Clearing Out

[mandyjw]

When I was a preteen I made myself suffer because I thought that I should dedicate my life to God and be celibate. Because I studied the Bible myself of my own accord I ended up with different interpretations that the church's taught. The focus on the family (also the name of an organization my parents heavily supported) didn't seem to be as supported in the Bible as it was by the Christian community. I was torn on this subject. 

What would this look like if I did dedicate my life to God, since I wasn't going to be a nun? The only role model I had was an older woman named "Ruby" who I rarely met but was spoken of. She had never married, had dedicated her life to God and was a missionary to Africa. There was a story about her being poisoned by the tribe leader but she ate the food knowingly and was fine out of faith and the tribe was converted. To me, this was the highest example of giving your life to God. 

My fascination with Africa continued when my best friend Sophie's Mom did a presentation on her time spent in the peace Corp is Sierra Leon. Leon, was the name of the pastor who caused my parents to forever leave the church. Leo, lion, etc. I was also traumatized by the movie "Blood Diamonds" that takes place in Sierra Leon with Leonardo DiCaprio, who is a subject I will likely be returning to.

In gradeschool the teacher who called me the big round yellow sun, was also a Mason and she was fierce, terrifying and looked like a lion. She was also my first role model of what authority and power looked like in a woman and I DETESTED IT and her. When we graduated she asked what we wanted the theme our graduation as. I jokingly mentioned The Lion King because I liked it so much, and she strongly encouraged us to do it. So we did.

My parents were workaholics. Dad was brought up with an incredibly strong Christian work ethic, and companies took advantage of him. At the time he was working at a dairy and they spent late nights managing the place. Mom had always been in the habit of helping him with his work load, unpaid. Work=purity. The first Disney movie, or movie in a theatre I ever saw, was The Lion King. We went to a drive-in theatre. Our parents lied to us and said we were going to work with them, where we often went and had to entertain ourselves four hours. It was such a rare incident of fun and such a wonderful movie that it was forever burned into our memories. 

Later the lion symbol came back in my obsession with The Chronicles of Narnia, which married my love of nature, animals, and Jesus. I was reading the book The Horse and His Boy when I had a psychological break, and my OCD forced me to confess to my mother that when I was a little kid I had undressed with a male friend. I was so distraught for a week, I literally made myself ill. After a week I finally confessed to her. In my mind it felt like the world was ending. It seems silly now, but the pain was intense. I got flu like symptoms for about a week, and illness that acted like mono, and slept most of the afternoon and night. Later a good bit of my hair fell out. 

I just realized that I was reading that book which is my least favorite of the series, about horses and Arabian themed. When my husband and I got married we spontaneously ended up getting a doberman puppy that a friend had rescued. I named her Hwin after the female horse from The Horse and His Boy. She is a wonderful dog but her fear drive is intense and she can't be trusted around strangers. I had to give her up to my parents. It's funny that dobermans look so much like horses. The breeder I just bought my new puppy from also ran a horse camp for girls and boarded horses. 

This song was playing on the radio this morning. 

"Just dance in the living room, love with an attitude
Drunk to an 80s groove (ayy)"

Well THAT reminds me of my teenage obsession with THIS song. 

 

Edited January 24, 2020 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

So since I was a young child I rejected my humanity, in my love for animals and God. I didn't see how ONE all the separations I was making were.

I loved all animals, except for one. Monkeys. They scared me, they disgusted me. Of course.  I have a cousin who is very sexually explicit and open. I'd always hated her. She adores monkeys. She stole from my Grandmother and I especially couldn't forgive her after that. At the funeral last winter she cried more than anyone there. She had needed my Grandmother's non judging unconditional open love more than any of us. How fucked up my compassion was for her in my judgement. 

I recently saw a clip of Robin Williams with Koko the gorilla who just died. It made me consider a lot of subjects at once. 

Last night I became very aware of how afraid of being vulnerable I am in interactions with my husband. I'm just starting to untangle all the thought patterns around him. I was aware of lowering my voice when saying certain things. As I was aware what kept coming up was humor, my deflecting to humor, lots of self deprecating humor, over and over again.

In high school I had one friend who wasn't very intelligent in the traditional sense, but could sometimes make connections none of us saw. She hurt me quite a bit and hurt my reputation and standing with teachers. Once I got a zero on a test because she copied me and the teacher assumed I had let her when really, I was oblivious. Another time she referred to our English teacher as a whale and said "THERE SHE BLOWS" when she walked past.  She had no filter, no common sense. But I NEEDED her. She was hilarious, hysterical. She relived the intense tension I felt by attending high school, the hardest time of my life. 

She went through a really rough time when I started dating my husband the last year of high school. They never liked each other. 

Edited January 24, 2020 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

This is exactly where I found this video paused at last night. 4:44 on the subject of comedy and zen. 

 

[mandyjw]

Being a missionary to Africa was the alternate in my head to my living a normal life. There were major fears in my way of this. Namely my germaphobia and fear of worms and parasites.

During that same preteen phase, I washed my hands raw and started obsessive hand washing. It only lasted a winter and never got severe. I never got over my fear of germs, intelligence seemed to say that they were a very real threat. This actually got worse as an adult, the more I read and learned. My first pregnancy made it really severe. I stopped eating fresh fruits and vegetables and obsessed over everything because I was afraid of listeria. The Katz Deli with the deli meat (listeria concern) were the two fears of crowds and germs combined and it became so much thinking and stress that I had an actual panic attack. The more I thought about it, the more is seemed like there was no possible way to protect oneself from germs. 

Deer mice got in my studio when I was pregnant and it seemed like the online precautions were literally impossible. Who was to say what standards of  clean or "safe" were enough?

At the end of my pregnancy, I went out with friends. One bought some fresh mango from the store and offered me some. I wouldn't touch anything like that, I was so obsessive so I said no. She got a bout of horrible food poisoning from the mango. 

How was there any possibility of living in a world in peace when my environment was CONFIRMING my worst fears. How could this be, that other people lived lives without thought of these things and also seemed to get along fine? I caused an ear infection after I got my ears pierced by over sanitizing my ears with alcohol, and unknowingly never letting them heal. I got them pierced when I was 17, and dating Jon, but he didn't want me to do it. When I found out that he was looking at "websites" online, I decided "fuck him", I would get my ears pierced. I passed out in the middle of the store.

He bought me a pair of diamond earrings and a diamond engagement ring. I never wanted to wear them after watching the move "Blood Diamond". I started wearing the earrings a lot recently, but just this past week I lost them and can't find them anywhere. 

My sister went through a dramatic teenie bop phase. I made fun of her for it, but closely watched. She got magazines every week and covered her room with posters of all the boys from Backstreet Boy and N'Sync. Her absolute favorite was Leonardo DiCaprio. This was the one I could agree with her about. We watched every fucking movie he was ever in. The movie Titanic came out and we all went to theater to see it, only because of my sister's obsession. I was probably too young for it. I remember the scene where Jack draws Rose nude and then all of a sudden the screen went blank and it was intermission and there was my mother sitting next to me, and it was like, "what the fuck kind of reality am I in right now?" 

I remember having a giant teddy bear in my bed, and also thinking about Leonardo DiCaprio in that movie and feeling like I was in a very awkward in between place in life. Later, when I was dating Jon, his mother made him a birthday cake for his 18 or 19th birthday. It was shaped like a teddy bear. I recently saw it scrolling through his old photos on facebook and it brought the memory back. I remember feeling very awkward about this cake, because I could see in her eyes that he was still a little boy, yet in mine, it was a very different story.  They always called him Johnny Bear. He even took it and went by "JB" a lot. This past Christmas on a whim, I asked his mom for his old Christmas stocking because I have mine. Mine has a white teddy bear on it. She gave me a white stocking printed with bears all over it. 

[mandyjw]

We really torture ourselves over the need to make, depend and focus on all sort of separations and distinctions, don't we? 

Sometimes at the dairy my parents worked at, we would rollerblade and listen to the soundtrack for the Lion King. There was a refrigeration room that the floor got disgusting and had to be squeegeed. The floor was concrete that was perfectly solid, sealed and non porous, hard as rock and slippery. I decided to take off my socks and shoes and skate around barefoot one day. 

I guess that back in those days, companies weren't afraid of getting sued, or didn't know we were there, this was so irresponsible on so many levels. But anyway, I immediately fell and hit the back of head, HARD. I wasn't supposed to be there. They never took me to the doctor. I passed out, woke up when we got home just to throw up and went to sleep. 

I've always wondered if the reason why my brain just spaces out sometimes is because of that. I've never intellectually been as smart as my sister. 

Once I was in the car with Mom and it was raining. I was kinda zoned out. I made the comment "That's so weird how the rain on the tires makes a sound when the cars go by."

"AMANDA, that sounds like something someone HIGH on pot would say!" I became aware that I should be ashamed of this state of no mind and perception.

Sex/high/drugs/passion, it's all the realm of the devil. Rock and roll and the runner's high were allowed and definitely in my tool box though. 

[DrewNows]

1 hour ago, mandyjw said:

Once I was in the car with Mom and it was raining. I was kinda zoned out. I made the comment "That's so weird how the rain on the tires makes a sound when the cars go by."

"AMANDA, that sounds like something someone HIGH on pot would say!" I became aware that I should be ashamed of this state of no mind and perception.

 Reminds me of how gullible I was growing up and at some point began "playing gullible" I guess because it had been an entertaining way to connect, perhaps hold/take some power. Self granting permission to be as outrageous as i could imagine. This often lead to my entire family questioning my sanity a whole hell of a lot, nobody knew when i was joking, being honest or what. Just read a bill murray quote "it's hard to win an argument with a smart person, but it's damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person". Since i'd had some severe concussions as a young adult, everything that followed, the depression and all, now seemingly only keeping a foot in the matrix, in reality, at times, can all be blamed on brain damage 

1 hour ago, mandyjw said:

During that same preteen phase, I washed my hands raw and started obsessive hand washing. It only lasted a winter and never got severe. I never got over my fear of germs, intelligence seemed to say that they were a very real threat. This actually got worse as an adult, the more I read and learned

hahaha same total paranoia ...i suppose you still believe in germ theory?

this reminded me to continue listening to this video i started a few days ago on a discussion from a book "Bechamp or Pasteur. A lost chapter in the history of biology" by Ethel Hume. 

"History can be cruel and rewritten a hundred times over to fulfill the needs of those in control. This week we cover a story highlighting this fact to the 100th degree. We delve into the mysterious lost truth of where modern medicine has derived its foundation from and how this path was created through fraud and hubris of one very celebrated man. Not only is this a fascinating tale of deceit and misinformation but a crucial lesson for those seeking to understand the modern Western medicine paradigm."

 

[mandyjw]

It all just boils down to wanting be be loved and not letting it in in our belief that love is separate from us, and then separations are born like infinite fractals. 

It's weird that a day or two ago I became conscious that the band The Kings of Leon exist. I had heard their music but never paid attention to who made it.

I seem to have tapped into art therapy which is a subject I've never researched, using colors and symbols and using intuition and synchronicity to see the connections and draw up emotions. Music helps. Music has always had the ability always to make me so fucking high. 

https://www.loudersound.com/features/def-leppard-hysteria-album-artwork-interview-andie-airfix

Feels lonely. I know I'm getting sidetracked and off the trail and need to go deal with that. "Off the trail" is funny, because when I got so depressed, and went out for a ski in the middle of the woods, I had torturous intuitions to keep going and I thought I'd find the trail to loop back and I kept going off on side trails and never getting anywhere. Eventually I had to go all the back the way I came. 

"You can't get there from here"

Working out and paying attention to my diet caught up with me today and the critical voice came back. When you grew up with Christian sexual repression, having a materialistic, image obsessed culture to find your way in on top of that as a female was brutal. 

As a teenager I decided that, sex was dirty and disgusting, like the human form, like humans in general, unless they were PERFECTLY attractive, in which case they maybe transcended this.

 

 

[mandyjw]

@DrewNows Honestly, germ theory is ANOTHER assumption I hadn't even considered until now to really look at and reexamine. It seriously feels like this past year since waking up never happened. I guess it never did. 

 

[DrewNows]

It definitely opens up a whole new can of worms 

for instance what if your pup eliminating those worms was actually a good sign and that they served a purpose prior to...

 

[mandyjw]

@DrewNows It's the strangest thing that they get them from their mother, even if she is free of worms. I never got a satisfactory answer as to how that works. 

 

[mandyjw]

These are Laura Doyle's 6 intimacy skills for marriage. 

1. Replenish your spirit- self care

2. Relinquish inappropriate control, let him handle his own shit 

3. Restore respect

4. Receive graciously, take compliments and gifts without complaint

5. Reveal your heart, be vulnerable

6. Refocus your view, "stay on your own page" instead of criticizing, change your focus back to your own goals

It's funny that by relinquishing control I will at the same time be taking responsibility for my experience, my point of attraction. 

[DrewNows]

@mandyjw If the germ theory is incorrect then how would sickness occur in the body? 

41 minutes ago, mandyjw said:

@DrewNows It's the strangest thing that they get them from their mother, even if she is free of worms. I never got a satisfactory answer as to how that works. 

 

Haha yes i also feel the reason "they got them from their mother" is still not a sufficient answer for why they are there in the first place...

[mandyjw]

@DrewNows We live in a magical fairytale, no fairytale is any fun without a few spooks. 

[mandyjw]

So I went full circle back to the Empowered/Surrendered wife book. I shattered my phone screen. My husband bought me a new one that very day without me asking. I wanted my Kindle books on it and wanted him to download and sign in for me so I brought the phone to him. He made a joke right then about rekindling things.  That's the book I was intending to read. 

I've been SO selfish. It's about being Selfish not selfish. 

[DrewNows]

29 minutes ago, mandyjw said:

@DrewNows We live in a magical fairytale, no fairytale is any fun without a few spooks. 

i dont understand, is this bypassing the question using magic   

But it's fine you don't have to answer, i was just curious what you might think...

Edited January 24, 2020 by DrewNows

[mandyjw]

@DrewNows 

 

[mandyjw]

@DrewNows  I'll look into it later, I prefer to only try to understand the why of things in my own experience nowadays. But I do see how sickness I experienced in the past has served me in cases, and how I've made myself ill. 

 

 

Last year before the awakening I lost a DVD my kids rented from the library. It drove me CRAZY. I looked everywhere. Today, I lost my hairbrush. Both of them. And all the combs, except for my daughter's baby comb. It makes no sense. I looked everywhere. I ended up buying a copy on ebay and taking the disk to return so I wouldn't have to fess up. I looked in the couch for a comb just now, and there was the Barney DVD.

Titled "Just Imagine" 

 

 

 

Edited January 24, 2020 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

Last night was the first night in a long time that I didn't have back or stomach or hip pain. 

Again, it seems like it should have been SO obvious. But there is not "should" and no hidden or obvious. It feels so good to be on your way. 

 

The quote  "Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power," is a quote I've always been intrigued by and thought I understood. But I didn't understand power at all. Control was a strong part of my shadow. 

There aren't really any subjects or topics in personal development to tackle. There's only defining what you want and going with the flow, love and inspiration. It's amazing to me that symbols, colors, and whims can drag up your deepest darkest pathologies to light. And yet they aren't pathologies, just desires you're stuck on not letting yourself have or give into/let go of. It's no one's fault, you didn't know. "Forgive them (and yourself) because you knew not what you did."  

The love is the whim, the desire to start bellydancing which in itself to the mind seems like a distraction of some sort, but turns out to lead you to all sorts of other things.

I remember when we were young and dating and I expressed the desire of someday having a blue eyed boy and brown eyed girl, mirroring our own. Isn't that stupidly specific? Who specifies their kid's eyes colors? But that's exactly what I got. I want to be the girl i was who is full of desire. "I am a goddess of desire," was the impulse I got on a run almost a year ago that felt so good. What IS desire? No one can say. It's a resonance, a spark an excitement a conscious fantasy in this dream of life. 

Yet here's the secret that i didn't know when I was 19, there's no future in desire, it's inseperable from focus of gratitude right here in this moment. 

Here's the secret i didn't know when I was 29, that there is no acceptance of the present moment without accepting desire.

I transformed my house. At one time I was living in a house that was mostly gutted. I'd just had a baby girl and I wanted so badly to tell her that the year she was born we elected the first woman president. We got rats in the house, in a mostly gutted house, which meant that at night, they had the run of it. I couldn't sleep at night. "I'll be so glad when the Trump rat and the actual rats are gone." Trump won the election and it took a long time to trap the rats out. I realized that my mindset was fucked. I appreciated Trump. I realized that this was serving the awakening of the planet. I started appreciating the house, how cozy it was, how living in a small space meant it was easy to keep, and then my mother in law gave me a couple of Christmas presents I appreciated. They were all things that hung on the walls. I allowed myself to desire a finished wall to hang pictures on. 

 This was the trigger. I found a solution, I gave up on trying to control how the house was renovated out of fear and let my husband take control of hiring out the work. My Dad had controlled the project and me from day one, because I asked him to, out of my own fear. I had to risk the relationship with my dad and let my husband take over. The house turned out better than I dreamed possible. 

But it wasn't finished. My Dad and I repaired our relationship, he let go of the project and Dad found me the carpenter I needed to finish it. 

A lot of these patterns of control and fear seemed to come from my father, who has a background of deep repression and fear instilled in him by the Christian church. There was also a lot of love and transcendence that came from it. My father is a paradox, raised to wear suits and ties going door to door preaching the word of God with a leather bound Bible under his arm, then turned into a truck driver and immersed in that culture, with its own pathologies. I absorbed the fear/control vicious cycle as my own. I let go of and the community around me transformed, my house transformed and I completely neglected the man who was closest to me, thinking I had to be true to Daddy. Even when I thought I had let go of this, the practiced patterns still ran through my head and controlled me. 

It's stomach turning how bad I treated my husband, even just in my own thinking. Even though outwardly I was making his meals, taking care of his children, keeping the house, faithful, always told the truth to him, doing everything I thought I needed to do and more, inwardly, in the way I thought and saw him, I was the cruelest coldest bitch to him. When you aren't conscious of your behavior and want so badly to be conscious and to truly see, your stomach turns for you and you can't know why. 

 

 

Edited January 25, 2020 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

I knew this connection was coming when I saw on this album cover "hey Dad" in graffiti on the yellow door. And when my husband's car broke down a couple weeks ago and I took control and called daddy to come rescue me, to nearly disastrous consequences. 

You can't spend your entire life doing everything to be daddy's little girl, accepting the control and manipulation and ever love truly another man. 

The smashed beer bottle in the floor, the alcohol fueled verbal abuse, the extreme hatred and put downs directed to my husband, the attempts to get me to leave him, there was no other man who could save me from daddy. I could only love him as myself. 

Only love him as myself.

Only love him as myself. 

Only love him as myself.

Only love him as myself. 

Only Love Him as Myself. 

Edited January 25, 2020 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

Girl loves her heart-led, hard working, raised on a farm Daddy with a control problem and drinking problem to match with all her heart, so she goes and finds herself a man who is a nerd with high level intelligence, passive, raised with wealth and class and has never touched a drop of alcohol in his life. But both with Christian cultural damage/repression and the knowledge of the love of God underneath it all. 

How's that for a brilliant manifestation of God wanting to integrate and resolve itself? 

 

Edited January 25, 2020 by mandyjw