Miracles Happen in Real Estate too!

Today is a particularly rollercoaster-y day and this past week has been action packed. I spoke in my video about how there has been miracle after miracle in my last real estate transaction. But when push came to shove and the final documents needed to get signed, panic ensued. Both the escrow agent and the listing agent became frantic in wanting to ensure everything was done.

And that’s natural. But what puzzled me abbot this is that the listing agent and I knew in our hearts that this transaction even going as far as it did was a miracle and that it would close. We knew in our hearts and so as complicated as the transaction was, with as many moving parts as were involved we didn’t lose faith.

But yesterday she lost faith and today I lost faith. I notice when someone in the transaction loses faith then the others have to carry the positivity or belief in the transaction closing, the loan funding, the money literally appearing electronically in the buyer’s escrow account. Miraculously.

I felt that this whole transaction was a deep lesson about faith. When do we have it, when do we keep it, how do we lose it? It’s easy to keep faith when, despite difficulties, everything appears to be going your way but what happens when things start to seem to fall apart?

I lost faith and that was the whole test. There were 88 individual miracles in this one transaction and this family’s faith and good humor in going through each seemingly impossible obstacle was amazing and I felt completely blessed to be a part of this. I felt privileged to be doing the work I do.

I lost faith, my clients lost faith and for a minute everything looked bleak. Then I remembered how God carried us all through every obstacle in this transaction. And I decided to believe that there would be another miracle and the necessary funding condition would appear. And once I decided it would, it did.

I decide to live a miraculous life and I decide to be fulfilled. I decide to have faith that everything I need will show up for me and that all the moving parts needed to arrange themselves for me will. And they will.

This decision changed, is changing and will change my life.

He loved her even though she was fat

When I was a teenager I had a friend. She was about 5 foot 11 and quite overweight. She had gorgeous thick brown hair and sparkly brown eyes. She was kind and gregarious. And I liked her a lot.

One winter she invited me to her cottage. We drove ourselves there because we must have been 17 or 18, maybe 16. It was sweet first independence from parents and the emotional manipulation of my home. Her cottage was nestled next to a lake. It was the dead of winter in Canada, pure pure white glistening snow. Deathly quiet. And cold.

I remember when we got there on a Friday afternoon, it was already getting dark but the fire was lit and the place was warm and inviting. When we walked in, my friend introduced me to her father, who got up walked to us at the door and gave her a warm hug. He seemed very happy to see her and his eyes twinkled.

I remember being shocked. But this was an abomination! How could this man love her!!! She had committed the same sin I had - being fat. I was incredulous. She was not only fat but also very tall. Another sin. Unsightly for a girl.

I continued to be amazed throughout the entire weekend and even through my later teenage years. Her father seemed to genuinely be interested in her life, thoughts and feelings and wanted to spend time with us but also gave us space. He seemed to accept her and encourage her. He loved her even though she was fat.

I had never seen such a thing in my life.

The Dark Queen

Tonight I was the dark queen with a little bit of the queen of hearts thrown in. As her, I wanted to control everyone and everything. All she wanted was to make everyone love her. All she wanted was sincere remorse for the pain that was caused to her. But sincere remorse is like sincere love. You cannot fabricate either one. And if you have wisdom you will see that you can no more make someone regret their wrongs than you can make them love you. It is something that can only come from one's own free will.

Speaking of free will, we all have a right to it. No one was born without it. So to take it away by trying to control them really is ripping out their heart. It really is a form of dark magic. The dark queen has to control because she doesn't believe in her own goodness. She doesn't believe in her own capacity to be worthy of love and so she must take instead of receive. But you cannot take love just as you cannot take mercy. No, love and mercy are the gifts grace bestows upon us and we may only receive.

The dark queen is an aspect of the shadow feminine within all of us. Some other aspects of the shadow feminine are the void of unexpressed love or the void turned vacuum instead of sacred creative space and the warrior who protects the little girl's heart, hardened and impenetrable.

Which aspects of the shadow feminine have you noticed in your life?

Octopus Story

She is so beautiful, stealthily gliding through the water. She is intelligent, intuitive and inventive. Octopus brings back the lost children from the depths of the ocean. She can bring many up at a time with her many long, strong and hug-able arms. She feels smooth and soft to the touch and she smells like seaweed. She is very tender and her gentle caresses and soft touches with the tips of her arms calm the lost children as she carries them home. Her arms can reach all parts of the world at the same time. She can also go into imaginary worlds
and bring children who get lost there too.

Song

The nurturing love of the Goddess never ceases

Her bountiful gifts never come to an end

They are new every morning, new every evening

Great is your faithfulness, Goddess

Great is your faithfulness

Miracle in San Diego

This seems like it might be a really long post but here I go anyway (took 18 minutes).

About two years ago I signed up to host international students. The lists kept getting e-mailed of all the students that needed a place and for some reason I rarely felt attracted to any of the names.

My husband and I had gotten married a few months earlier and were enjoying some honeymoon time as well. We were talking about possibly having a child soon and although I wanted very much to be the mother of his child, I had some very serious doubts about being a mother.

I had done tons of therapy to work through the way my "daughterhood" went. It just seemed to work out pretty traumatic, especially the ages 6-17 or so. I felt very alone in those years and even though I know my mother loved me she also had some pretty serious depression and anxiety that was undealt with and that made her emotionally unavailable, critical, angry, spiteful and volatile. She also seemed to compete with me in my teenage years and unable to respond to my emotional needs. She felt the need to constantly be right, prove and reprove it and set up situations where she could prove that once again. Offering to help me with homework was a trap to create an opportunity for her to flex her academic muscles while belittling my relatively unformed ones.

Needless to say there was a sense of self-confidence I very much lacked as a woman. It took me many years in therapy, self-reflection and prayer to get to a place of being able to hear and nurture my own emotional needs. I felt insecure as a female and also as an adult female. I was afraid that I would be a bad wife and never form a healthy relationship (which I overcame partly with my supportive and loving husband's help). I was particularly afraid that I would be a bad mother if I were to have a girl.

That summer the list was sent out and on it was one name that stood out to me, Alessandra. Without thinking twice, for the first time ever, I sent an e-mail to the foreign student organizers saying that we would host Alessandra.

A few days after I found out that my beloved dog Mimi was dying of cancer and I would need to put her down to relieve some of her suffering. Plagued by thoughts of self-doubt I tried to cancel hosting Alessandra, thinking that I needed to devote time to caring for my dog of 8 years and not knowing how much of a host mom I would be while mourning her death.

But the reply came from the organizers that, alas, they had no one else available to host and anyway Alessandra's friend was going to be living nearby and they wanted to be close to each other. I felt like I could not back out now.

But I was so filled with insecurity that I could not sleep that night. Alessandra's mom had sent me an e-mail saying hello with picture of their family and they all looked like movie stars and very happy. Looking at that picture I felt that our little home and my insecure life would be inadequate.

Bravely I wrote again to the organisers, particularly because that night I couldn't sleep until 3 am saying that I could not take Alessandra. But I also prayed. I told God all my worries and fears but I kept hearing The Voice that I should host her anyway. Despite this guidance I sent the 3 am e-mail but did ask upon sending it that God's will not mine be done.

Alessandra did come to stay with us. She was wonderful and darling and we loved her and cared for her and picked her up at the trolley station and walked her to the bus stop. In the mornings I would walk to the bakery and buy her favorite sweets and sometimes I would make her dinner so that she could eat when she came home after a full day of exploring San Diego with her friends. I would check in on her when she did her homework and drive her to the beach fro walks together.

Several times she said I was a good mom and a perfect mom. I could not believe it because she had nothing but good things to say about her Italian family and her own mother so I know she knew GOOD MOM!!!

Mimi did die while Alessandra was here but she walked through that part of it together as one would with any family member.

When Alessandra left we both cried and a week later I found out that I was pregnant! This was a miracle, especially when we found out that it was going to be a baby girl. We decided to name her Alessandra and I felt that I was ready and capable of being her mother. I was also willing.

My friend Talia suggested I write a song for her and we did. Here is the song and HOW the song came into being is the subject of my next miracle post.

Miracles HAPPEN EVERY SINGLE DAY!!!! WOHOOO! PRAISE GOD!

Miracle in Sofia

When I was 22 I went to visit Bulgaria, where I was born,  with my boyfriend at the time. We traveled to Sofia, stayed at a hostel, went to the black sea where we got an awful digestive infection and then made it home to Gabrovo, the city of my parents' birth and where much of mu childhood took place.

We stayed with my paternal grandmother who raised me when my parents emigrated and I was left behind. I have a special connection with this grandmother. In a sense she rescued me and she was also capable of giving me a quality of love and nurturing and understanding that I never quite could get from my parents.

My boyfriend of those years was my second ever love but he was somewhat mentally ill, depressive and abusing marijuana.

When it was time for our flight back about a week later, I wasn't ready to leave but I was very conflicted because he was putting a lot of pressure on me to go back with him, taking it personally that I wanted to stay (he felt he needed to go back for the start of his school trimester) and pulling his manipulative withdrawal tricks when I mentioned it.

But my grandmother was in her 70s. She lived with my parents in the USA and she was only very rarely in Bulgaria. It felt like if I didn't take this chance to be with her and revisit some very special moments in my favorite city Gabrovo, the home of my entire blood line, then I may never get the chance.

Thus conflicted, my boyfriend and I left for Sofia to catch the scheduled flight back to London where we would stay with a friend for a few days before flying on to New York. I felt responsible about having made these arrangements for us to drop in on her and didn't want to change them now or back out or make my boyfriend half to change his flights or have him stay with strangers. I prayed for a sign that I would do the right thing, that I would know what to do. Looking back now it seems it was a matter for the heart versus a matter of the mind but at the time it seemed a very hard decision to make and I felt if I left my boyfriend and went back, he might break up with me. But while we were in Sofia walking around foraging for breakfast in the capital that morning, I stepped away from my boyfriend to go to a store and I ran into my mother's best friend from child hood, right there on the street. And I was alone. I thought she was an angel. I knew she must be the sign I had been praying for. In our greeting hellos - she hadn't seen me since I was a child - I described my situation. Her response was that having the freedom to travel as we please was one of the reasons herself and my parents had worked so hard to leave communist Bulgaria. So that the children would have a better life and the freedom to do what they want.

I knew that was my answer. We said goodbye and I went with my boyfriend to the airport. In line I was so tense I actually had an orgasm when I told him that I will accompany him to London and stay there with him at my friend's house but four days later when it was his flight for New York, I would return to Bulgaria.

He sulked but I did just that. Returning was a life-changing decision. Not only did I get to enjoy some deep and special alone time with my beloved grandmother in her home and the home of my refuge when my parents, as I thought then, had abandoned me, but I also got to spend time with some friends from childhood and make a very special friend who to this day guides loves and supports me on my artistic and personal journey as I do her.
All in all it was a miracle and I am very grateful.

Magic Report 2014

Last week I woke up with rage. I think it was a Wednesday. I went to my usual yoga class and I felt it. Two young girls were chattering loudly in our studio of about 15 silent people. Imagining a less-than tranquil shavassana I grumbleb furiously to myself. After waiting a few minutes for them to settle in and they continued, I took a few deep breaths I walked to the door, opened it and said audibly but calmly, “there is a sign here that says, ‘thank you for not talking.’” One of the girls stared at me in disbelief and the other one said. “Oh, OK.” They were quiet the rest of class and left me to a peaceful shavassana.
Throughout the yoga class I had mind chatter about this. Was I too mean? Nah, I was in the right. When did I get my backbone back? I used to be stand –up-in-your-face confrontational for many years and then I turned into a pushover. I would try to “be Ok with it” when something bothered me to “stay calm” when it gnawed at me inside for days. But today, this seemed a truly assertive move, while being polite. I hate that word assertive. It has ass in it. Anything with ass in it can’t be good, makes one feel foolish. Assertive can mean self-confident or forceful or aggressive. I would much rather the word imply the inherent nobility and courage required to honor self and others rather than the insinuation of being pushy and that respecting and protecting your own needs and those of others in a pre-agreed upon space is somehow undesirable.

“Listen to me, your body is not a temple. Temples can be destroyed and desecrated. Your body is a forest—thick canopies of maple trees and sweet scented wildflowers sprouting in the under wood. You will grow back, over and over, no matter how badly you are devastated.”
—Beau Christopher Taplin ‪#‎TodaysMantra‬

Blessings and Grapefruits

Today I wobble between inspiration and despair but at least I am writing. Mostly inspiration. There are so many business ideas, so many ways to make a difference, so many ways to get busy saving the world.

From my mojo blog to my dating book, to revolutionizing the mortgage industry, a miracle blog, I am full of creative ideas.

Jonathan Fields talks about building a revolution, not just a business. What his work has shown me is that, for there to be deep fulfillment,  there must be a greater cause beyond just the traditional business model and making money. There must be a greater cause for greater contribution in order to gather the momentum to rally people against a common injustice or outdated no-longer useful practice, towards a more useful and productive way of consumerism.

Today I got a taste of being of service when my neighbor Davis and I spoke about the car I lent him for months and then let him buy with non-interest payments. He repeated once again how he didn’t know how he could thank me, that he was praying for me every day. I told him that in an exchange such as this, both are blessed, the one receiving and the one having the capacity to give.

I remember the car sitting for months parked across the street. It was my first car I ever owned, a wonderful car I drove for years and paid off. I loved that car and often spoke to it. Once I got my new Lexus  I didn’t need it anymore and it looked sad and downtrodden hanging out by itself.

I tried posting several ads but the people who came to test drive it didn’t come back. I felt the pressure to sell it but in reality there wasn’t really a financial reason to do so. Thankfully. One day I posted for-sale signs on it and waited another month. I kept getting this little feeling to wait. So I waited.

One day I was yet again coming back from a walk with my new baby and saw the car parked there. I thought to myself that I am ready to let it go and that I would post another ad but I didn’t because that little voice told me to wait.

In the meantime my neighbor Davis from Uganda living across the street had a grapefruit tree in his yard which I would eye, desiring fresh grapefruits for my morning juices. One day I knocked on his door and said hello. We made acquaintances and I asked him if I may pick his grapefruits and he said of course. Several weeks passed and I was happily picking grapefruits and on occasion would see him and wave.

When he called for the car, I knew exactly who he was. He asked to test drive it and I just gave him the keys, busy with our new baby girl. Something told me to just let him drive it. My heart went out to him when he explained that it took him two hours to get to and from work by bus and that he was looking for a new job and he needed a car desperately.

So I let him drive it. And I didn’t worry about it. I figured when he was ready he would pay me for it. He changed the battery and kept driving it. He said he wanted to buy it and could we meet. So we met and he asked for a payment plan because he had spent his savings on one of his three daughters in Uganda who needed heart surgery. I was already prepared to let him just drive it and I told him he could drive it until he could pay and he can just pay the insurance $35 a month for now. He faithfully left the money under my front door mat every month and eventually after some months he got a steady job and was ready to start making payments.

The business woman in me wanted to charge him interest but a little voice told me not to. So I offered him a fair price of $3500 and 13 payments of $250 a month plus the insurance so a total of $285 which he said he could easily do.

So he has made two payments so far and before that he drove the car for two or three months. Whenever we speak he expresses his heartfelt gratitude but what I feel is blessed to have been able to be in a position to really truly help someone who needed it and appreciated it.

I feel so blessed by this miracle I want to continue operating my life this way. I would like to focus on service and contribution and get compensated for my creativity and special gifts of sensitivity, listening to Spirit and musicality. I would like to share these gifts with the world.

I am shifting my focus from production to meaning. Wayne Dyer calls this the afternoon of life. But I am 36 and am I already in the afternoon of my life?

I know I am on the right path because I feel the fire in my belly again. I am creating again, I feel powerful and unique again, I trust in the Universe and my gifts again.

I am still confused about many things such as why it was so difficult for my mother to allow me to differentiate and I also have compassion for the people who raised me. They had to craft coping mechanisms in order to survive communism and the humiliation, shame and abuse that was prevalent and widely accepted as normal. They had to create grandiose personas. My mother is the know-it-all fail and mistake proof always right academic version of narcissism, my father is similar in his refusal to admit or apologize for mistakes, but he also has millionaire proclivities. Ha!

And where does that leave me, my friend Ana once asked when we were discussing the inability of our narcissistic parents to see us, relate to us, or allow us our individuality and separateness. Well, it leaves us without Fathers. And Mothers. Or at least with leopard-print white and dark bullet-whole type paper- thin mannequins of them, hollow, physically there but mentally and emotionally checkered and scrappy. And it leaves us working harder to find community, support, self-esteem and self love. But we can get there, with a little help from our friends here in this world and our Guides and Angels and God in the world beyond.

Thank you Spirit for the opportunity to be creative, to have friends, an enjoyable life and may it be a life of deep contribution and service. May I be what I truly am. May I find the courage, the support, and the self-compassion to be the artist that I truly am.  Amen.

Satisfaction

Aaah the satisfaction of a blank page What shall I write? I like the idea of the art of revolution, don't start a business, start a revolution. I would like to start revolutionizing corporate America. Seems like a lot to take on.

Anyway, that's a post for another time. Today I sit here sort of terrified because I want to write a letter to my mother. I mean I don't really want to write it, but tonight is the first time I think I have a beginning, a point and an ending. So here goes.

Dear Mom,

I am so tired of the cold silence between us. There are layers and layers of misunderstandings and I don't even know where to start. But I am going to try one last time because I love you and I want a relationship with you and I desperately need you in my life and I think if you are suffering as much as I am at not having a relationship that at least somewhat works then I must try again.

I know it;s been hard because you have been getting negative feedback from me for a long time. It's true that there are many things I am angry about but I think there are a few roots. I hope.

First, when we last spoke I asked you for 4 things, one of them was a way to ask for space that works for you and you didn't provide this, you just stopped calling and decided I didn't want you to call but that wasn't what I was asking. That was a misunderstanding and just robbed us of the opportunity to work together on a need I have.

After our 3 hour conversation before I got pregnant and before our trip to BG, I truly thought we had taken a turn to better understanding each other. That time I felt we hashed out a lot of things and I was so happy. One of the things that has remained with me after that conversation is that you said I had someone over at Christmas one year and didn't want to see you. At the time we spoke I didn't think I had but then I remembered that there was a Christmas I had a cold and didn't want to see anyone, including you and Grandma. But I felt lonely so Dragan came over to watch a movie.
I didn't mean to tell you an untruth, I had just forgotten but the underlying question is why does it matter what I do with my time in my house? How I choose to spend my time is my business since I became an adult. If I chose to stay home and watch movies on Christmas then that's what I did, You may not like it, but part of having a good relationship with anyone is respecting their choices.

I am basically mad about a few things. First the many times you humiliated and shamed me in Canada. The many times you criticized me. The viciousness with which you would yell at me so that you were literally foaming white at the mouth.

Once you told me that you felt like your leg was cut off because we didn't have a relationship that suited you. Well how do you think I felt, not to have a mother?

Now, as a mother myself and spending 6 long lonely months at home and feeling isolated, the reality of my motherless predicament is even more excruciatingly painful.

Yes I describe my pain with such vivid detail and I know it's hard to hear. Yesterday in my writing class a girl wrote that in her darkest of tsunami during her mental illness breakdown, Jesus knelt down beside her and wept.That to me just spoke of the deepest compassion one can have for another - to kneel beside them and weep with them.

Nah, I can't even believe I am attempting the gargantuan task of writing this letter. Ok. Deep breath. Stay with the process.

You were such a great mom. I remember going to plays and puppet shows, I remember you drawing me math puzzles, and painting my doll's nails when we had to rehabilitate old dolls at the kindergarten. I remember one play where they made water by waving blue pieces of cloth. It was so magical. You really did an amazing job of fostering my artistic side as a child and my sense of wander. You also really fostered my language skills and my intelligence. I remember you sewing the "e" on my dress, I remember holding you I remember your sweet smell and loving you.

When we were separated in BG I dreamt about being with you every day. I couldn't wait to hold you and to tell you how much I missed you and I loved you and I told myself it would all be OK once we were together again.

But my hopes slowly faded. The first sign of your state of mental health was that when we were delayed for our flight in NY, Looking back now, maybe you had a nervous breakdown. I could not understand why you were so worried but it made me so uneasy, after all I was traveling with my only parent to a new country. I tried to console you and comfort you. But who was consoling and comforting me?

When we arrived in Bloomington, many things were a blur because I was so traumatized. Recently more memories are surfaceing like the fact that you bought me barbies, made me chicken soup and put it in my pink "my little pony" thermos for lunch in my babrbie lunchbox. I remember the ham sandwitches you made me enrolled me in art class, swimming lessons and tried to teach me to drive. But what also stands out from that time was that when we had to buy a car, you wanted me, a 10 yr old to help you make a decision and that felt very unsettling and scary. But that's not the part that was hard, what was so hard was getting yelled at by you, being told I was "spoiled" when I was traumatized and also I remember you yelling at me because I was washing the dishes with cold water but I didn't know how to wash dishes, I had never washed dishes before. I just wish you had found it in yourself to be a little more kind to me but I recognize now that you were in a very poor state of mental health due to your separation and also your hernia surgery,

When we lived in Boulder I remember being forced to go on walks when I didn't want to and I remember the scary story you told me about the girl that got a beer bottle kicked up her vagina after she got abducted by a man and a woman and I was only 11. I was so traumatized by this. Also, as I reflect back now I realize you were pretty depressed and you were not really emotionally available. That is when I started to lose hope that we would ever reconnect as mother and daughter.

When we all reconnected in Toronto, your mental health must have suffered further because of your constant stress with Dad maybe. Those were hard years for all of us but also some of the most stable we have had as a family. In those years I remember you yelling at me because you asked me to clean something and I didn't clean it to your approval. Our relationship became more and more strained as you used helping me with homework as an excuse to flaunt your superiority. You used these opportunities to humiliate and shame me and I only now understand that that's how you must have been taught in Bulgaria but it sure hurt and destroyed any sense of closeness I felt with you.

Later, in San Diego once Dad moved out you made fun of me for being an "artist". You taunted me with that word because I wore a white skirt sewn inside out with ruffles. I remember Arnut was there and he told you to leave me alone. But at that time you also stood by me when Melanie came to visit which was brave and loving and meant the world to me and you also helped me buy my first car. You also let me use your Neon to get a job and you were very kind to share your car with me.

When I moved out to my apartment in Hillcrest you sometimes, well no often pressured and guilted me to get together with you and you especially wanted me to comply with this when Gramma was here. You resorted to guilt and what felt to me like an enormous amount of forcefulness and you frequently violated my boundaries.
'
I have recently been researching narcissism and I am not saying you are one but you definitely often seemed a very focused on your desires, ignoring mine and my needs. If you had just left me alone, and given me some space I would have come of my own free will. I felt that you didn't care about me or what I wanted and you wanted everything to look prefect to grandma and like we were a happy mother-daughter pair when I felt that you had abandoned me emotionally long ago by not being interested in my true feelings.

That left me not wanting to spend time with you because I began to realize you were not really interested in a real relationship where two people exchange needs. You seemed interested only in getting your needs met, regardless of the cost to me and how things felt on the inside. When I refused to comply with a phony relationship based on not only pretenses but what seemed like a one-way street, you blamed me and refused to take responsibility for your part in it until your sister had a talk with you.

Only then did your behavior towards me start to change, I think also it was around the time that you got to know Mario which I think helped you see the artist in me.

Over the last few years you have backed off a lot. You helped me financially when I was in Spain which I appreciate tremendously and you also helped a great amount when Alessandra was born and I appreciated so much all the little ways you wanted to let me know you cared; by buying hose handles and the slow cooker and the racks for the pot lids and little things for Ale. I want you to know that these things have not gone unappreciated but it's all bittersweet because while you are so physically generous, you still need to be right, to point out my part in an upset and to be defensive even while I was completely sleep deprived and in excruciating pain. I wish you would have just let some things go, epsecially then when I was incapable of coherent emotions. Sometimes you have a really hard time seeing beyond your need to be right.

I have never said you were a horrible mother. You did some things very well, especially when I was young. I have only two bad memories all of my other memories are wonderful dn sweet.

I forgive you for my teenage years because I know that you had a lot of depression and anxiety.

I forgive you for your constant force on me to comply with your wishes in my 20s because I realize you were still depressed and anxious from the divorce.

All I am asking you to do is stop insisting that you are always right. Try to take responsibility for your mistakes and try not to make them again. Try not to use guilt to get what you want.

I know an over focus on yourselves you and Dad both have as an overcompensation to survive the shame and humiliation and being constantly pushed down by communism. To survive one creates a removed sense of self-importance and superiority.

I understand this and I understand it was a psychological survival mechanism you and Dad had to fashion to survive. But using it in your personal relationships, you will always be trying to prove your superiority instead of fostering connection and it will most likely leave you feeling alone and alienated from those you want to be close with the most - like me.

I think you have realized that by now. We all make mistakes. We are all human. No one was born a mother. We all have to learn and keep learning. We all all swimming in this life of beauty and brutality, naked. We are all vulnerable and imperfect and we all struggle.

What makes the struggle harder is alienation. You say I alienate you but by always needing to be right and superior you alienate yourself. Your defense mechanism is to say, "I don't agree with you."

It doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with my feelings and ideas. You are entitled to your opinion and you are entitled to disagree. But how many disagreements have led to the connection we both seek?

None. What if we choose choose to see and understand instead?

You did a lot of things amazingly well. And you also made mistakes. So does everyone. Take note, apologize, move on and try not to make the same mistake again. If you do, apologize again and keep going.

Love Emi

Wow that wasn't so bad, took about 30 mins and I feel much better

Narcissists, Communists and Artists

There are days the sky moves just so. It is beautiful to watch the clouds glide past the horizon of my balcony window. Something is coming alive in me, little by little. It's a small seed. The cracking of the shell is hurting. I thought you only go through growing pains once in your life.

Thirty six years of grief are enough. How does it stop? The happiest I have been in my life is when I was as far away from my parents as possible. And when I was doing art as a regular practice, in community.

Never make the mistake of taking a narcissist on. You will be attacked for your very being and end up feeling small, incapable and impotent in your life. The narcissistic parent will take this opportunity to offer help using it as a way to infantize, manipulate and guilt you. You will end up enraged, confused and feeling crazy in your own reality.

I think Communism made my parents narcissistic. They grew up there until their 30s. It wasn't communism by itself, but the particular flavor that played out in Bulgaria. The humiliation, degradation and shaming, I think for most people, created a split personality to survive it. The humiliated and downtrodden diminished self and the aggrandizement of the self in an attempt to compensate for the degradation. We can see this in Hung Moo's biography. In modern psychology we call this split personality bipolar disorder and narcissism is a particular type. It doesn't mean you cannot function in the "real world". In fact most narcissist function extremely well because they attach their sense of self to achievement and power as a way to compensate for what they lack in self-esteem.

What does all this terminology do for you and for me, where does it leave us? Without parents....but also with validation.

Get busy living or get busy dying

If I was 65 now, or 70, I would tell myself, GO FOR IT! Jump into life with all you have. Don't hesitate. Jump in with both feet and live your dreams. The only way you can receive God's gifts is to show up for them and where they swim is in the river of life.

I had a practical demonstration of this when one day at the end of a workshop everyone circled up for a hug. I desperately had to pee so I told the girl next to me to please take my hug for me and hug back, once the circle-in got to me.

But then I realized that was a ridiculous request so I stayed put holding my pee.

Frozen Woman

The ice was so thick. It stood between them like a quadruple-paned window, not letting an iota of sound in or out. She felt frozen, stuck in time. She wasn't the ice queen of Hans Christien Andersen's stories, the one that steals Kai and magically freezes his heart. No, her heart was hot, beating, she could feel it. But when she looked for it in her chest, she was amazed that actually, where it seemed to beat and throb was in the feeling in her lower abdomen and in between her legs. There, life throbbed, yearned and lot her know that she was, indeed, alive. If it wasn't for that one feeling of deep yearning and heat, her life might have stopped altogether, frozen in time. And she might have become Frozen Woman.

Now, some emotional and temporal distance between the present and the time she felt frozen seemed like a safe space to write about it. To write about Her. To write about Frozen Woman.

It's a hot summer day. It's hard to think that anything might be frozen for too long. But she was. For eight years. Frozen.

She felt like life was happening around her. Like she was just recycling old feelings, old emotions, old beliefs, old memories. That there was nothing left in life to get to know, nothing to discover, nothing to experience that wasn't already somewhere in the realm of the experiencED. She felt so heavy with it. You might think that, since she was frozen, she would float to the surface of her life like frozen water, which, as ice, it does. In fact we owe life to this one simple principle, ice floating. Because if ice didn't float, it would sink. And if it sank, the bottoms of lakes, rivers and even the ocean would freeze, leaving no nutrients available to decompose and create nourishment for life.

Despite the fact that she was ice and should have floated, she felt that she was sinking. Deeper and deeper into an ocean of disconnection and fear.

She must not have sank, thought. She must have floated, because, somehow, little by little, as life does, the current stirred and brought her around and around again to spring. To thaw, to saw new seeds. To welcome the birds flying home from their long flight away in the South. She must have somehow miraculously floated to the right place within herself where she could begin to melt. She floated on home.

The REAL voyage....

July 15, 2014

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

I had seen this in my acupuncturist’s office for years. And today, as in many times I go to see her, it took on the life of its meaning. It is often puzzling how, as we grow and age, we can take so many events and occurrences and mis-categorize them,  misinterpret them, misunderstand them. Such was the event of my father’s leaving.

He left when I was six but as an HSP I probably knew he was thinking about it at 5. He left communist Bulgaria so I could have a better life. I know that now in my bones and blood and I thank him from the deepest of namastes. I see him, old and frail, white hair, small, perhaps crippled in a wheel chair. I see myself a mother, grown and capable, an accomplished writer, my life soaked, drenched with meaning and contribution, holding him. Loving him, calling him Tati, the love flowing between us, the understanding creating a loop of palpable electricity.

It’s a tricky business this life thing. Fatherhood, motherhood, daughterhood. I am glad I get to experience not only daughterhood but also motherhood. Until now I had insisted on misunderstanding him. I insisted on knowing he had abandoned me. But today, when Esther said I still had the parasite we had been trying to get rid of for months, we asked deeper questions and this came up. I am open to seeing this in a new way, I told my guides. And then the perception opened the realization of how wrong I had been in my stubbornness not to see the truth but how not seeing the truth was how things were mean to be somehow and it was all perfect.

Because I would look at Emil my husband with my daughter and stubbornly tell myself that my father never loved me that much, how could he have, he abandoned me. But now I see one of the biggest wounds of my life in a different light. He didn’t abandon me; he did it for me, so that I could have a better life, so that he could forge a way. It took a lot of courage what he did. And I was willing to see that. See that if I hadn’t come over when I did, at 10 yrs old, I may have come over later, when the iron curtain fell, and of my own volition, feeling less extracted from my homeland.

But then I would not speak English as fluently as I do now. I may not be as deeply seeped in the North American culture. And perhaps I would not have been able to write as well or as eloquently and publish so many books, contributing to millions of lives. As I sit here, before this happens, I dream of being a contribution, sharing with you the deep soul work we are all here to do, to encourage you to help you keep doing the deep work. Because that is the evolution, that is the process, that is the steps we must all take to heal ourselves and the world. And good thing, because all things are moving to healing. And collectively, so are we.

I opened to the guides and I said I accept, I accept. I must channel like this more. I thought of Melissa seaman. They said to write type type type and they danced around in a rhythmical song and dance that made me laugh and cry at the same time, knowing, sensing, believing deeply, that whis walk out into faith, putting one foot in front of the other, as Esther said, is all I ever have to do. So here I am writing writing writing, typing typing typing.

I come home to my peaceful home, a woman now, a mother, a wife. I know one day I would get here, and feel successful. I am still looking around marveling at my life. Except for my health. But we all have our work.

I ask if Emil my husband will support me, and I know he will. I helped him start his business and now he is giving my daughter and I the gift of my being able to stay home with her. And write.

Thank you God,

go to the next door

I used to peddle art. Don't ask me why, with a bio tech and business double major with honors, I decided to participate in the cacophony of going door to door and letting people yell at me.

At the time I was reading Carlos Castaneda books and was very aware of my sensitivity and the tendency to take things personally. I thought this took away from my power and so I decided doing the door to door sales would toughen me up. It would be my warrior training. My enlightened warrior training.

And boy was it ever. I learned so many things out there. After the endless doors of defeat, failed sales, people calling me the b word and telling me to get out, I had two choices; give up and go home or go tot he next door. In moments of pit less despair and hurt offense I would ask the Universe, "what to I do now?" and the answer would come, clear as day, "go to the next door." And so I did. And then I would sell 20 paintings to 2 people and make $400 bucks

I also learned that people pay for your energy. It SEEMED like I was selling art out there, but I wasn't really. I was trading energy. Some people were just not interested and that was OK, they were not rude about it they were just busy and engrossed in their own life. But for those whose interest I may have piqued, it didn't start with the art, it started with me

Did I have confidence? Was I able to capture their attention? And in the end why did they want to listen to me talk anyway?

There was a girl in my office selling hundreds of dollars worth of art EVERY DAY. There was one day when I decided if she could do it, so could I. And that one decision changed my life.

A few weeks ago I decided, if other people are successful coaches and motivators, I could be also.
This one decision is going to change my life. And I am going to the next door.

I am going to knock on that door and walk in, with all I am.

Dreams

My top 5 Values:

1. Spirituality, sense of purpose and Faith
2. Authenticity, Honesty and Genuineness
3. Creativity, Ingenuity and Originality
4. Gratitude
5. Bravery, Valor and Courage

Wow what a satisfying night, as my art therapist would say. It is so fulfilling to be seen, not just for where you are but also for who you are and where you can go with what IS you. Emilia, who IS you? A guy interested in me once asked and I laugh because I ask myself that daily. Who IS you? What wants to be created through you? What does God Source Infinite Creativity want you to create in your world, now? Now. Because now is all there is. I cannot create yesterday or tomorrow. I can only create now.

This online blog is beginning to replace my personal journal. My personal journal is morphing into less words and more art. And the words are making their way onto this page.

Out of the blue, a job as a trainer recently opened up and I, surprising myself by how excited I was, applied. Emil supported me and I took the next step after the interview, which is to request the job.

The amazing thing is that success is when opportunity meets preparedness. And I was prepared for this because I had been going to career counseling over the last year, really delving into what is a good fit. Emil and I prayed that God would make this job happen or close the door. God didn't close the door, so I kept going. My only concern is that it's not taking me away from my real purpose of writing and speaking about my own ideas, discoveries and sharing myself with the world. My prayer is that it take me closer to my dream not further from it.

I didn't slide into my 30s the way I did into my 20s, an easy slippery deeply disturbed but comfortable ride. Arriving into my 30s and now my late 30s feels like a squeaky wheel. Laden with health issues, addictive and very unproductive thoughts but yet clutching my belief in God's purpose for everything, I arrive here. I am baffled by the pretense and the fakeness. I am baffled that most people seem to devote as much energy as possible to not being who they truly are. I refuse to pretend in my marriage, with my friends and at work. I see pretending as death.

Yet many relationships ask for pretense, thankfully not the ones at work, just my parents!!! And my aunt, uncle and cousin. There is nothing as stressful in my life as my parents' preference that I just pretend. And for their sake I do. But because I do I avoid them. We don't have a connection, we just have a duty. They are the only place in my life where I pretend for survival, not from choice. Because if I don't pretend that they are "good" parents I will be attacked, ridiculed, criticized. I don't even share anything with them anymore. In looking at this, I realize we don't even have the same values.

I tell myself that I will have to take care of them they are old but that's not now. Living in the now, I make a different choice and that is to move if not physically, at least emotionally as far away from them as I can.

But it's Ok to pretend when you are faking it to make it, when you are conscious of it and doing it for a good reason. Right?

I am going to pretend that I can do 100% of anything that I deeply desire. I am just going to keep pretending.

I am seeing my friends drop off the radar of dreaming like flies. But I believe in dreams. I believe in doing anything and everything possible to live your dream and to support others' dreams.

I want to live my dream, I don't want my dreams to die, I want my daughter to see me following them. And I want her to see me supporting her father in them.

I want to support my husband in his dreams.

They are going to have to pry my dreams out of my dead little hands, because I am going to dream until the very day I die.

I SO deeply long to share this blog. But I am SO chicken to cross-post to FB.

Last night as I lay there going to sleep, I felt the fire in my belly. The fiery horse. The primal power. I felt this amazing gift. Then I remembered the quote my art therapist has on her journal, "My passion devours my terror."

I saw a job post as a trainer. I applied. I got an interview. My husband, humble and walking in faith said that if it's from God, who is he to say whether or not I should take the job? He said all he could do is support me in whatever I chose.Thank you God for my incredible husband.

I didn't think I would be feeding my Baby formula. I didn't think I would work full time and I didn't think I would put her with a caregiver. But if those are the things that work for our family, work for me, work for our life as it actually is, not as how we would want it to be, then why not let those ideals go?

My fiery horse, the tan tien, is just churning and churning. I hope yours is too.

Today my father asks me, for his birthday, to either buy or make a card and write down three of our best memories. I look back in my mind, shuffle through as through a deck of index cards, searching. I find good memories, sure, but they are all bittersweet. For example there was the time when, after he had already left and my mother had left, we went to the Black Sea. This had been a family tradition that fell apart once my parents tried to flee communism. My father had been gone a year and come back. The year that he was back, my mother had gone to meet him in Bloomington, Indiana. She stayed there and he came back "to get me". But when he was back, he was often gone late at night, leaving me alone at 8 and I was anxious and terrified because I had already lost my mother. He also had affairs.
So the good memory about us being on the bus together, when he came back, going to the Black Sea is also dripping with deep sadness, because my mother wasn't there and because I felt so betrayed by him.
I remember other good memories, like the time we went hiking in Laguna Mountain. But he was angry at my mother and said she was like the dog who got spooked by him and then lunged to bite him.
Or the time we went hiking in Penasquitos canyon and he talked about how much he had to give up to have a family and to support my mother and I and how he had never been able to follow his dreams because of us.
When Dr. Gibson said that they were still treating me like a child, I wasn't exactly sure what he meant. When he said they were people who should have never had children, I was sometimes hurt. And finally when he said, they were emotionally manipulative and controlling, I wasn't so sure. But that was over 6 years ago and over the years I have seen how this is all true. As an only child I had no one to corroborate the evidence, except the daughter of my father's brother, who also grew up with similar parents. But because there was a divorce and my father had a second marriage and divorce, little by little the truth is illuminated. There is a Flamenco letra that says:

Por las cosas mas oscuras el tiempo tiene la clave y con la corta o la larga con el tiempo, todo se sabe.

For the things most hidden time has the key and whether you take the long way or the short way, with time all becomes clear.

So when my Dad asks for three good memories, I have a hard time picking out some that are just good. But will I tell him this? No. Will I be authentic and say, dear Dad you did a lot of things poorly and you did some things well, here they are. No. He wants me to feed his idea that he's not that bad of a father, his delusions that he didn't really mess up that bad when in his heart he knows differently. What's important is that he tries to fix it now, but he's not truly all that capable of having an honest and transparent relationship. But he tries. And for that, I won't hold this semi-dirty laundry up for him to see. On his deathbed it will be between him and God. It's actually none of my business.
Recently I shared with him some things about the PPD I have been experiencing and his response was to want to sit down with me to resolve it. Maybe he thinks that's what a concerned father should do. Maybe there are others out there, without fathers, who would want nothing more but for a concerned father to want to sit down and solve things with them. But to me it is belittling and controlling. I want him to say what, ironically his mother, my grandmother says to me, which is that I am a smart and capable girl and that I will find a way through this.
I know now why the control, the gripping. When we have no faith in ourselves to roll with the punches, to have cognitive flexibility and adaptability, we control, oppress and force others to comply. And that is never the way to a true relationship. Then we convince others that it's their fault, unwilling to look at our part in it.
So good memories, yes there are some, but there are very few that are without a dark cloud just because that's how my father and my mother rolled. They didn't love or respect each other and found no peace with each other. Yes I know they loved me but they just could not show it in a way that was visible.
So let's see, good memories, without a dark cloud, dear father, for your 59th birthday.
I must have been five and you woke me up by tickling my face with a long piece of grass. That day was full of delights. We went for a picnic in the grass with mom and you took photos. I don't remember ever feeling so happy and loved, except for the time I would beg you and mom to mummy me in a blanket just one more time, each holding one end and swinging me in it like a hammock. It was delightful to be in between my two parents, because I loved them.
The third good memory is not specific, it's just general times I heard you play your guitar, there is a classical piece I will always remember as you.
Beyond that, most of my memories are of yelling, cruel words and forced intimacy, criticism, rage and control.
I wish it was different, and perhaps you can get away with pacifying yourself into disillusion but I have long learned to have strong boundaries and there is very little that is safe to share with you. We are not close.

Love, your daughter

The Ivy leaves and the Curse

Last night I drove by a house covered in Ivy in South Park and I thought to myself, if stay in San Diego, this house is where I wish to live!

I remembered the place that was covered by Ivy in Bulgaria. It was called Vranilovtsi and it was some land we have with cherry and apple trees.

As children, my grandmother would take us there and pick cherries and apples and currants for us. Sometimes we would stay under the tree and she would throw branches laden with fresh ripe red sweet cherries. It was delicious.

One day we stayed in the shade of the small country house. It was covered in ivy. We were not allowed to go inside because in the living room was a pile of dirt and in the middle of that huge pile of dirt (not sure how it got there) was a black umbrella, unopened, stuck with its point down.

My grandmother said never to go in the house because it was a curse. This always surprised and frightened me and filled me with a deep curiosity I could not satiate.

My grandmother said that a lady named Maria had put a curse on our home. It was because this lady helped take care of the land for a while and she thought in return, my grandmother would gift her the land. But when my mother didn't gift her the land, she got angry. And so her curse was placed. Soon after that, my grandmother says, is when my grandfather (paternal) got sick.

I grew up mostly seeing my grandfather in a bed in the kitchen. He rarely got up except to pee. He peed in a jar in the kitchenette, where the wood-burning stove was, in my grandmother's small apartment in Gabrovo, Bulgaria.

He would rarely get up to eat and when he came to the table he would huff and puff as if it was the scariest thing. I remember being equally afraid and dismissive of him. On some level his illness scared me but also it was something that I had grown up with so it seemed normal.

I always believed he could snap out of it if he wanted to. One day I lie on his bed with him. He acknowledged me and even moved me to the other side. He smiled. I was surprised and happy.

On another occasion I got angry about the strain he was putting on my grandmother that I told her to lock him outside in the common apartment staircase so that he would have no choice but to walk. He can't lie down there, I said. "Don't be so cruel, " he said to me.

Now, 25 years later, heavy with life, disappointments and experience I can see why my parents had lost their playfulness and I can see how maybe he wasn't ab;e to just snap out of it. I forgive him and I ask that he forgive me.

Grandpa, please forgive me for saying those things. I didn't understand. I also forgive you for being that way. I says, sitting here with open palms. I hope our relationship can be restored to its rightness. Please forgive me. I love you. I forgive you. Thank you.

So on this particular hot summer day, my cousin and I were waiting under the shade by the ivy for grandmother to finish picking cherries, forbidden, to go in the house with the curse.

So I had an idea! Let's help grandma clear all this ivy, I said. She has been so busy picking fruit that she hasn't had a chance to prune the house, I said to my cousin Elena, who was just over a year older than me,

She said Ok and we started picking. We cleared the entire wall and felt very proud of ourselves. I was happy to be able to do something for our Grandmother.

But when Grandma came back, she wasn't happy!!! She was angry that we had taken off the ivy and that the ugly old walls had been exposed and now the house was even more vulnerable to decay.

She blamed Elena for not having more sense because she was older. I was relieved not to be held responsible, when it was my idea, but also I felt horrible that she got blamed. But I didn't say anything. I was 9.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that being this "unwell" makes me afraid to have the second child we dream of. I cannot imagine having another pregnancy. When I told Dr B he said, oh, don't say that, which I thought was very sweet and when I told him I was limping out of bed, the car, and any prolonged seating position, he seemed to wince slightly with kind compassion.

Mojo Myself and MORE

Today was a pivotal day. For two reasons, one because I am going to just share like I would in my journal without trying to impress anyone and two because of the kind of day it was.

I sit here with my little 5 month old baby in my bed, she is turning her head with a pacifier in her mouth and eyes rolling back, it's bedtime. How sweet to have her next to me as I write this, a dream come true.

The whit crib, that was given to us by a friend the week we started looking for a crib was another of the many sign that there IS a loving GOD and he/she IS providing, always, ENOUGH for our needs.

The crib is like a cemented image in my mind, a representation of my dream coming true and it is amazing to finally have it set up in the baby room. She is here, it is real.

Had I known I had fibromyalgia, or have the courage to ask for the diagnosis, which I fit exactly with sleep difficulties, aches, stiffness, migraines, food sensitivities, depression, anxiety, etc, I would not have had her. But it's Alessandra, I hear a little voice say. She gets it. No judgement. She chose me to be her Mommy.

I am kinda happy and hopeful. Because I FINALLY had the courage to face this disease. I went to a pain doctor today, and he GOT it. He GOT the hyper activation that my system is constantly in. He works with pain patients. I got some supplements, some pain cream and a blood test requisition. I am finally facing this.

Prior to this the diagnosis, the word fibromyalgia enraged and terrified me. I did work on it naturally for 8 years with only marginal results. But somehow I am in a different place now. I recognize that this is my journey. I accept. I see that this is a way to grow insurmountable compassion and strength, qualities I didn't have before this disease hit and I probably would not have developed.

I just rub some of Corinn Guntoli's "I speak Clearly" oil on my nose and throat chakra every morning and every night and remind myself that I speak lovingly to myself. And hey guess what, whenever I remind myself that I speak lovingly to myself, guess who else I speak lovingly to?

Yes I am happy. I am happy to be working on this. Thirty percent of his patients recover, Dr Bonakdar said. Hopefully I am going to him early enough that I can recover. Hopefully I am young enough, determined enough, with enough healthy habits already.

There is a part of me that has made peace with it, in a way. It majorly blows but on the other hand it's not terminal. And there are a lot of things one can do to enrich the quality of one's life.

The days that ensued walking out of the hospital with a newborn when I was drowning in pain and it became apparent that the pain I was experiencing (and still to some degree experience in my girl parts) was more than average, I asked myself how come no one stopped me.

I do I wonder this, when your medical professionals see that you have anxiety or depression, or if you are in some way handicapped or have a medical condition that may contribute to your inability to care for a child as well as a healthy person would, why don't they stop you?

Frankly, when we came home with a newborn, I was surprised that no one had stopped us. HA!

But now, 5 months later, I think we are GREAT parents, despite our difficulties. And when you have a problem like depression and anxiety, all you can do is be aware of it and handle it. Like an adult. And that is what I am doing.

I am amazed at how life changing this is for me. I remember the rage and emotional instability of my father and the anxiety and depression of my mother. When I was 8 yrs old, I wanted to kill myself because of my father's rage and neglect and when I was 12 yrs old I wanted to kill myself because of my  mother's emotional unavailability and depression.

I judged and was angry with my mother for many years and now looking back I see that not only did she have a very good reason to be depressed, but she was also biochemically predisposed to it. I judged my grandmother for not being able to move on from my grandfather's death, for being "stuck" in the tragedy of it, my mother and grandmother are stuck too.

And now I find myself stuck. I look around and life somehow seems to happen around me most of the time and I am not really feeling in the flow. I have been feeling this way for 8 yrs, after I got attacked by a pit bull and started working from home.

These realizations are life changing. I can't wait for the repercussions of my choices to handle this as an illness and get treatment to ripple out through my life. Praise God for my understanding and supportive husband. We all suffer from anxiety and depression but some of us are more prone to it taking a foothold in our lives and never leaving. Being "stuck" is a cingulate problem fairly commonly alleviated by SSRIs. Over-reactivity to pain is over-reactivity of the limbic system. I am very hopeful. YAY!

More Mojo Stuff:

It would be nice if I had a moment alone to write. But I don't. And that's Ok. I have a family and they are here, my husband is feeding the little one.

I lay there, Esther poking me with her finger while she did her "organ and emotion determination". I poked her back and we laughed. Those deep deep deep belly laughs you only share with true sacred soul mates.

I asked her if we could search deep inside, like we had done for the parasite. She did her little pokes, which she said is a combination of cranio-sacral, Somatic Experiencing, and all the tricks in her 30 yr old practise bag and she said, "neurotransmitters".

Recently I had been working on a bout of postpartum anxiety and depression. There is nothing like having a child to bring up all your stuff, she said.

She asked me to go deep within and picture what the field looked like when I "came in" because she twitched her little fingers and they told her it was upon conception.

I felt the field. I could not feel myself. I just felt dizzy, anxious, a turbulent wave of emotions. She asked me to search for my essence. I did just that and went deeper, and I saw many many miniature lights, oh they were so warm and beautiful, on a stone path.

What should I do now, I asked my guides. Follow the little lights, they said. I walked to a house and I found my mother, father and aborted sister there. It was my family.

It first I recoiled back but then I was so happy to be there, with all of them again. To BELONG there with them. I had rejected them because of the emotional instability that they created together.

I went to be with them and I just reveled in their presence. I a stone drop in my gut, the regret that I had rejected them. I put my hands up to receive and I declared that I accept and I love them, no matter who they were, and even if they were emotionally unstable.

I hung out there for a while, a few ideas bouncing in my mind but I felt such acceptance and joy. And That joy was sending joy neurochemicals in my system, Esther said, and balancing my neurotransmitters.

I felt at peace with my family of origin and I think what that means is I can be at peace with my family of choice.

Since I had written my daughter a song, a challenge was put to me to write my mother a song, or just play, "did you ever know that you are my hero" and send it to her. I remember I sang it to her when she had her open heart surgery.

Thank you God for the opportunity to do this work, thank you my angels and guides for the journey.

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body 
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.” 
― Mary Oliver

My friend asks, why do we do that, why do we always procrastinate? When I tell her that everyone has good ideas but the difference between success and mediocrity is followthrough.

And I came up with the theory that we are a dichtomy of two essences, spirit and animal, or as Alison Armstron calls it, human spirit and human animal. Than those two parts do not oppose each other, though it may seem like they do, it's more like they have opposite goals.

Human animal's job is to keep us alive, survive and therefore it is more concerned with storing energy than expending it.

Human spirit's job is to keep us evolving, creating and discovering, which takes energy.

So that's why we are always stopping ourselves. The bhuddist would call is the soul and the ego, I think....

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

Mojo Missin Madness

After meeting a good friend for dinner today, I realized something. But first, let me tell you how it started.

She shares her emotional life with me and I share my emotional life with her. To me, that is sharing life.I often have this feeling, like, just underneath the veil of all these physical life things like cars mortgages, pretty hair and bills, there is this whole other undercurrent of an emotional life. Perhaps it's what Carl Jung called the subconscious and the collective subconscious. Either way I am convinced it's there, like a strong river, motivating our words and actions, dreams, self-permission to dream and our identities.

I like sharing that part of myself with others and I consider that intimacy. Sometime that part is celebrating, sometimes she is grieving, sometimes she is just processing or observing. Whatever it is, it's precious to be able to truly allow another to witness it and to witness another as they truly LIVE.

But today, as has been now for a few weeks, the theme to our conversation was that we can share our innermost life with each other. And this friend told me, as did another friend last night, that they really appreciate my emotionality and my realness. And I told them about a woman I know who is in her 50s, who is getting pressure from her husband and family to take antidepressant drugs. I nor she think that she wouldn't benefit from them, she very well may, but the bottom line was that her suffering and authenticity makes everyone uncomfortable. They want her to have a good life and do what they do; go out to dinner, eat gluten-FULL bread, enjoy shallow social patter. And she doesn't. She is real. Like the Velveteen Rabbit. She says she feels like she just discovered who she was at 50; that was about 6 years ago. Then she was offered the red or blue pill and she took whichever one it is that shows you out of the Matrix.

And those of us who are so deeply and truly committed to "realness" often feel isolated and alone, because what we observe is, that, rater than spend their resources discovering who they are and what motivates them, how they can contribute to society and more, most people spend their emotional resources in suppressing and oppressing who they truly are and that seems to be the culture we live in. Perhaps why Brene brown's work on vulnerability has taken such a foothold and is considered so counterculture. But really it's just research on how our brains are wired.

This theme also runs through the AVATAR. I often feel like all I have to do is "drop in" via meditation or intention and I am in the primal world of Pandora.

So maybe we are counterculture or maybe we are the normal ones, confused by the illusion of fancy cars and condos in Miami. It's not that we don't enjoy those things or find satisfaction in them, it's just that the satisfaction they bring doesn't quench our true thirst for self-discovery and the desire to touch, oh if only just a little, this great mystery that we all swim in, clueless and naked.

It's not that we judge others for how they swim. But I have gotten considerable pressure from my family, as my older friend does to go on medicine, the pressure I get is to "just move on" and appreciate life. The message is that there is something wrong with my process and my suffering and perhaps there is but who is to say? I just want to be able to share an emotional snapshot of my life at any given moment and for that to be allowed, welcomed, desired, OK.

But it seems it makes many people uncomfortable but thankfully others find it refreshing.

Like the other new mom that lives nearby. The first few times I saw her at the end of her pregnancy and in the early weeks of her birth, her and her husband seemed very chill and happy. They were going to the zoo, nursing was OK, everything was pink, I felt like a failure in their company which is why I didn't pursue a connection even though she lives a few doors down. But because she lives a few doors down, when I started needing Valium to get to sleep, I sent a text that I was struggling and would she like to walk and she came over the very same day and the first thing she said as she walked in the door was that she had started Zoloft. And that she had been attending a postpartum group. It seems like the realness of the moms at the postpartum group and her own struggles had finally forced her to strip off her false pretenses and she shared with me that when she told her mother she started medication, her mother quickly changed the subject.

As for me I feel equal terror and gratitude for the wakes of PPD becoming a mother has left behind. I think it's because for the last 8 years I have been struggling with a sensory overload and as my acupuncturist calls it a "global activation". I had depression but I was afraid to treat it with meds. I did everything natural you can think of; acupuncture, meditation, yoga, massage, and on and on and on. All of these things helped, but nothing got me over the "hump" of just not feeling alive, feeling like life had frozen still.

This is how I saw my mother and her mother deal with life. After the trauma of my grandfather's death when my mom was 5, life froze and everyone was perpetually stuck in grief. I blamed all of them and hated them for it, but now I see it was also at least some degree of mental illness. Seeing myself here I gain two insights; first that my  mother had profound depression, anxiety and some OCD and that my life as a teen and pre-teen would have been considerably better had she treated it, possibly with meds. I do remember that when menopause hit her she took Paxil for 3 yrs and our relationship was better than usual. And second that with my history of trauma and predisposition to these conditions, I cannot ignore the reality that medication is probably my next step.

I am so encouraged by the fact that in my middle trimester I started nortryptaline for migranes and I have barely had a migrane since; just once when I overdid the salt and the next day was a heat wave. But considering the sleep deprivation and stress of motherhood I am extremely grateful to say that there have been no migranes.

Perhaps increasing the nortryptaline or starting another SSRI or SNRI will allow for even more relief with the chronic pain, anxiety, insomnia and reoccurring thoughts. I just want my life back. I make a life wish to thrive. I am afraid of SSRI side effects but I am also willing to take a leap of faith because I want to be calm and happy and feel good in my body. I do notice that taking most seratonin receptor agonists really helps the body tension and aches. I am excited about the prospects!!!!

All I can do is face the problem and handle it. So that's what I am doing. I am increasing the nortryptaline to 25 mg. I am at 10 mg + 2 ml now and there is 2 mg per ml so I am taking apx 14 mg.

Thank you God,

Amen

I thought I would get to be a little girl. But I never did. We got back together as a family after a long separation - half of my childhood, in fact, and life just went on. I felt life moving again this morning listening to classical music and then the grief came. Grief is life. I appreciated my Father for having played so much classical music at home. And in those days it wasn't easy, you had to buy the CDs and know what you were looking for. Thanks Tati.

The Mojo Killer - Anxiety and Medication Musings

I took some Buspar - 7.5 mg and Ignatia and the first thing I did when I took Ignatia 30X is feel like I can go do something. Before that I was exhausted. I also felt like I was re-orienting to the present. Like I was honoring my story and able to leave it behind. But then it stopped making any difference. It did help the loopy thoughts, sorta. Then I took buspirone. It was an instant feeling of relief. I just cried with relief.

Last night a friend and I talked about being the one to be the generation curse breaker. That is’s hard but also what a blessing to know you are the one God chose for that VERY important JOB.

The following night I just wanted to be with myself, to feel my relief at finally having found my grief!!! Once Busperone took the anxiety cap off, what was underneath was a deep sadness and grief about my parents' divorce. I have not grieved that yet. I felt my grief and it was MINE! Precious and beautiful and real and life affirming and MINE!!! and it was delicious. Because grief, my body can process, but anxiety isn't natural. Grief is natural. YES! Thank you Thank you Thank you, God.

More Mojo - Mother Bear and Good Wife

Today I went to acupuncture and after my acupuncturist put in the needles I lay there taking another journey. My guides are funny and witty and entertaining. My inner life is more fun than my outer life. I hope soon they will even out.

They told me that I was an amazing wife, the right one for my husband, despite how badly I may feel about the anxiety and OCD issues I bring to the table. I handle them, take responsability for them, and do not put them on him and that's really all I can ask of myself. Not only did I give him a daughter, but I also stood by him, believing in him, trusting him, encouraging him and loving him into his own business and paying the bills while he got going. I let him, I allowed him and I believed in him. Now HE provides, our dream! For that, they surrounded me and gave me a standing ovation, calling other angels to join them. I couldn't believe it. It's like the standing ovation I got when I tried Cymbalta. As they clapped I stood there in disbelief, trying to receive it all and then I laughed at their giddiness. You set out to do this, they said, and you did it, you are doing it.

Before that, my acupuncturist was asking me to go into my body and see what was happening. I saw that my body didn't trust me,that  I pushed her too hard and expected too much from her, that I had hurt her terribly. To my body, I was as my mother is to me, perfectionist, breaking boundaries. But my body wanted me and loved me and needed me. So I exchanged my face for my mother's face inside myself and declared that anything she needed she would have to look to me for it. She jumped up in exhilaration and joy. I confessed that I had no idea how to be a mother but that I would engage with the process as deeply as I could and fail but try again. That's when my guides stepped in and said not to worry, they would download some serious mothering skills down. And they did. like Mama Bear skills. Like have no fear Momma is here and she's gonna make it right. and suddenly I felt confident that I could step in and be that mother figure to myself and to Alessandra. After all, now I got the skiiils and not just that but some great examples of great mothering; some close friends and even my husband.

I felt so grateful for this and as a friend said so grateful to have been chosen to be the one to break the curse of over-arousal, anxiety, suffering and stuckness in tragedy. All these ways of being are not only learned but also neurochemically wired into our brains.  As we were celebrating this work with my guides and also celebrating my decision to take medication - I had asked for confirmation and got it - I snuck in that I wanted them to take the neck pain away but they said that would not be in my highest good. AI AI AI!

Finally they sat there, in a circle, after the standing ovation, just admiring my beauty. We wish you could see what we see, they said. And they showed me: a beautiful, kind, strong, compassionate soul, so so so committed to love in the world, so so so beautiful, soft and feminine, gently but strong, colors of turquoise and green and blue swirling through. Thank you God for the unfolding. Thank you got showing me my soul.

Hurt People hurt People

Aug 3, 2014

What I would tell her

I would tell her that I know how hard she struggled and I probably can only barely begin to see how painful it must have been for her to leave her daughter behind. I would tell her that I suspect she can’t forgive herself and that’s one reason why we have so many misunderstandings. When you feel guilty you project judgment on others and then you defend and defend.

I would tell her I have compassion for her deeper than she knows but that she must also be brave enough to hear my anger. I would tell her that it could be worse; she could be denying herself and myself a true relationship of understanding.

I would tell her I suffer every day and that not a day goes by I don’t think about her with a stone cold deep sadness in my heart about how things are. I would tell her I grieve every night and every day that we have not found a way to be close, that she has not found it in her heart to truly hear me, to just be with me, to stop blaming me.

I would tell her I love her and I thank her for cutting the pineapple for me after I gave birth and that I still can’t sleep at night for sadness at the way our mother daughter bond went.

Can’t we change it? Can’t we do anything? I would ask her. Before it’s too late, before you are dead.

I would tell her I am tired of her saying she does not know what to do when I tell her what to do and then she refuses to do it and insists on being right in her way.

I would tell her, why are you so stubborn, your daughter needs you.

I would tell her, remember that day you said life felt like walking around with your leg cut off, because you were not close to your daughter, well how do you think I feel, without a mother to be close to?

I would tell her, watch Byron Katie, don’t believe your mean thoughts about me.

I would tell her, pls forgive me for believing my mean thoughts about you.

I would tell her I love her and I thank her and to pls forgive me and that I forgive her.