The Bully Within

Do you often find yourself being attacked by a bully? I don’t mean the one at the office or the obnoxious one sent by the government to harass you. This bully waits inside you, usually until night when you’re in bed trying to sleep. He sneaks in with memories of your past trangressions (especially the embarrassing ones) using them to shame you. with. You try to chase him away but it doesn’t work. Your face grows warm, becomes buried beneath the covers.

Once this bully has your attention, it’s hard to get rid of him. “There’s nothing I can do about that now,” you say. “It was a stupid thing I did (or said). I suffered because of it.”  Or “It was an accident. I didn’t know a piece of toilet paper was stuck to my skirt. You should’ve told me instead of snickering to each other about it and pretending you didn’t see it,” Etc, etc. The things this bully has collected to shame you with knows no end. What do you do?

If a friend were to confide one of these incidents to you how would you respond? Would you feel compassion for your friend, assuring him or her that we all make mistakes and it was nothing to be ashamed of? How come it’s harder to express compassion for ourselves? Everybody needs support in healing and growth, so why shouldn’t it come from inside us?  You need to be a friend to yourself, getting rid of the bully who is set on shaming you.

The inner bully is a by-product of the lack of self-compassion. We struggle with shame and self-doubt until we are able to bridge the difference between how we treat our friends and how we treat ourselves. So kick your bully out in an act of compassion for the person you’ve become.

My Words

Do you hear it on the wind? Shhh? A whisper asking you to be quiet. So you can hear the voice of God? I believe He speaks to us always, through every thought, every feeling, every vision our eyes can see. When we learn to listen.

I have discovered that for most of my life I’ve been on a search for words; words to say just what I feel, just what I think or believe, what I mean. Yet words continue to elude me. Then recently I remembered a day when my son was four, before he entered kindergarten. He had repeated swear words he’d heard his father say. “Please,” I had pleaded with my husband “do not use those words in front of the children or they’ll repeat them.”

But I also told my son: “Those are Daddy’s words’ and you aren’t allowed to say them.” At first he listened to me but then he started kindergarten. One day when he came home from school he had learned new words, bathroom words! “Now those,” he said, “are MY words!” I was dumbfounded, hoping if I didn’t make a fuss he would outgrow the need to use them.

But it seems strange to me that all these years later I’m finally aware that the strongest need in my life, has always been to find the words with which to express my thoughts and feelings. Words to say just how I feel, to say how the sky appears to me just before a thunder-storm, as it fills with dark boiling clouds or calmly permits the Sun to shine through. For all my life I’ve been on a search for words.

I have a vision of Truth waiting for me on the peak of a mountain with many paths leading to it, aware my path is only one of many

Hanging On, By Golly!

Anyone who knows me, recognizes my black humor so I make no claim of ignorance about what I’m going to say. What’s all this bit about death and dying. Every thing dies, everybody dies, end of discussion.

Not exactly. What if you and your two remaining siblings have had to say goodbye to the other six, counting the brother who died at 18 days old – although some psychics claim they grow up on the other side. I look forward to meeting this dude if indeed he does exist in some nether land. That brings up another question. Is there really such a thing as life after death or have we been deluded?

Long ago my eldest brother said “Folks will really be surprised when they die. All of a sudden they have the answer. They know.” I keep wondering where that brother is now and what he found out. I was with the next oldest brother when he was in Hospice care. He saw the three brothers who had already passed over standing behind me, which evidently didn’t include the baby who supposedly grew up but then he wouldn’t have been familiar, would he?

I’m reminded of the man who said “What if you die and there is no hereafter! I’m gonna me madder’n hell!” Ha ha, him and the bogeyman. My own belief is we just roll over into a different dimension of reality. Don’t ask me to explain that, please. We each have a right to our own belief and that one is mine. So I’ll wait, while hanging onto the proverbial cliff by my fingernails, enjoying communion with my two remaining siblings. Prepared to be surprised – or not.

THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAINS

If you wonder how the modern world evolved to the point where we’re allowing the beautiful mountans of Appalachia to be blown off and discarded like trash in order to more profitably and easily extract the coal—-perhaps this long quote from Richard Tarnas’s book COSMOS will provide you with the answer.

RICHARD TARNAS:
“…the course of history brought about a deep schism between humankind and nature, and desacralization of the world. This development coincided with an increasingly destructive exploitation of nature, the devastation of traditional indigenous cultures, a loss of faith in spiritual realities and an increasingly unhappy state of the human soul, which experienced itself as ever more isolated, shallow and unfulfilled.
In this perspective, both humanity and nature are seen as having suffered grievously under a long, exploitative, dualistic vision of the world, with the worst consequences being produced by the oppressive hegemony of modern industrial societies empowered by Western science and technology.
The nadir of this fall is the present time of planetary turmoil, ecological crisis and spiritual distress, which are seen as the direct consequences of human hubris, embodied above all in the spirit and structure of the modern Western mind and ego.
This second historical perspective reveals a progressive impoverishment of human life and the human spirit, a fragmentation of original unities and ruinous destruction of the sacred community of being.
Something like these two interpretation of history here described in starkly contrasting terms for the sake of easy recognition, can be seen to inform many of the more specific issues of our age. They represent two basic antithetical myths of historical self-understanding: the myth of Progress and what in its earlier incarnation was called the myth of the Fall. These two historical paradigms appear today in many variations, combinations and compromise formations.
They underlie and influence discussions of the environmental crisis, globalization, multiculturalism, fundamentalism, feminism and patriarchy, evolution and history.
One might say these opposing myths constitute the underlying argument of our time: whither humanity? Upward or downward? How are we to view Western civilization, the Western intellectual tradition, its canon of great works? How are we to view modern science, modern rationality, modernity itself?”

A Wise Quote From a Genuis

I ran across the following quote from Einstein yesterday. “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” – Albert Einstein

It’s not too late to open our minds and hearts to recall the sacred gift of intuition granted to us at our birth. It awaits hopefully to be rediscovered and renewed. How many times have you learned something new and then discovered you had already known it before you learned it. You had just forgotten it for awhile. It had been waiting in the back of your mind for you to remember.