Category Archives: fear

THOUGHTS ON LOVE

Posted on by under desire, Divine Truth, Emotional Injury, emotions, Expectations and Demands, Facade, fear, God's Love, love, Mary and Jesus, REal self, soulmate, True Self, Truth, Uncategorized

love-is-a-gift

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:

  • “Love is not an act… not an audition.”  Jesus says that love and truth go hand in hand so you can not love or be loved if you are in facade.
  • “Love is not  a bargain.. it is not a currency you buy things with…Love does not make deals. Love does not say, ‘I will give you love, but first you must give me something else.” This is the bartering system I was talking about and most of us are in these type of relationships ( any type of relationship).  I love this quote by Hafiz, “Even after all this time, The sun never says to the earth: “you owe me!”
  • “Love is not idolatry… when you don’t feel equal you give yourself away and take on a role.. they block intimacy. They conceal dishonesty.” I have done this many times – made myself smaller, less important than the other. If you make someone else higher than you, you live in fear and suffering: this is not love. It is a lack of self-love at the very least.
  • “Love is not special…. such as, “I’ve been saving all my love for you.” You are making someone into your “holy cow,”  Robert Holden says, and use them to “milk as much love as possible.” Love is not exclusive for one person, the goal is to love everyone. When you love you can love anyone ( though of course soulmate love or love with God with is different – though I will admit I am struggling with this one).
  • “Love is not selfish..Love is full of desire. You are intent on knowing the whole person… drop the mask and stop hiding. ” This makes me feel that Love is brave and open: it flies and dances. I have felt lust and infatuation – both feel addictive and selfish – it is all about what you can get.

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

 

 

 

 

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BADGER CULLING: HOW DO YOU FEEL?

Posted on by under addictions, creation, denial, Ecology, emotions, fear, love, Nature, THE ENVIRONMENT, Truth

badgers

This post is a bit different from my normal posts, but it is still about love. This time it is about my love for animals and specifically a protected species that is being mindlessly killed by the thousands here in the UK: Badgers. I have decided I want to stop the badger culling that is happening. To save them, but also to pay back something to the animal kingdom as I used to be a meat eater and I can now feel how awful that is and for me helping the badgers is a step to atone for that unloving action.

To give a bit of background, I became a vegetarian back in 2001, but didn’t do it very well and became malnourished and ate fish again for a about 2 years or so. I obviously still had some emotions about food and eating to work through. Since my son was born in 1994 I had gradually gone off different types of meat, the last thing being chicken. Bit by bit I suddenly saw and felt the “meat” as a living breathing animal. I couldn’t disassociate anymore and then eventually the same happened for fish. I have now been vegan since the end of 2015, though I was hardly eating much dairy by then. I did it for health reasons and then watched the film “Cowspiracy”  which not just talked about the animals, but also the impact on the environment of the meat and dairy industry, and that completed the transition.

Since I have become vegan I have over time found it harder to understand why people eat meat. I know it is not nutritionally necessary, but I guess there has been an emotional shift in me that now it seems very odd when I see people buying and eating meat and even at times, if I am honest, I am repulsed by it. I “see” the animals and I sometimes hear their cries.

Then lately, I have the feeling I want to atone for the sin of eating meat. This is not a judgement on those that do, but just how I feel within myself. The badger culling has upset me since I first heard about it and I signed a petition, but now I am wanting to do more if I can so I hope I can contribute some awareness to start with.

The reason for badger culling, so the government say, is to reduce the incidence of bovine TB, which has devastating effects on the farming industry and their families. (Of course if we didn’t eat meat or dairy this wouldn’t even be an issue as farming would be plant-based).

Here are the facts:  (source the Badger Action Network and Wildlife Trust)

  • This year 19,274 badgers were culled ( and this doesn’t include the number in West Somerset or West Gloucestershire)
  • Next year 33,841 are targeted
  • A scientific study was done between 1998 and 2006 where Lord Krebs concluded, ” badger culling can make no meaningful contribution to cattle TB control in Britain” and “Culling is not a viable policy option.”
  • The primary cause of the spreading of Bovine TB has been shown to be cattle to cattle.
  • In fact, Bovine TB exists in the countryside and has been found in everything from soil, earthworms, cats, sheep pigs and more.
  • Badgers were protected by the Protection of Badger Act in 1992 and the Convention on Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats because they are a crucial part of an ecosystem. When one badger is killed the number of foxes doubled.
  • The badger cull has no support from the British Veterinary Association, the public or any wildlife charities.
  • There is  no evidence that culling has changed the level of bovine TB. In fact prolonged culling has been shown to increase bovine TB levels because it affects badger behaviour and the location of badger setts.
  • Badger Culling is more expensive than vaccination. Between 2012-14 £16.8 million was spent on the culling of 2,476 badgers which works out at £6785 per badger. Vaccinations cost £293 per badger
  • Most scientists and wildlife experts believe that vaccination is more effective as it does not  disrupt badger behaviour.
  • More research also needs to be done on biosecurity to prevent cattle to cattle spreading of the disease.
  • Here is a short film by some leading wildlife experts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhojkHMyaJg

So it all seems very clear and we can take actions: sign petitions, join local groups and write to MPs and much of that has been done. In fact, there has been a huge public outcry about this so why isn’t it changing? Why are the government ignoring experts and its voters and continuing with this illogical and awful killing?

I believe it is the same reasons, people still eat meat. We have become hugely disassociated from our emotions about animals and nature in general. We look upon our survival as dependent on us and our actions. We don’t accept emotionally simple facts, such as without trees, we won’t have oxygen; without flies, we would have piles of bodily waste products sitting on the planet. We don’t FEEL how much we need nature and in fact because of our development how we are the custodians of this planet and all the creatures in it and that possibly this beautiful place is ours to enjoy without the need to destroy it or the any living being who lives here with us. We still have very arrogant and maybe have religious justifications for “lording it over” animals, thinking we have a right to their meat, to their reproduction. Therefore, we don’t feel all our fears that underlie this: our fears about our own survival, for instance.

In the video, one expert stated he understood the farmers angry emotions about the impact of bovine TB on their lives and that because of this they wanted someone to pay. How awful, that it is now the badgers that are paying for the fact that farmers feel helpless, don’t want to feel helpless and want something to make them feel better: so let’s kill badgers and despite the evidence to the contrary. To be a farmer, you must have to become emotionally detached from animals and their suffering to varying degrees, whether it is sending them for the slaughter; putting newborn calves in tiny pens the same day as ripping from their mothers; killing hundreds of thousands of male chicks or forcing cows to produce gallons of milk time and time again after forcibly inseminating them.

But none of us are innocent in this. We demand dairy products, we love our cheese, we want our steaks and we want someone else to provide it for us, to kill the animal for us, to take the baby calf away so that we can drink it’s milk. We want that. So despite the fact than many of us are up in arms about badger culling, and we want animals to be recognised as sentient beings we actually are hypocritical every time we put on our leather shoes, or cut into our Christmas turkey. We won’t look at our real emotions – the un-lovingness in each of us that allows these things to occur and asks another person, a farmer to kill on our behalf.

We can not change things we are lying about. We can only change things when we face the truth, emotionally, of what is  happening. If you really want to stop this awful culling, you can take some peaceful actions, but you can also ask yourself about how you really feel about animals. Watch things that will trigger emotions, such films as “Earthlings,” and don’t cover your eyes or press pause. Face the truth, feel it. If thinking was the answer all the scientific evidence would have changed things. It hasn’t. For some reason the culling is continuing so this means we are not recognising something we need to.

To not eat meat again I have had an emotional shift, over time that deepens over time. There are many who become vegan for lots of reasons and it is currently quite fashionable, but if the shift isn’t in your heart you will feel “tempted” to eat meat again, you will find it difficult or you will become anaemic because of your fears around plant-based diets.

We need to do the same for all our treatment of animals. Stop disconnecting, face the truth and chose Love. We ignore what is staring us in the face because it is not convenient, it challenges our “comfortable” lives and addictions. Ironically, that is the  point, to change everything, we have to challenge and question all the ways we are doing things and seek the loving solution and the real truth. We will make mistakes, but the seeking of the truth is a very good first step. It is the that step which created this blog in the first place: an experiment, a searching and seeking for change.

I want to save the badgers. I want to learn what love is. But other times I am still very angry, in pain, wanting addictions and presenting a face to the world that isn’t me. That is the truth: a battle of my soul, a seeking and searching, making mistake after mistake and getting a few things right. But I would rather try than do nothing. As Roosevelt said:

“The best thing to do is the right thing. The next best thing to do is the wrong thing. The worst thing to do is nothing.”

Prayers for the badgers and all the beautiful creatures that share this world with me.

@2017 Maxine Bell

 

 

 

 

The Difference Divine Truth Has Made To My Life

Posted on by under cancer, desire, Divine Truth, Emotional Injury, fear, God, God's Laws, God's Love, God's Truth, heal, Mary and Jesus, REal self, Robert James Lee, self worth, The human soul, THE WAY, Uncategorized

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?

Mary and Jesus visit 2012

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:

  • Understand that I have a soul, a spirit body and physical body and that I am a soul and how that works
  • That I am created to be emotional and that my soul is the power, not my mind.
  • Some understanding of how the universe works, who God is and His Laws
  • The difference between God’s love and truth and human understanding of love and how little we/I know of real love.
  • To start to see the truth of my life and my soul condition, my emotional injuries and the sin ( things out of harmony with love) in me.
  • How my suppressed emotions impact the world negatively
  • How fear has been my God for a long time
  • That God is interested in me, the real me, the “pinnacle of his creation.” and not the facade me
  • That I matter.
  • That there are absolute Truths
  • Information and understanding of the spirit world and spirits.
  • Understanding of spirit influence in my life and how I can change that.
  • That what I think and what I feel can be very different and it is always the emotions in me that guide my life
  • Some understanding of soulmates – that God designed a perfect mate for me and why I we currently don’t know that because of our emotional injuries.
  • That I have spent much of my life in a facade, which has grown as I have grown, due to my fears and addictions to avoid my emotions
  • To have compassion with  myself
  • That following my desires and passions is important. That my unique gifts make a difference to my soul and to everyone else around me.
  • That there is a difference between natural human love and God’s love and they create two different ways of healing and growing and the potential of the second is far greater.
  • That all the information I have learnt ( as above) has given me hope and empowered me. I had thought that life was meaningless, empty, but that it isn’t and that my younger feelings that Love guided everything is true and that I if I grow faith in this and God’s love for me, everything in my life can change.
  • I am becoming a better person because I can examine and feel more truthfully about when I am sinning. I have stopped denying I have these ugly emotions in me.
  • My desire to experience these emotions (without harming anyone) will set me free. I have the choice.
  • To seek for my real self, to seek beyond what I thought I knew.
  • To be truthful and that love and truth hold hands and one can’t exist without the other.
  • Without knowing some of the Divine Truth teachings I would not have coped with the cancer as well; I would not have understood it’s root and causes, I would not have found a reason to keep living.

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

 

Jesus promise

 

 

 

FOLLOWING DESIRE

Posted on by under denial, desire, emotions, fear, God's Truth, self worth, The human soul, Uncategorized

Following-Your-Dreams-300x194

How much do I desire what is in my heart?

I have been looking more into the truth of what I desire and experimenting with observing what I create every day from my desire.  I have also been becoming more sensitive to how it feels when I do and when I don’t follow a desire. The following notes are from that experimentation and from the Divine Truth teachings. I will put a reference to the talks that have helped me the most with this at the end.

The evidence of my desire for a particular thing or a things, is in my actions every day: the amount of time I think about it, feel about it, read about it, investigate it, experiment with it, act on it. If I am not doing this then there are some emotions in the way: fear; fear of change; fear of who I may become; fear of failure and how terrible that may feel. We may think we want to become that new person, that we want the change, but an emotion in our soul is in disagreement with that thought because it is our soul which is actually the true driving force of how we act on our desires or not. Our soul tells us the truth, whereas our mind can manufacture thoughts that are not true and often distracting. It is just our mind, but we are our soul.

Our soul contains all of our emotions and our beliefs – many error based from our childhood environment. Our soul also contains our passions, desires, intentions, memories. But it cannot contain both the truth on a subject and the error on the same subject. To know the truth we have to release error.

So if my parents have told me all my life I am incapable, or a failure, a disappointment – we are terribly afraid that what they said or projected at us may be true and if we hold onto that fear it prevents us taking action on our desire. We don’t challenge that belief we will stay stuck in it. If we don’t challenge our fear we cannot follow our desires.

I live in my fear, my fear creates all sort of excuses for not following that desire: I don’t have enough time; I can’t afford it; what will my partner think; my children need me. I also create many addictions to distract me from the fear – that keep me busy and “comfortable.” I stay stagnant or even get in a worse state as our soul shrinks when we deny it, when we don’t feel, and when we don’t follow our desires.

Jesus teaches that fear is the biggest block to desire. The more we live in our fear we have the less desire we have, the less we know what our desires even are. Instead, if we act on a desire, however small, and we let ourselves feel our fear, but not let it stop us, we will release some fear and then there is room for more desire in our soul.

I have felt how it has felt lately when I have followed a desire even when I was very afraid. I recently did a performance for the solo autobiographical theatre I started this year (to get out my comfort zone) and I deliberately included in it two things I was terrified of doing in public: dancing and singing. ( There are also two things I love doing). For a week before I felt shaky inside, woke up in the night with fear, felt sick, couldn’t think straight at times because all I could feel was this fear pulsing through me. But, I did it anyway, and goodness it was so freeing. I learnt that my fear didn’t kill me, that it is just a feeling. It may sound silly, but I have had a fear of fear – that it would overwhelm me to the point of death. I am not saying that has gone fully, but this one step has given me some faith that fear will not kill me. I also felt my soul expanded. I feel braver and more willing.

These feelings are in stark contrast to what I have been feeling for a long time: restricted, oppressed, small, lost, despairing – like where is the real me? I have felt so disconnected from my own soul and as time goes on it becomes more painful to not be me, to live in facade, to live in fear.

So what does my heart really desire? I just need to look at my day what I create every day: I create what I desire. So if I truly, sincerely want change it will happen and I won’t let anything stop me. If change doesn’t happen then the truth is my soul is actually saying, “I am too afraid of change” or “I don’t feel worthy” – feelings like that. So be honest.  If we keep deceiving ourselves that we want something and getting frustrated that it isn’t happening, blaming outside forces, or making excuses we will remain stagnant.

God wants us to discover and follow our passionate desires. It is the most loving thing you can do for ourselves: to discover our worth, our real self in the process.

I starting to have some faith and some belief that it is okay for me to follow my desires. I am the at the beginning of that path and ironically maybe, just stepping out of my comfort zone a bit has also highlighted how much grief I have yet to process over my lack of self-worth. But that’s okay, as I have been pretending for a while I was feeling much better about myself than I actually do.  The denial was doing me much more harm than the truth I am now feeling. What is now occurring is a deeper shift that feels long-lasting. Baby steps – but like a baby the more I walk the steadier I will get and the then the faster I will get.

So being honest about our desires, about our fears, about our excuses and blocks will create movement. Taking action is a must. It means we are not living in our fear and it will automatically trigger the emotions we need to release.

Imagine living in your passion – what will that feel like? Oh just to feel it, to experience it. Look at those that are doing this. They don’t go to work, they go to play.

I am very curious about my potential and I am curious about yours.

What do we desire? But more than that, what are we doing about it?

Maxine Bell@2017

References/more information – 

The Law of Desire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XIUzc8CULA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6qaXczC-d4

How the human soul functions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuxJN2sLbxI&list=PLE-RF2VTnr9h_dfiaZT_qkY9C1M86P5o4

 

 

 

 

Said Better Than I Can and One of The Greatest Gifts I Can Give You…

Posted on by under Divine Truth, Earth changes, fear, God, God's Laws, God's Truth, God's Way of Love, Mary and Jesus, resistance

After a few weeks of resistance and rebellion and not feeling happy at all in that space and then spending a good amount of time in nature this weekend -swimming in the sea, walking on the moors, by rivers, where despite ranting at God, when faced with such beauty I can not help but be awestruck and challenged by the different perspective that beauty and the love of it’s creation/Creator confronts me with. I am still feeling bloody-minded (there are fears I don’t want to feel), but I came across these interviews from 2011, after a friend was interested in what I was telling her about the divine truth teaching and having not seen these all the way through before, found them really good and poignant for me to feel other things beside just my resistance. Just can’t deny these teachings or these two amazing souls!

In the first video Jesus and Mary talk about their identity, why they are back on earth, who God is, why we struggle with believing in God, soulmates, and a basic summary of what they teach and demonstrate. In the second video the subjects range from the Law of Compensation, forgiveness and repentance, non-violent resistance, why Hitler came about, 9/11 and earth changes. All really interesting stuff and a good introduction (along with Secrets of the Universe talks on the Divine Truth information page on this website) – if you want to get an overview of what I talk about regularly or are just curious about the fact Jesus and Mary are back on earth. They are interviewed by Geoff Whitehouse who says he has been an atheist for 20 years or so and been reading Richard Dawson and suchlike, but meeting Jesus and Mary has made him rethink…

PART 1

 

PART 2

Be open, enjoy.

Maxine

BELIEFS ABOUT FATHER

Posted on by under Emotional Injury, Fathers, fear, Gender Wounds, God's Love, God's Way of Love, Grief, humility, Parenting

dad

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

IF I SURRENDER

Posted on by under fear, heal, True Self, Uncategorized

surrender

 

If I surrender,

The world may cave in.

 

If I surrender,

I may crash and fall and stumble.

 

If I surrender,

People may think I’ve gone mad,

I’m too deep,

Too different.

 

If I surrender,

I may feel aloneness so deep, it will be like sitting

In a dark void where nothing and no one exists.

 

If I surrender,

I may get bashed or smashed or broken

Or beaten or bruised.

 

If I surrender,

I may have to let go of the fragile foundations I have built

And am convinced are safe; not happy, but safe.

 

If surrender,

The unknown will come knocking on my door

And scream in my face, “I’m HERE!”

 

But if I surrender,

I may discover all that I thought was true,

All the terrible hopeless things I thought, are false.

 

If I surrender,

I may tingle with the feeling of shedding a skin,

Unpacking my rucksack.

 

If I surrender,

I might finally cry all the unshed tears

And create oceans whose tides allow me to step on new shores.

 

If I surrender,

I might find I can dance

With a lightness I never knew before.

 

If I surrender,

I might discover what no tension feels like

The tension of having to be ‘strong’ and capable

And responsible and ‘alright.’

 

Instead if I surrender,

I might just feel and feel and feel and feel

And let my heart beat again.

 

If I surrender,

I might discover who I am really

And as I let go and allow the mud on me

To soften and melt.

 

If I surrender,

I might set myself free

To love again and to be loved.

 

If I surrender,

I will know that surrendering was not terrifying

And dangerous, but instead is

Beautiful and raw and tender and deep.

 

If I surrender,

I might find me.

 

Maxine Bell@2017

Maxine Bell @2017

FATHERLESS

Posted on by under abandonment, emotions, fear, Grief, Parenting, shame, suppression, VULNERABILITY

Fatherless

 

I would like to recommend a book today, by my friend, Phil Barber. I have only known Phil a few months, but we have been sharing quite a journey together on our weekly sessions of something called ‘Solo Autobiographical Theatre.’ You can‘t call it a drama class alone, as it is much more than that as you may guess from the autobiographical bit in the title. I wanted to do something that would get me out of my comfort zone and this was it and it has proven to be more than I could realise and in it, I am pretty fearless with the hope and desire this will spread into other areas of my life.

Together with 2 or 3 others we get together and pull strands from our own lives and find a way to express the story, face the sadness and some of the sweeter memories, but also tune into the wider story and break down some of those false beliefs and emotions that keep us stuck in the story. It really is an incredible gift and I am embracing it all and finding out things about myself I didn’t know I could do and becoming aware of emotions and experiences I didn’t know about. I find I can improvise a piece so quickly because with my spiritual journey in mind, I decide to focus on the emotion of a memory rather than the detail of that memory and from the feeling something grows. I also get to experience and watch others courageously opening themselves, unveiling their raw and vulnerable spots, as well as innate creativity.

But the other gift is that the four people I do it with sit without judgement and allow and encourage me to find the rawness of the emotion I feel and I so I feel uninhibited ( mostly), even with anger – an emotion I have found difficult to show publically or in the past admit I even had. There feels a supportive love present. In our different ways, we are seeking something and facing fears and challenging each other to be truthful and adventurous. Sometimes it is incredibly intense and yet very beautiful to see each other’s vulnerabilities and unlike therapy it feels less staged.

I know that sounds weird and there have been times when I have had therapy and it has helped me, but there have been many times when I felt a therapist was trying to control what I was feeling – so as “not to re-traumatise” me. If you have read some of my other blogs you will know that I understand and experience that it is the suppression of our emotions that has damaged us/me and to me that kind of therapy, just falls into society’s fear of emotional overwhelm and logically, if we look around at the problems in the world it is our denial of our true emotions that allows us to live so much of life in facade and untruths.

This autobiographical theatre is allowing me to experience myself in a new way and it has stirred up memories that are painful, but need to be felt, as well as moments of childhood that are sensory, that are good. So, in a short time, we all may have got to know more about each other, than we may have with other friends we have known for years. I guess when you are not sitting there over coffee having a chat over mundane or everyday things, you skip some facade and that is refreshing.

During the process, there have been some emotions in Phil that I related to a lot and so when he said he had written a memoir of his childhood, which was a journey of his life in and out of various children’s home and foster care I wanted to read more. From my experience, I have read more bad autobiographies/memoirs than good ones. Phil’s memoir is a very, very good one. He said it took him five hard years to write and I can see why as much of it is heart-breaking and sad and a poor reflection on how children are treated by their own family, but also by the systems in place which are meant to keep them safe from harm. It must have been a very emotional journey to write -and there is the gift.

In his introduction, Phil says he wrote it because “in fathoming more deeply my own journey it would help my children fathom theirs… and to speak to the orphan in us all.” The book is a gift of love to himself, which when you read the story, will see why that is so important; a gift of love to his children and to any of us that connect in with the feelings his childhood created and which so many of us relate to.

It is very well-written, but mostly frank, honest, deeply touching, but very self-effacing, making it all the more easy to read and connect with. I want to say a very personal thank you. I could not put this book down and by the end of it was in tears as I connected with many of the emotions of not feeling good enough, loneliness, shame and grief of my own childhood. So yes, it touched the “orphan” in me.

This orphan feeling I feel, runs deep in all of us. It initially may be a feeling we experience as coming from our own poor parenting, but I also feel it from our disconnection with our true parent – the one I am now trying to discover – and to discover that true parent, I know I have to grieve all the bad stuff that happened. I get angry at God, at times, because I don’t want to feel all of that, and I just want Him to hug it all away, but I have to bow to a greater wisdom that knows that my soul will expand once I have off loaded all the crappy stuff – to make room for the good. Makes sense hey? You can’t fill a jug with clean, fresh water if it is full of mucky old brown sludge.

But I digress! Please read this wonderful memoir. It will help you emotionally, if that is what you want, or it will just be a beautiful read. As the title of my blog, Phil’s book is called “Fatherless,” and I have put a link below. I can’t recommend it enough and I feel blessed to have such a friend.

And Phil – you truly have come a long, remarkable way. Well done and thank you so much.

With love,

Maxine

SURVIVING AIN’T LIVING

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

fight-or-flight-uncertainty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Oh goodness, now won’t that be wonderful…

Maxine

SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE

Posted on by under addictions, emotions, Facade, fear, humility, VULNERABILITY

goldfish

“You use your strength to separate yourself from everyone, but it’s thrilling when your defences are down.”

This is a line said by Harry (Jack Nicholson) to Erica (Diane Keaton) in the film “Something’s gotta give.” I am not writing a film review, but I watched it because having never heard of it before it came into my view twice in 12 hours   – firstly, it was mentioned at dinner with friends and then the next day I wondered into a charity shop so see if I could find a film to watch and there it was standing out among the DVD’s on display. I felt I was being guided to watch it and so I bought it.

It came under the guise of a romantic comedy, about two people, who in their own way had shut down the idea of the possibility of a deep love and connection, both for different reasons. They were thrown into the path of each other and despite a tricky start they fell quickly and deeply in love. However, fear came up and one of them pulls back. I won’t say too much in case you want to watch it. It is funny and touching and I waited to see what it had to offer me.

On one hand it is obvious, I am terrified of giving myself to love and I struggle to receive love. I am very suspicious of someone saying they love me, because love has meant departure, manipulation, feeling used, disappointment, confusion and pain. In truth none of that IS love. I know this intellectually and I have a small feeling deep down there is something much more special that is truly love, but my emotional wounds, my parent’s/ environment version of love, like many of us, was wrong, is wrong and now I am attempting to understand what love is, but I am scared. Scared by previous experiences and my emotional knowledge of love. Yet to keep saying this is also an excuse and an addiction and re-educating myself about love is within my own power and choice.

Then on the other hand is this issue of strength. When this line was said it struck me – it was me. I use my “strength” to separate myself from everyone. I have noticed that I call my mother the bounce back queen. Despite all her own lack of self love, the damage she has done to herself and to others, how she has treated her body, she still survives, she still keeps going. She has a chronic illness- temporal arthritis which requires horrible medication, including lots of steroids. Because of this her bones are fragile and the smallest fall she breaks a bone. This year she fell and smashed 6 ribs, had a metal plate put in to fix them. She was home within 3 days. Last week, she discovered she had 2 fractures in her neck, that had gone undetected for a week and she still got on a plane to Spain for a week. Many will read this and think, wow she is strong. But is it being strong or is it being self-reliant and avoiding her vulnerability?

Last week at work, someone asked me some questions about myself, which I answered honestly and their comment was, “you are one strong lady.” It was said in a way, that I should be proud of myself, proud of my strength. It has been said to me before a number of times. But right now I don’t want to be strong. What does it really mean? I am addicted to it. I am addicted to “being strong:” to surviving through many things, to getting back up, to pushing on, to keep going. I am addicted it, but I am sick of it because it is as Harry says my strength has become the space I use to stay separate, to avoid relationships, to avoid love, and to avoid feeling. It also involves appalling self care at times because I ignore so much of my pain.

I can feel the damage it is doing to me, emotionally, spiritually and physically. I have pain in some part of my body daily and I don’t take analgesia. I haven’t for long time and I used to consider myself to have a high pain threshold. I do, but this is not a good thing, this is shut down of feelings. And there are many of you out there who do the same thing.

There is no judgement is this because we live in society, that celebrates this kind of strength, this way of coping. I am English and we have had a long tradition of stoicism, that “stiff upper lip” nonsense: “chin up!” In other words, pretend it doesn’t hurt, don’t be emotional, just grin and bear it. The words that aren’t said here are “don’t be emotional because that will trigger all my emotions which will make me and everyone else around me upset and we don’t want to be upset because we don’t want to feel our emotions either. Avoidance, facade and all of us meeting each other’s emotional addictions.

What I feel now, is that this is incredibly sad. It is incredibly sad that we are so locked up, that I am, because when I lock up my negative emotions I also lock up my positive ones. So I can not experience my joy and happiness as I should. It is the way our soul works – suppress one emotion and we suppress another and it builds up to the state of numbness and de-tunement many of us live in.

I am not happy being like this and I am sick of being “strong.” It means I am overly self-reliant and I don’t let others in and I don’t let them help me. Then I feel alone and then I feel upset and angry that no on will care for me: a vicious cycle. Compassionately, I have reasons why I became “strong:” it was a survival technique and in fact I was taught to be this way, to support my mother and to care for my brothers and I certainly wasn’t encouraged, like many, to feel or acknowledge my own needs. I may be “strong” to the world as it currently is, but the truth is I am weak in knowing myself, and allowing myself the real strength and courage to feel all of my emotions.

There is small part of me that wants to be vulnerable and the times I have allowed that have been the most amazing times and I have felt almost beautiful. After the crying, we often feel more peaceful, especially when it is a causal emotion. I long for that peace and yet I must have a greater desire not to feel at the moment, to hold on and if I really want to progress more quickly something’s gotta give.

Being vulnerable is something I don’t emotionally understand properly. I feel inside it is weakness, as many do. Most of freak out when too much emotion hits the room. We can cope with a bit, but if it goes on too long, either with ourselves or others we judge it, we get fidgity, distract ourselves, talk ourselves out of it, eat ourselves out of it, drink ourselves out it; anything to lessen the “drama” of a roomful of emotions.

But emotions are E – motions. They are meant to move in and out, like a river. Often, instead , they sit in us like a rock and despite on some level we feel the weight of stuck emotions we have become experts in pretending they are not there. It is similar to being very overweight, we keep buying bigger clothes, bigger chairs and bed, put elastic in our belts so we don’t have feel too uncomfortable and aware of that extra flesh.

Being vulnerable would be to put on those trousers we can’t fit into, feel how uncomfortable they are now, walk out in them, feel exposed and allow all the feelings of that to come. So for me this acts as a key to accessing my vulnerability – getting out my comfort zone.

In November I did a four day workshop called Solo Autobiographical theatre. I had 4 days of being outside my comfort and it was transforming in the sense that I faced fears, didn’t live in them, felt emotions, felt exposed and at the end felt empowered discovering bits of myself I hadn’t before. So now I am signed up for 2 terms of this and I keep looking for ways to get out of my comfort zone. Actually, I think I will call it my addiction zone, because I would say most, if not all, of my so-called comfort zone is full of emotional and physical addictions. It is pretend safe zone, but truly an avoidance zone and the truth is, the reality is this addiction zone may give me some sense of gratification, but it has not brought me real happiness, love or joy. So, on an experimental basis I would say that experiment has failed and it is time for  new experiment. No real love in our life is no real life at all: it is living life in the greyscale, instead of vibrant colour.

I have so much to learn about vulnerability and blocks to work through to allow it more in myself. Then I feel, I will also learn more about being strong in the true sense, strong enough, courageous enough to feel, to feel my emotions, to feel my Self and awaken all my senses, and start waking up to truly living again. It is in there, because God made us that way. She didn’t create robots after all, she created living, breathing, dancing, singing, creating, thinking and most of all, uniquely of all, emotional beings: all that makes us human.

The ability, the desire to feel all of our emotions all of the time is humility. Humility allows vulnerability to be present and allows us to move those negative emotions out of us and let in the new, more joyful ones in. Our current definition of strong for me is rigidity and denial: a painful holding on: the inhale. Vulnerability is softening, allowing, surrender: the doorway to more truth, joy and freedom: the exhale. Sighing…

“You’ve got to learn how to fall, before you can learn how to fly.” (from the film).

@Maxine Bell 2017