lot of holding on and the pain in my body represents suppressed emotional pain. Reconnecting with my physical body and it’s pain may be the first step and I can see the logic in it so I shall persevere.
But what I realised too it is easy to be distracted by trying to solve things externally. Yes, I can eat healthily, I can go for walks, I can receive other treatments, but it is my willingness to “dive in” that will produce results. And in fact, I do want to do this with God, not on my own. My self reliance is like a cancer in my soul and it needs a lot of work: it needs humility, a whole ton of it. In biology, cancer cells are very good at tricking the bodies inflammatory responses so that the normal immune responses don’t attack the cancer cells. Well my self reliance is the same – it is very good at tricking me and telling me there is no other way, but to help yourself: it is arrogant and rigid and I need to remind myself that it is a very good trickest and I must desire to know the real damage that is being done and to want to change it, by becoming more God reliant and more self responsible. Self responsibility is not self reliance, by the way, it is more humble and willing to face truth. Self reliance will accept anything, including lies, in order to maintain being “right.”
When I was younger, this self reliance, this toughness, probably helped me survive, and so well that I have a belief that I can not do without it. At the moment, this feels like one of my biggest battles, my biggest belief system to break down, the biggest shell to crack. But if I do, then I feel I will allow myself to feel those terrors and traumas and stop putting on the “strong” facade. May the ice queen melt! May she find a space and scream and shout and shiver and cry! Self reliance is nothing more than a big, ugly rock that needs smashing into a thousand pieces!
I know I have jumped around a bit today – trauma to tantrums, rocks to water, self reliance to surrender. It kind of symbolises my own unravelling, and that’s ok.
The quote from above about being the “most wondrous of your creations” is from the prayer that Jesus wrote. It was changed into the biblical from of the Lord’s prayer, but this is the full, unedited version ( As on the divinetruth.com website). I love it. Some of the words challenged me when I first read it, but now I love it , even when my emotions struggle with it, it reveals much and it has the power to express everything I can’t always find the words for:
My Father, Who is in Heaven , I recognise that You are All Holy and Loving and Merciful, and that I am Your child, and not the subservient, sinful, and depraved creature that false teachers would have me believe.
I know that I am the greatest of Your creations, and the most wonderful of all Your Handiworks, and the object of Your Great Soul’s Love and Tenderest Care.
I know that Your Will is that I become at-one with You and partake of Your Great Love which You have bestowed upon me through Your Mercy and Desire that I become, in truth, Your child through Love, and not through the sacrifice and death of any of Your Creatures.
I pray that You will open up my soul to the inflowing of Your Love, and that then will come to me Your Holy Spirit to bring into my soul this, Your Divine Love, in great abundance, until my soul is transformed into the very essence of Yourself; and that there will come to me faith – such faith as will cause me to realize that I truly am your child and one with You in very substance, and not in image only.
Let me have such faith, as will cause me to know that You are my Father, and the bestower of every good and perfect gift, and that, only I myself, can prevent Your Love from changing me from the mortal to the immortal.
Let me never cease to realise that Your Love is waiting for each and all of us, and, that when I come to You, in faith and earnest aspiration, Your Love will never be withheld from me.
Keep me in the shadow of Your Love every hour and moment of my life, and help me to overcome all the temptations of the flesh, and the influence of the powers of the evil ones who so constantly surround me and endeavour to turn my thoughts away from You to the pleasures and allurements of this world.
I thank you for Your Love and the privilege of receiving it, and I believe that You are my Father – the Loving Father who smiles upon me in my weakness, and is always ready to help me and take me into Your Arms of Love.
I pray this with all the earnestness and sincere longings of my soul, and, trusting in Your Love, give You all the glory and honour and love that my finite soul can give.
AMEN
AMEN!
with love
Maxine
The other day I watched this amazing clip of a woman giving her wedding vows. It was so honest and raw that it hit me right in the heart. You may not agree with everything in the clip, but I certainly recognised parts of myself. I have a huge wall around my heart in relationships – mostly built of fear: fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of anger/attack, fear of deceit, fear of abuse, being used… you get the gist. My experience of “love” is so messed up that I am afraid to really love or be loved and so I shut it out and run away physically or emotionally. “Love” is so connected with pain for many of us we don’t even realise that it was never love in the first place. Love does not include pain: pain comes from our unhealed emotions – shame, grief, fear, anger. All the stuff that got stuck creates situations that are painful. This is the Law of Attraction: constant events provided by this God-made law to show us what we need to feel and release. The longer we hold on the bigger the pain, the bigger the causal become, the more we have to heal emotionally. Love is actually the remedy: loving ourselves enough to allow those feelings to be felt, loving others enough not to project our fears and anger at them.
It is closer to the biblical quote of Corinthians 13: ” 4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is [never] angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
(The bit in brackets I have changed to never because it said “easily angered” and I believe love or God is never angry. I know some religions will disagree, but that is my personal belief and experience).
We need to reeducate our little hurt selves about love and feel all those emotions. I find re-educating my hurt self easier ( intellectually) but still walking around looking at my wall, instead of trusting God that he provided me with enough to knock through. So many times I feel I am a hypocrite – it’s so easy to say words, watch videos, get it in your head. It’s not real though until we live it and breath it: until it is in our heart, our soul.
THE WALLS OF MY HEART
I still cling to the walls round my heart,
Afraid, trembling,
The urge to run constant and repeating,
I blame, shift and shape
To avoid the terror
Of another trampling of my heart.
But these walls serve only as a prison,
Keeping out the garden of Eden,
The gift of understanding the truth about real love,
A gift eternally shone on us by God.
To bring us to our knees
And lay before Him
All our pain, terror and sadness,
So that we can love, laugh and live.
Yet we cling to these walls,
I cling to mine,
Banging raw knuckles at them ,
Again and again
Because a part of my soul,
Cries out for freedom,
Cries out to feel,
Cries out to reach out
And experience the true bliss
Given to us by God,
The wild, passionate knowing of a soul
In love
with all.
A beautiful constant flow from the rivers of heaven.
God wants to give us it all.
Yet we continue to resist, rebel, hate and yell.
We..I can not even love myself
With these walls around my heart,
I can not give myself fully to another. .
To you, my other half,
My beautiful soul mate.
Yes wounded birds we are,
But the cage we look out from,
Never had a key,
It was never locked.
Addicted to our pain,
Broken in a thousand pieces was all an illusion.
We were always whole in God’s eyes.
She just waits for us to truly learn about love.
Not the twisted, fake over-romanticised,
Vomiting, belief-in-heartbreak kinda love.
But the unconditional, pure love as shown by God:
A love with no walls, no cage and no prison.
Love that is true and real and big.
Love that is humble and honest,
Flowing and unafraid.
I have only touched the edge of this love
For brief, beautiful moments in my life.
But I have faith it exists.
And that knocks the first brick
from the first wall round my heart..
Pow!
Maxine Bell
Sisters, Sisters, Sisters,
There were never such devoted sisters
Never had to have a chaperone “No, sir,”
I’m there to keep my eye on her
Caring, Sharing,
Every little thing that we are wearing…..
This is the song from White Christmas and a while back it kept popping into my head so I took that as a hint from my guides about some emotions that were coming up for me around friendships, particularly women so writing this helped me explore it a bit more.
If we believe we are all children of God, all men are our brothers and all women are our sisters. So when I refer to sisters here I talk just not of biological sisters we may have had, but also about our friendships: an area that has been a challenge for me all of my life.
All relationships have been a challenge for me, but those with women I have found difficult in ways I can not describe fully yet, as I am still investigating, still feeling through painful emotions and I have a way to go yet.
I find it hard to believe I am accepted and loved. I feel rejection in all sorts of scenario’s: an anxiety and fear that does not actually relay the truth of the situation – it is often just my fear and I live in it still and in the last few years it has got worse. Of course it has: I have not felt the causal emotion – the reason it all started.
The words to this song, from the movie White Christmas, intrigued me years ago: I had never had a friendship like that. I had had what I thought were close friends, but they didn’t seem to last. When I was a kid, we moved around a lot, so I made friends and then I would be off. One year I left a school, then plans changed and I was back there in September, but off again within a few months. I remember my discomfort at having to return after having said goodbye to everyone. I felt like everyone thought I had lied about leaving. When I was 12 we moved to Devon and I did stay in the same place for 6 years but by that time I was already uncertain and unsure of myself. I still made friends, still giggled together with others on the bus home from school, still compared notes on boys, but never felt that closeness with one particular friend and even if it started to feel like that, it seemed to change. I often felt like a strange creature with a secret world that no one understood or knew about: I often felt like an observer of my own life. I would relate to a certain point, but mostly I felt so utterly alone, in my thoughts and behaviour and with my feelings. My only true friend became the ocean, where I went to talk, cry, sing and write poetry: its strength, beauty and far out horizon gave me space to feel and express myself.
I moved away from the ocean when I was 18 and my tentative relationships with women continued. I would seem to make good friends but they only lasted a few years and then they were gone. We would lose contact or something would happen and we no longer had anything more to say to each other. One friend ended our relationship because I was “too thoughtful.” At the time it made no sense to me and I learned to trust or like myself even less: not knowing when I was giving too much, which sometimes led me to feel worn out and resentful if it felt like others were just taking and not giving: not understanding what I had done “wrong.” If problems arose in friendships I would often bury my head in the sand: not answer calls, pretend not to be in, panic if I bumped into them, or pretend everything was fine, but retain feelings of anger, confusion, fear,sadness and even devastation within.
I was too scared to speak up in case I was not liked anymore: I averted disaster to avoid the pain of rejection or judgement or punishment. The truth is I had become ashamed of myself, unsure, and certain I was not truly liked, that people would find out in the end how awful I was – that the real me was a bad, unlovable person.
Naturally, it was not just that I moved house a lot: in fact the constant moving, the never asking how we children felt about it was just a clue to the fact our feelings or the effects of the changes on us were never considered. I still have huge blanks in my memory, but my feelings tell me that everything was about the adults, especially about my mother. She was needy and narcissistic. Her own childhood, her own family history created a parent who really struggled to be a parent at all. How can you love your children when you do not know about love? When you do not know how to love yourself? All you do is believe that the world is against you and you fight in whatever way you need to to get attention, to get “love”. For my mother, the need was so great, the pain so deep, that she used her children to meet her emotional needs, which is very damaging.
The most painful emotional event for me was how my mother would pull me closer, tell me I was her favourite (which didn’t make me feel comfortable), get what she wanted from me, which could be any form of caring for her – either emotionally or physically. Then I would not do something as she expected in some way, if I didn’t make her feel better, if I didn’t stop her pain, didn’t do enough chores, didn’t listen to her enough, she would push me away – tell me I didn’t know what she was going through, that she “had sacrificed everything for her kids” and that we were ungrateful and I was a terrible daughter. I would stand confused. I tried to please her more and more. I would get her breakfast in bed, I became an entertainer to make her smile. I feared her wrath. I feared the uncertainty of her moods and the events it created. I feared rejection and abandonment.
I became a carer, a people-pleaser. I had been taught my emotions didn’t matter and in fact to express them was “selfish.” I learnt that love meant I had to earn it, I had to be perfect: in this way the love I dreamed of became unattainable.
My fears became so great I suppressed them hugely and many times my own law of attraction brought me events where I was rejected by friends. Of course this is God’s law working with love to help us feel and release the painful emotions – but that is something I have only understood in the last couple of years. Most of my life I have continued to suffer and hide my pain, my aloneness..
Rather than face others judgement I judged myself first and have self punished myself in many, many ways all my life: through food, through poor self-care, through relationships, living in fear and not following my dreams and desires. I gave myself the slap before others did – it seemed the easier option. It is a route many of us take. One that imprisons us in fear and suppression. A prison cell that only we have the key to.
Of course I never did reach the perfection I felt my parents wanted, no matter how hard I tried, particularly with my mother. So I mostly felt unloved and unaccepted. The rest of the craziness of my childhood led me to feel invisible and insignificant. Most of my life I have felt that no matter what I did or who I was, I could not be loved.
So why would I believe that a friend could really love me? Every other minute I wait to be “unloved”, rejected and alone. How can I trust my sisters, when the one big sister ( my mother) who was meant to guide me and teach me about love and trust, manipulated and hurt me. It may not have been consciously, but it happened. My hurt happened, as it has for so many of us on this planet: living and in spirit.
This is a fear, covering up a huge amount of grief and what is particularly painful for me right now is that it blocks me from receiving God’s love. I find it nearly impossible to connect to the feminine aspect of God. I often call my Father, but I can not say Mother to God without that sick feeling in my belly: an indication of my fear, blocks and pain. I have found the most incredible teachings of God’s truth and yet I can not fully embrace them whilst I block the most powerful love in the universe through my false beliefs and emotional injuries.
I recently wrote to Mary and Jesus and Mary said my unwillingness to feel my fear was blocking my progress. I totally agree and so I have been praying and letting myself start to feel some fear – it is a tiny trickle at the moment and sometimes I still revert to anger to avoid my fear, but I will keep going as what I do feel now is the pain of my suppression. I feel like an immovable rock and it hurts: it feels heavy and yukky. My body talks through pains in my shoulders and back: it tells me that my suppression is a burden, a heavy sack of “not love.”
I am also taking steps to not live in my fear: I called a friend I haven’t seen for a long time. I suggested to someone at work we go out to a cafe one day for a drink. I felt my fear when confronted with a woman at work who scared me. It’s amazing when you do feel your fear: everything changes. She is now more respectful of me and friendly. God’s laws working perfectly. The power of emotions to change our soul, even if it is just a little bit, which then in turn change our life. So if I start to feel more, my life will change more. These little steps out of my fear may seem silly, but for the last 3 years I have been a bit of hermit – avoiding situations where I might feel unaccepted, judged, or have to face angry women: avoiding friendships. Even when I write to Mary I feel my neediness – “love me, love me” as I seek approval. It’s sad and it’s also an unloving demand to Mary or anyone else I project it too. If I just feel the emotion that will stop. I have been in huge denial, and I at least hope that is changing.
Mary wrote some great stuff on fear and how to “jump from the plane” on her blog and she herself is a great inspiration as to watch her change throughout the videos on the Divine Truth website over the years and it has increased my faith in the process God has provided to heal our soul. To see her and Jesus, increase in love, increase in joy and passion touches my soul and provides hope and an example for us all: they really, really walk their walk.
At the moment I am still standing near the door of my plane (metaphorically) and starting to feel what the worse thing that could happen is if I feel my fear. I could die, I could go mad in the terror of my fall, but then I remember there is no death: then I remember that God loves me and wishes me no harm and I have daily evidence of that. Yes the fear I need to feel may be a castle of terror, but it is holding me back, locking me up and these days my desire to be free is starting to overtake my desire to be “safe.”
So watch out sisters, I may be coming out of the woodwork. I may even start to feel you like me: I may even start to like me myself. It doesn’t matter: all I know is it’s time for a change and it’s time to discover more about myself. Praying to be braver, more humble, more loving and more truthful: one step or one leap at a time.
Maxine
An Aside:
