mandyjw

After I graduated highschool I went into full hermit mode. I read some novels and built my business. I remember reading this novel . I'd completely forgotten the main character is Leo. The name Leo keeps coming up. My best friend sent me a gift and it came from Russia, and arrived late for Christmas on a morning when everything was going wrong, I woke up sick and my husbands car broke down. I put it next to my cat, that I took from my old bedroom and kept and treasured after reading the Marie Kondo book. It was the one thing I had an epiphany experience of coming to love when I stopped thinking. Most of the things I just let go of. My first knowledge of Buddhism and "clearing out" was from discovered Leo Babuta's zen habits blog. My friend called me that day and said it should be there, so i checked the mail and opened it on the phone with her. She told me about some sort of synchronicity with the email address of the artist being Leo and some kind of insect. I'll have to ask again. I immediately set it next to the cat and exclaimed how the eyes matched the royal blue. When I was a kid I took glitter and filled in the cat's eyes to make them royal blue. I always regretted doing that. I exclaimed over that. This morning at the end of meditation I saw royal blue.

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly. Let the lover be. -Rumi “Run from what's comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I'll be mad.” ― Rumi “Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.” -Rumi

@seeking_brilliance I just read this by Rumi today. What is the mirror of being? Non-being. Always bring a mirror of non-existence As a gift. Any other present is foolish. Let the poor man look deep into generosity. Let bread see a hungry man. Let kindling behold a spark from the flint. An empty mirror and your worst destructive habits, When they are held up to each other, That's when the real making begins. That's what art and crafting are. A tailor needs a torn garment to practice his expertise. The trunks of trees must be cut and cut again So they can be used for carpentry. Your doctor must have a broken leg to doctor. Your defects are the ways that glory gets manifested. Whoever sees clearly what's diseased in himself Begins to gallop on the way. There is nothing worse Than thinking you are well enough. More than anything, self-complacency Blocks the workmanship. Put your vileness up to a mirror and weep. Get that self-satisfaction flowing out of you! Satan thought, "I am better than Adam" And that "better than" is still strongly in us. Your stream water may look clean, But there's unstirred matter on the bottom. Your sheikh can dig a side channel That will drain that waste off. Trust your wound to a teacher's surgery. Flies collect on a wound. They cover it, Those flies of your self-protecting feelings, Your love for what you think is yours. Let a teacher wave away the flies And put a plaster on the wound. Don't turn your head. Keep looking At the bandaged place. That's where The light enters you. And don't believe for a moment That you're healing yourself. ~ Rumi

It's constant, it's an obsession. I'm scared of people in my normal life finding my youtube videos. I'm horrified that my in laws will find out that I'm into non duality, Gnostic Christianity, Witchcraft. I guess I better read The Crucible. Too much synchronicity here. I WANT TO BE LOVED. BY OTHER PEOPLE. I don't want to be responsible for causing them pain or discomfort. I want to toe the line and interact in an appropriate manner. I want to be respected. Every time I've felt dismissed because I'm female, I've dismissed myself. It's all fiction. It can never happen. I can only allow love. I can only give love.

Oh shit. The other horrifically traumatizing thing that happened was in Junior English class. I had attention problems in school. I was very lost in my own inner world, and you know, it was safe in there. UNTIL I felt like coming out of it. We were reading plays in English and I LOVED reading out loud and acting out characters. I had started to come out of my a bit when i got assigned a big role in reading a play out loud. Then we started a play I really didn't like. It was called The Crucible. I had to google and search a while to dig that up. All I remember is I thought it was really fucking dark and depressing and boring. I wasn't paying attention in class and suddenly became aware that the teacher wanted someone to read something. So I offered. I hadn't realized that she was trying to get someone to read the most sexual explicit scene in the book and the other character for the girl had been picked. Erika. She was from one of the most renowned families (that was a thing because it was a semi-private school) and was the most or second popular girl in our class. The teacher spared me declined my offer and made the most confident open minded boy in class do it, but I immediately realized then what I had done. I never, ever wanted to disappear so bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucible What's the play about? Fear of what people think. HA ha ha ha HA.

The other memory I have felt horrible and embarrassed and confused about, I have recently made sense of. I was at an outdoor summer craft show and hadn't brought my tent, I sat in the sun all day long and was exhausted. My consciousness must have been altered by this and I was getting ready to take my display down. A man came up and looked at my display and spoke to his wife or someone else with him, and I was just working around him not paying attention to him. My husband, boyfriend at the time was with me and I started talking to him, saying random things about my mother and making random statements that came to my mind. The man left. I didn't think much of it. When I sat back down my husband said that I had parroted everything he said said, until he took offense and left. I had completely unconsciously rephrased the subject of his statements, and thought they were my own original thoughts. I was horrified by this. How do you let someone know, it's not about them? You worry and overly concern yourself and live in constant anxiety.

How OBVIOUS, it should have been! I had to go through all that pain and all that maze of Easter eggs just to realize, guess what? I care what people think. How much pain in my life has been caused by caring what people think? Here's one of my early embarrassing moments. I think I was in third grade and I got a new shirt because it was the start of the year. It had a yellow smiley face on it. It was free time to read and we were allowed to sit where we wanted. I must have moved somewhere when I saw these girls looking at me and laughing. It made me uncomfortable so I moved across the room. They laughed even HARDER. I moved back. It got worse. Then I looked down and realized a thread from my shirt was unraveling and had left a trail everywhere I went. One of the girls was my friend and was nice to me and that really stung. She lived near here where I live now in an old yellow house. It's like a cat, unraveling a ball of yarn that is the cat. The symbolism of the smiley face on that shirt is hysterical. My other embarrassing moment in that class was when I was in 4th or 5th grade and I wore a bright yellow shirt. I was going through my chunky phase. We were studying the solar system and our teacher did a demonstration where we would organize and play the order of the planets. She chose me to be the sun because of my shirt. She emphasized how the sun was "BIG and ROUND" and all the kids laughed. Hilariously, the first insight I got when I sat to meditate was "I am light." Oh....

What is the mirror of being? Non-being. Always bring a mirror of non-existence As a gift. Any other present is foolish. Let the poor man look deep into generosity. Let bread see a hungry man. Let kindling behold a spark from the flint. An empty mirror and your worst destructive habits, When they are held up to each other, That's when the real making begins. That's what art and crafting are. A tailor needs a torn garment to practice his expertise. The trunks of trees must be cut and cut again So they can be used for carpentry. Your doctor must have a broken leg to doctor. Your defects are the ways that glory gets manifested. Whoever sees clearly what's diseased in himself Begins to gallop on the way. There is nothing worse Than thinking you are well enough. More than anything, self-complacency Blocks the workmanship. Put your vileness up to a mirror and weep. Get that self-satisfaction flowing out of you! Satan thought, "I am better than Adam" And that "better than" is still strongly in us. Your stream water may look clean, But there's unstirred matter on the bottom. Your sheikh can dig a side channel That will drain that waste off. Trust your wound to a teacher's surgery. Flies collect on a wound. They cover it, Those flies of your self-protecting feelings, Your love for what you think is yours. Let a teacher wave away the flies And put a plaster on the wound. Don't turn your head. Keep looking At the bandaged place. That's where The light enters you. And don't believe for a moment That you're healing yourself. ~ Rumi

Red rum from the shining. The cats with red bottles. Schrodinger's cat. Middle aged ladies came through for me. https://www.agefotostock.com/age/en/Stock-Images/Rights-Managed/MEV-10991364 The cats are quoting from different Charles Dickens characters. ' "Care killed the cat." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_killed_the_cat Oh my GOD! "The original form of the proverb, now little used, was "Care killed the cat". In this instance, "care" was defined as "worry" or "sorrow for others." "Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back." I noticed very clearly yesterday when I lost the flow state, when I was painting the wall, concern of others was a major theme. I put the second coat on it this morning and contemplated that a lot. Why not like a bright yellow wall? Because you assume others wouldn't like it and you shouldn't either. If the cat is both dead and alive, no one thinks a thing about you, all there is is thinking about what they think. Other people don't think Mandy.

Stephen King donated the money so our school could start the first art class I ever had.

I was journaling this morning an came up for an analogy for awakening. It's as if I'm in a labyrinth or a maze. As I started to disidentify from myself and where I was I started to focus on where I wanted to go. I was given the gift of seeing myself outside myself in the maze, and I saw where I had been, I saw the maze as a whole and felt in full the freedom of detachment from being one who is lost in the maze. Now I am back in the maze. I saw the maze as a whole, so why don't I just liberate myself? Now the labyrinth exists as a fictional idea in my head. Before me are the walls of the maze. I had a glimpse of the actual pattern of the paths but now I'm left with just the translation or image I made with the filter of my old mind patterns and flawed memory to go by. I saw how beautiful and perfectly designed the entire thing was. I also know that what I want is what I have. I want the thrill of working through the maze. The idea of liberation only exists in my mind as a story, as a goal, as a focal point. Without the concept of an "end" the story would be nonsensical, unsatisfying. What I really came for is the thrill of writing my own story, the challenge of working through the maze.

One of my cats is missing. What the fuck is this drawing trying to say or advertise? Is it a get well card? An ad for medicine? I went to my middle-aged lady forum and asked them because I think they'll know. Is the last cat flipping me off?

And another forgotten song, from the need for speed game, which I sucked at horribly. That life is yours and you can keep it Don't give a damn about some secret This world is yours and you can have it Can't find my own, I'll smash and grab it Live live live live live like you wanna live Live live live live live like you wanna live Live live live live live like you wanna live Live live live live live like you wanna live The way I live is so exciting Do all the things that you call frightening It hits me like a bolt of lightning The way I live is so enlightening Live live live live live like you wanna live Live live live live live like you wanna live Live live live live live like you wanna live Live live live live live like you wanna live

And another lost forgotten about song from that time.

I was digging for the pictures of the house they burned, that isn't there anymore, the house where the other story came from. I found a picture accidentally of the field of... fireweed there with the date. But on my hardrive it starts at December of 2013, and this was in August. I've been trying to find the old ad online explaining the photo of the sick cats I found in the wall. I accidentally opened up a folder on the hard drive and found my old music. There's a song by "Faster Pussycat" and I couldn't remember what song I had from them. House of Pain Faster Pussycat A little past supper-time I'm still out on the porch step sitting on my behind, Waiting for you. Wondering if everything is alright. Momma said, "Come in boy, don't waste your time." I said, "I've got time. Well, he'll be here soon." Five years old and talking to myself. Where were you? Where'd you go? Daddy, can't you tell? I'm not trying to fake it And I ain't the one to blame. There's no one home In my house of pain. I didn't write these pages And my script's been rearranged. No, there's no one home In my house of pain Wasn't I worth the time? A boy needs a daddy like a dance to mime and all the time I looked up to you. I paced my room a million times. And all I ever got was one big lie, the same old lie. How could you? Well, I was eighteen and still talking to myself. Where were you? Where'd you go? Daddy can't you tell? I'm not trying to fake it And I ain't the one to blame. There's no one home In my house of pain I didn't write these pages And my script's been rearranged. No, there's no one home In my house of pain [Repeat] And I'm alone again Well, if I learned anything from this... It's how to live on my own.

What is that is hard to let go of? That is stored in the gut as burning discomfort? I saw someone comment elsewhere that no one has found an evidence that DMT is produced in the pineal gland but rather, in the blood and bowels. There was a me. I didn't leave the labyrinth to see the overview of it, "I" saw myself in the labyrinth. How can the one who navigates, who's eyes see the labyrinth walls in front of her let go of herself? When I was sitting on the toilet, sick my daughter came in (no privacy around here) and asked me "Why do you have eyes?" In that moment I looked at her chocolate brown eyes with great big pupils staring at.. (me?) Well darling, do I have eyes? You tell me. That's what I wanted to say, but I didn't. My husband got up and commented/joked that he hoped the bright yellow wall was just a dream, but woke up and there it was. Yes honey, it's STILL a dream.

Because of strange circumstances, and a long story I don't feel like telling now, getting that attic bedroom I wanted meant seriously jeopardizing my relationship with my dad. The renovation was incredibly difficult and took place over the winter, two blizzards delayed it and the entire time we were living in one crowded room. I ended up doing all the painting myself on a deadline to stay on budget to get it done. The contractor went against our wishes and gutted the upstairs in one go. He cut through walls and completely redid the rafters. It was pretty horrifying. Had he respected what we asked, I'd never have had had the attic bedroom. I remember the feeling of painting it, and going to another place. I was overworked, over stressed and felt penned in but I had tasted freedom, and I had gotten my desire, expanded my world and tapped into something beyond me. This was my first taste of law of attraction, manifestation without knowing it at the time. The first room we finished and painted, (the whole house was gutted except two small rooms) I wanted to celebrate so I painted a painting for the wall. It's a path that ends in light. The home I live in itself, my shelter and the story of it, is a myth. An analogy. A pointer. Everything I've been inspired to do ever leads here.

So what if she so indulges herself by telling herself only the stories she wants to hear? What if she lets them lead her on adventures? What if she creates her own dream world whenever "reality" feels bad. What if it really doesn't matter what other people think? What if that is another fiction I've been making up in my head the entire time? What if there is truly no ground or should? What if the story of sanity is just as real as the story of Humpty Dumpty? What story would you choose to tell? What story feels amazing to tell? What if it doesn't matter what "value" or influence come out of it? What if value and influence is just as real as the tooth fairy? Yesterday I painted the hallway yellow. It's really fucking bright. I was hating myself the whole time. The house is all done in white, with some grays, blues and greens. I told myself I was crazy, for painting the wall yellow and just plain old crazy, and doubted myself the whole time. isn't yellow the color of craziness itself? It felt awful. I checked the clock midway through and saw the time was 1:11. Alignment. I went to visit my mother because I didn't want to come home to a yellow wall and a messy house. I read about segment intending and mom made popcorn and I sat on her couch and played the role of her kid again. It's a nice break from the role of being a mother myself. When we got home both the kids loved the yellow wall and it made me smile. They had cereal for supper and bright red apples. When we got groceries, we ended up buying four bags of apples because no one could agree on what kind they wanted. My daughter left her apple core smack dab in the center of my yellow hall. I love the smell of paint. When I walked into the paint store the smell immediately hit me. I love to paint. I've painted the entire house, inside and out. I've gutted through most of the walls, seen inside them, and found old treasures within each. Old shoes, old bottles, an old hat. I made a shadow box with some of them. Shadowbox, snicker.

Oh, the clockmaker from the city I wrote in red on the dream board and kept having connections with had a labyrinth built in his honor. I'm hot on the trail. It seems I have fresh new spirit guide from the 1800's. Come play with me. As if there ever was such a thing as a me, a spirit guide or the past. Oh but I do love all three of us, that is true.

It's a myth that some characters aren't as loved as other ones. It's a myth that there are characters. I am unraveling my own myth. I believed that there were things that could hurt me, trigger me, make me uncomfortable. I believed that I could hurt, trigger and make others uncomfortable. When I was a kid I put huge emphasis on truth. I lied to my parents about brushing my teeth when I was very young and then took upon myself the belief that lying was really bad. The problem was that I noticed because of this that there were just situations where I didn't know the truth. I didn't know that my life was one big car accident that happened so fast (or not at all rather) than no one remembered anything about it and were scrambling to fill in the blanks based on what made sense to them. After I read Harry Potter through the second time, I must have been 19 or so, I got inspired to write my own story. I never mapped it out entirely. It was about a girl who grows up in an awful cursed town, and she is adopted, pretty similar theme as Harry Potter. I only ever wrote the first chapter. It starts with her accidentally falling asleep in a field watching the clouds. It was long before I started meditating or heard that analogy. She was found in the woods, abandoned as a baby and a woodsman found her and adopted her. His wife never liked her nearly as much and when he died so she was pretty much a slave to her adoptive mother and lived in the attic of the old house. This was before I even knew anything about old houses. The house we did buy had a sort of attic but was on the same level as the upstairs because it was part of a funny old addition on the house. On the very end of the room, there was no floor and it was a storage room. I found a hideously creepy ornament there and an old police siren. Something about the room spoke to me. It had this old odd short door to it, cut off at an angle so it would fit in along with the roof. There was a keyhole cut into it but the door opened with just a hook latch. I wanted so bad to renovate that room into a master bedroom but it seemed too difficult. We didn't heat it. In the winter I would often love to see the sunlight pouring through that keyhole and the crack along the door that didn't shut all the way. It reminded me of the quote "We are all broken, that's how the light gets in." Anyway, in the story the girl is lead by a witch or a hag in a white nightgown deep into the woods and she discovers her past, her people and her magic there. One of the themes I had was that if you lie you lose your magic, your power is in your truth. She is reunited with her people but it is short lived and she ends up going on a quest to see some sort of wizard (ok I hadn't planned it all out yet ) on the top of a mountain. And he ends up being tied with everything and is in fact her father. (oh shit) She thinks she can escape the boring town but healing and integration is the theme and resolution. I remember walking around town here and just being filled with this sort of feeling that felt like fantastic inspiration for the book. When I got off on really negative thought patterns I used to brainstorm ideas for this book and the other one I've talked about in the past. And so I have tapped into the radical implications of no time and infinite love, which is that past and future only exist here in the present and so every single story, every single separation or clue, or mystery, or event within the story gets resolved and tied in in the "end", (the now). You see, the resolution can only be as brilliant as the amount of spiderweb chaos complexity of the buildup in the story. The awakening was a glimpse, like being taken up in an airplane and seeing the beautiful design of the labyrinth from overhead, then dropped back to the lost place in which you were. Come on my dear, put it together now! YOU saw the pattern of the maze! Liberate yourself already. Ah..., but you see, that would be too easy! I got lost and I asked for a hint. I got the hint. Now the labyrinth exists as a fictional idea in my head. I had a glimpse of the actual patterns but now I'm left with just the translation I made with the filter of my old mind patterns and flawed memory to go by. It was beautiful though, wasn't it? Yes, it was beautiful. But you know what I really love, more than the idea of getting out? The thrill of working through this maze.

There's a very subtle difference between focusing on shadow in a way that strengthens it, highlights it and makes it grow and focusing in a way that lovingly embraces it. I believe that it absolutely requires meditation or one to be a natural (unconscious) mediator. There seems to be a fine line between self love and narcissism. The spiritual ego says all kinds of things about the ego that aren't true. The ego can only ever be examined in oneself, by feeling. Other egos come into your experience and you know them by how they feel, yet it's all only occurring in your own experience. If you chose to play a unique role in life, and have a unique vibration or energy, to have unique talents, if that was by CHOICE, then you also chose the "bad" things to lead you along your way. Without self love, without paying attention to how you feel, without acknowledging and loving the talents, and the WHY behind the rest of it, there is no clearing out of past or letting go. When you are an ego your narcissism is just the other end of the coin of love self esteem. It's trying to push out low self esteem by force of power of ego. It's taken responsibility. Self love is the only cure. Does it seem like a good idea to tell a narcissist that they need more self love? Who wants to tell herself, who thinks she's a narcissist, to love herself? That seems like the furthest thing away from what she wants or should do. She thinks she is the voice in the head who cautions her, but quieting the voice is the self love. Low self esteem is a misunderstanding of what voice is the self. It's a cutting off from oneself of how they feel, of their joy and true source of power. When she is connected to the true self, she has the power to rewrite her own story. The story itself was never the problem, the storyteller was. You see we all live the same myth, but the art is in how you tell it.

I've been making myself a victim of my own monkey mind, blaming everything but. The chaotic mornings, the unfinished projects, the messy house, lack of time, the overwhelm. Then I wonder why I have the general fatigue and lack of focus that results. Identify what you want and focus. "Over prepare and go with the flow", I used to say. Prepave, intend, dream and allow.

"Segment intending is the process by which you eliminate the predominant hindrances to your Deliberate Creation: influence of others who may have different intentions than you do, or the influence of your own old thought patterns." - Abraham Hicks. Ok, so meditation, dream boarding and segment intending seem to work all together. Segment intending seems to be the thing I really need right now in life. A couple nights ago I prayed like I used to, but was concious that I was asking for certain things and focusing positively. Praying is like a mix of dream boarding and segment intending and even mediation sometimes. Splitting them into three is like leveling up. Segment intending takes a lot of focus and presence. What is the benefit? Focus and presence. ?

Bleh. Completely lost focus. Probably got ahead of myself and wasn't paying attention. When things are good, they are so, so good. When I get away in thinking, it hurts more than ever. I'm getting better at turning myself around faster and faster. Stop (can't stop but slow) thought. Go in the direction of what you want. Right now I just need to stop. A message to and from Source to yourself,

The last time I spoke to her, I was disturbed by her horribly long painted fingernails. The hag, the crone, the witch. She didn't care what anyone thought.