Welcome

This is my journey. I want to share this incredible roller coaster ride of hopes, dreams, signs, emotional crashes, and excitement.
this is the space where i work out what is going on in my head. i hope that you can see yourself in my posts and that you will gain something from following my story.

Showing posts with label trust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trust. Show all posts

Tuesday, 27 May 2014

horoscope

i don't usually pay attention to horoscopes. and when i do, they are just silly. however, my last 2 horoscopes have been incredibly accurate and right on. this morning i woke up feeling vulnerable and raw. and this was today's horoscope that i will go through bit by bit. 

May 27, 2014
A Loving Trust
Aries Daily Horoscope
You may feel wide open and vulnerable today, and you could feel the need to reach out and share your fears and insecurities with others. It's possible you will seek the company of dear friends or loved ones, individuals you know you can trust. 

i use my blog as a way to reach out and share with others. seeking the company of people i can trust is my plan for today. 


You might consider asking one of these people to get together with you today to have a long conversation. If you do, you might first think about how you're feeling today and what may be at the root of any worry or conflict you could be experiencing. If you communicate these things openly with another person, allowing yourself to be vulnerable, you may get emotional support in response. 

i am meeting Zed for coffee this afternoon, with the plan to have a long conversation about all our worries. and my constant goal at the moment is to be open and vulnerable. which is why this horoscope speaks to me so deeply. 

Should you wish to be open and vulnerable today but feel blocked, you might consider letting yourself really trust those with whom you speak.

Trusting the people we are closest to allows us to be vulnerable. Having faith that others love and want the best for us creates an atmosphere of openness and willingness. We are able to set aside our fears and can freely express anything that weighs on our minds or hearts. 

trust. i put my trust in my readers that my openness and my willingness to share the deepest parts of myself with be received with love and not with judgement. 

The simple act of communicating these things to a caring person lightens our burden. The more we share, the better we feel, and the more closely connected we are to the other person. Trust that those you choose to be open with today care about you and appreciate your honesty, and they will respond to your vulnerability with love and support. 

trust, openness, vulnerability ... those are the messages i will carry with me today. 

yesterday, i was having a bad day and i reached out to gigi's mom and told her how i was feeling and why. she shared with me a website called  www.dailyom.com which had these horoscopes as well as a beautiful message about grief. this was yesterday's horoscope:

When we are trying to piece together the puzzle of our future, we can get help and guidance from other people. 

gigi's mom offered me support and guidance and hope in her email to me. she gave me a piece of my puzzle. 

Everyone we interact with has something to contribute to our journey. As we engage with others and listen to their advice, we can formulate our image of the right path, solution, or action for ourselves. Each person we question can add a small piece to the puzzle of our future. 

gigi's mom set me on the right path as i was wavering in an opposite direction. 


Seek recommendations and guidance from others regarding your aspirations today, absorb the wisdom that benefits you, and watch a new piece of your life's puzzle fall into place.

each person who offers me wisdom has offered me a piece of my puzzle, or as directed me as to where my piece needs to go ... i have never been good at puzzles, so having help makes me feel less lonely and less alone. 

it's amazing how one person can say one thing that can have a huge impact on your day. be that person today ... be that person who says something to someone that changes their day. 

be kind to yourself, and each other,

xoxo

...


Thursday, 17 April 2014

damaged antenna

last night i learned from D B-R, that we are born with the ability to be intuitive. we are naturally able to tell the good people from the bad people - meaning the people who make us feel good and the people who make us feel bad. 

but what happens when a child is told that their instinct is wrong, or crazy, or stupid? what happens when children are made to feel like their natural intuition is off? 

it teaches you to not trust yourself and your intuition. it teaches you that what you feel is wrong. 

imagine a child who cried every time she saw her cousin. cried so much that she threw up. and the response to that was for her parents to work on desensitizing her to seeing his face by putting photos of him in bedtime story books. 

imagine a child who cried every time she saw her cousin. cried so much that she threw up. and the response to that was for her parents to ask her questions about why, to never leave her alone with that cousin, and to be on red alert around him.  

which child do you think will grow up trusting themselves? trusting their intuition? trusting the people whose job it is to take care of them, to protect them, and to keep them safe?

a child whose intuition isn't trusted learns that she can't trust herself. 

that's me. 

i have a damaged antenna. i know perfectly well who is going to harm me, and yet i act as if i trust those people. 

up until the last few years, i would enact untrustworthy relationships repeatedly. 

i remember being 6 and cabbage patch kids were all the rage. people had swarmed stores and near-riots had broken out in december as people fought to buy cabbage patch kids for christmas. 

my dad managed to get me one on christmas eve. 

so there i was, 6 years old, at ballet class. my friends and i went downstairs with our cabbage patch kids and our moms were still upstairs. a man walked up to us and asked us about our dolls and asked if he could take one to show his friends in a restaurant. 

i handed over that doll. i was sure that i would never see it again. i was sure that he had stolen it forever. my damaged antenna told me that talking to a strange man was bad, but that i must be crazy so i talked to him. my intuition told me that he was stealing my doll, but my busted antenna told me that i was wrong about everything else, so i must be wrong about this too. 

in the end, the man did actually come back with the doll. but my mom was furious at me for talking to a stranger and for giving that stranger my doll to take into a restaurant. 

damaged antenna. 

about ten years ago i became friends with a woman whom i shall call Leanne. this was an odd friendship. my intuition told me that this friendship was never going to work. Leanne told me that if i ever crossed her she would hate me for life. but because i believed that my intuition was off, i stayed friends with Leanne and took her constant verbal abuse. this went on for 2 years, me thinking that this friendship was crappy, but convincing myself that i am always wrong, and staying her friend. 

it wasn't until i crossed her that the friendship ended. it was a little thing. i turned my back and spoke to someone that wasn't her in a staff meeting. seriously. i'm not kidding. that one act made her decide to hate me "for life." and we haven't spoken since. it's been 8 years. we still work together and she continues to ignore me as much as it is possible to do in a work setting. 

i look back on that friendship, and on many others that i had before that one ... and i think about my damaged antenna. 

so ask yourself this ... when you were a child, were you taught that your intuition was worth listening to? or were you taught to mistrust yourself?

my damaged antenna plays out in all areas of my life. it plays out in food and eating. i make a list of the foods that i can't eat, even though intuition tells me that deprivation will lead to a binge. which it does. which then leads to further deprivation of food altogether. 

i don't know my own cues for when i am hungry and when i am full, because i wasn't taught to believe myself or to believe what my mind and body tell me. 

can a damaged antenna be repaired? of course it can. through mindfulness. through trusting myself. through listening to myself. 




even after this terrible winter, the flowers come back. they know when to grow. they know when to lie dormant in the earth. i saw these flowers today on my walk and thought about intuition. 



how is your antenna?  


be kind to yourself, and listen to your intuition

xoxo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btbTj7DJ1yM ...

Tuesday, 15 April 2014

betrayal and marbles





i remember my first ever betrayal by a friend. i was in kindergarten. we were sitting in circle and the teacher was talking. i whispered to my friend that the doctor said i didn't have to wear glasses anymore ... the teacher yelled at us for talking and asked if we were talking on topic. my friend could have lied and said yes. she lied all the time. but she didn't. she said "no" so i got yelled at some more. 

i remember that feeling of my heart sinking. of knowing that my best friend didn't have my back. 

so what do we do with these feelings of betrayal? i want to share with you a really important part of Brene Brown's Daring Greatly. she wrote about trust as a jar of marbles. 



when someone does something trusting, we add marbles to their jar, and when we are betrayed we take marbles out. she wrote:


When we think about betrayal in terms of the marble jar metaphor, most of us think of someone we trust doing something so terrible that it forces us to grab the jar and dump out every single marble. What’s the worst betrayal of trust? He sleeps with my best friends. She lies about where the money went. He/she chooses someone over me. Someone uses my vulnerability against me (an act of emotional treason that causes most of us to slam the entire jar to the ground rather than just dumping out the marbles.)

All terrible betrayals, definitely, but there is a particular sort of betrayal that is more insidious and equally corrosive to trust. In fact, this betrayal usually happens long before the other ones. I’m talking about the  betrayal of disengagement. Of not caring. Of letting the connection go. Of not being willing to devote time and effort to the relationship. The word betrayal evokes experiences of cheating, lying, breaking a confidence, failing to defend us to someone else who’s gossiping about us, and not choosing us over other people.

These behaviors are certainly betrayals, but they’re not the only form of betrayal. If I had to choose the form of betrayal that emerged most frequently from my research and that was the most dangerous in terms of corroding the trust connection, I would would say disengagement. When the people we love or with whom we have a deep connection stop caring, stop paying attention, stop investing and fighting for the relationship, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in.

Disengagement triggers shame and our greatest fears - the fears of being abandoned, unworthy, and unlovable. What can make this covert betrayal so much more dangerous than something like a lie or an affair is that we can’t point to the source of our pain - there’s no event, no obvious evidence of brokenness. It can feel crazy-making.

so what do we DO? how do we recover when we notice the marble jar is empty?


we trust ourselves in asking for what we need. we notice the people whose jars are over-flowing and we focus on those relationships. we let go of our fear of being abandoned and alone and we turn to our full-jarred relationships. because those are the people who will fill your life with more than simply marbles. 

as well as remembering my first betrayal, i also remember the first time someone had my back. it was my cousin D. i was the youngest kid on the street and all the older kids used to tease me and bully me. i had these shoes ... these really cool red plastic sandals. and the boys on the street would tease me by calling them orange. i know how dumb that sounds. i really do. but i was only 7 years old and it was one of the many things the boys did to make me cry. they seemed to take pleasure in my tears. tying me up to the tree with skipping ropes, trying to get me to eat poison berries ... anyway ... my cousin D was visiting. he is 3 years older than me, so he seemed like a big grown-up teenager to me though he was only 10. and he stood up to those boys and told them that the shoes were, in fact, red. RED. 



such a small thing. but it has stayed with me for 30 years. D remembers it too. his jar is over-flowing with marbles. 

who are your full-jar people? how do they add marbles to the jar? what will you do to add marbles to theirs?

be kind to yourself,

xoxo

...

Sunday, 13 April 2014

grateful for friendships


i have been wanting, for a long time, to write a post thanking people for being my friends. but i am so worried that i will forget someone, that i am not going to name any specific friends, and instead i am going to say ... you know who you are. 

having friends that you can have open conversations with is the most important thing in the world. there is nothing better than the relief of sharing your story with a friend who doesn't judge. 

thank you to the friends who listen to me without judgement. it took a very long time, many many many years, for me to find you, and i appreciate you very much. 




having someone just listen to me, or even just be there when i am down is an amazing thing. i spent so much of my life feeling alone, and now i have an incredible group of friends who have stuck by me throughout everything i throw at them. 



when i was starting grade 9, i had a goal to make friends with every single student in the entire school. 500 friends. that was my plan. but getting to know everyone meant not truly getting to know anyone. i am incredibly lucky that over the last 10 years, i have developed incredible friendships that are true, meaningful, important, and unlike anything i have ever experienced before. 



my friends are my family. they are the people that i turn to for love, support, and understanding. and i hope that i am to them what they are to me. and then there are the family members who have become true friends.



there was a long period of my life where i felt very lonely, and very alone. and it took a lot of encouragement for me to reach out to people to make friends. and since then, my corner of the forest has become very crowded and lovely. and i will even venture to other parts of the forest. 




there's the friend who is there to tell me to stop beating myself up, the one who gives me pragmatic advice when i am sure the sky is falling, the one who listens and says "yeah, that sucks dude," the one who gives me hugs and cuddles, the one who sends me cyber hugs, the friend who knows when to make a smart ass comment to make me laugh, the one who will meet me at the very same restaurant every time partly because it's delicious and partly because i know how to get there and where to park, the friend who knows when to side with me and when to play devil's advocate, the friend who listens without judgement, the one who is there at 3am when i can't sleep and neither can she ... i could go on and on about my amazing friends. but since most of you are reading this, i am simply going to say thank you for being my friend. 

and finally, you know who you are ... 



be kind to yourself, and to your friends, 

xoxo

ps. This post on brene brown's website is awesome:
http://brenebrown.com/2014/04/08/daring-interview-series-meet-gavin-aung/

...