Tag Archives: Soul

THERE IS ALWAYS A GIFT OF LOVE

Posted on by under addictions, Disability, Emotional Injury, God's Love

gift-box

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”

mj-ben

PRECIOUS MOMENTS

Posted on by under creation, God, God's Love, God's Truth, Nature, Robert James Lee, Soul, Spirit World

flower in crack

There are precious moments in some of my days when I feel I can touch the edges of heaven. Moments that come unexpectedly. I close my eyes and breath in these moments and hold onto them, breath them in.Sometimes it is words I have read or heard, a movie I have watched, music I have heard or the beauty of the natural world, that grasp my hand and heart and drift into my soul where the echo of knowing that these things truly are. It’s not easy to put feelings into words, but there is a longing, a yearning and yet a faint memory from sleep state and dreams of other places: beautiful places, familiar and waiting. Greater hopes and the building blocks of faith start here, and my heart sighs with wonder and relief that these things are, these places exist and most of all that the Universe we live in beats with the pulse of Love in all that is created.

I used to remember these places more clearly in my sleep state and now it is rare, sadly, but there are other sources of information that allow me to dream and know.  what I can see clearly, as what I have experienced seems so small compared to the expanse indicated. There has been a more consistent shift in me to really feel the truth of life that goes beyond the grave, the infinite possibilities of such a life, the infinite possibility of a life I can have,even here on earth . This awareness helps me pull myself out of false beliefs and negative influence a bit quicker to search for God’s truth on the matter. I have been wondering about the truth of God, looking for evidence, that He is good, loving, kind and steadfast.  I have been remembering those places that I can see sometimes in my third eye. I have been reading wonderful books that reveal more of God, more of the full story of life, of love. Funny things like making a poster to tell me that God’s truth is I am “the most wondrous of his creations.” Some of you may think this is a comfort blanket, but for me it is important. I have believed so much bad of myself, so much of what I was told I have believed to be true – that I am unimportant, bad, never good enough. I have believed it so much it has become destructive addictions that have made my life a painful existence instead of a fully vibrant life of discovery, joy and love. I have believed what my injured parents told me, when they only spoke through injury not truth. And living in these false beliefs, especially as addictions, is just a way to avoid the truth that maybe God sees me as wonderful and a tender child of His. It helps me avoid the grief I need to feel about all those projections, all the fears I have that it may have been true. 

I need to re-educate my hurt self and to discover truth beyond what this wounded world shows me. The funny thing is the evidence is all around me, under the dust and dirt of this world. It is like when I walk on paving stones and then discover a small flower growing through the cracks: strong, vulnerable beauty pushing up to be seen. I wonder at it’s little power, it continual effort to exist and remind me of what is real. Only love can create that; the light in the darkness.

I am on my second reading of the Robert James Lee Trilogy of channelled books. Lee channels a spirit called Aphraar (Frederick Winterleigh whilst on earth). Aphraar has a passion to share the truth about the spirit world and earth with the world and tells the story of his passing and his existence and experiences in the spirit world, in order for us to have a greater understanding of what life and all it’s wondrous possibilities is about and tell the truth about God. I find reading them just breathtaking at times. The truths shared, the images created, the love revealed behind what he experiences and observes in spirit world just wonderful. Even in the darkest corners of hell Love acts, waits and hopes. For me, these books, reach into my heart and my imagination of what is possible and what is already existing for many. I also, know that my understanding of what he is telling is minimal to the true wonder of it all.

And why should I believe these books? Many would dismiss them as having no evidence in fact. But what arrogance do we speak from? What gods so we believe ourselves to be in that because we have not seen it ourselves or touched it, it is not real. We can’t see air, but it exists. I can’t see the world is round so I have to trust that the photos I have seen, what others have seen make be true. There are many things I have not experienced myself, but I know to be true through other people’s evidence. All I know is I have a feeling about the books that let me believe what I read. My soul is touched by the love demonstrated, but also by the sense and logic in the tales of the different lives of different spirits- from those earthbound to those living in the heavens. I have also spoken to spirits through mediumship so my experience has given me evidence of their existence, of life beyond the grave.

new earth x

We are just afraid often by things we don’t understand and we live in it. Yet, there is so much to discover and I am grateful for these moments, these precious moments. One of my favourite chapters in the first book – “Through the Mists,” is the chapter about a poetess. It is a poetess that Aphraar was inspired by in his earth life and now gets to meet in spirit world. She demonstrated great faith in her poetry and helped his own faith in times when he felt very alone in his pursuits. In this chapter, Aphraar describes her home “like a realised dream in which some weary painter, musician or poet  had sought – and found – rest.” He describes the gardens:

“Here, Color had wooed, won, and lived in sweet fidelity with Music. Before me lay the natal bowers of Beauty, Enchantment, Harmony, Grace and Rhythm, each of whom held court in one or other of the hundred odorous halls of grove, or hill or mountain.Echo and Song chanted roundelay upon the heights for which the lake rippled its approbation in silvern tones; birds of dreamlike plummage warbled their anthems of evergreen luxuriance..the heavens unrolled their canopy of atmospheric tones and tints which have no names or counterparts on earth.” This is not the Nature of earth – it is beyond that in beauty and grace. As a painter and a lover of nature, I tried to imagine this place. It was like one of those photo-shop images I have seen: more vibrant, more alive, more harmonious. The ones I have posted and others have groaned “oh that’s been photo-shopped.” A groan of despair that such a place could ever truly exist. But why not? Why stay stuck believing “What the eye can’t see…” What would a blind man say to that?

As I read this description for the second and then third time I felt my breath, my eyes close to “see” such a place. I remembered my sleep state experiences where I have visited, in the past, different places, but two in particular stand out as places I have been to many times. One,  I sit by a river, with huge stones in it, the water dancing over them. There is small green bridge. The grass on either bank is a dark, but vivid, lush green: a thick warm rug underneath me. I am sitting by an old tree, looking out and up to beautiful mountains in the distance; the sky is blue and the light bright. I feel peaceful here and sometimes animals come and visit.it is so alive! In the background I can hear children’s laughter. Flowers grow among the grass, and happiness is a regular companion.

The other place is a small, sandy beach surrounded by tropical plants and forests. There is wooden hut there, with beautiful hangings. Again I am surrounded by beautiful mountains too, which rise up around and beyond the water. The sand is warm and dolphins greet me, playfully from the sea, which is deep and wide, light dancing off it’s surface. I often sit just letting sand trickle through my fingers, reflecting, breathing, resting. I haven’t been there for a while.

In the previous chapter, Aphraar has discovered that when we sleep on earth, our spirit bodies do travel and do have real experiences and he has just be reacquainted with many friends, many people who he helped when he was on earth. He has remembered all of  his sleep state and so is now meeting those he knew then. The poet is one of them. Her poems had “been almost my only companions in the solitude of earth life. She seemed to understand life, as I knew it, with its deep soul longings and unalleviated heartaches, like an almost kindred soul, but she had conquered and found a calm for which I vainly searched.” He discovered after her death that her upbringing had been “an education in the ministry of love,” as her father’s faith was deep. She related her own growing faith and closeness to God in her poetry and she inspired Aphraar to have faith as “she glided heavenward she sang- told all her deep experiences, reflected back again the sunlight which fell upon her soul, thus her voice came with wonderfully soothing influence upon the storms and troubles which encompassed me.” And now here he was on the same level – both passed from earth and experiencing the spirit life and he shares his wonderful experience meeting her again and learning what she had to teach.

She shares that despite her faith when she passed she had to realise the error of some of her beliefs that she would travel straight to God, to the highest heavens. She describes her experience of learning that we must climb step by step carefully and embrace each step, waiting for God to know when it is right for us to climb higher. There is a portion of a beautiful poem called “Waiting.” (p189). It ends in the book: ( though this is not the full poem)

“Oh, the vision would o’er power us,/ If it suddenly were given/ So we wait in preparation/ In the vestibule of heaven.” Aphraar was memorized and thrilled by her reading of her poetry, done with such longing and passion. He describes “Her recital was a calm confession of trust in God…she lingered over each recurring ‘waiting’ as if she drew from its deep spring the full sweetness of the assurance that ‘they too serve who only stand and wait,’ and was reluctant to turn away from the refreshing draught. She had forgotten me – everything save her God…” He was speechless for a while, in the presence of her ecstasy.

When they converse again, she shares her knowledge of the many stages of progression to God, that they may be infinite. She lives in a beautiful home already, but knows she can not even fully comprehend the beauty that is to come as she grows closer to God, even though some of her friends have tried to describe it. He asks, “When you think of such a consummation, do you not wish for the intervening stages to hasten by that you may obtain it?”

“Yes; and yet, no!” she answers. “That is the absolute ideal of every true soul, which, in common with them, I am anxious to reach. But at present I have not the capacity to appreciate and enjoy it, so the gift would be too overpowering and would only crush, instead of elevate me. You must remember that one who has been successfully operated on for blindness can only, be initiated into the light by degrees. We have all been blind, and God’s light will only come as we are able to bear it.”

She has learnt “every step I take towards Him becomes another messenger to me, bearing some fresh revelation of His love, every halting-place becomes another unfoldment, and every message quietly expands my soul into a closer likeness of Himself.”

Their whole conversation is full of treasures, full of information about God and God’s workings. It lifts my spirit, my gratitude and my curiosity to find out more. It encourages me to be patient, to let myself experience the steps on this journey, even the “halting-places” – of which, I have many right now. It also helps me feel God has a home waiting for me too and to have faith in that, based on what I discover, will help me never give up.

It’s tough a lot of the time still as I still resist and avoid, when I should surrender and trust. Books like this, words like this, information like all help me, nourish and feed my soul, educate me about love ( for which I am not even at kindergarten level). Many of us think we know about God – what He is or isn’t through our indoctrination or our complete denial He exists, but often we haven’t even investigated or questioned our beliefs, haven’t looked around at our world and searched for the answers ourself. What I have found as my desire increases, more books, films, music and teachings cross my path. I notice them and they are the jewels that are thrown on the rocky path I still choose a lot of the time right now: they are the precious moments that make my soul sing and for those brief minutes allow me to feel the possibilities open to me, the gifts God has waiting for me… when I am ready to receive them. I am the horse, God is the water… He will not force me to drink, but will long for me to thirst so that I may taste the pure waters of truth, the divine sup of Love.

So I start to see beyond my small, small world. Open the door a little and see the crack of brilliant light beyond. The door is heavy, but I really I am weak. I have a feeling this door is only as heavy as I believe it to be.

Maxine

WAITING

Waiting now upon the threshold,

Just within the porch of life;

Safe from all the storms and tempests,-

Hushed the discord and the strife;

Stilled the heart of its wild beatings,

Calmed the hot and fevered brain

Waiting now, and resting sweetly,

‘Til the Master comes again.

Waiting, where the rippling wavelets

Of life’s river lave my feet;

Washing off the stains of travel,

Ere the Master I may greet;

Till the voice is full and mellow,

And I learn the sweet, new song;

Till the discord is forgotten,

That disturbed my peace so long.

Waiting, till the wedding garment,

And the bridal wreath is here;

Till our Father’s feast is ready,

And the bridegroom shall appear

Till the seeds of life have blossomed,

And the harvest-home we sing.

Gathering up my life’s long labours

For my bridal offering.

Oh! ’tis not as men would teach us- 

Just one step from earth to God;

Passing through the death-vale to Him,

In the garb that earth we trod;

Called to praise Him while aweary,

Or to sing, while yet the voice

With love’s farewell sob is broken,

Could we, fitly, thus rejoice?

No! we wait to learn the music,

Wait, to rest our weary feet;

Wait to learn to sweep the harp-strings

Ere the Master shall we meet;

Wait to tune our new-found voices

To the sweet seraphic song;

Wait to learn the time and measure,

But the time will not be long.

Wait to understand the glory

That will shortly be revealed

Till our eyes can bear the brightness

When the book shall be unsealed.

Oh! the vision would o’er power us,

If it suddenly were given

So we wait in preparation,

In the vestibule of heaven…. 

(By the Poetess, Chapter XVII, Through the Mists by Robert James Lee)

 

 

 

 

The Emotional Truth About Cancer

Posted on by under addictions, cancer, Divine Truth, emotions, Expectations and Demands, Facade, fear, God, heal, Uncategorized

heavy-burden

“I have come to believe that cancer is the physical metaphor for the extreme need to grow [in  love] ”

 Dr Lewis Thomasgk . My add in is in brackets.

I have found this the most difficult blog to write so far. I have written and re-written and re-written a number of times. The reason is, I am writing about having cancer and it has brought up fears just in the idea of writing. Others do this everyday, but in my fears, I over analyse sometimes (sometimes? Alot!), but also I am trying to discover the truth in everything I do so I have been feeling a number of things about why I have struggled to write this particular post:

  1. I am afraid of other’s peoples emotions about me having cancer.
  2. I am afraid of other people’s judgement about me writing about my cancer.
  3. I am judging my own desire to write – that it may be narcissistic, self-absorbed.
  4. I am afraid of exposing myself too much, the stuff I view as “bad” as I have an emotional addiction to being a “good girl” and a false belief that if I am not perfect I will not be loved.
  5. I am afraid of the opinions and feelings of two people I hugely respect, Mary and Jesus, thinking bad of me in some way. I know intellectually they do not judge me, but love me and it is my injured self that projects my “parent” stuff at them – creating a huge fear of disapproval, judgement and punishment. I don’t even know if they read my blog anyway.

The truth is I can not guarantee it isn’t self absorbed or addictive in some way. I still have a lot of error in me in understanding what the truth is. However, there is also the desire to share to help others ( which could also be an addiction, by the way). But whatever is going on, because of the fear I decided to write and just feel those emotions. especially as fear is an emotion I struggle hugely with.

When I first started to write ideas for this blog a few weeks ago, I started going into lots of detail about what I was doing for myself, physically, to heal my cancer and also explain the positive and negatives of different medical approaches: conventional vs alternative or mix of both. I then stuck a bit about emotions on the end, but as time has gone on I realise this is not the information I need to share. There is a ton of stuff in books, videos and websites on treatments for cancer: I have accessed a number myself, but what there is hardly anything about is the true cause of cancer and what the most important thing we need to do, to heal. This also applies to any illness, not just cancer.

Before, I came across Divine truth teaching I already had the view that emotions are the cause of our illnesses and I tested this out when I had an issues with my kidneys in 2010. I used more of a technique, that Brandon Bay used and wrote about in her book “The Journey.” A friend helped me “talk” to my kidney to find the cause, which of course was an emotion, which I attempted to feel. Somehow I did enough and I recovered and didn’t need to go back to the hospital again. Though I still feel there is much more to feel in that area. I had tried Louise Hay, but even though I thought some of the causes made sense I didn’t feel the affirmations were enough. I just didn’t resonate with talking myself out of my disease.

So, when I heard Jesus say that there is an emotional cause for every illness and every accident I accepted that and so I accept that my cancer has an emotional cause. However, I am also aware I haven’t always treat my body lovingly, in fact terribly at times, and I have had food addictions since I was about 10. They are not as acute or harsh as they were years ago, but they are still there. I still use food to suppress my emotions. I also, feel that I have some disassociation with my physical body through various traumas and I notice that I refer to my body parts as “she”, as though I am not part of them. For instance, my reaction to my diagnosis included feelings towards my cervix and uterus – I felt sorry for what she had been and was going through. I was diagnosed at the beginning of September with cervical cancer and it took me three months to realise what I was doing and the day I changed the words to, “I have been through a lot,” did I feel grief come up. From that, came the desire to be as loving to my body as I can be through this process.

After a bit of research I decided to treat my cancer naturally. The conventional treatment was a radical hysterectomy where they even remove the top of your vagina. I am in the earlier stages of the disease and to me this seemed – well radical! I also took advice from intergrative medical practitioners, so as not to be irresponsible and it does include nutrition and other therapies. What I now realise is that my reasons for not wanting surgery are very mixed. Yes, I knew there was an emotional cause, but for someone, like myself who is so suppressed and terrified of most my emotions, not having surgery certainly seemed risky. But, I thought I could at least give myself some time to try. I also, had fears in me about handing myself over to the mercy of the doctors – well-meaning as they may be, I didn’t want to be powerlessness. This is a particular fear in myself, and many women. I have experienced that many times in my life, as a woman and had some very negative sexual experiences, including being raped when my drink was spiked. So maybe saying a fear is underplaying what I feel is really there – terror. From wanting to avoid feeling powerlessness, I wanted control, but this also led to a feeling of rebelliousness: “You can’t have me!” So I know many have said I am very brave to not have conventional treatment, but I don’t feel it is necessarily brave what I am doing, but driven by other emotions – some of which I have identified, some I have not.

At the start, I did have a lot of fear and I even had to feel that maybe I wanted to die. I have felt despair a lot in my life and I noticed a part of me really felt that maybe going to spirit world would be easier. Fortunately, through Divine Truth teaching, I know that that is madness and we do not escape what we need to heal by passing to spirit world and in fact if we pass in a poor condition, with lots of addictions, it is very challenging. God does not allow us to run away from the truth, even when we refuse to acknowledge it. He is always trying to bring us home to Love. So I looked at my life and I felt some sadness that I had not as yet truly lived because of the emotional damage I am still holding onto. Enough damage to have caused cancer, to threaten my life. My parents were the original cause, but boy oh boy I have piled huge amounts on top of that with my own choices that haven’t been loving. I have treated myself very, very badly and hurt many others from my wounded state. It is difficult for us to admit what we have done that hurt others and we are not aware that we are doing most of it, as our view of love is so twisted and incorrect.

When I first heard Jesus use the word ‘sin’ I recoiled as it triggered my experiences with religion. I belonged to a baptist church when I was 17/18 years old and they preached what sinners we were and hell and damnation and God being angry with us. This so connected in what I received from my parents: anger, disapproval, not feeling good enough, being a really bad person that in the end I couldn’t stand the church any more. I was already in a state of no self worth and self punishment so felt I didn’t need anymore. Having recognised what triggered me, in the end, I understand that we do sin – we do make unloving choices, action and thoughts all the time. It doesn’t define us though and that is where Jesus’ true teachings, that he is sharing again now, differ. He encourages us to face the truth of our sin – to awaken to it – but we need to do this without judgement, to really feel the truth and feel sorry for what we have done ( repentance). But he also teaches that we are all God’s children, deeply loved, are the pinnacle of God’s creation and we have the power to change things in every moment. So I am less afraid of the word sin now and less afraid to look at my own sins. How can we change things we don’t even admit are there. The truth will set us free.

But that is a whole big topic, told better, by Jesus and Mary, than myself. Not long after my diagnosis I wrote to Jesus and Mary for some feedback and they kindly sent me some information about cancer they had put together ready for some FAQs they are making about physical illness. The first day I read it and shoved it under a book – didn’t want to hear it. A week later, I picked it up again and tried to absorb what they had said. When I opened to it I could feel what they said was the truth. However, I went into a complete shut down about the specific emotions for about 2 months or so. I had become temporarily homeless, as Robby and I decided to not live together and my finances were terrible. It all happened at once and became my excuse to avoid those emotions. I felt a few other things, but I basically went into survival mode. I did the physical things I needed to do, was kindly offered a room to stay in, but just tried to survive.

I realise now, that is how I have lived a lot of my life and always afraid that my whole world was going to crumble. This is what I learnt from my childhood: survival, but not living. It was the chaos and uncertainity of my childhood that leads to my huge addiction to control everything in my life, especially my emotions. Survival mode helped when I was a child, but has created a large amount of pain in my adult life. Noticing this has increased my desire to live now – to really live, to learn what that means and what really loving means. When I felt this I decided I needed help to unlock myself. I was praying to God sometimes, but my will to feel was not and is not strong enough because of my fears. Once I admitted I needed help I was looked for a therapist who had experience with trauma and I found one really quickly then. So finally, I was beginning to be ready to deal with some emotions in a currently patchy way. I only hit the surface a lot of the time, but I have experienced some deeper feelings – often in the middle of night – when I am alone and not distracted by anything else. ( Distraction is a big addiction of mine).

I have since re-read a number of times what Jesus and Mary wrote to me explaining that those of us with cancer are very blocked to personal truth. To block that we create many addictions and we want those addictions met. We do not understand that to create cancer it means that over a long period of time we have been very out of harmony with God’s Laws of Love: love of self and love of others. We also, often continue in those unloving ways which means we are not taking responsibility for the cancer in us. In fact, we are willing to create a self-attacking life threatening illness in order to get our addictions met – which indicates a lot of anger in the adult with cancer. We have a lot of demands that everyone else responds to those demands and the our cancer. We give to others often to get something back, but can continue to believe we are altruistic when we are not. Also, we do not understand that spirits are heavily involved in the disease due to our co-dependent demands and addictions with others.

Depending on your own response to these words, you may feel a bit like I did when I read them it is pretty harsh. The truth is that sometimes the truth can feel harsh. But the truth is the truth whether we like that truth or not and Jesus and Mary have been dealing with truth for 2000yrs: I have not. They know about real Love and I do not. They are more progressed in love than I am and so I need to listen. I mentioned above, how unlovingly I have treated my body for instance and that is just one group of unloving actions in me. What I haven’t wanted to know, until lately, is how my actions and thoughts have affected others. I have acted out of my hurt and hurt others, I have done a million things to avoid feeling emotions of anger, fear, terror. Even that is unloving to myself and to others because I am not being truthful. I am wearing a facade of “being ok,” of “being good” or whatever: we wear a thousand masks I sometimes feel. The cause stems from my childhood, but I have continued to make unloving choices. I have ignored, feelings inside that helped me know what was wrong and I have put so much energy in trying to control everything in order to “feel safe” and avoid my fears.

Inside I am terrified I am unlovable, that everyone will abandon me, that I am as terrible a person as I was told by my mother. But when those feelings start to surface the fear of how big they are leads me to do anything not to feel them and these become addictions and facades. Things like distracting myself with everyday tasks, eating, facebook, calling a friend – these are the easy ones to name. They are addictions every time I use them to avoid what I really feel, every time I lie to myself and others. This suppression shrinks my soul; when my soul is full of error and negative feelings there is not enough room for the good feelings – not the pretend I am happy feelings – I mean truly happy from deep within. My control addiction is massive – I try to control my environment, my  home, myself and those around me. I am demanding all sorts of things in my addictive, suppressed state: “save me, save me;” “Please make me feel loved, valuable, worthy etc;””I don’t want to feel my fear, stop me feeling my fear” – and many more. And if someone doesn’t meet that demand then I get angry. We all get angry when an addiction isn’t met – whether it’s a physical or emotional addiction and that is very unloving. So over the years I have suppressed and suppressed and done everything in power to maintain this control over my emotions so I didn’t have to feel afraid and vulnerable and sad. In the process I have created a lot of damage to myself and to others and it now culminates in cancer. Our body is our last wake up call. There have been many wake up calls – God sends them out all the time through our law of attraction – either a good law of attraction letting us know we healed the error in us or a law of attraction letting us know we still have something to heal. The damage seeps from our soul, to our spirit body and then to our physical body. And that is what my cancer is a massive wake up call or as the quote above states… “physical metaphor for the extreme need to grow [in  love]. “

Cervical cancer is caused by low sexual self worth. Jesus says it is suppressed anger with the male’s desire for sexual intimacy without emotional intimacy, or your own demand for emotional intimacy without sexual intimacy. It includes the willingness to sacrifice self by pandering to men sexually or emotionally rather than emotionally resolve the situation internally. It also includes an emotional unwillingness to engage sexually, but still physically engaging in order to avoid men’s disapproval or to obtain your own sexual satisfaction.

I am  not sure at what age my sexual injuries started. I remember something strange when I was a girl – it a feeling I had that something that just happened wasn’t okay and my mother’s views on sex and the body did not help. As I said above, I experienced some very unpleasant things sexually and I handed my will over, like many women do, so many times. I had sex when I didn’t want to, with people I didn’t want to and I got forced into things I didn’t want to and I did things I didn’t want to – to avoid the man’s disapproval and anger and because I didn’t have enough worth to say no. So from that I agree with everything Jesus has said: I wanted emotional intimacy when it wasn’t really available and I let men have sex with me without emotional intimacy and yes over time that made me mad and very sad. I did sacrifice myself and my true values in order to gain validation and approval and avoid anger and disapproval. I was also a hypocrite, demanding emotional intimacy when I was unwilling to give it myself. So I agree that I developed an angry demand that a partner should make me happy sexually, when I could not do that myself; that he be emotionally intimate while I was a closed book. I feel angry about the way women are treated as objects and bodies and I have a lot of shame about the things I have done and a lot of sadness about losing my innocence, and my self.

It is the anger that creates the cancer. If you look at how cancer tumours look, they are knotted, tight tissue, red, inflamed and nasty looking – in a way an image of anger. The underlying fear and grief is there too – the cause, but it is feeling and releasing of this anger that will heal my cancer. I do not find this easy AT ALL. I judge my anger as a bad emotion – so I hold it in. When I do try to express it, it can often whittle away again. I have managed some of it and when it happened I went straight into some grief which is good. But there is  more, I can feel that as I write. I am the Queen of Holding On so learning to let go, to jump from the plane, as Mary once described in her blog ( a great article on fear ) is part of my journey right now.

What I feel would help me most is to receive some of God’s Love – the most powerful healing force in the universe. So looking at why I block Her Love, why I prefer my addictions to Her Love and increasing my will to love are all required. I have been talking the talk of Divine Love for a while – looking at that narrow way and thinking that sure looks good, it makes sense, I can feel it in my soul, but looking is not moving and I need to move. The fact that I had to get cancer to start being more truthful is crazy really, but that is where I am at and I can’t say if I can do this or not. God knows I can and growing my faith in the Laws she made to help us is essential and having faith in myself, and for me my biggest block is my terror of overwhelming feelings.

But what I have learnt on this path is that sometimes you can think you know something, but when you do get to feel it, you were wrong. So some of what I write today may be true for me, but when I do progress I may discover I missed a lot of crap. But I am okay with that right now. I know very little, but what I do know is that intellectually I accept that releasing my emotions will help me and in fact I have some evidence in the few times I have hit something I feel so much better. But I am aware I like to hold onto my anger – it makes me feel strong and I don’t like feeling weak – or what I perceive as weakness. I am just afraid of letting go. The irony is when I soften I feel so much lighter and so much less tense: the rock becomes the river. This just goes to show it can take a while to re-educate our hurt selves, to build faith.

For me I carry a rucksack of heavily suppressed emotions, piled on top with addictions and then the accompanying spirits who are in co-dependence with me. It is pretty yuk! But I have a little faith that can change: a tiny seed, but a seed no less. One thing I never doubt is the truth in the spiritual path I have found. So yes, being honest about our emotions will start the cure for cancer and feeling them fully ( without hurting anyone) will cure it. If we remove the toxic emotions from our soul – it will seep through to our bodies and allow our physical body to rebalance and detoxify and heal itself – just as God designed.

At my recent check up, things were looking a little better. But if these events – these effects bring me closer to God, to my self and to my soul mate then that is what matters most. It truly does as they all lead to life, and love and joy. When I truly feel this I will feel anything, any time and any place and learn what to be fully human really is in all our softness.

With huge gratitude to Mary, Jesus and all those who take part in the videos that inspire me, challenge me, give me hope and keep me going.

With love

Maxine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE WALLS AROUND OUR HEART

Posted on by under Divine Truth, Emotional Injury, God, heal, Heart words, love, poetry

https://video-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hvideo-xfp1/v/t42.1790-2/11017086_10153206602642276_1882098574_n.mp4?efg=eyJybHIiOjMwMCwicmxhIjoxODYzLCJ2ZW5jb2RlX3RhZyI6ImxlZ2FjeV9zZCJ9&rl=300&vabr=161&oh=4fbe7190340693977148479d20ec3d0b&oe=55B8E922

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

Walls

from the first wall round my heart..Pow!

Sisters, Sisters, Sisters….. there were never such devoted Sisters….

Posted on by under abandonment, Divine Truth, Emotional Injury, emotions, fear, Gender Wounds, God's Love, God's Truth, Hurt Self, Narcissistic Mothers, self worth, shame, Soul

haynes-sisters

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:

  •  I will put a link to Mary’s blog in the Extras section of the website.
  • Please note my previous posts are all below this one. You have to scroll down. Until I get the finances to upgrade it is a little fiddly, but I hope you find it worth it. 🙂
  • I am going to start adding books that have helped me too.

Popping the Cork..

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

pop the cork

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With love

Maxine

When Enough is Enough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So yes enough is enough and now there is more…

With love, Maxine

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