Life’s Golden Ticket – Brendon Burchard, Did I Live, Did I Love, Did I Matter?

Did I Live?  Did I Love?  Did I Matter?  Those are interesting questions to ponder and what Brendon Burchard talks about in this video.  The book was an easy read full of thoughts to meditate on.  It is easy to blame our misery on other people, but the reality is, we choose to be miserable.  I used to tell my students “water on the duck” meaning that I can choose to be the duck and let negativity roll off my back like water on the duck or choose to be a sponge and absorb all that negativity and let it affect my thoughts and actions.

In Lies We Trust – More Vaccine Information

This film is produced and freely distributed by consumer protector and public health expert, Dr. Leonard Horowitz, and features the world‘s leading vaccine expert, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, explaining why Merck‘s vaccines have spread AIDS, leukemia, and other horrific plagues worldwide.

This feature length documentary about medical madness, cloaked in bioterrorism preparedness, will awaken the brain dead. It exposes health officials, directed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), for conducting a “War of Terror” that is killing millions of unwitting Americans. This urgent life-saving DVD comes without copyright restrictions. Every viewer is encouraged to reproduce and distribute copies to others. Donations to Tetrahedron Films to cover costs and produce more films like this are greatly appreciated online at http://www.inlieswetrust.com or by calling toll free 1-888-508-4787. You can screen the film on behalf of local charities. It was produced by award-winning humanitarian, Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz (http://www.DrLenHorowitz.com), a world-renowned authority in public health education, covert intelligence agency operations, and emerging diseases investigations. He is the author of three American bestsellers, including Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola—Nature, Accident or Intentional? and Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse. (Tetrahedron Press; 1-888-508-4787) This monumental film exposes the agents and agencies behind: Hollywood films and the media creating a profitable culture of bioterror; the “War on Terrorism” used to control populations; the most lucrative war in history—the “War on Cancer;” the onslaught of dozens of new immunological diseases and deadly flus; the “War on AIDS” triggered by contaminated vaccines; the anthrax mailings resulting in restricted freedoms, and sales of toxic drugs, deadly vaccines, and more. Documents displayed in film may be viewed online at http://inlieswetrust.com For over 400 of the top Critically important videos see http://netctr.com/media — Much more at the site. Wake up, get involved, Save the Republic – Your kids, grand kids and your life will depend on what you do from now on.

Are you a sexy mom?

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I tend to say, err…  scream, “Oh God!” during intimate times with my honey.  It’s hard to explain what is going on inside my head during those moments because I’m…  well…  I’m enjoying the moment.  One day he asked me about my enthusiastic outburst and I had to stop and try to put a whole cosmos of feeling into mere words.  But to put it simply, it’s like a little prayer to God inside me that is bursting to come out.  It’s like saying, “Thank you God for this opportunity to be the woman you made me with the man that you gave me.”

Being Thankful – Learning to count all my blessings.

It is easy to maintain the scarcity thinking that plagues so many of us, especially living through what many consider the next Great Depression. But it is time to flex my muscles and really take stock of what my real blessing are. What are my assets? What do I HAVE? It is time to stop thinking about everything that I DON’T have. Now, my life my not have reached perfection, but I am incorporating all of these thankfuls into my daily affirmations. So, here goes!

I am in excellent health. I’m beautiful, active, strong, intelligent, and sometimes witty. (Yay!)
I have a wonderful husband who always does his best to take care of me and my children. (Yay!)
I have beautiful, healthy, intelligent, charming children who love each other and are eager for life. (Yay!)
I have the goofiest pets in the world. (Yay!)
I have good food to eat – it is delicious and healthy. (Yum!)
I live in a home that keeps me dry and comfortable. (Yay!)
I have great friends that always encourage and support me. (Yay!)
I love my work and have clients contacting me every day to enlist my help and skills. (Yay!)

You Can Heal Your Life – the power of affirmations

Continuing my own spiritual journey toward healing, I grabbed the book You Can Heal Your Life
by Louise Hay. This book was recommended by JoAnn who commented on my posting “How do you regain your health when things seem so bad?”. Thanks JoAnn! This was a fabulous book. It is a book about loving, forgiving, and living. What more is there to life?

Remember that Saturday Night Live skit with Al Franken as the crazy blob of a fellow who would sit in front of a mirror wallowing in self-pity? Well, this is a far cry from the real truth behind affirmations. There is real power in this. Allowing yourself to love yourself unconditionally is the way we all should live. I know that I need to stop that continuous stream of mental trash talking. It’s not easy, because we are trained to be critical of so many things, especially ourselves. When you look in the mirror what do you see? The pimples, the wrinkles, the blemishes? Or do you see God’s beautiful creation looking back at you?

I once had an enlightened moment about taking the Lord’s name in vain. It was in a lively discussion with my church about profanity (of all things!) The talk was all centered around the usual arguments: which words are bad, which words are good; the difficulty with intent – saying fiddle sticks instead of fuck, what’s the real difference if your meaning is the same; really choice words like God damn it – is this really laying down a curse or what. Then it hit me. If we are truly made in God’s image and if God’s name is I AM, isn’t saying things like “I am ugly”, “I am worthless”, “I am stupid” really taking the Lord’s name in vain? It really made us all stop and think.

Now, this is far from a Christian book. But the truth is the truth, wherever you can find it. And the truth is, we all need to start loving ourselves and the wonderful gift that God made us to be. There is no one else just like me. There is no one else here that can fulfill my destiny.

So now everyday, I try to tell myself “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me.”
No WAIT! That’s just wishy washy drivel. But I AM beautiful, intelligent, passionate, caring, and successful. And I deserve a life of joy, excitement, and wonder.

On the verge of a gestalt moment…

This has been bothering me for some time. For three years I have been on a journey of self-transformation. I find myself rediscovering God and myself and my place with Him. Hours and hours of prayer, meditation, reading, and learning and I am still a little stumped. Here’s the deal. I am so immersed in the lives of my family – my children and my husband – that I am struggling to separate my successes and failures from theirs. I think it is one of my life’s lessons. When I see one of them struggling, I think it is my responsibility to “fix it”. Sometimes it is because they are struggling with the very same issues that I struggle with. And they are all so very near and dear to me that I want only the best for them. But I am only me. And I can only fix myself, so to speak. But I also take my responsibility as a mother and wife very seriously.

I know I am getting closer to this great moment of self-discovery because I have started to catch myself doing this. I used to sit in judgment. Well, that of course caused a whole host of problems. But I am starting to see what the real problem is. I will keep praying and meditating on this.

The cost of therapy

Look at me. You’d never know it. But I am a survivor of sexual child abuse. Why didn’t any one report it? Why wasn’t anything done? How could this have happened? Well, it happens all the time. And nobody ever knows about it. This is a dirty, dark secret that so many people have. It happens in all classes, to people of all races, all countries, all situations. Educated, ignorant, wealthy, poor, it doesn’t matter. Abuse is not prejudiced. It affects everyone. It is easy to jump on the bandwagon and scream for the end of child abuse. It is easy to point the finger of blame. It is easy to make a list of possible signs of abuse and wonder why things continue on as they have for centuries.

The thing is, there really aren’t any signs. There are no clues. Unless the incident is violent and results in disease, pregnancy, or serious physical injury, you have no clue that something bad is happening. I am not, of course, talking about those absolutely horrible examples of abuse and neglect you see on the news. Stories of children locked up in basements, half starving and barely able to speak are sprinkled here and there throughout the media as sordid examples of human degradation and how the state comes in like knights in shining armor to save the day. These are tragic examples that pull at our emotions. They are horrible, vile examples of human wretchedness.

But what I am talking about is more prolific, more hidden, and therefore, more dangerous. Everything that in hind-sight causes you to kick yourself… I should have seen this! I should have known… everything… can be explained away and overlooked as normal. Potty training regression? It doesn’t cause a light bulb to go off in your head until a certain age. Aggression, teen angst, sullenness and pouting, lying about cleaning the litter box? What child doesn’t go through all of these? I went through my whole life and nobody knew I was a victim of child abuse. NOBODY. After I was older (about 18 years old) I would secretly tell a few select friends. Often times the other girl would share a similar experience. But we never elaborated on it. It was like we all belonged to a secret club and spoke in secret codes. I would look, nod my head, and say something like “Well, YOU know.” and she would reply with a nod “Yeah, THAT.” As I got older I even encountered guy friends who had suffered similar abuse. And yet still, it seemed like a girl’s suffering. I even foolishly thought that my first child would be safe from what I experienced, simply because he was a boy. How blissfully ignorant I was.

My oldest son never liked chocolate. One Easter Sunday (about three years ago), after returning home from a weekend trip with my parents, my son stuffed a pound of solid chocolate in his face while hovering over the kitchen sink. I was shocked, afraid, stricken, heartbroken. He didn’t understand why I was so upset. To this day he has no recollection of being abused. It was my only sign. But, after living as a victim for so long, and living a life of secrecy and denial, I told myself that our family could take care of this ourselves. After all, this could have been anything. Maybe I was being over sensitive because of my own abuse history. This wasn’t, after all, your typical sign of abuse. I thought we could handle this. After all, I had “handled” my own abuse for my whole life. But the reality was that I wasn’t handling anything. I was doing what I had always done, pretending that life was fine, that everything was just dandy. I thought that if I was a good mother, I could heal all hurts with kisses and hugs. I thought by just avoiding my father I was dealing with my own abuse. But this was so not true. About a year ago I learned about EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). I didn’t think about it much at the time until a small incident in my own life caused me to realize that I needed real help. I scrambled onto the internet and dug up that article. I ended up contacting an EFT practitioner and went in for a session. The result took us both by surprise. I had worked on my own childhood abuse and came out a better, more whole person. One hour, $50 out of my pocket, and real tools that I could use brought me closer to real healing than I had ever been in my life. But that was just me. I didn’t realize that my children were suffering too.

Why is this happening to me? I love God and follow his commandments. I practice the Law of Attraction. I have spent the last two years of my life transforming my spiritual, mental, and physical health. I still need to exercise more and quit smoking, but I’m more totally healthy now than I have ever been my entire life. Why now? If everything in my life is because I willed it to be so, did I cause this? I read an interesting book by Joe Vitale, Zero Limits. The Ho’Oponopono guru was talking to Joe Vitale about this very issue. He states something to the effect that, how do we know that a person has attracted problems into their life. It is possible that God has allowed tragedy to happen for a greater purpose. It is definitely something to think about. My thoughts around my children were always hopes and dreams, a bright glittering future of endless possibilities. Is that all over now? Amazingly, I still have hope. I will do whatever it takes to help my children achieve their best future, even if it means telling the world about my secret history, the shame of my childhood. I have been poor for a long time, both financially and spiritually. I didn’t get professional help for myself because I thought I couldn’t afford it. I didn’t get professional help for my children at the beginning because, again, I thought I couldn’t afford it. How many other people are in the same situation? How many other people are struggling along in secrecy and shame because it seems there is no other alternative? How many other people are hurting like this?

I don’t want this history to continue hurting my family. I love them all dearly. It is time for me to move beyond my own healing and look to bring healing to everyone I love… everyone that matters most to me… my children, my husband, how many more people need to be hurt because of what my father did. No more!
This is too important to sweep under the rug again. Paying for therapy is going to really hurt us financially, but this is all too important to ignore.

What’s your vice?

Everyone who knows me knows that I am a huge activist at maintaining good health.  I eat natural, organic foods, I try to exercise regularly, I avoid synthetic chemicals like the plague,  I hardly ever take any medicines or pharmaceuticals, and I detest sodas and shy away from sugary snacks.  But I have a dirty little secret.  I’m a smoker.

ARGH!  Yes, the secret is out.  It seems so hypocritical to condemn all these other addictions when I myself am a slave to the nicotine stick.  Sigh.  But the thing is, everyone has an addiction – everyone has a vice.  How you deal with the addiction is what makes you different from other addicts.  Sure, it’s not easy to quit smoking, or over eating, or tv watching, or drinking soda, or eating Krispy Kremes,  or whatever.  But what are you doing about it?

To be honest, I am not trying to quit right now.  I have quit before.  I went 9 months!  And then my brother died and, stressed out, I grabbed a cigarette.  Yep.  That was a total bum move and I really regret it.  But I cannot dwell on past mistakes.  I can only work on the present.  Right now, I am working on maintaining health and balance in other areas of my life, so that when I try to quit again, I am more likely to be successful.  I will not be a smoker forever.

No More Diapers – Almost!

Humbingbird (the 2 year old) has been wearing big girl underwear for about 3 months now and has upgraded to wearing her underwear through the night instead of a diaper.  Yay!  And she’s been dry – no accidents (knock on wood).

And finally Squirrel (the 3 year old) is wanting to wear his big boy underwear after what seemed a lifetime of “no, I want to wear my diaper”.  Last week on Sunday he went all day in his undies.  And then Monday came around and we asked him if he wanted to wear his big boy underwear…  “no, I’m going to do that on Sunday.”  :/  But Sunday came around and he remembered and asked to wear his big boy underwear.  Yay.  Only one accident right after he woke up from nap.  He’s not ready to go without a diaper during the night though.  And that’s okay.  And hoorah, this morning he brought down his undies by himself.  He likes to pee standing up (yes, he makes the sound effects when he’s expalining this to me) because he doesn’t squirt himself.  Or at least that is his reasoning.  I think it just makes him feel like a big boy.

Finding Employment During a Down Economy

My husband lost his job two years ago.  I quit being a full-time stay at home mom and got a part time job at a local fast food joint.  It’s been a rough two years.  Both of us are degreed professionals but are struggling to find adequate employment.  Too much experience, not enough experience, the wrong kind of experience.  Ugh.  It has been frustrating to say the least.  I tried to go back to school, but wasn’t able to afford it and couldn’t qualify for a student loan as I have not been able to repay enough of my original school loan.  It’s a vicious cycle.  It is a pity that this country holds the abilities of teachers at such a low level that we are both virtually unemployable.  It doesn’t seem to matter that the skills of teachers are highly transferable into any field.  Sigh.  But I cannot look at the doom and gloom side of it.  I must remain confident.  I am a professional and  perfectly capable woman who would be an asset anywhere.  Oh, yes, we are starting the school.  But that is going to take time to get off the ground.  Until then…  we must eat and pay our bills.  So, I keep looking.  I’m updating my graphic design skills (might as well make us of my art degree, right!)  I keep blogging, I keep learning something new, I keep writing, I keep on keepin’ on.

Right now I am working on:

• finish writing the parenting book
• develop basic skills curriculum for Pomegranate Gardens School and to publish as a home schooling resource
• develop brochure to start advertising my skills as a freelance graphic designer
• develop Pomegranate Gardens School brochure
• continue seeking full-time employment that will support my family until I am able to support myself through other means.

There…  That’s not too unrealistic.   I have time lines set for each goal and work steadfastly each day.