Time-Looping a Mistake. 400

Tags

from mistake to sucess, learning from mistakes, learning how to fail, self-acceptance, Self-Forgiveness, Self-Judgment

Last week I walked into a time-loop in my mind that I then remained within for the greater part of a week. This is what happened:

I met with someone whom I sort of looked up to and saw as a role model. In already going into the meeting with that attitude, I felt insecure and inferior. During the meeting I felt like the person was better than me, how I should be more like them, and also how I am already, is not good enough. It was like, seeing how great they were, made me see myself in a different light. Looking back, I can see how it was an idea about myself that dropped in that moment I compared myself to the other person, like before meeting them I had way too high thoughts about myself, and after I had way too low thoughts about myself – not really seeing myself there in the middle being equal parts good and bad.

So the point that I compared revolved around what food I am feeding my child, and I had until now seen myself as giving my child healthy and wholesome food. But this person was feeding their children with even MORE awareness, on a whole other level than I was, and compared to them, it was obvious to me that what I was feeding my child was virtually ‘unhealthy’ – and so I judged myself as being not a good enough mom to my child. So in one moment I went from being “quite ok” to being “not at all ok” – but what was even worse was that I reacted so promptly and so subtly to my own self-judgment that I went into a complete shut-down inside myself.

And it was only when my husband yesterday asked me: “Can you center yourself inside yourself?” that I slowly but surely started finding my way back to myself. I realize that this is a tendency I have, to deeply suppress reactions, especially when they are towards myself, realizing that I’ve done something wrong within self-judgment. I liken it to a child hiding a mistake because it knows it will be scolded.

 

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to go into massive self-judgment and scolding when realizing that the food I have been feeding my child is not as good as I thought it was.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to feel guilty and ashamed for having fed my child food that isn’t healthy.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to have created a relationship with making mistakes where I immediately go into massive self-judgment and shame the moment my mistake is revealed to me, causing me to in turn go into massive suppression to not have to ‘suffer’ from my own scolding – and so disconnect myself from my awareness to not have to face myself in/as self-judgment and scolding.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to make it impossible for myself to learn from my mistakes because I immediately go into such judgment and self-blame that I suppress the mistake and even go into a suppressed state of living in relation to other parts of myself – all so that I don’t have to suffer from my own self-judgment, causing myself even more harm in the process.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to go into a state of self-punishment when I make a mistake that I judge and blame myself for, where I start treating myself and my body in a punishing way of not doing what is best for me but resort to past addictions and habits that I associate with being in that state of self-punishment and suppression.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to not create a wholesome relationship with myself in making mistakes where I can face myself and face my mistakes with clarity and self-honesty and gentleness – and immediately and simply move into finding solutions and corrections as well as understanding why I made the mistake in the first place.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to feed my child with a particular type of food simply because I saw other parents feeding their children with this food and considered them to be “proper” parents and so didn’t even question or consider the nutritional value of this food for myself because I blindly assumed that if other parents give their child this food, it must be ok.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to exist within and as a state of internal conflict towards whether to emphasize what is considered ‘healthy food’ or whether to be more relaxed about the food that my child eats, not judge certain foods as unhealthy – where I experience that both approaches are flawed in that one isn’t flexible and the other has the potential of trusting information that isn’t reliable – in which case I realize that I have the ability to make assessments for myself based on common sense in the moment, something that I’ve not dared to trust myself with until now.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to hold and hang on to a definition of myself as being someone who can’t be trusted to care for a body or provide a body with proper nutrition and so hold onto a judgment of me that keeps me in a limited position of agency – because I then have to rely on the information of others which I see as flawed, exactly because it’s not me having done the research myself and made decisions based on common sense and a holistic perspective on the body and on food.

Self-Corrective Statements.

When and as I see that I am judging myself for a mistake I’ve made where I feel that intense regret and blame towards myself, I stop myself, move myself to gentleness and understanding and drop the judgment so that I can see the mistake for what it is – and instead move to focus on a solution.

I realize that with my current relationship with mistakes, I’ve made it impossible for myself to correct my mistakes and as such I have ‘doomed’ myself to cycle in the same mistakes over and over – which is not what I want to live or model to my child.

I commit myself to take responsibility for myself and for my mistakes, to instead implement gentleness, understanding and self-acceptance in relation to mistakes – and not judge myself for not being perfect.
I commit myself to work on trusting myself through doing proper research and investigation on what foods are supportive for my and my child’s bodies.

Photo by Abigail Keenan on Unsplash

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The Mother of all Mothers. 399

Tags

7 year Journey to Life, becoming a mother, being a mother, Desteni, Fear of Failing, how to be the perfect mother, Motherhood, the dark side of motherhood

I have been facing some quite intense experiences in relation to my role as a mother in the recent weeks, and I have slowly but surely started to wrap my head around what has actually been going on within me, and why it has become so intense.

So what I have found is that I have created an delusional, unrealistic expectation to myself to be a perfect/optimal mother to my daughter, really like placing myself on a high horse in my mind and think that I am ‘polished/well-rounded/elite’ when it comes to my ‘skills’ at being a parent. And yes, for sure, there are aspects of parenting that I am kickass at. But of course there also plenty of aspects that I’m not. Every single personal issue I have with myself will somehow compromise or reflect on my parenting in a potentially consequential way. But I had created this delusional bubble of perfection in my mind (which I’ve realized is not the first time I’ve done), and so all my energy went into feeding that and making that real.

What this meant was that I only accepted the positive aspects of myself as a parent, and completely rejected all the negative aspects. So any experience of frustration or irritation or boredom, I would suppress. I would do my very best to sound upbeat, gentle and calm around my daughter, which I find I’ve been surprisingly good at. The only problem was that I started becoming more and more bitter and negative towards my husband.

Obviously it can be quite a turbulent period in new parents lives when a child arrives, but this was something more than that. The more positively I experienced myself with my daughter, the more negatively I experienced myself in relation to my partner – to the point where I actually considered if it would be best if we ended the relationship. He couldn’t do anything right, and I remember catching myself thinking that I would never treat a child this way. Eventually when it became really bad, the thought that I didn’t want my daughter to see or model me being this way towards her father – I stopped.

Looking back at my life, I see that I have been the same way with my cats which I’ve written about previously, and how I became neurotic in trying to give them the best home possible. But I even see how I’ve created similar delusions in the past, as my own made-up way to try to succeed in life (because I had no idea how to do it for real), so I’d create this elaborate fantasy of how I wanted things to be, and then I’d hold, hold, hold onto that as long as I possibly could, only for that bubble to burst as hard as all the daydreaming I had put into it.

So what I did today was that I embraced all that suppressed emotions that I had hidden from myself in relation to my daughter and especially also to being home with her alone. I allowed myself to embrace that feeling of being annoyed or irritated because she’s so wiggly and difficult to change clothes on. I embraced the experience of shear boredom I felt over being isolated at home with my child. And you know what, it was liberating and it was empowering, but more than anything, it supported me to relax more.

When you’re constantly trying to uphold a (totally unrealistic) expectation to yourself, a lot of hard work has to go into keeping that delusion going, so dropping all that, and instead facing what is here, gave me some ‘space’ within, to say the least.

I have realized that I resist just being here with my daughter, and I have admitted to myself that that is a problem and indeed very odd. Why would I resist being here, when I am already here? Why would that be something that scares me, bores me? So what I’ve been doing is, when that experience comes up, I deliberately immerse myself in the HERE moment, whatever it is. And the more I push myself to be here with my daughter, the less bored I feel, and the less irritated I feel.

And I have had this sneaking idea that it is like my daughter being here and me having the incredible privilege of staying home with her, is my chance and opportunity to learn how to be here, because in the past I’ve been able to resist it and blame it on not having time for example. But at the moment at least, I’ve got nothing but time. There are moments, and days where I can’t do much housework because my daughter needs me to be physically close to her at all times. Or I put her in her ‘backpack’ and strap her to my back. And since we live far out on the countryside, there isn’t many places to go, so we are for all intents and purposes ‘stuck’ here (today we went to the little local supermarket just to get out for a bit and see some people) – but maybe that is not a curse, but a tremendous blessing in disguise.

To be continued…

Escaping to Imagination Land, and its Consequences. DAY 398

Tags

escaping through fantasies, fear of getting caught, Imagination, imagining I'm a different person, projecting into the future, Projection, self-acceptance, Self-Judgment

When I was a child, I used to lay in bed at night and as I was about to go to sleep I developed this technique of doing positive visualization or imagination to basically lull myself to sleep. So I would lay there and imagine my future life, the house I would live in, my future husband, how we’d meet etc. until I basically went into a state of unconsciousness and eventually fell asleep. I spent a lot of my childhood and early adult years being afraid or sad before going to sleep, so lulling myself to sleep this way became a way to soothe myself, as being alone in the dark would otherwise trigger anxiety and sadness within me.

Fast forward to today, I’ve been having an issue with severe pain in my hands over the past year or so and it has gotten so bad that I wake up with terrible pain in the middle of the night and can’t fall asleep again. The pain is of the nature where the hand feels like it is sleeping, it is incapacitated and feels totally numb. I can barely grab things or for example operate the keys on my phone with my fingers. But at the same time, it is like this numbness comes from or correlates with an experience of having way too much energy surging through the hands, because it basically feels like I’m being electrified on the inside, causing me to feel completely numb on the outside.

I asked a friend who is also a kinesologist for a consultation on my pain, to see if she could help with identifying any mind points that might be causing or contributing to my pain experience (I’m also going to the doctor again, but last time I went everything checked out fine).

So in consulting with my friend over several sessions, she showed me that the point has to do with a mental loop or infinite ping pong match of sorts between a negative foundation experience of myself and a positive imagination ‘cover-up’ that I use to not have to face my general negative experience of myself. I use positive imagination to suppress and hide my negative experience of myself, my sadness, my self-judgment.

The first immediate reference I could see, also because this pain in my hands is worst at night, is to this habit I have had of using positive visualization to lull myself to sleep. But really when I look at it, I’ve created an entire larger pattern of immediately using positivity as something soothing to suppress the negative inside me, whether I fear it or don’t want to face myself as it.

What comes up now as I write this is that this is not unlike how many parents give their children a pacifier or a piece of candy to get them to stop crying. I’ve recently discussed this with my partner in fact in relation to our daughter because I could see how, when she was sad and crying I would feel so bad in my heart for her, so I would start saying these soothing things and ‘shower’ her with love, like “Oh no, don’t cry baby. You’re ok. Mama loves you”. My partner on the other hand would go very upbeat and would try to distract our daughter from her pain/crying by trying to make her laugh/feel happy. It was quite interesting to see how both our strategies was to use positivity to get her to stop feeling sad/in pain/cry.

As I had investigated this point before and knew that it isn’t supportive for children, I then discussed it with my partner and together we looked at the potential consequences of us using positivity as a way to deal with sadness/pain/crying – and how it would be much more supportive to stand as an example of stability for our daughter and show her how she can remain stable and breathe through the pain/emotions.

But it is interesting how our first instinct (because that’s what we’ve been brought up with as children ourselves) is to respond to negativity with positivity, which, rather than being aimed at neutralizing the negativity is wanting to push it down – make it go away basically. When you do this, you don’t learn to deal with or look at the negative experience. You only learn that it is bad and dangerous and must be pushed away. And you learn that the positive will make the bad feelings go away.

As I kept investigating my own relationship between positive imagination and negative self-experiences, I could see how this is a pattern I’ve developed to a rather extreme degree, almost as a form of OCD, where, as soon as I experience anything negative inside myself, I immediately look to a positive experience to push it down. It could be food, watching TV series, speaking with someone or doing positive visualizations inside my mind.

Looking at a solution here, it is about stop trying to run away from facing what is inside me and to develop supportive tools of handling and embracing what comes up inside me or in my world – without running away from it/pressing it down being my go-to strategy.

Another experience perfectly related to this one that I’ve had in the past is an experience of finally getting ‘above water’, as though I am in a constant state of drowning (negativity) and then once in a while, I manage to get myself above water (feeling good/positive) and then I desperately want to stay there and want to believe it is real, and so I desperately flax my arms to stay above water, but eventually sink down below the surface again as my newfound state of positivity wasn’t real or substantiated in reality. While I am there, I convince myself it is real (because it would be so much easier) and I try to maintain this state for as long as possible – but it never lasts.

This also correlates with another experience I’ve had (this is the ping-pong I talked about earlier) of being stretched – or compartmentalized, in a tension field between this positive self-definition that’s like a veneer on the surface and a negative undercurrent experience of negativity. What I hadn’t realized however was that this positive experience existed with the sole purpose of holding the negative in check – and keeping it alive.

Here, I am somehow reminded of the Osho Zen tarot card called “The burden” which shows an image of a man carrying another man, that remarkably resembles him. The man who is being carried is pointing sternly to a direction in the distance while the man carrying him is looking completely exhausted. They’re walking up a mountain. Meanwhile a rooster sits on top the man who points his finger. The man below is dressed in rags while the one he is carrying is dressed in proper clothes like a noble man or something.

“A man’s true life is the way in which he puts off the lie imposed by others on him. Stripped, naked, natural, he is what he is. This is a matter of being, and not of becoming. The lie cannot become the truth, the personality cannot become your soul. There is no way to make the nonessential the essential. The nonessential remains nonessential and the essential remains essential, they are not convertible. And striving towards truth is nothing but creating more confusion.

The truth has not to be achieved. It cannot be achieved, it is already the case. Only the lie has to be dropped. All aims and ends and ideals and goals and ideologies, religions and systems of improvement and betterment, are lies. Beware of them. Recognize the fact that, as you are, you are a lie. Manipulated, cultivated by others. Striving after truth is a distraction and a postponement. It is the lie’s way to hide.
See the lie, look deep into the lie of your personality. Because to see the lie is to cease to lie. No longer to lie is to seek no more for any truth–there is no need. The moment the lie disappears, truth is there in all its beauty and radiance. In the seeing of the lie it disappears, and what is left is the truth.”

Osho This Very Body The Buddha Chapter 6

Interestingly enough I am also reminded by a different Osho Zen tarot card. This one is called Trust and it is my favorite card in the whole deck because of its image. It shows a figure, maybe a woman, or a child jumping into the unknown with open arms. All we can see of the unknown is a warm pinkish color and to me there’s always been this inner movement to this card, like I can see/feel myself taking this jump and it is extremely liberating.

So what does these two cards have to do with one another? Isn’t trust exactly about letting go of the burden of the past? The burden of control? Of thinking that I know where I am going. And the image that I relate so much to is about taking the leap into the unknown in/with trust that whatever happens, whatever is out there, I will land on my feet. The two images couldn’t be more different. One is about carrying an overload of unnecessary ideas and beliefs up a mountain, the other about taking a leap from that same mountain, letting go of the old and immersing oneself unconditionally in the new.

Self-Forgiveness

I forgive myself that I have not accepted and allowed myself to develop supportive and effective ways and methods of directing what comes up within me as thoughts, emotions and feelings and that I have instead accepted and allowed myself to abdicate that responsibility to the mind and within following the mind, use suppression as a tool to stay sane and functional in my every day life

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to not forgive, and to, through and within self-respect, honor and love, direct and let go of my negative emotions of of shame, self-judgment, remorse, sadness and self-hate and self-loathing and that I have instead used positive imagination as the primary way through which I hide/hide from my emotions and negative experiences and emotions, where I, as soon as something comes up within me that I don’t want to face or fear facing, immediately turn to find something positive to focus on

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to resist letting go of my positive imagination and my ‘tricks’ to experience positivity because I fear that all I will be left with is the negative aspects of myself, not seeing, realizing or understanding that that is ALREADY what I am living with/within/as, and that all I am doing is playing a game of chasing my own tail in reverse, trying to escape something that is a part of me – AND that the only way to stop existing as these negative aspects, is to actually face – and embrace – myself as them so that I can change them from within

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to create what we in Danish call a “infinity machine” as a pattern that is created in such a way that it can keep going without requiring outside fuel/power as it is running on its own momentum and so become stuck within and as it – where I switch between going into extreme negatives to extreme positives to neutral, over and over, without even noticing, because I am too preoccupied with trying to stay in / sustain the positive and trying to forget/erase/get rid of the negative

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to see and accept myself as a permanently broken person who cannot be fixed, not realizing that seeing myself this way is a distinct manipulation and self-sabotage feature of the mind because it is like a ‘backdoor to holding backdoors open’ as being broken means that I can always use that as an excuse to not push myself or not change

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to create and live on a lie because I believe the truth about myself is not worth living, not seeing, realizing or understanding how event his ’truth’ about myself is a mentally constructed idea I have created about myself AND that I’ve to a certain extent made real through perpetuating and repeating it over and over

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to become addicted to self-loathing and a general negative experience of and relationship with myself because of the energy I generate within me when I participate in these emotions which has a thick dense intensity to it, a depth almost, like it is saturated and filled – and I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to not consider how immersing myself in this energy could be a replacement for something that I am not living/giving to myself that is of life and support for me like real deep self-nurture and presence

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize, see or understand that the entire positive imagination and perception of myself that I’ve created in my mind is really nothing but a smoke screen behind which I hide the negative within myself; the shame, the remorse, the depression

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to think and believe that the solution to my negative ‘issues’ of how I see myself within/through negativity is that I have to become better, become a better person, not realizing how I am within that only perpetuating the negative image I have of myself as I am validating it – instead of dropping it all together and seeing and accepting myself as who I am – and correct the parts and aspects of myself that I see aren’t best for all, and celebrate and expand those that are

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to create and participate in a fantasy, projection and imagination about myself where I believe and convince myself that I am ‘the best’, that I am ‘perfect’ – that I then expect myself to be able to live up to and live out, and when I cannot because it is totally unrealistic, I go into a deep pit of self-hate and self-judgment, where I think and believe that I am a total failure

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to not realize that I am setting myself up to fail by creating unrealistic expectations towards myself and by creating fantasies about my supposed grandeur

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to NOT live here in my immediate and direct reality and that I have instead created an addiction to fake realities in my mind that are based on fantasies, projections and imaginations and that I, because I have participated within them for so many years, aren’t even aware of anymore because it has become second nature to me to not be here

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to not realize or be aware of the extent to which I am not here and that I am instead participating in fantasies, projections and imaginations in my mind

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to use fantasies, projections and imaginations as a way to escape facing what is here in and as my current reality as a child because I did not know how to handle what was happening and what I experienced inside, and that I have because of that created an addiction towards escaping in my mind, that is now catching up with me through the consequences I have created in my body because of it

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to trap myself in an addictive relationship with my imagination where I resist and refuse to let it go, because I use it to avoid facing myself here and avoid facing and dealing with things that are difficult or painful and so it has become something positive and safe within my mind, like a refuge I seek to to hide in

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to compromise my actual reality and the potential for creating the best possible life here, because I am addicted to projections, fantasies, and imaginations in my mind

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to hold myself – but even others to the standards of my imaginary self where I am perfect and optimal in all ways, and therefore set myself up to fail because I can’t possibly live up to my own expectations, yet they’ve become second nature to me as I use them to make myself feel better and so I create an infinity loop for myself that I can’t get out of

Self-Corrective Statement

When and as I see that I am for a moment stepping out of my physical reality and into imagination/protection, I stop and I breathe and I bring myself back here by for example focusing on something in my physical reality with my eyes or my hands or through feeling my body

I realize that I’ve been using imagination/projection/fantasies as a method to escape facing what is here as myself and I realize that I cannot escape facing what is here as myself and so all I’ve done is to postpone that moment of facing myself and that I have in that process created consequences for myself by building up suppressed inner experiences that have compounded inside my body

I commit myself to take responsibility for facing myself here directly in my reality and with the tools of self-support I have available to me, support myself to walk through what I am facing – and to stop using imagination to try to escape what is here and make myself more than who I am a

Reacting to Feeling Reprimanded and Being Corrected. DAY 397

Tags

being reprimanded, fear of being corrected, fear of being wrong, Fear of Failing, fear of making mistakes, feeling guilty when making a mistake, Feeling reprimanded, reacting to being corrected

Like most people I’m sure, I don’t like being ‘reprimanded’ and as most others, I have developed defense and survival strategies to deal with the experiences that comes up within me when I experience myself being reprimanded. Today I had an experience of being reprimanded where I saw an interesting mechanism unfold within and through my mind.

First of all, I’d like us to have a look at the words “being reprimanded”: I see that the words/perception “being reprimanded” are very specific, because they bring back conscious and subconscious memories of being a child and being “told off” by an adult. In the situation where one is being reprimanded by an adult there is also a very specific dynamic going on, because it assumes that the adult is the authority, has full control over the child and knows what is right and wrong in the situation. The child is completely passive and have no choice but to take the reprimand for example in the form of verbal scolding. Experiencing oneself being reprimanded therefore is specific to feeling victimized, inferior and abused. The ‘correction’ comes from outside oneself with force. This goes hand in hand with feeling blame and resentment towards the adult, but also guilt for having done something that requires one to be reprimanded, where one internalize the judgment/abuse and believes that there’s something wrong with WHO one is due to the nature of the reprimand being somewhat abusive/judgmental in nature. It basically makes you feel bad about yourself.

Did you notice how, in none of this were there any talk about actually learning something, of growing from one’s mistakes, of gaining insight and understanding the world better and thereby being able to prevent mistakes in the future? There weren’t any talk of learning how to take responsibility for oneself either. And yet, we somehow expect children to learn how to do that, as though we can somehow scare them into becoming upstanding citizens, and not the passive aggressive, guilt-ridden people most of us has become, who repeat the same mistakes over and over, because we’ve never actually learned how to embrace our mistakes – and learn from them. To change that, we have to stop the perpetuating the cycles in ourselves.

Now – what I found so fascinating about today’s incident was that it was nowhere near a situation where I was being reprimanded as I were as a child. YET – I react to it the EXACT same way, as if I was back in my childhood body, feeling scolded and abused by an adult and feeling disgusting inside myself because I knew I had done something wrong and felt I deserved the scolding, while secretly hating the adult for making me feel this way.

In observing what played out today, I realized that this is a general reaction that comes up within me in certain situations where I perceive myself as being “corrected” by others or when others point out flaws or mistakes I have done. It is basically like I’ve created a mental ‘allergy’ towards being corrected that I within my mind place it into the category of “being reprimanded”/” being told off” and react to accordingly, exactly as when I was a child.

The reaction that comes up within me when I experience myself being reprimanded is one of immediate blame and self-victimization. So I’d basically experience myself as though someone is throwing an arrow at me, and before it has a chance to hit my chest, I catch it and send it right back at them so that it can’t hurt me.

Practically speaking it out play out in such a way where I would immediately look for flaws and faults in the other person’s argument. Like let’s say that they are saying to me “You didn’t do that thing that we agreed to last week.” I would immediately start searching for things like them not having been specific enough with the instructions or me not knowing that it was my responsibility to get it done, basically look for any and all excuses to get “off the hook” of having done something wrong.

Fortunately, I was able to see the mechanisms play out and stop them in real time and as I did that, I could see how I had in deed missed a point due to an abdication of responsibility on my part. I had neglected to direct a certain point, because of accepting myself to exist in a state of passivity towards a certain point, where I had come to take for granted that others would do things for me and where I had accepted myself to not put any effort into the point.

I would not have realized this if I hadn’t immediately identified and dropped my defense mechanism which is a shame, because it is actually a GOOD THING to realize bad shit about ourselves lol. I mean, facing what’s flawed about ourselves and directing ourselves to change that, is what self-growth is all about.

BUT because I had associated being “corrected” (which this wasn’t even. It was simply someone showing me what I had done) with being “reprimanded” and because I had created such a negative relationship to being reprimanded as a child, my fire walls immediately went up to justify and excuse my behavior.

Looking at it practically, how many times are we actually as adults being reprimanded by other adults? In my life: never. I mean, it could happen with a boss once in a while sure, or in a marriage, but it is not something I’ve personally experienced since being an adult. In fact, I actually see that we as adults are really bad at being able to tell each other when we’ve done something that might require a correction, exactly because we fear the backlash from the other person reacting to our words as though we’re reprimanding them!

This means that we can barely support each other to change, grow and expand, because we can’t even say “hey that thing you did/said back there, it wasn’t cool and I see that it can create these consequences. I suggest you have a look at changing it.” And when someone says something like this to us, what is the standard reaction of most of us? Feeling insulted, becoming defensive, brushing it off, excusing it – anything BUT actually looking at the point in self-honesty and going “you know what: I see what you are saying. Thank you.”

The reason for this is that we’ve created such a negative relationship to anything remotely related to mistakes/points that requires correction due to the way our mistakes are dealt with by adults when we are young. Adults reprimand children. They think that punishing children, excluding them, scolding them will make the child correct itself, but all it does it scare it into submission, a submission that can be subverted at any point, when the child becomes angry enough to defy the adult.

So – I would like to be able to be open and receptive when others show me points I can change or correct. I would like mistakes to be a thing to be celebrated, a healthy challenge for me to expand myself, to grow, to develop. I would like to meet mistakes head on and immediately look at how I can practically correct myself in the future, to prevent the same mistakes, not out of fear, but because I see the potential within myself to expand, to perfect myself, to become someone that I can be proud of and honor and respect.

Self-Forgiveness

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to associate others showing me a point that I can correct/change/expand with being reprimanded and told off and scolded, that I then simultaneously invert into myself where I go into a state of self-judgment and self-blame and blame the person whom I perceive as scolding me for making me feel bad

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to take it personal when I perceive and experience myself being reprimanded, scolded and told off and immediately go into a reaction of feeling inferiorized, victimized, abused and guilty and blame the other person for making me feel this way

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to automatically go into a state of self-defense when I perceive that someone is correcting me because I associate being corrected with being reprimanded, scolded and told off and because I associate that with feeling victimized and abused

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to deceive myself into believing that being corrected is the same as being reprimanded, scolded and abused and therefore immediately shut myself off from hearing anything that’s being said and immediately assume that I have to defend myself and so not listen or hear the person out and actually learn something about myself that I can expand from/within

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to immediately attack someone that I perceive to be correcting me through finding flaws in them/their statement through which I can undermine their argument of correction so that I can justify not listening/hearing or taking what they are saying into myself and instead blame them and make it so that I either didn’t make a mistake/do something wrong OR that if I did, then they’re to blame for it

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to immediately look for something I can blame the other person for, if they point out a point in me that requires correction, as a defense mechanism to not have to confront myself with the fact that I’ve possibly made a mistake/done something that requires correction which I’ve come to define as ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’ and something that I will be scolded and judged over and that I will judge and blame myself for and therefore have to avoid at all costs to not have a negative/bad experience within me

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to not realize that making mistakes and doing things that creates unnecessary and detrimental consequences is not a bad thing and it does not reflect negatively on who I am if or when I do such things and that I can instead celebrate when I see a mistake/point to correct in myself because it is another opportunity for me to expand and become the person I want to be, as someone whom I am proud of, whom I honor and respect

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to make mistakes/points that requires correction such a taboo within myself that I fear so much, that I’d rather defame someone else and compromise my relationship with them than admit to them or to myself that I’ve made a mistake/done something that requires correction

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to not realize that the reason why I’ve repeated mistakes and kept doing things I knew I needed to correct over the years, is because I have been so afraid of admitting/facing mistakes/points that requires correction within myself that I’ve suppressed and denied them within me at all cost, to not risk being confronted with them and as such with the experience I remember from childhood of self-blame, self-judgment, victimization and shame

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to blame adults as a child, and so blame other adults now for being scolding and judgmental when pointing something out to me that requires correction and so blame them for me not admitting it or changing it and blame them for me feeling bad and suppressing myself – when in fact, I know that they didn’t know better. They were working with the tools available to them based on how they were raised which were in the exact same way in which I would’ve equally raised my kids, had I not started to change this within me, based on thus perpetuating the sins of the fathers in and through which we’re all as equally innocent as responsible

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to take it personal and react when others react to things I’ve done that requires correction, instead of simply remaining stable within myself and within my relationship to mistakes as something that isn’t bad or wrong, but in fact a vital part of learning and growing, and so support the other person to see that too

Self-Corrective Statement

When and as another is pointing out something to me that they see I can change or correct and I see that I go into a self-defense reaction and don’t want to listen, I stop and I breathe. I relax and open my body and myself up to be be able to hear what they other person is saying and to unconditionally take their words in with gratitude so that I can learn and grow from them

I realize that it is an awesome opportunity to grow and learn when others are willing to show me my mistakes or points I can correct, because in this world, there are hardly anyone that dares to do that for another, let alone who cares enough about another to want to take the time (and risk the backlash) to support them to grow and develop themselves

I commit myself to embrace others that show me points I can correct and grow from and to be grateful for their assistance and support with showing me points about myself I might have not seen or that might have taken me years to see and that I now have the opportunity to walk through in the moment

I commit myself to humble myself and to be open towards hearing what others have to say, when they show me points I can change/correct

Learn more about this way of living:

• DIP Lite – a free online course to get started on your journey of self-discovery and liberation
• Desteni I Process PRO – a course for those ready for the next phase
• School of ultimate Living – Online community focusing on real life practical change
• 7 Year Journey To Life Process – People Sharing their Processes of Self-Forgiveness and Self-Correction
• Journey to a New Life

The Most Epic Love Story. DAY 396

Tags

Back to Self, coming home to yourself, Epic love story, Even og Isak, falling in love with yourself, Isak and Even, Self-Love, Shame series, Skam

I’ve recently been introduced to the Norwegian TV-series SKAM and I must say that it has had quite an interesting effect on me that I was in no way expecting. In fact, I am not sure I’ve ever been affected by a TV-series or a movie the way I have with SKAM, and it seems I am not alone with this experience as thousands of people around the world are watching it with awe, with people saying that it has changed their lives and entire sections of the internet being dedicated to it in various ways.

It is quite extraordinary to me that a TV-show can have such an impact, not only on me but on thousands of people around the world. It hasn’t been marketed or advertised anywhere, but has still become an overnight success due to the word of mouth of young people who have shared it with each other. The series is so remarkable to me because it speaks TO and ABOUT REAL people and real issues. It shows a glimpse of a potential what TV and movies can become in the future, as something we watch, not as mind-numbing entertainment that’s supposed to let us escape from our lives, but instead as something that supports us to grow and develop ourselves and gain insights from watching our lives being mirrored and reflected back to us with messages of courage and strength – messages that especially young people need to hear.

The series focuses on a group of teenagers between the ages of 16-19 who is attending high school in Oslo, the capitol of Norway. Each season features a new main character. The series is created in a such a way that the acting, the scenes, the cinematography and even the music makes it all feel extremely realistic. Not only do you feel like you are right there with them, (and the show does an amazing job at depicting youth culture of today), but I was also transported back to my own teenage years.

The series is so different because it doesn’t speak down to young people, but instead speak directly from their perspective. Many of the adults in the series are for example represented only by the middle part of their body and their voice. So you don’t see any faces and this is such a cool cinematographic concept, because it places the entire focus on the kids and at the same time depicts relationships teenagers often have with adults, of not at all being connected with them.

Season 3 (spoiler alert ahead) features the perhaps most epic love story I have ever seen and it nearly knocked me over with the intensity of the feelings I experienced. I am not going to go into the details of it, because it isn’t important here, but since watching it, I’ve opened up within me to investigate what it is about this particular love story that has moved me so much.

The main character lives a life of being fake and miserable and in total suppression of who he is. He lies to his friends and creates conflicts and basically has a horrible life. That is finally released when he admits to himself that he’s in love with this other boy and they eventually end up together.

The scene that impacted me the most, is the first scene where we see the boys finally together. They’re laying next to each other with hoodies on, kissing, hugging and speaking. It is a very ‘every-day’ kind of moment.

Yet it triggered some very deep feelings within me. I realized that it was the experience of ‘coming home’, of ‘belonging’ of ‘letting go’, of finally being able to be completely oneself and be open, of being intimate and vulnerable and without fear.

The whole experience has a tremendous impact on the boys as well and the main character end up saying that there’s nothing he finds embarrassing anymore. He’s walked through the worst, so he has no fear anymore.

In looking at how watching this love story unfold between these two boys, I also identified some words that I could see in them that caused me to react in such an intense way. It was words such as ‘devotion’, ‘intensity’, ‘passion’ and ‘romance’ and specifically related to the way the boys looked at each other.

I find it quite interesting to see myself react in this way and also to see how many others around the world (particularly young girls and women) react in the same way. All my life I’ve been quite a romantic when it comes to imagining being in a relationship. It is one of the first defining things I remember about myself. When I was 3 I started speaking about being in love with the boys in my kindergarten. And it wasn’t in a ‘cute’ romantic way, but more in relation to desiring ‘passion’ in a relationship. This basically continued all the way up until adulthood with a major peek during my preteen and teenage years and then as I had several long term relationships that ended, I started becoming more and more disillusioned with the idea of this ‘perfect love’. What has then been so interesting to see in how I’ve reacted to this series, is how this desire still exists virtually ‘intact’ within me as I in watching the series, have experienced myself exactly as I did when I was 12-13 years old and was yearning after some boy.

In bringing all of it back to myself, I have had a look at how I live in relation to myself – because obviously these intense feelings do not come out of the blue. Looking at the word devotion for example, I could see how I haven’t this lived in relation to myself. Rather than wanting some boy to look at me with total devotion, I can develop an intimate and devoted relationship with myself.

I also looked at how I wished that there was more passion, intensity and romance in my relationship with my husband and I could see how I had been passively waiting for him to bring it into the relationship, due to a specific limitation I’ve created of the gender-roles having different responsibilities in a relationship. I believed it was the man’s job to “seduce” the woman and that the woman more passively had to be the recipient of the man’s advances. I realized that I actually have all the information inside myself of what I’d like to develop in my relationship, so there is no need for me to wait for something to happen. I can create it myself – not only in relation to my husband, but also in relation to myself and my life.

Then there is also the other side of the story that has to do with an experience of ‘coming home’ and ‘belonging’ that we often project onto romantic relationships. In this case it was particularly extreme because it was someone who was denying who they were, and so there is a scene at the end where the main character shares that what he’s so glad about in having met this other boy is not so much the love itself, but how it allowed him to finally step up and be himself.

This has made me look at my own relationship with myself and how I am holding myself back from expressing who I am, but also from being my own ‘home’ and creating a ‘home’ within/as myself. For too long, I’ve lived as an enemy against myself in so many ways and it is time that I start landing in myself. To do that, I have to be a person that I would actually want to be with – and so in a sense, become my own ‘perfect partner’.

If I want passion and intensity in my life, I am certainly not going to get it by watching a TV-series and becoming consumed by ‘feel-good’ feelings – that isn’t real, it is just a simulation. It is the same in most relationships, which is why it cannot be sustained throughout time. It isn’t real. So why not create REAL passion, REAL intensity? Why not find out what romance is in a REAL way, as something that isn’t fleeting and based on superficial and volatile feelings of love, but that can actually be sustained over time? Perhaps these ‘epic loves’ that we are all looking for, were never about achieving some great feeling towards someone else (or someone else feeling that towards us.

Perhaps it was about finding our way home to ourselves all along.

Learn more about this way of living:

• DIP Lite – a free online course to get started on your journey of self-discovery and liberation
• Desteni I Process PRO – a course for those ready for the next phase
• School of ultimate Living – Online community focusing on real life practical change
• 7 Year Journey To Life Process – People Sharing their Processes of Self-Forgiveness and Self-Correction
• Journey to a New Life

Living as my Best Self in Every Moment. DAY 395

The last few months I have been going through a sort of ’shedding’ process within myself, where I’ve had to take some good long hard looks in the mirror and question both my behavior and who I am within it. I made a decision to focus on ‘self-work’ as the primary point and purpose in my life; to change, grow and develop myself to become the best possible version of myself that I have the potential to be and become. I also made a decision to push myself to follow through on my commitments to myself, especially in relation to self-work, because I could see how me neglecting self-work was virtually the cause of most, if not all my problems and conflicts in my life, both internally and externally. I finally admitted to myself how I had been neglecting myself and I could see all the mechanisms that I would use to justify to myself why I did this and so make it ‘ok’ within my mind.

As I started pushing myself, I very quickly saw how everything became quiet, simple, clear and in place within me. What a difference from the stormy mind I had been walking around with! My mind was clear and free from clutter and I could relatively easily direct whatever came up in my mind. I could, for the first time, effectively direct conflicts in my relationship not only to a resolution but to new expansive depths because I was clear and stable within myself.

During this process, I was acutely aware that I have made a ‘commitment’ to change many times without following through with it, and I that I had been existing in this pattern of compromising myself for quite some time, so I knew that I would have to test my commitment and that it wasn’t a given that I would follow through with it simply because I now ‘felt motivated’.

After a few weeks another layer opened up. I have been dreaming very vivid and lucid dreams since becoming pregnant and as I woke up from a particular dream one morning, I started looking at the ‘nature’ of the dream. I realized that many of the dreams were practically the exact same, except for the story changing. In these dreams that I call my ‘stress dreams’ I am always on my way somewhere using public transportation, often in a hurry or having to get to some important event. The dreams usually involve me missing my stop on the buss or getting off at the wrong place, or somehow ending up somewhere I wasn’t supposed to go and having to find my way back. In most of these dreams either my cats suddenly appear or I somehow end up having to take care of defenseless tiny animals. I won’t go into that part of the dreams here as I’ve written at length about it here.

What I then started looking at is the fact that this experience of stress and dissatisfaction with myself that I have in my dreams, is actually showing a general state of mind that I am in, day in and day out, from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep. It is on an extremely subtle ‘undercurrent’ level (because I have suppressed it but also because I have normalized it and accepted it within myself) so it isn’t something I was consciously aware that I was doing.

As I started to interpret the dream, I could see that the whole transportation part of the dream, the getting from point A to point B has to do with how I view life and getting ahead in life, and I realized how I actually find my days very stressful and burdensome, even though I don’t actually necessarily have any concrete burdens. It is kind of like being chased the whole time, only what I am being chased by only exists inside my own mind.

I realized how the stress and resistance I experienced towards waking up and meeting the day had to do with the relationship I had created towards the tasks at hand, and I knew that the solution was that I had to follow through with my commitments and not create this polarized relationship to the things I had to get done.

So I have been pushing myself to apply self-forgiveness, to breathe, to write and it was going great the first couple of weeks, but sure enough I started to creep back into my old habits of coming up with justifications and excuses for not applying myself. However, because I had already started changing, I knew I couldn’t go back. I can no longer accept myself to exist in this space of being in constant conflict with myself, for so many reasons, including how I eventually project this conflict outside myself. I have seen a glimpse of what life can be like when I simply do the self-work that needs to get done and it is a life I don’t want to miss out on creating for myself.

So now I get to the point that is within the title of the blog. Because it has to do with deciding and pushing myself to be the Best version of myself in all moments. I realized that my priorities inside myself are screwed up, like a broken compass (which I’ve also written about in the past here) that sends me to a completely different destination than the one I was heading towards because the direction is off. The things I ‘want’ are not necessarily aligned with what is best for me, and because my ‘loyalty’ inside myself has been to go with what I feel towards, then I’ve really screwed myself.

I’ve written about this as well in the past, how I’ve separated myself from doing what’s best for me, because that is what I initially experienced as my mother’s ‘role’ or responsibility and it always ended me up in situations where I perceived myself as ‘missing out’ and so I came to associate ‘what is best’ (things like health for example) with words such as ‘restriction’, ‘boring’ and ‘limitation’ and conversely did the same with the opposite.

What I know now without a shadow of a doubt is that I am not interested in continuing to live this way. It is not worth it. Pushing myself on the other hand, pushing through resistance and making an effort to get something done, man the satisfaction of that, there’s nothing that beats that. It is satisfying on a whole other level.

So – I am the point of integrating these realizations and insights into a consistent living application, so that it eventually becomes a natural part of me, to such a degree that I can begin seriously focusing on supporting others/the world through my own self-transformation process.

Learn more about this way of living:

• DIP Lite – a free online course to get started on your journey of self-discovery and liberation
• Desteni I Process PRO – a course for those ready for the next phase
• School of ultimate Living – Online community focusing on real life practical change
• 7 Year Journey To Life Process – People Sharing their Processes of Self-Forgiveness and Self-Correction
• Journey to a New Life

Exploring the Deeper Levels of Jealousy and Competition. DAY 394

Tags

competing with others, fearing others will take what is mine, feeling jealous at others, how to stop feeling jealous, Jealousy, survival mechanisms, why am I so jealous?

In the recent weeks, I have started to open up the pattern and reaction of jealousy within myself and with jealousy; also competition and comparison as I see are interconnected in and as a trinity, also connected with superiority, inferiority and judgment as specified in this recording.

So I have very slowly been lifting the lid on how jealousy exists within me, besides in the very obvious ways that I have written about in previous posts. The other day I was writing on a DIP assignment in which jealousy, competition and comparison is a major part of the pattern I am exploring, and I saw a specific dimension of jealousy that I hadn’t considered as clearly before.

I saw that jealousy and competition is based on a flawed calculation of facts within my mind where I perceive and believe myself to be in a situation of social or relational scarcity in and through which I go into fear of losing the relationship I experience that I have or could have with other people, not realizing that relationships doesn’t have to be based on a principle of scarcity.

Often the jealousy I have experienced has been related to relationships with people or with personal or physical attributes of other people. I have seldom for example been jealous of what people own. So it is quite interesting to look at jealousy in the context of fear of scarcity because that would mean that I believe that I exist in scarcity specifically when it comes to relationships and personal/physical attributes.

As I was looking at this, I started having memories coming up from when I was a child and I was part of several ‘girl groups’ where we would fiercely compete over and with each other. There was this idea that only two or three could play together or be friends, so there would always be someone ‘voted off the island’. I was not the most popular girl in the group, and so I was fighting with some of the other girls for the popular girls attention and friendship.

As recently as in my work, I noticed how this pattern crept up again within how I (very subtly under the radar of my own awareness) started becoming jealous at a co-worker, fearing that this co-worker would ‘take my place’ and then very subtly started taking actions to ensure that that wouldn’t happen.

Another way that this can play out is through deliberately blaming and finding faults and flaws in others where I realize that I was doing so deliberately because I felt threatened by them, somehow, in some perceived position that I fear losing, or that they have and that I want to gain. It is quite a nasty system that competition and jealousy system.

There can only be one god right? And we all want to be it. We all want to be on top, be the ones that succeed, and we couldn’t care less about the ones we have to trample to get there. It is a strange thing that is built into us and to our world because when people live according to this notion, the collective cannot be sustained, and in a very real sense this world is actually dependent upon its collective organism functioning to survive.

So when we act out in this notion of “there can only be ONE, and that ONE is ME”, we are actually enchanted by a form of insanity, a self-destructive mechanism because rather than protecting our survival, we become a threat to it.

Isn’t this also what cancer is and does? Where the cells turn against each other and try to take over the body, but without having the foundation of nurture and sustainability on a collective level. Maybe this is what happens when the principle of oneness is lived without the principle of equality, which could also explain the point of fear that sets the whole thing into motion – the fear of losing out, the fear of someone else being more, having more.

So I realize that these are the two positions one can have in relation to jealousy, comparison and competition. It is like we’re all in this long line and each one has their ticket, and the whole game is to get ahead and eventually be the one who is at the front of the line, whatever heaven or endgame we believe to be at the end of that rainbow. But you both have to protect the ticket you have now AND try to win the tickets of those who are ahead of you. So the one experience has to do with fearing that those who you perceive to be behind you (this could be in relation to a work position, in relation to physical appearance or any other parameter of competition that you deem valuable) will rob you of your ticket and push you back in the line. The other experience has to do with wanting the tickets of those who are in front of you in line and trying all sorts of schemes to get their tickets.

So if I bring this back to myself and to the experiences I have had with subtle notions of jealousy that emerges through a competitive fear of loss, I see that the solution is that I do/become the exact opposite of what I am within this experience, namely being generous, giving, open, sharing.

Self-Forgiveness

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to go into and accept a negative experience of jealousy and feeling threatened by another within fearing that they will take what I believe to be mine OR when they have/express something that I would like for myself

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to be ashamed that jealousy exists within me and that I have accepted and allowed myself to act out on jealousy and at times treat others in a not supportive way because I was so possessed with jealousy

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to trigger a possessive reaction within myself where I go into momentary insanity when I feel that someone is trying to take what I believe to be mine and I fear losing that which I believe to be mine, where I will virtually do or say anything to ensure I don’t loose what I believe to be mine

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to exist within a world of perceived scarcity in my mind where, I do not experience much physical scarcity due to living in a relatively supportive system, but where I have experienced what I perceived as social scarcity as a child and therefore believe myself to be living in a socially scarce world where I have to compete for attention, for positions and even for people that I want in my life – not realizing that this scarcity is entirely fabricated, as it is not actually so that there is only room for so many people in a person’s life and that people have to compete to ‘win’ a position. Obviously it is somewhat like this in the employment system, but even still, I live in a country with relatively little scarcity on that front which implies that my experience is irrational.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to react immediately within a state of fear when I perceive scarcity and that I immediately trigger a behavior of start grabbing what I can for myself as a survival mechanism, instead of actually questioning the premise of the scarcity and see if I can challenge it and even invert it into abundance, create more rather than accepting the premise of less and then perpetuating it

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to respond with fear and self-preservation as an automated reaction whenever I perceive that someone is out to get what I believe is mine and thus respond to it as a real threat that I must protect myself against instead of stopping up and questioning the premise of my experience

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to exist within a subconscious undercurrent pattern of perceiving myself to be in a constant competition with everyone else in this world, causing me to see others as a threat, calculating and analyzing them and myself in a constant competition to see who’s where on the ‘scoreboard’ and whether they are either a threat to me or I need to be a threat to them

Self-Corrective Statement

When and as I see that I am accepting and allowing myself to participate in competitive thoughts or backchat I stop and I breathe

I realize that this pattern of competition is a self-sabotage and self-destruction mechanism and that its purpose is to ensure that we do not realize ourselves in oneness AND equality and therefore that the solution to stopping this is to emphasize equality on a real and practical level

I commit myself to change my relationship with other people from being competitive and fear-based to being based on mutual support, sharing and equality

When and as I see that I am accepting and allowing myself to act out in jealousy towards another, I immediately stop myself

I realize that acting out in jealousy is a possession of fear of loss /desire to win based on competitive programming and that it is in no way based on real or sound principles

I commit myself to stop accepting and allowing myself to act out in jealousy.

I will continue in writings to come.

To learn more about jealousy and competition:

The History, Origin and Nature of Jealousy

Life Review – Comparison, Judgement and Competition

Self Forgiveness on the Experience of Jealousy

Learn more about this way of living:

• DIP Lite – a free online course to get started on your journey of self-discovery and liberation
• Desteni I Process PRO – a course for those ready for the next phase
• School of ultimate Living – Online community focusing on real life practical change
• 7 Year Journey To Life Process – People Sharing their Processes of Self-Forgiveness and Self-Correction
• Journey to a New Life

Is this what a Perfect Mother looks like? DAY 393

Tags

how do I become a better mother? Wanting to be a good mother, not good enough as a mother, perfect mother, wanting to be perfect

Being pregnant I have been facing some interesting points and experiences that I had no idea existed before becoming pregnant. One of the reasons is that pregnancy in how it is displayed in the media, is very one-dimensional and paints a romantic picture of the wonderful harmonic pregnant woman, without also relaying all the shocking and sometimes painful and horrible experiences one might go through.

This particular experience surprised me because it was not at all something I was expecting to experience.

In looking back at my childhood, I’ve mostly had a rather negative relationship with how I grew up. I have specifically focused on the lack that I experienced, both on a social, emotional and physical level. When I got pregnant however, I suddenly started thinking about all the awesome things my mother especially did for me when I was a child. She did in fact do a lot of things that I now would like to be able to do with my child, which surprised me a lot.

When I was a small child, we didn’t own a TV so our nights would consist of listening to the radio, read books, do chores or do something creative. I didn’t grow up with much. The first 6 years of my life we lived in a small apartment in the middle of the city. We never owned a car. I rarely got new clothes. My mom is a nature lover and would take me on bike rides and walks in nature as well as on travels that focused on spending time in nature. She would make sure to feed me wholesome and healthy home-cooked food every day. For the Danish equivalent of Halloween where kids dress up called Fastelavn, she would make me these incredible homemade costumes. When I was two, we started going on weeklong canoe trips every year with a friend of my mother’s and her children where I would sit in the middle of the canoe with a blanket around me as the adults and older children rowed. She spent endless hours reading to me, all the way up until I was 9 or 10 years old where I started reading more independently by myself.

Looking back at all this now that I am pregnant, I have wondered how life will be for my child. I have totally different lifestyle than I did growing up. It is almost the exact opposite in fact. I live on farm with my husband. We have two cars. Although we don’t have a TV, we both spend most of our free time on our computers, either working, researching, attending to our personal process or watching tv-series or movies. We don’t spend a lot of time in nature and we rarely go traveling. We do cook every day more or less and we use vegetables from our garden, but I am definitely also prone to a more ‘unhealthy’ way of eating, liking candy and the occasional pizza (which I never used to get as a child).

So in looking back, and comparing the life my mother provided me with, with the life I will be offering my child, I have started to worry that what I will offer is not good enough. I mean, I don’t want to be the kind of parent who never goes out and explores, who spends all their free time watching TV or on the computer, and yet, that is the example I am mostly living at the moment.

There is however also a different perspective which is that my husband and I can give our child something that I never had as a child; parents who are more self-aware, who are walking a process of becoming self-responsible, who doesn’t take their personal issues out on their children, whether directly or indirectly because of not knowing any better.

And yet another perspective is that we won’t ever be able to give our children the same childhood as we were given (I am also aware that I shared a very idealized version of it here!), because the times are different. When I was growing up, we didn’t have computers or smartphones, so technology wasn’t as integral a part of every day life as it is now. I am grateful to have access to technology, and I know that there are some awesome, amazing things one can do with it too, also together with a child. We will be able to research anything together. We can have a discussion about the lives of walruses in one moment, and in the next we can watch a documentary about walruses or find templates for how to draw them.

When I browse through the parenting Facebook groups I am a part of (they are typically for mothers adhering to an alternative way of raising their children; attachment parenting/Continuum concept/baby carrying/long term breastfeeding etc.), I see a lot of mothers worry about being bad mothers, even in the most minuscule of things.

In the times of today, mothers even try to control that their children are having the most optimal or perfect upbringing in the smallest detail of things, from feeding them an exact amount of breast milk every day at certain specific times, to only giving them specific foods and not in any way allowing them to come into contact with things like television or candy. It is no wonder that mothers are stressed out and exhausted! Along with having to work full time and pursue careers that fulfill us on a personal level, we also have to make sure we exercise and eat to look at best at all time, not mentioning being the perfect mothers to our children.

So – I would like to prevent this from escalating in my life as a mother. I’ve already walked through a near breakdown in relation to my cats (that I wrote about here) that was triggered by the exact same motherhood pattern, and this is not something I ever want to experience again. But I see how easy it is to fall into these intense and desperate fears of failing as a mother, equally connected with the intense desire to be perfect and in full control at all times.

I will start by releasing the fears, beliefs and desires through self-forgiveness and then I will prescribe a preventive and corrective process for myself so that I can stop this pattern from developing further.

Self-Forgiveness

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to participate in a negative experience of worrying that I won’t be a good enough mother for my child when I look at the life I have now and the life I lived as a child with my mother, where I compare the two in an absolute way and conclude that one was perfect and ideal and another is not, when I know that this is not the case in fact

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to think, believe and fear that I won’t provide my child with as good a childhood as the one I have because I don’t live in the same way now as I did as a child, because I do don’t the same things that my mother did with me, when in fact there is nothing that is stopping me from changing how I live now or later when I have my child

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to, already before having my child, trigger and become preoccupied with the motherhood fear and guilt system that I see in so many mothers that causes us to not be relaxed and natural around our children, expressing ourselves in an authentic and relaxed way, but that instead causes us to be constantly worried, tense and trying to control our children so that they will have and be what is best, actually causing us to not be the best for them that we can be, in trying so hard to be perfect

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to hold an ideal within my mind of who and how I am supposed to be as a mother, an ideal that I have absorbed from watching movies, television, seeing advertisements and seeing other mothers in my world, not realizing that this is an ideal that is entirely impossible to live where I as a mother am perfect at all times, having a perfect home, perfect body, perfect husband, perfect job, cook perfect cook and everything is simply perfect all the time – not realizing that I have copied this ideal from a one-dimensional still image of a perfect mother that is not only constructed and fake but that is also only containing one split second of a moment where things seemingly are or seem perfect, that I then believe that I must emulate in every moment, in every way and that I then hold myself up against and compare myself according to

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not see, realize and understand that I am setting myself up to fail when I believe I must live up to an ideal of being a perfect mother that is physically impossible to manifest into real life, because no matter what I do, I will never be that mother

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to, within my mind, measure the success of a mother based on the level and length of perceived perfection she is able to portray, thus for how long and how good she is able to portray herself as the ideal of a still image of perfection, instead of success being measured by who I am in reality with my child as I grow, learn and develop myself with my child, as being and becoming my fullest potential

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to create an overtly positive expectation towards myself as a mother, where I think and believe that I will be so great at it and it will be so natural for me, which is the other side of the coin of this ideal and the fear I experience towards failing, where I am convincing myself that I am living up to the ideal and try to boost myself in my mind’s eye, instead of letting the entire thing drop and let go of trying to be perfect and in control, since what I will be facing with having a child, is something I’ve never done before, and so I have no idea how it will be or how I will

Self-Corrective Statements

When and as I see that I am accepting and allowing myself to participate in fear and worry towards not being good enough of a mother towards my child, I stop and I breathe. I look at if there’s something in my practical reality I want to change, now or when I have my child that I see will benefit my child, and if there is, then I start implementing it, if not then I let go of the point and trust myself to direct myself here.

I realize that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to believe that it was in any way possible for me to control the outcome of having a baby in such a way that I could be perfect and that I therefore should strive for this perfection as anything less than that would be a failure and I now realize that that perfection was an illusion and that if I actually spiraled into this pattern of control, I would do myself and my child a disservice

As such, I commit myself to embrace myself here, as who I am, as and within the process I am walking, in my imperfection, to focus on who I am within and to keep walking the process I am walking of birthing life from the physical as what is best for all and let that be my measure of success as I walk into motherhood – to decide and determine who I am in all moments, as I walk into it with the self-trust that I will change and correct myself when necessary, and so grow and expand in the process.

How to become a perfect mother is thus to embrace my imperfections and within that stand as an example to my child of someone who is willing and able to grow, change and learn from their mistakes.

Learn more about this way of living:

• DIP Lite – a free online course to get started on your journey of self-discovery and liberation
• Desteni I Process PRO – a course for those ready for the next phase
• School of ultimate Living – Online community focusing on real life practical change
• 7 Year Journey To Life Process – People Sharing their Processes of Self-Forgiveness and Self-Correction

• Journey to a New Life

Shortcuts becomes Detours. The Only Way Out is Through. DAY 392

Tags

am I in a life crisis?, how to get over a life crisis, living in lala land, taking care of yourself, the mind as a computer, walking through a life crisis

How can the analogy of a slow and virus-infested computer support us to understand how our minds work, and how are directly responsible for creating states of crisis within ourselves? How can we use the exact same analogy as a tool to empower ourselves with in moments of a life crisis?

Firstly, a note on the notion of a life crisis: As I see it at the moment, there are two types of life crises. The first one is where unexpected external events happen that catapult you into a state of crisis within your body, mind and being. This might be triggered by a divorce, or by the onset of illness in yourself or a loved one, or by any other external event that forces you to reevaluate your entire life and who you are within it.

The second type of life crisis is where something happens inside yourself, within your mind, body and being that equally forces you to have to reconsider your entire life. It could be exhaustion that causes you to have to reevaluate your line of work, or it could be an experience of not having any feelings for your husband or wife and wondering if you should stay with them.

The common denominator in the two types of life crisis is that the events taking place are unexpected, and ‘rock the boat’ of the life that you had taken for granted or come to rely on and find stability in. As such, the experience of being in a life crisis is something that prompts you to reevaluate certain aspects of your life and yourself within it.

In my case it is a combination of the two types of life crises, but the ‘crisis’ aspect itself pertains more to the second definition. The external events that have played out in my case aren’t events that are necessarily ‘destructive’ or ‘bad’ in my life. For example: I am currently 7 months pregnant and being pregnant has brought on a lot of new experiences within me. It has triggered or intensified fears that existed within me already, but that I hadn’t walked through. Secondly, there have been some changes in my relationship with certain people in my life, which in turn has prompted me to have a very long hard look at myself and who I am within my life.

Within all this I saw a cool analogy as to explain how I got to the point where I am at now, where I cannot go on, or continue as I have been in the past:

Imagine that I am a computer. I have my body, which are the hardware and my mind, which is the software of the computer. Now – how do many of us handle our computers (or smartphones or tablets or other devices)? What do we do when we get those notifications that we need to update a program or that we might be affected by a virus? Many of us flat out ignore them. Why? Because we’re busy playing a game or watching porn, or we are sending that important email or scrolling through our Facebook feed or we are busy buying shoes. We can’t be bothered with the computer’s prompts for us to take action – to make decisions – to take responsibility. We’ll do it later or we hope the computer somehow will fix itself.

At the very bottom list of our considerations is that it could possibly be our responsibility to ensure that our computer is up to speed and in good condition. Why? Because most of us don’t even understand our computers. We couldn’t be bothered to. We just want to be able to use them without the hassle of having to have an engineering degree or a burning passion for programming. Is that too much to ask for?

As the days progress, the computer starts getting slower and slower. Suddenly some of the programs won’t open. In the beginning you just ignore it. At some point you start to wonder what is causing it, and in the back on your mind you remember that there was that notification that you kept ignoring every time it popped out, but still; you can’t be bothered. You’re busy right now and it really isn’t a good time to have to drop everything to fix your computer, plus who knows what many issues could be hiding in there, and you have no idea how to fix it. So you leave it be and you get used to waiting for programs to open or waiting for the computer to reboot when it crashes. Sure, you loose some documents once in a while that you didn’t save in time, but it isn’t a catastrophe.

Then one day you need to install a new program; let’s say it is Photoshop, and it is really important for your career or your business. For whatever reason, it is something that has to be done. But you can’t. The computer won’t install it, however many times you try. It keep coming up with an error message that your computer is so outdated or compromised by virus that it simply can’t handle the new program effectively. In fact, for the new program to work properly, the computer has to be in tiptop, optimal condition.

And then it hits you: unless you go back and deal with all the things you ignored for so long, you won’t be able to install the new program and you actually might risk loosing your job in the process. So now you HAVE TO do it.

The computer is so compromised that it will take time,  you have no idea how long, and you have no choice but to go through it program by program, learning how to understand it and how to delete or upgrade the programs or install new ones when needed. There is no more “Can’t be bothered” because you don’t have a choice.

This is where I am at in my life at the moment. I am at a point where I have to install a new and very important program (a new baby!). I am at a point were I have allowed myself to ignore and dismiss certain inner ‘notifications’ telling me that there were points within me I needed to take care of. I’ve abdicated responsibility for the programs that exists within me, by saying to myself that they are too complicated, that I just don’t understand them or that I’ll take care of it later – exactly as many of us do with our computers, compromising them until we can’t work on them anymore and we either have to reinstall an entirely new operating system or send them for maintenance because we can’t fix them ourselves.

When you try to take shortcuts in life, they very quickly become detours, perhaps because you don’t know where you are going, or because you get distracted from following the path you are on. Therefore, the quickest way to any destination in life is often to walk it straight through. It is the same with this point.

I couldn’t be bothered with taking care of things along the way, because I was existing in a La La Land in my mind of “everything is fine” and “I can’t be bothered right now” and so now I have no choice but to walk the entire point through from beginning to end, all at once, whereas I could’ve otherwise handled it one point at a time.

This is obviously also partly what causes the ‘shock’ that I experienced as a life crisis, because I had totally stuck my head in the sand in terms of being observant about what was going on within me, so when everything started resurfacing, it was unexpected to say the least.

If we go back to the computer analogy it means that it would have been much more practical to simply click on those notifications prompting me to take care of the computer as they popped up, instead of waiting until the whole thing became compromised and I could barely work on it and had to go over it in its entirety.

The other point I want to bring up here is the point of self-responsibility. In the analogy I used before with the computer, there is this abdication of responsibility within hoping that the computer will take care of itself OR in a worst case scenario that I can send it to someone who can fix it – which often leads to the whole cycle starting all over again because the I am still not taking self-responsibility for taking care of my computer, and so will again run it down to a point of near destruction, before once again taking it to an expert who is by the way making a decent living off of people like me who do not take care of their things.

Regarding my relationship with my computer, which is an essential and important life line in my life, I realize that I have to take responsibility for learning how to take care of it, at least in the most basic ways that I can. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with taking it to an expert, if I can’t boot it or something has happened that I can’t fix, but there’s a big difference between doing that, and then totally mismanaging it in a state of abdication of responsibility.

The same goes for my mind, my body and my life. The primary responsibility for all of that is with me, and if there’s something I don’t understand about myself, I have a responsibility to learn and develop that understanding so that I can take care of myself in the best way possible.

This is the process I am busy with and while it is not necessarily a lot of fun, I am grateful that it has opened up now and that I have the opportunity to give myself a fresh start.

The wonderful thing with computers is that there is most often nothing wrong with the hardware itself (unless it is old, broken or doesn’t have enough RAM) which means that it can go from being barely functional to being in tip top shape simply by one taking care of upgrading, removing, reinstalling programs and software. We can do the exact same in our own minds – and yes, it does sometimes require a systematized and structured and intense process of ‘healing’ or ‘programming’ – but it can be done.

Learn more about this way of living:

• DIP Lite – a free online course to get started on your journey of self-discovery and liberation
• Desteni I Process PRO – a course for those ready for the next phase
• School of ultimate Living – Online community focusing on real life practical change
• 7 Year Journey To Life Process – People Sharing their Processes of Self-Forgiveness and Self-Correction

Facing The Storm of a Life Crisis. DAY 391

Tags

being in crisis, how to walk through a life crisis, I don't understand what is going on, life crisis, mid life crisis, my world is upside down

This post goes out to anyone who is facing turbulence in their lives, who is feeling like everything is upside down, feeling lost or feeling in despair. Maybe you are in a life-changing process, maybe what you are facing cannot be seen by anyone but you. This goes out from one person immersed in a life crisis to another, as a point of support and stability in the storm.

Recently I have been facing some points that have shaken me to such an extent that I have felt like my entire world was upside down and that I couldn’t find any form of grounding within it. I have felt lost, abandoned, alone and very confused within all this – like my whole world was falling apart, and this is something I haven’t experienced in quite some years.

Then something interesting happened.

The other day I spoke with two people in two completely unrelated situations and it turned out that they too were facing points in their lives where they had to reevaluate the very things in life they otherwise rely on for stability. It was almost the exact same as I was experiencing, only our focal points were different.

It was around the same time that Trump was elected president in the U.S and a shockwave swept over a lot of people all over the world. They too felt like their world had been shaken to the core.

Now – I cannot explain to you exactly why this is happening and I am certainly not here to tell you that it is mercury in retrograde and that it will all be over soon. So this isn’t a story to calm the nerves and tell you that the turbulent flight we seem to all be on is going to be over soon or not crash into the ocean. I have no idea if it will or if it won’t.

What I can do is to share some points that I have realized in this process that may be supportive for you, if you too find yourself ‘caught’ in a ‘life-altering tornado’ that seems to be pulling everything you hold dear up by the root, whirling it all up into the air, leaving you completely disoriented not knowing where it will all land, or if it ever will.

Something I realized after nearly breaking down with a panic attack for the 10th time over not understanding what the hell is going on within me, is that a issue in all of this has for me been that I fear the very process I am in.

I don’t like when I don’t understand what’s going on, within me or otherwise. I don’t like when I don’t immediately see from A to Z in a point or at least that I can quickly orientate myself and get back on track. I don’t like that I have no idea when this ‘roller-coaster ride’ is going to be over and I can return to my relatively stable ‘normal’ life and I certainly do not like not knowing IF it ever WILL return to that or if I am now catapulted into a totally unfamiliar territory, seemingly floating without direction, like someone lost at sea or in outer space.

I like when things are simple, clear, easily understandable, neatly organized and approachable. I am not (it is something I am working on) a person who is super excited about having to push through difficulties and hardships. Instead I have during my life created a lot of survival mechanisms that involve ‘slipping under’ and ‘sliding through’. I have to a certain extent had an easy time ‘getting’ things and the things I didn’t get, I simply avoided. But now the thing I don’t get is myself and parts of my life that I have no choice but to take direction over, and so I have no choice but to face this point head on. There’s literally no place to escape to because no matter where I go, I am always with me.

So – I finally realized that I have to embrace the process I am in at the moment. This is a creation process and not knowing what I will create or even how to create it, is not a ‘bad’ thing. It is also not bad or dangerous that I don’t have any immediate or easy answers or solutions for myself.

It is showing me that there are still more points for me to work with and uncover and I cannot force it to be ‘over with’ or ‘return to normal’ because that would be the same as preventing this process of transformation from unfolding – preventing change within wanting to crawl back into my comfort-zone. I don’t understand it yet, and that is OK. I am in no way in control of it – and I never was. I don’t know exactly who I am right now, and that is actually much more cool than walking around being super ‘together’, thinking that I’ve got it all figured out, all the while I am living on a total lie.

In all of this, this is something that I have been able to stabilize myself through:

I would rather be in a total state of crisis within myself, not knowing what’s up or down or who the hell I am – but at least be honest with myself, than I would want to live on a lie, or crawl back into my comfort-zone of self-deception (It reminds me of the scene in Matrix with the guy who wants back into the matrix because he can’t stand the truth about the real world and so compromises everyone just so that he can go back into total oblivion).

Luckily, it is not the first time in my life that I have experienced my world being rocked in the sense that I am facing having to question every part of myself and things I have spent years taking for granted. For each time this has happened, my life has become so much more real and enriched, so much more than I could have ever imagined had I remained in my little cocoon of self-deception and limitation where it was comfortable yes, but not in any way real or true.

So I am no stranger to this type of thing happening, and it has happened so much that I have grown to develop a deep appreciation and gratitude for when it does happen, because it is usually in these moments – these most painful moments – that I have developed myself the most, the fastest and in the most substantial ways. In fact, I owe everything I am now to these and such moments of total crisis.

But this time it was different and it triggered me to react because of this dimension of not being in control of the process, of not understanding what is going on. It is perhaps because, for the first time ever in my life, I have actually had something to lose, (or so I’ve thought). I have had quite a few years of ‘settling in’ to a certain life and I had become rather comfortable in it, and now, all the lies I told myself, all the compromises I made, are coming back with a vengeance to bite me in the ass.

What I have found supportive through all this, is to find a couple of anchor points, points that I DO SEE, and then start from there – because however lost and bewildered we are, there is something, some part of us that haven’t lost all clarity and from there we can start walking ourselves into a new creation as we at the same time face, forgive and let go of what was.

The only thing I can do is to remain completely open and humble towards this process and allow myself to BE in it rather than fight against it or try to make it neat and pretty and control its outcome.

I have no idea where this process will lead me, but I trust that as I push myself to be self-honest and face the lies that I’ve allowed myself to live and dare to question even the parts of myself that I’ve taken for granted the most, who I will be on the other side of this can only be a clearer and more authentic myself.

Life crises are not bad points or moments in our lives – they are beautifully, raw, painful opportunities to wash or burn the parts of ourselves that weren’t nothing but lies in the first place, but that we’ve lived for so long that we came to believe and accept them as all we were. Life crises are opportunities to face and let go of such lies, fears and fake personas in which we’ve been wrapped up, and rise up like phoenixes from the ashes, so that we can start again anew, cleansed and refreshed. But we can only do that if we actually learn from the painful lessons that the ‘fire’ of transformation holds for us, and to do that we have to be willing to be completely naked before ourselves and show ourselves the very worst parts of ourselves and dare to let that go, completely and unconditionally and stand up as something completely new, yet at the core we’re still ourselves, only more ourselves than ever before, but we won’t know what that is, who that is, until we actually create ourselves.

I have experienced quite some moments of despair and feeling completely stuck in a loop in all this, and in those moments I have pushed myself to reach out and speak up and ask for support from someone that I trust to see common sense when my vision might be fogged all up by my own mind – and I am tremendously grateful for that. But because I know how extreme this can be, I also know that we sometimes make some bad decisions when we are in these states of crisis, especially if we feel like we don’t have anyone to reach out to and everything is so twisted around that we might not ever again land on our two feet.

I want to invite you to reach out to me if you ever feel like you could use someone to stand with you, to stand grounded next to you for a moment until you regain your footing. I am immensely grateful to have such people in my life and I don’t know what I would do without them and at the same time I am committing myself to become that anchor for myself, so that I can face the (cleansing) storms of life within myself without having to lose my ground in the process.