Honesty, Open-mindedness & Willingness

I have stated before that I believe that the entire human race is mentally ill to varying degrees.  Those that are brave enough to face the fact that they are addicts know from painful experience that they are mentally ill.  The only way to have that bravery is through the willingness to be honest.  Very few addicts come to embrace self honesty quickly.  First they repeat sick attitudes and behaviors each time expecting a positive outcome only to find themselves sinking lower.  The more they do this, the more insane they become, only they can't see it, which is the worst part of the insanity.  Lack of self-awareness has led to the death of many fine people caught in the grips of an addiction that has affected their spirits, minds, hearts and bodies.

Many people practice self-deception and deception of others.  Deceiving yourself is very tricky.  Rationalizations become more important than an adherence to truth about one's self and others.  When you rationalize and try to justify attitudes and behaviors that have repeatedly resulted in harm done to yourself and others, you condition yourself to live sealed inside an illusion that everything is okay and will be fine when your experience says the opposite.  That is one of the insanities of addiction.  Self-deception can be very compulsive when you are so afraid of the truth which you instinctively know will lead to the requirement to change yourself.  Even the thought of changing yourself can seem as serious as facing death, which figuratively is true - change requires the death of one way of being in order to embrace a new way of being.

Deceiving others is more straight forward:  you make a choice.  You decide that it would be more painful to tell the truth than to hide it or lie about it.  In choosing to consistently lie to others, you are also choosing to turn away from personal integrity.  You also become chained to the lies you create.  Instead of working to preserve honesty and integrity you shift into preserving dishonesty and a lack of integrity.  You become untrustworthy.  You waste precious time trying to remember and organize your lies.  Lies become your master instead of truth.  Instead of being open and willing to learn, you become closed and suspicious of the lessons.  Your true self becomes overtaken by your false self.  Yet another sign of insanity.

The false self is the self committed to the addiction or addictions; it is the Addict Self, the egoistic self, the self that lives dual lives or multiple lives, an inconsistent, untrustworthy self, a self that betrays itself every day it lives in active addiction.  It is also a sorely misguided self whose heart attaches to the subculture of active addicts.  Active addicts may think they are very loyal to their addict friends and lovers, but what they are really loyal to is the addictive process.  An addict world is a world of reward and punishment.  The bond amongst addicts is both the highs, the fixes they literally and figuratively crave, and the lows, the pains they endure through in their bodies when they don't get a fix, and in their spirits by sacrificing their integrity and thereby sacrificing their ability to love and care for themselves.

It's a very sticky web that gets woven and, because we are all human and sensitive, guilt and shame do enter into this addictive process.  The horrible thing is that it grows over time and the more there is of it, the greater the desperation to run away from it and deny it.  It becomes too overwhelming to face alone, which leads hardcore addicts back into the company of their addict community where the addiction continues.  The only way out is through an act of kindness to ourselves and that kindness comes when you allow yourself to be honest with yourself.  When you can admit that you are suffering because you are inside a no win situation, which is the addict world, and that you are powerless to approach the problems that are so overwhelming, you acknowledge the truth, you return to reality and discover humility.

The opposite of humility is arrogance.  Considering all the amazing things we human animals have accomplished over time using our intelligence, talents, skills, vision, hard work, etc... it is not surprising that many of us fall into the deception that we are greater than we actually are.  One of the greatest disservices to our species is the general denial that we are, in fact, mammalian animals caught in the cycle of life and death just as all living things on this planet are.  Many have lost awareness and respect for the power and beauty and harmony of the nature within us and around us.  Being caught up in egotistic orientations shrinks the world and sometimes pushes it out of view.  In the same way humans used to believe that the sun circled round the earth and that we were the center of the universe, we tend to view the world as if it circles around us.

We need the reminders of a star filled night sky, the expanse of Grand Canyon, the seemingly endless stretch of the ocean and sky.  We need nature to show us just how small and vulnerable we really are. The openness in nature can be reflected within the openness of our spirits which have the capacity to expand through a combination of the mind and the heart held in the balance of health.  Which type of person does your spirit expand with, the dishonest and arrogant or the honest and humble?  Thank the Powers That Be we humans have a natural almost childlike response to people who are open and honest and kindhearted.  Most of us can't help but to respond in kind.  That is the true nature in all of us shining out for anyone to see.  To be honest, open-minded and willing to believe in the basic good nature in all of us is the starting point for a path of spiritual self discovery.

Poem: Dear Great Spirit, What Is Love?

Dear Great Spirit, What Is Love?

Love is the Pure Land.
Love is Nirvana.
Love can wrap its arms around any pain
And soothe it like a parent comforting
A frightened child.
Love is in the breezes that make the trees sway.
Love is in the sun that shines on you
As you come out of the sea
Cold and almost shivering.
And as the sun warms you,
As the sun loves you,
You feel the essence of freedom,
The freedom of your swim in the ocean,
The freedom as you walk out of that sea.
The freedom as you stand on the shoreline
And survey the sweet space all around you
While you feel the water rolling down your body
And evaporating in the heat
As you lay your body down on the towel
You brought to dry yourself off
As you lie there in utter relaxation
And fall into sleep.

Poem: Inside The Labyrinth

Inside The Labyrinth

So close
Yet so far away you are
From me.

So close
Yet so far away you are
From all the aspects in your mind
Struggling to embrace
True freedom.

The freedom of unity
Within the core of a healthy life.
Don't you deserve this
Despite the horrors you have faced
And perpetuated
Like countless numbers of soldiers
Who have returned home,
Who right now suffer so extremely
Just like you?

Did you get your rest last night?
Did you eat?
Did you take care of these basic needs?
Are you giving yourself a chance to heal today?

You are my dear companion
So close, yet so far away
And I will stay right here with you
As you go through
This labyrinth
Circle after circle
Till you reach the deepest center
And finally turn around
To make your way
Back to the beginning.

And every circle you walk around
Will bring you closer
To your true self,
The self you purely were
Before you were born,
Before you were conceived,
The self that I will greet
When you cross the thresold
And return home.


Listen to Audio here.

Poem: The Great Spirit Is Here

The Great Spirit Is Here

I am of nature, yet not in nature.
No, I am in my house.
This is a real house
And this house is a symbol
Of my soul.
It is a dirty, cluttered house
Where things needed are hard to find.
Yet there is peace in this house
And a simplicity within my spirit.

The Great Spirit is here in me, in this house
And all around this house
And in the atmosphere of this world
And beyond the atmosphere of this world
And out in other worlds
And fueling all the suns in the universe.
This Spirit in its holy freedom
Has endless lessons to teach.

Yesterday's lesson was and Today's lesson is:
Put First Things First.
First there is the soul
Which must be tended to like a secret garden.
The flowers there and the food cannot survive
Without the sun, without the water, without a rich soil,
Without the firm but gentle hand of the gardener.
Even I, who have no green thumb for the physical soil,
The real out doors, I do tend to my spiritual garden
Every day and every night and even in my sleep.

Sometimes I feel graced by the light of awareness
And I am mindful of what I do.
Other times I am in a dream state
Where my spirit must rely on the wisdom
Hidden inside my unconscious self.

The Great Spirit rests inside our hidden minds
And speaks to us and sings to us
And lets us know in our truest selves
We are safe and loved and free.


Listen To Audio Here

Evil Spirits & The Devil

I do not believe in evil spirits or the devil.  I know that we are animals, human mammals and that as a species we are all interconnected and we are all mentally ill.  War is mental illness.  And much has been done to harm ourselves and others through religion.  I do believe in God the Great Spirit or God as the Holy Spirit.  God is totally healthy.  And we are ill.  We have health in us, which is from God.  We always have God to reconnect to, but we get lost in our minds because we are not in balance, not in harmony as God always is.  When things are out of balance and in disharmony there is much distortion of Truth which is the essence of God.  

I believe the concept of original sin and the Fall of humankind is a mixture of imagination and mental illness.  Perhaps it the way some of us tried to understand our sickness and make it logical.  We knew something was wrong within us.  We saw that we acted out in violence and could cause great destruction within families, communities and countries.  So we became ashamed of what we had done and continued to do.  We believed that God the Great Spirit was angry with us.  I believe God is a God of Love and always has been.  He/She/It does not live inside fear and anger the way we often do.  God does not hate.  God is not angry.  God does not punish.  That’s all us and our mental illness.  We have such a desire to explain things to ourselves (just as I am doing now) but we misuse our imagination.  There is so much we don’t know and never will in our lifetimes.  It is not we who were made in the image of God but God who we have made in the image of our selves.  This is very disturbing to me.  There is so much beauty and goodness in the “holy” books of this world, but there is also so much sickness, so much violence!  This comes from us, not God.  

Yes, God works through our spirits which include our hearts, minds and bodies, and I do believe there are other non human beings who have reached a higher spiritual plane and can enter into our spirits, but they are there to teach us and not to punish us or drive us away from God the Holy Spirit.  Actually I believe they are there to reach the core of health in us, our true selves, and reconnect our true selves with the health and healing of God.  But first they must enter into our spirits which are ill, into our imagination, which is full of distortions and try to reach us through all the distortions we’ve created and often cling to in the form of prejudice.  Prejudice is the intolerance of those different from us who threaten us or perhaps who challenge our false selves/personas.  We are a very fearful species, easily threatened and we cling to our false selves as a misguided form of protection and security.  When that false self is challenged, we can become quite aggressive and even act out violently towards one another, using our prejudice as an excuse to judge and condemn others as if we were all little gods ourselves, as if we had that right when we do not - we steal it. 

We are not evil; we are very, very sick in our spirits.  How did we get this way?  It’s possible that it has its origins within our body.  I believe in evolution.  As apes evolved, so did the size of their brains and by the time we arrived the fetus had to be born prematurely.  Precious human babies are very, very vulnerable and very, very dependent on the mother or caretaker.  If it is true that we as a species are all born too soon, what does that do to our developing spirits?  The timing and rhythm of our lives is off, not balanced and we need even more nurturing and protection than ordinary mammals, a sort of womb outside the womb.  Most of us do not get this extra nurturing and protection for long enough.  Even the best, the healthiest of mothers and fathers cannot provide the optimal starting point for an infant.  We are are disadvantaged right from the start of separate life.  The sicker our mothers and fathers, the more disadvantaged we are for handling, let alone thriving in life.  We are very resilient creatures, but we are also damaged and become ill no matter how hard we try to overcome our obstacles.  

Hence, the need for God in our lives.  God our psychic doctor, our healer.  Some of us act as if God should just wave a magic wand and make us all better.  But I don't think for God that is the point.  The point is we have to learn how to take care of ourselves and each other in our present incarnation as spirits combined with bodies.  The key to doing that is to learn to love unconditionally, the way God does.  Cultivating love for ourselves, most especially, is our psychic immune system and defeats our spiritual malaise.  Extending self love to love of others, unconditional love, is the psychic immune system for our entire species.  This is the only way that our species can survive on this beautiful world that we are systematically poisoning, along with ourselves.  Loving your enemies is the ultimate test of unconditional love.  And despite what many people think, it is very possible to love those that abuse you and those that abuse those you love.  You can do this through the practice of compassion.  Compassion is empathy.  It is trying to walk in another person's shoes.  And it is true you should not judge a man (or woman or child) until you have walked at least a mile in his (or her) shoes.  Or put more simply - don't judge others.  Don't judge yourself.  Acknowledge that you are sick, that you need help and that much of what you have done in life that has been harmful is due to severe illness and not to an inherent badness, not to sin.  

There is no Devil.  There are no evil spirits.  There is just us and our collective mental illnesses.  Don't use the concepts of devils and evils spirit as a scapegoat for avoiding your responsibility to heal yourself with God's help.  Blaming others, even evil spirits or God is part of being an addict.  In our sickness the pain is so great the we want to project in outward onto something, someone, some other being.  What must we do?  Approach our pain differently instead of acting out, projecting, or acting in, repressing.  Pain hurts, sometimes very, very badly, but it is really only a small part of the bigger picture.  Pain is our way of telling ourselves that we need to take extra special care of ourselves.  Don't run away from your pain.  Sit with it as you would with an ailing friend as some Buddhists teachers have instructed.  Notice that there is much space around the pain and that pain is not all there is.  The space around the pain, the gentle, accepting, non judgmental, nurturing space is God.  Focus on the space.  Connect with God.  Do it again and again.  Make it a way of life.  Heal yourself.  Do your part to heal this world, our only home.  One person, one soul at a time, I believe we can heal the world by healing ourselves.  

International Peace Day

I am a pacifist.  I believe in and practice non violence.  This means that if my life were being threatened, I would choose to be killed rather than to kill.  I follow Buddha.  I follow Jesus Christ.  Jesus, when his life was threatened, did not fight back and did not try to organize his followers to fight for him or protect him.   He was a man of peace and he died a man of peace.  He said - Love your enemies and pray for those who abuse you.  He said - Do not even hold anger in your heart and deal with it immediately.  He was a man of all people - man, woman and child, Jews,  Romans, Pagans, Samaritans and I think quite likely some Buddhists too and more.  He said -  If someone hits you, turn the other cheek.  Let them yell.  Let them hit you.  Let them torture you.  Let them hang you on a cross, but always, always Love Them.  Forgive them, forgive them for they know not what they do.  When Jesus rebuked the corrupted Pharisees I believe he did this to reach them, to wake them up to their own hypocrisy, and yes, to love them.  And how many of them did he reach?  How many turned away from their hypocrisy and became, once again, honorable people?  We do not know.  But if even one had awakened I know it would have been worth it for Jesus.  Jesus died on the cross in part because of the Pharisees and others corrupted by power who did not turn around.  He also died for them, to show how far you must be willing to go to reject hypocrisy in yourself.  In our world, it takes more courage to not be violent than to attack.

What a crazy world it is here in the United States, a mostly Christian country.  If Jesus were alive today, I'm sure he would love every one of us, but how could he look at most of us and say we were his followers?  How do we forget his message so easily?  He said -  Blessed are the peace makers - not blessed are the warmongers.  He would say God blesses the whole world, not God blesses just the United States.  Jesus would not be a nationalist.  If Jesus had children who said they were going to enlist, he would not say they were righteous - he would rebuke them.  His practice was to eradicate anger from his heart.  How can you go to boot camp and pick up a gun or any weapon with the intention of protecting your life and potentially sacrificing others' lives and also say the you follow Jesus?  Who had more courage - Jesus dying on the cross or a soldier who protected his men but sacrificed an entire village in a foreign country?  And all those soldiers who have died for their country, would they have been willing to die instead not to keep peace in their country only but to foster peace all over the world by laying down their weapons?

Twenty two veterans commit suicide every day in the USA, approximately one every hour.  What message does that send?  Is anybody listening? What would Jesus say?  What would Jesus do for these men and women who have suffered so and for those who are suffering so with Post Traumatic Stress right this second, every second?  Which is the path of maturity?  The path of war or that of peace?  Children can be cruel, often following the example of immature adults.  Must we stay cemented into global immaturity?  Soldiers are not big, badass and tough -  they are just as fragile as any of us.  Their collective response to war is perfectly normal.  War is insane.  And so they return wounded so deeply in their spirits.  That is what violence does to both the aggressor and the victim.  And how are our veterans treated once back home?  So very poorly.  And how many of these poor, suffering human beings are homeless, addicted, insane, in prison?

How many of you here in the US who say you are Christian realize that Jesus was one of the most famous PACIFISTS on this planet?  If we were truly a Christian country, our nation would be a nation of pacifists, pure and simple.  It's as if we as a nation have some kind of amnesia about who Jesus was and what he stood and died for.  It as if the words "Love your enemies" were never spoken by him.  His core teaching was about love.  I have heard people say, oh, it's too hard to love my enemies and so they don't even try.  But Jesus never said it was going to be easy.  Following a strong spiritual path is never easy.  And who in their right mind would say that being a soldier trained to kill, killing others and watching others die is easy and yet people are enlisting every day.  Love is about sacrifice, not for your country, but for peace and goodwill amongst ALL people.

We are one people contributing greatly to the vast decline of this planet.  How much time do you think we really have before natural and man made disasters extremely degrade the quality of life for not just some of us, but all of us?  Our resources are dwindling.  How much time and effort and money do we invest in perpetuating wars across the earth?  Do we really need to get to the point of some global disaster so huge that all our warring over the years will seem petty in comparison?  Quite simply we need peace on earth starting now.  We need to transform our hearts and all turn towards pacifism making it the rule and not the exception starting with the children of this generation.  The basic rule must become crystal clear:  DO NOT HURT YOURSELF OR ANY OTHER PERSON UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.  Let's teach the children to grow up healthy by finally growing up ourselves.  That's courage in action.  That's what Jesus died for.

Childhood Victimization & Domestic Violence

I experienced violence up close for over five years cyclically month to month with my addicted, mentally ill, abusive partner.  I experienced fear I had never experienced before.  The intensity of it created mental, emotion distortions that repeatedly wounded my spirit.  I lost perspective.  I became insane, locking myself into a addictive relationship that I wasn't able to free myself from year after year.  My lover was very young, beaten down by the end of his adolescence, a victim of abuse.  He followed the father who raped him repeatedly in childhood and adolescence; he became an abuser and in doing so continued to victimize his true self.

When my lover became triggered by something in his environment, I could see the boy, the silly, sad, sentimental drunk flip into his sadist persona.  I was no masochist, but I did put myself in a position to become a victim.  Sadists are drawn to victims like a honey bee to honey.  Victims are nourishment to this brand of violent insanity.  My lover, in this mode, in this part of his personality, fed off me.  He fed off my fear.  In his eyes he was a righteous judge.  He was the high king and I was an offending slave.  In his eyes my fear was confirmation of my culpability.  The more afraid I was, the more justified he felt in condemning me if not to physical attack then to psychological torture, though the threat of attack at any moment remained.

What is the lure of violence?  For a more powerful attacker, it is the lure, the high of power.  For others, the chance to dominate and control.  For people trained in sadism might does make right.  A sadist might think that he has honor and justice on his side, but when it comes down to it he or she really enjoys having the power to generate fear and through that fear to control behavior, to set the stage for a cyclical, unending play.  My lover was both the director and the lead in this play.  I was no threat.  I was literally a trapped animal, the prey for the predator.  Without me, there would be no play and he would have searched for another to play the victim role.

At some point I realized that he was associating me with his father and was punishing me for the sins of his father and family.  He became "the father" and I became the despised child, a representative of himself as a child.  He tried to convince me through the shame of humiliation that I was not worthy of love and kindness, that I deserved what I got.  It was projection, pure and simple.  Only he didn't know it.  To be aware of just what he was doing would be to ruin the play and the thrill of the act.  And yes, I know that to abuse me as his child self gave him deep pleasure, at least while he was inside this part of his personality.  When he did this he was also inside his insanity.  He lost perspective and was psychotic.

He could lose himself for a night of sadistic pleasure.  He became the-one-with-the-power.  There was nothing to stand in his way and it felt good.  But something that initially feels real good and is at its core harmful to self and others becomes an addiction.  It traps the predator in a different kind of cage.  And so there were two people trapped in the abusive cycle continuing the seemingly unending play.  Predator and prey.   Abuser and victim.  The father and the son.  Perhaps the initial goal was catharsis,  but anything so negative cannot be cathartic.  It is addiction.  The interplay during the play or abusive episode is the drug.

Because his father had raped him, he judged himself unredeemable and his deep ambivalence towards his father had a strangle hold on him.  Though in times of self revealing anger at his father he said he wanted to kill him, but he did not kill him, did not expose his crimes, did not threaten him at all while he was with me.  He did not place blame where it needed to be placed - with the sins of his father.  Instead he sacrificed himself, branding himself over and over every time he acted out his addiction.  He associated this with honor.  The injunction was to protect the family, especially the image created for others to see.  He took on the role of the black sheep while actually becoming the scape goat for the family.

But that was truly unbearable and so he sacrificed me and made me his personal scapegoat continuing the cycle of shirking self responsibility.  His family never took off their masks and costumes and let me really see them and I learned that the way to survive was to put on my own costume and mask and deny my true self, go along with the sickness, letting my spirit start to wither.  But somewhere in me I was still saying NO to all this sickness.  I continued to think my truths though I rarely opened my mouth and spoke them - too dangerous.  And I prayed.  After all, I was addicted too and I was powerless over it.  I prayed to be released.  When opportunity knocked a year later, I took it and took off.

Before, during and after this relationship I was one of the walking wounded.  After I became darker, harder, my heart difficult to access.  I said NO to my abusive lover and turned away I thought in order to re-embrace myself.  When I sang and made up songs I found bits and pieces of me but they were mostly distorted because my thinking was still distorted by the conditioning of my love/relationship addiction.  I was far from my true self still laced with residual self-hatred passed on by my lover to me during his sadistic projections.  I refused to enter into another romantic relationship but was willing to swap a relationship addiction for a romantic fantasy addiction that only left me frustrated and ashamed.  Still self hating.

My mysterious voices which came forward during life threatening moments during my relationship resurfaced after I left my partner.  They showed me that I was on a spiritual path despite the residual web of self hatred.  They led me to the study of Buddhism and to the ancient Chinese oracle, the I Ching; they led me to practice yoga and meditation and mantra.  They also led me back to art and songwriting and writing.  They led me back to art school.  And, after a year at school, they led me to an even deeper, more dangerous place along the path - they led me into psychosis.  I saw that my relationship with my lover/abuser had been a sort of boot camp to prepare me for what I would have to endure through in psychosis.

A Return To Health & Balance

I joined Weight Watchers online last week after talking with a close childhood friend who had just joined and was beginning to go to meetings.  I decided about a month ago that I needed start a diet and exercise program and began to diet and exercise.  I weighed myself today for the first time in about six months and I am at the heaviest weight I've ever been by a few pounds, but during this past month I have found that I do not have an eating disorder and my body is still strong and flexible.  I realized that what I need most and have needed most is exercise.

I started out as a child very enthusiastic about dancing.  I remember taking a modern dance class with several friends when I was still in grade school.  I studied more modern dance all through high school and then some yoga during college.  Mostly I danced in my room by myself.  I discovered that I had natural talent and I loved it.  I don't think anyone has ever really seen me let go and dance and I've only seen a bit looking into the large mirror in my room.  So I've viewed my dancing as a private communing with the Higher Power and rarely had the desire to perform for others.  I still view it that way.

Several weeks ago I sent an email to the owner of a karate teaching business in my town.  I had taken a yoga class there once and really like the studio space.  I thought it would be a great place to dance.  So I asked this black belt karate teacher if I could rent out her space for an hour at a time three days a week, every other day.  A couple of weeks went by and she didn't respond, but last week she apologized and said that my email had been in the junk folder and she had only just discovered it.  She said she was willing to meet me.  I quickly wrote back and thought I had set up a meeting, but when I arrived at the studio, no one was there and all the doors were locked.

Then I thought that I probably should visit the doctor for a checkup before I find a space to dance in.  This week I have to encourage myself to make the call and set up an appointment.  I really don't like going to doctors, but it has been a year and a half of so since I went and I need to be sure that my blood pressure is good and get my blood tested to see what my cholesterol levels are.  I need to be sure that I have not become diabetic, which, thank God, I have not acquired since becoming obese about 15 years ago.

This is my main goal for the year - to take better care of my body and home.   Since I became psychotic I have become obese, dirty and, to put it bluntly, a slob.  Taking care of my basic needs to be physically fit, clean and orderly were the first things to go when I got so sick and I have struggled with that off and on for years.  Each time I have tried to change my ways I have succeeded for only a short time and then fallen back into negative patterns.  I have hurt myself for this, judged myself and shamed myself and that just served to keep me stuck.

Something in me shifted a couple of years ago.  I stopped judging myself and worked on accepting myself just as I was.  I stopped calling myself "fat and ugly" and began to love and appreciate myself.
I began buying a lot of inexpensive, but quite nice clothes from an online store called Roamans and I began enjoying wearing them.  I cut my hair shorter.  I bought earrings and necklaces.  I started wearing just a bit of lipstick.  I started smiling at myself in the mirror.  I began asserting that I liked, loved and respected myself.

I came to accept my weight and my dirty, cluttered house.  It is not what I ultimately want and sometimes it bothers me, though mostly it makes me laugh.  So now I think I'm at a point of transition into a healthy way of living my life.  I have been praying for help to continue on this path and something is happening.  My challenge this week is to begin working on creating the good habit of exercising each day.  I have a stationary bike that I enjoy and I will bike on it for 20 minutes a day and no longer.  My urge is to push myself and that's just what I don't want to do because when I do that I do not consistently sustain it and I stop.  I need to change my life style gently and gradually.  I am not in any competition, I just want to get healthier.  A habit takes about 3 weeks to make, so I've decided that for two weeks I should just do the 20 minutes daily and no more and then start to increase the length of time and the intensity.

So perhaps I will wait 2 weeks before I contact the karate teacher which will give me time to see the doctor and reinforce daily exercise.  I also know of another place, a dance studio in a neighboring town, where I could dance if this first option doesn't work out.  I want to work my way up to having a dance practice.  I want dancing in a studio space to be my reward for putting in some effort to take care of myself.  I've only danced once in a studio space by myself.  I snuck into a university's dance studio with a small boom box when no one was around.  I danced for a while in freedom until I heard someone come through the door.  It was a little Asian American girl and she wanted to get permission to sit and watch me.  I told her no because I would be too self conscious and it would mess up the practice.  I felt bad about saying no, but I just couldn't do it.

My body amazes me.  Obesity has not stripped me of my strength, flexibility and talent.  Though I don't listen to music all the time, I love it.  Music motivates me to move and be expressive.  I have a strong sense of rhythm, pacing and flow.  My body still remembers what it knew as a child, adolescent and young adult.  Singing and making up songs, and dancing, have been the closest I've come to finding joy and a kind of worship of the life force in and around me.  I feel grateful to have another opportunity to reach for health and balance.

God In My Life

Ten months ago I was in the midst of a psychotic break - I was delusional and paranoid.  Compared to the psychotic breaks I had early in my illness it was mild and yet I could not deny that I was sick.  I withdrew from social contact, I deleted this blog and a bunch of other writing I had done over the years, I changed the lock on my door, I stayed home most of the time, I stopped taking my medication, I stopped seeing my therapist, I stopped going to a 12 Step meeting.  I'm not sure why this happened, and yet I never felt divorced from the Higher Power.

Then I returned to taking my medications, returned to a 12 Step group (Al-Anon), returned to therapy with a new therapist and fostered my commitment to turning my life and will over to God with a simple daily practice of taking my medications and thanking God for them, praying each morning and off and on throughout the day and reading aloud from various daily readers.  In the last couple of weeks I have returned to once again approaching the 4th Step by taking an inventory of my life.  I've been having trouble doing it because the truth is that I feel good about myself and my life.  I love and respect myself and am proud of the choices I made while in an abusive relationship with an alcoholic and afterwards while in the midst of deep psychosis.  I don't believe that I have harmed many people, just my ex boyfriend who I have made amends to over the years even though he has been dead since 1999.  And even then with him I tried very hard to be strong and loving kind.

I know that a lot of why I have not harmed others is because I have been a recluse for much of my life.  The greatest harm I have done has not been towards others but towards myself.  And yet I also believe that I have lived the life that I was meant to live.  It was necessary for me to live this life in order to learn the lessons I needed to learn.  These lessons were about compassion, faith, tolerance, patience and a growing commitment to the good in life.  I am now committed to the good in life and I find it all around me wherever I go.  God is everywhere, in the deepest hells on earth and in the highest heavenly experiences of humans on earth too.  God is in our spirits.  We would not have spirits without God.  God is in our hearts and minds.  God is in our bodies.  Believe in God or don't, God will still be there.

All the life on this planet has great meaning.  We create our own personal hells when we lose faith about the meaning in our lives.  I think one of the worst psychological states a human can be in is severe depression.  I feel a lot of love and compassion for all those people caught within that state especially because I have lived through it myself.  To be robbed of the motivation to engage in life is truly horrible and yet it can be overcome through medication, therapy, support groups and most especially the practice of gratitude.  It is the day to day practice of focusing on the positive that can gradually change one's perspective and therefore one's life towards healing.  I have spent many, many hours lying around or sleeping trying to avoid the pain in my life.  But I think even when I wanted to die I still at the same time also wanted to live.  It was the pain I didn't want and not this world.  And so I persisted.  At first I decided to listen to many, many audiobooks while lying on my couch.  If I couldn't do anything, at least I could listen to all kinds of stories and accounts of life and take my attention off my pain.

I could still listen and learn.  So I didn't give up despite being beaten down by my illnesses.  I had training to endure and survive acute psychosis and depression through having lived with an abusive alcoholic lover for over five years.  He was someone that I loved, but could not save.  I learned through him that the only one I can save through the help and grace of the Higher Power is me.  And later I saw that that was true for all of us.  The most important relationship in every one's life is between self and God, however you define God (and there are so many ways to do that).  And whether we admit it or not, I believe we all long for union with God.  And by God I mean peace, love and happiness.

There is value in developing endurance through painful life experiences and relationships.  If you open up enough to look, there are valuable lessons in every single life experience and relationship.  Nothing goes to waste.  I have thought of God as sentient space.  Space is everywhere in even the hardest seeming object.  There is no waste in space.  It is open, harmonious, peaceful, receptive, gentle and essential.  We tend to focus on the objects in space instead of on space itself, just as we tend to focus on the pain in our lives instead of in the pleasure.  Buddhists teachers have taught that nirvana or heaven is in every present moment.  Nirvana is now.  The ability to be aware, to experience through our five senses, to think, to feel, to breath, this is all nirvana, this is heaven.  Pain and suffering can serve to highlight this if we allow it.

Why is it necessary for us to suffer?  To learn, to appreciate what it is not to suffer.  The farther down you go, the higher up you have the potential to go.   Profound experiences, both positive and negative, can deepen your life and make for profound understanding, for revelations about the nature of truth.  How can you define and experience true freedom if you have never been in bondage?  We are all slaves on the path to freedom.  Union with God goes way beyond our life as living beings on this planet.  And yet what joy there is and can be for us here in our limited forms.  So I say appreciate what is right in every moment while we're here.  Cultivate your awareness of the beauty and balance all around us which is the essence of God.

Back From Florida

My brother and I returned from Florida on Tuesday evening.  This is my third day home.  We had a safe trip down to Florida, a safe stay and a safe return and I am grateful for all of that.  We were supposed to get my father's ashes and spread them at the Unitarian Universalist church in Fort Myers,  but found when we were at the funeral home that we could not do it because the church office was closed on Monday and we had to give them some kind of document before we could spread the ashes on their property.  A very nice man at the funeral home said he would spread the ashes the next day for us.  It was not what I wanted, but we had no choice.  It was my father's wish that his remains be spread in the same place as my mother's were spread and we had to leave the following morning.  It would have helped me to have a sense of closure to spread the ashes myself, a sense of the reality of my father's death, but instead I had to let go and move on.

It was bittersweet staying on Sanibel Island for three days and four nights.  The condo I chose was very nice, had lots of room so that my brother and I could have some privacy from each other when we chose to.  Being August in southern Florida it was very humid outside, like hanging out in a sauna when I would go outside on the lanai to smoke cigarettes.  I went over to the beach three times.  The last two times I couldn't stay for very long because there were many tiny biting insects flying around me as I sat on a chair near the water.  It was still pleasant to be by the water, to walk in the sand and to put my feet in the water, pick up a few shells, but it was just not the same as when my parents were alive and living there.  My brother felt the same way, maybe more so, because he only went over to the beach once and did not go and look for shells on the beach, something he normally loves to do.

On Saturday morning we went over to  my parents' retirement community in Fort Myers to clear out my father's room in the nursing home and to be there when Goodwill Industries came to take most of what was there.  We only took some framed photos and my father's iPad and charger.  My brother and I got a couple of very nice hugs from two of the nurses and it was sad, but relatively simple and painless.  I didn't feel my father's presence there much.  It would have been different if he had died in his apartment and we then had to clear out all of his and my mother's belongings.  That might have been very upsetting, but we had already done that months before while my father was still alive and I'm grateful for that, too.

I am proud of myself for arranging for this trip, for taking on the responsibility, but I'm still left with a feeling of depression.  It's a natural response, but obviously not a pleasant one.  And so my parents are gone and my brother, uncle and I remain.  This evening I go back to my Al-Anon meeting and that should help me to get a better perspective and lift my mood.  I will continue to take it one day at a time focusing on staying in recovery by having contact with people in recovery, reading support literature and studying, writing, staying creative.

Heading Soon To Florida

My parents at Westhampton Beach

One of the nicest photos of my brother that I've ever taken.

So my brother Rob and I decided to go to the Grassroots Festival in Trumansburg New York which we've been going to for  over a decade even though our father had died five days earlier.  Earlier in the week I wasn't sure if I wanted to go because I was feeling a little unstable mentally, but I knew it meant a lot to my brother to go and I wanted to spend a couple of days with him.  It turned out all right.  I was stable and the weather was good despite all the rain we've been getting in this area lately.  Also I got to take this great picture of Rob where he looks very happy and relaxed.  The festival was good, but not as good as it has been in the past.  We did get to see and hear Steve Earle which was a plus, though that was the first night we were there and I had had a long day and was very tired.  Unfortunately a singer/songwriter/musician named Samite (who was originally from Uganda) got sick and we didn't get to experience his great music.  I play his music in my car a lot because even his sad songs are happy and his music relaxes me.  He was one of the reasons I wanted to go to the festival.

So I've been home for almost a week and I'm feeling pretty good despite my father dying.  I don't know why, but I am okay with him being gone and my mother too.  I've been preparing for it for the last eight years or so since my parents entered into their 80s.  I am so grateful that my father died very quickly.  It was quick and quiet with little of the trauma that so many people go through.  This week I've taken care of some of the practicalities such as informing the Social Security Administration of his death, the lawyer and the company he worked for in NYC (so they could stop sending his pension money).  I also paid off most of my father's minor debts and worked with the funeral home giving them the permissions they needed to cremate my father's body as was his wish.  And then I arranged for roundtrip tickets for Rob and me to Fort Myers Florida and back.  We will be leaving for a four night stay on Sanibel Island where my parents spent 10 years of their life in a nice home near the beach before entering a Fort Myers retirement community.  I didn't realize it at the time, but the condo I chose to stay in is very near to my parents old house, within walking distance, and we will be staying practically on the beach. 

My brother had wanted to stay in a cheap hotel, but I quickly told him that I wanted to spend the extra money and stay on Sanibel which fortunately is in the off season right now, so the prices were not ridiculous.  We have not spent a whole day on the beach or overnight in years and we both love it.  I wanted to honor our parents and also touch base with some of the joy we felt spending time on Sanibel with my parents when they were in 60s.  As I've written before, the beach was our family's favorite place.  My parents had bought a small beach house the year my brother was born, 1958, for the small amount of $9,000, which was all they could afford.  I spent my summers there from the time I was born till I left for Western New York at age 27.  Now I am a woman who has lived in the country for nearly half my life.  I love the country, but I am not a country woman.  I am a mostly stay inside the house kind of woman, especially since I got ill in 1998.  And so I watch the wildlife through my dining room window, mainly the deer, the birds, a resident woodchuck and the occasional bear.  But my heart is really much closer to the ocean.  At the ocean I can't help but want to be outside near the water.

When I left New York City in 1989, I had to give up my attachment to the beach because I would be living at least 6 hours away from it deep into the country.  And so I have for most of 26 years.  And then for the last 15 years I've been obese and have no desire to get into a bathing suit no matter how tempting the water seemed to be.  But even without swimming, just getting my bare feet into the sand and into the water and seeing the long stretch of the beach and watching and identifying the shore birds and soaking up the sun and the expanse of the sky gets to me like no other landscape.  And I want that now as I rejoice in the good lives both my parents' lived.  I have no major unresolved emotional baggage to carry.  I know that I loved them and I know that they loved me and we told this to each other often.  They are still my people and the smart, kind people that I follow.  And, of course, I am a believer in some kind of life after death.  And so I pray and will continue to pray that they are in some good place and that their spirits are alive and well as they journey on.   

Here are some photos I took of Westhampton Beach and Sanibel: