The Awakening
(Author unknown)

A time comes in your life when you finally get…when, in the midst of all your fears and insanity, you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere the voice inside your head cries out…ENOUGH1 Enough fighting and crying and blaming and struggling to hold on. Then, like a child quieting down after a tantrum, you blink back your tears and begin to look at the world through new eyes.

This is your awakening.

You realize it’s time to stop hoping and waiting for something to change, or for happiness, safety and security to magically appear over the next horizon.

You realize that in the real world there aren’t always fairy tale endings, and that any guarantee of “happily ever after” must begin with you…and in the process a sense of serenity is born of acceptance.

You awaken to the fact that you are not perfect and that not everyone will always love, appreciate or approve of who or what you are…and that’s OK. They are entitled to their own views and opinions.

You learn the importance of loving and championing yourself…and in the process a sense of new found confidence is born of self-approval.

Your stop complaining and blaming other people for the things they did to you – or didn’t do for you – and you learn that the only thing you can really count on is the unexpected.

You learn that people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say and that not everyone will always be there for you and everything isn’t always about you.

So, you learn to stand on your own and to take care of yourself…and in the process a sense of safety and security is born of self-reliance.

You stop judging and pointing fingers and you begin to accept people as they are and to overlook their shortcomings and human frailties…and in the process a sense of peace and contentment is born of forgiveness.

You learn to open up to new worlds and different points of view. You begin reassessing and redefining who you are and what you really stand for.

You learn the difference between wanting and needing and you begin to discard the doctrines and values you’ve outgrown, or should never have bought into to begin with.

You learn that there is power and glory in creating and contributing and you stop maneuvering through life merely as a “consumer” looking for you next fix.

You learn that principles such as honesty and integrity are not the outdated ideals of a bygone era, but the mortar that holds together the foundation upon which you must build a life.

You learn that you don’t know everything, it’s not you job to save the world and that you can’t teach a pig to sing. You learn the only cross to bear is the one you choose to carry and that martyrs get burned at the stake.

Then you learn about love. You learn to look at relationships as they really are and not as you would have them be. You learn that alone does not mean lonely.

You stop trying to control people, situations and outcomes. You learn to distinguish between guilt and responsibility and the importance of setting boundaries and learning to say NO.

You also stop working so hard at putting your feelings aside, smoothing things over and ignoring your needs.

You learn that your body really is your temple. You begin to care for it and treat it with respect. You begin to eat a balanced diet, drinking more water, and take more time to exercise.

You learn that being tired fuels doubt, fear, and uncertainty and so you take more time to rest. And, just food fuels the body, laughter fuels our soul. So you take more time to laugh and to play.

You learn that, for the most part, you get in life what you deserve, and that much of life truly is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You learn that anything worth achieving is worth working for and that wishing for something to happen is different than working toward making it happen.

More importantly, you learn that in order to achieve success you need direction, discipline and perseverance. You learn that no one can do it all alone, and that it’s OK to risk asking for help.

You learn the only thing you must truly fear is fear itself. You learn to step right into and through your fears because you know that whatever happens you can handle it and to give in to fear is to give away the right to live life on your own terms.

You learn to fight for your life and not to squander it living under a cloud of impending doom.

You learn that life isn’t always fair, you don’t always get what you think you deserve and that sometimes bad things happen to unsuspecting, good people…and you lean not to always take it personally.

You learn that nobody’s punishing you and everything isn’t always somebody’s fault. It’s just life happening. You learn to admit when you are wrong and to build bridges instead of walls.

You lean that negative feelings such as anger, envy and resentment must be understood and redirected or they will suffocate the life out of you and poison the universe that surrounds you.

You learn to be thankful and to take comfort in many of the simple things we take for granted, things that millions of people upon the earth can only dream about: a full refrigerator, clean running water, a soft warm bed, a long hot shower.

Then, you begin to take responsibility for yourself by yourself and you make yourself a promise to never betray yourself and to never, ever settle for less than you heart’s desire.

You make it a point to keep smiling, to keep trusting, and to stay open to every wonderful possibility.

You hang a wind chime outside your window so you can listen to the wind.

Finally, with courage in you heart, you take a stand, you take a deep breath, and you begin to design the life you want to live as best as you can.

“You are probably familiar with situations like these:

- You post something smart and thoughtful to one of your social networks, and nobody responds – while somebody else posts something silly or trivial, and droves of enthusiastic people jump in: “This is so cool! Love it! You are a genius!”
- You enter a crowded room (like a party), and nobody notices you. The moment you muster the courage and start talking to somebody, they don’t see you and turn to the waiter instead.
- You are listening to an interesting conversation and want to contribute something meaningful. The moment you speak up, somebody else says something, and everybody turns to that person.

Painful, embarrassing, humilaiting,isn’t it.
Being invisible to other people, not having a voice can be devestating – especially if it is the theme of your life. Old, intense chilhood pain comes up, memories of parents who would not pay attention to the little girl or boy.

Now, when you are grown up and feel invisible (without a voice), that means two things:

1. You are re-enacting childhood scenarios
2. You are literally on a different vibrational level than the people around you. For example: If you are a hypersensitive introvert, you will not do well with a crowd of frolicking six-pack Joes and Janes. Does that mean that there is something wrong with you? Not in the least (nothing wrong with the happy crowd either). Your vibrations just don’t match.

Keep that in mind for your EFT reframes:

Even though I am invisible to so many people around me,
I am willing to connect with the people who can appreciate me

Even though my voice does not count, I am ready to meet people who are eager to hear what I have to say

Even though nobody ever seems to see or hear me, I trust my spiritual guidance to lead me to “my people”.

Keep going. You will find what you are looking for. Nobody is cut off in our world; it is energetically impossible.”

“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”

~ Anna Quindlen

Take time to celebrate.

Celebrate your successes, your growth, your accomplishments.
Celebrate you and who you are.

For too long you have been too hard on yourself. Others have
spilled their negative energy–their attitudes, beliefs, pain–
on you. It had nothing to do with you! All along, you have been
a gift to yourself and to the Universe.

You are a child of God. Beatutiful, a delight, a joy. You do not
have to try harder, be better, be perfect, or be anything you are
not. Your beauty is in you, just as you are each moment.

Celebrate that.

When you have a success, when you accomplish something, enjoy it.
Pause, reflect, rejoice. Too long you have listened to admonitions
not to feel good about what you have done, lest you travel the
downward road to arrogance.

Celebration is a high form of praise, of gratitude to the Creator
for the beauty of God’s creation. To enjoy and celebrate the
good does not mean that it will be taken from you.
To celebrate is to delight in the gift, to show gratitude.

Celebrate your relationships! Celebrate the lessons from the past
and the love and warmth that is there today. Enjoy the beauty of
others and their connection to you.

Celebrate all that is in your life. Celebrate all that is good.

Celebrate you!

We must discover our own truth.

It does not help us if those we love find their truth. They
cannot give it to us. It does not help if someone we love knows
a particular truth in our life. We must discover our truth for
ourselves.

We must each discover and stand in our own light.

We often need to struggle, fail, and be confused and frustrated.
That’s how we break through our struggle; that’s how we learn what
is true and right for ourselves.

We can share information with others. Others can tell us what
may predictably happen if we pursue a particular course. But it
will not mean anything until we integrate the message and it
becomes our truth, our discovery, our knowledge.

There is no easy way to break through and find our truth.

But we can and will, if we want to.

We may want to make it easier. We may nervously run to friends,
asking them to give us their truth or make our discovery easier.
They cannot. Light will shed itself in its own time.

Each of us has our own share of truth, waiting to reveal itself
to us. Each of us has our share of light, waiting for us to
stand in it, to calim it as ours.

Encouragement helps. Support helps. A firm belief that each
person hs truth available–appropri ate to each situation–is what
will help.

Each experience, each frustration, each situation, has its own
truth waiting to be revealed. Don’t give up until you find it–
for yourself.

We shall be guided into truth, if we are seeking it. We are not
alone.

No one can build  security upon the nobleness of another
person. ~WILLA CATHER

Where do we look for our security? Do we look to our significant others or
our lovers? Do we look to a parent or our children? Perhaps we
seek our security in our jobs. But none of these avenues brings
lasting contentment, as we’ve each probably discovered, just as
pills, alcohol, or maybe food failed to give us lasting security.

Security of the spirit is with us from our birth. It’s just that we
haven’t tapped into the source. Perhaps we don’t even know the
source, but it’s been with us always, awaiting our realization of it.

No step do we ever take alone. Each breath we take is in partnership
with the eternal source of strength and security within us. We have
the choice to accept this partnership any time. And this guarantee
of security in all things at all times is the gift of freedom.

Shame can be a powerful force in our life. It is the trademark of
dysfunctional families.

Authentic, legitimate guilt is the feeling or thought that what we did
is not okay. It indicates that our behavior needs to be corrected or
altered, or an amend needs to be made.

Shame is an overwhelming negative sense that who we are isn’t okay.
Shame is a no-win situation. We can change our behaviors, but we
can’t change who we are. Shame can propel us deeper into
self-defeating and sometimes self-destructive behaviors.

What are the things that can cause us to feel shame? We may feel
ashamed when we have a problem or someone we love has a problem.
We may feel ashamed for making mistakes or for succeeding. Me may
feel ashamed about certain feelings and thoughts. We may feel
ashamed when we have fun, feel good, or are vulnerable enough to
show ourselves to others. Some of us feel ashamed just for being.

Shame is a spell others put on us to control us, to keep us
playing our part in dysfunctional systems. It is a spell many
of us have learned to put on ourselves.

Learning to reject shame can change the quality of our life.
It’s okay to be who we are. We are good enough. Our feelings
are okay. Our past is okay. It’s okay to have problems,
make mistakes, and struggle to find our path. It’s okay to be
human and cherish our humanness.

Accepting ourselves is the first step toward recovery. Letting go
of shame about who we are is the next important step.

Spring is guaranteed to come. I can bloom no matter what the weather, because I am growing spiritually each day. Today I take time to notice how I have bloomed so beautifully despite my circumstances. I am capable of reaching for the sun and sky because that is my natural state. I am reaching upward every day and do so joyfully, knowing I am grounded in the life cycle of spiritual development.

From “The Women’s Book of Empowerment: 323 Affirmations That Change Everyday Problems into Moments of Potential,” by Charlene M. Proctor, Ph.D.

More affirmations here

Researchers have discovered that not only does body shape relate to how attractive we find others, but also in the way they carry themselves.

The findings reflect the views of over 700 individuals who participated in a series of five studies, three of which involved animated representations of people walking. The attractiveness ratings for perceived women increased by about 50 percent when they walked with hip sway, and attractiveness ratings for perceived men more than doubled when they walked with a swagger in their shoulders.

“When encountering another human, the first judgment an individual makes concerns the other individual’s gender,” said Kerri Johnson, one of the study’s authors. “The body’s shape, specifically the waist-to-hip ratio, has been related to gender identification and to perceived attractiveness, but part of the way we make such judgments is by determining whether the observed individual is behaving in ways consistent with our culture’s definitions of beauty and of masculinity/femininity. And part of those cultural definitions involves movement.”

“It turns out that decisions about a particular individual’s attractiveness are high level ones which integrate an entire complex of cues, one of which, again, involves how the individual moves.”

The study appears in the most recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed publication of the National Academy of Sciences.

Louis G. Tassinary, one of the study’s authors, first became interested in visual cues to human attractiveness when he realized he was unsettled by a popular 1990s take on the subject – that female physical attractiveness depends primarily on the ratio between an individual’s hips and waist. According to this line of thinking, waist-to-hip ratios greater than the “ideal” (approximately .7) portend that a female will be perceived necessarily as less attractive.

This early research used simple line drawings, asking study subjects to rate figures as to attractiveness and was supported by evolutionary arguments – that is, that females with certain waist-to-hip ratios were more fecund than others and were therefore perceived to be more attractive.

In collaboration with former Texas A&M professor Wendy Wood, and current Texas A&M professor Mardelle Shepley, Tassinary and Kristi Hansen, then working on her master’s degree in architecture, demonstrated in the late 90’s that the linkage between the waist-to-hip and perceived attractiveness was likely an artifact due to the commonly used line-drawn stimuli. Tassinary then worked with Mitsitoshi Higa, then a master’s degree student in visualization at the college, to develop more dynamic, animated figures to use in experiments on perceived attractiveness.

These early efforts opened up a fruitful line of inquiry, Tassinary says. “Using our more dynamic figures, it became clear to us that the waist-to-hip ratio is just one cue to perceived attractiveness. Because attractiveness generally is both complex and multidimensional, Kerri and I designed this current line of research to broaden the scope of inquiry.”

Knowing the cognitive mechanisms undergirding the relations between judgments of attractiveness and body cues is essential to understanding human evolution, Tassinary notes. For example, physical manifestations of “femaleness” differ across cultures. Western cultures may favor a smaller waist-to-hip ratio (the “hourglass” figure), while certain non-Western cultures have been found that favor a larger ratio (the “tubular” figure).

Not only has the research proved fruitful and significant, but it is a model for collaboration in the academic realm, Tassinary notes. Johnson was once his student, earning her master’s at Texas A&M while the two worked together on earlier projects, and their collaboration has continued since Johnson received her doctorate from Cornell University.

“The current findings bolster our understanding of how and why the body is perceived attractive,” Johnson notes. “Body cues bring about the basic social perception of sex and gender, and the compatibility of those basic precepts affects perceived attractiveness.”

Source: Texas A&M University & New York University

Most people feel badly about themselves from time to time. Temporary feelings of low self-esteem may be triggered by being treated poorly by someone else recently or in the past, or by a person’s own judgments of him or herself. This response is normal. However, low self-esteem is a constant companion for too many people, especially those who experience depression. If you go through life feeling bad about yourself needlessly, low self-esteem keeps you from enjoying life, doing the things you want to do, and working toward personal goals.
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Categories of people vulnerable to having low self-esteem
*Children who were verbally, emotionally, physically, sexually abused
*Children who were not loved and accepted unconditionally either at home, at school or in the community
*Children of parents or grandchildren of grandparents who came from a codependent or dysfunctional family system
*Children of dependent parents (alcohol, drugs, gambling, food, shopping, sex)
*Children of workaholic parents
*Children of mentally ill parents
*Children raised in a high stress environment
*Children raised in an environment where feelings were not openly expressed, experienced, or welcome
*Children who have experienced the divorce of their parents
*Children who have experienced the loss of a parent or significant other in their childhood
*Children raised in an absolutist or fundamentalist environment
*Children raised in a family headed by a single parent due to divorce, death, or absence due to career
*Children who were abused emotionally or verbally in a school environment
*Adults who have been hurt badly in a relationship, in marriage, in school, at work, or in the community
*Adults who work in a codependent work environment
*Adults hurt in a relationship at work or in the community with someone and/or married to someone who is dependent (alcohol, drugs, gambling, food, shopping, sex
*Adults in a relationship with someone or married to someone who is a workaholic
*In a relationship with someone or married to someone who comes from a codependent family or work system
*Members of a family in which a child with a developmental disability is born and reared
*Members of a family in which a chronically ill family member is cared for
*Members of a family or work environment in which a compulsive individual lives
*Compulsive or dependent individuals once they are treated and enter recovery
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Building Self-Esteem
A Question of Self-Esteem

A local reader asked over coffee a few questions about self-esteem. Since the information is worth sharing, I present it here in Question and Answer form.

Q: “What is self-esteem? Is it another word for self-confidence?”

A: No, they are different. SELF-ESTEEM deals with the image we have of ourselves. It is about how we see and FEEL about ourselves. It is about the degree to which we VALUE ourselves. Those who have a positive self-image, hold themselves in ESTEEM. (They have high self-esteem.)
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Abuse creates toxic shame – the feeling of being flawed and diminished and never measuring up. Toxic shame feels much worse than guilt. With guilt, you’ve done something wrong; but you can repair that – you can do something about it. With toxic shame there’s something wrong with you and there’s nothing you can do about it; you are inadequate and defective. Toxic shame is the core of the wounded child. This meditation sums up the ways that the wonderful child got wounded. The loss of your I AMness is spiritual bankruptcy. The wonder child is abandoned and all alone.
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Ability to speak for self
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You seldom address the issues that concern you the most. Whether it’s noisy neighbors or a raise you feel you deserve, you usually wait for someone else to bring it up. When someone treats you poorly, you often hesitate to speak openly. Letting people know you disagree with them is difficult since you generally lack self-assurance. However, if you act like you deserve respect, others will treat you accordingly.
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