You need to understand said the snake – day 364 into 365

Days of high tension here, it is like something is cooking in my subconscious and I’m not understanding it. Last night I dreamed, I lay down on a bed an a big snake somehow circled my chest, I could not breathe, my heart almost stopped beating. I did not want to die but the snake kept on smiling at me saying it would not be a problem, I just had to learn to let go and the pain would be over; ‘Life is just a stage, stop resisting and understand all this, the fear and suffering will stop.’ Well, NOT READY YET! So…. obviously I resisted (the candle on my table just broke when I wrote that) and called for help. (NEW!) And now I wonder what would have happened if I had not resisted. I think the snake himself was Wisdom. And he was going to speak to me about how this world and Life and Death work. So I guess I missed out.

The bookstore man gave me a book on reincarnation but I have not been reading that since last week. I am guessing the dream is part of that and possibly, well very likely, it is related to my fear of death which is spurred by my hypochondria in combination with the pains I experience (still not taking painkillers) from falling of my bike. Part of me thinks that I had a heart attack and that it was masked with a dream. I’m starting to wonder more and more: how does one heal from hypochondria? Sigh….

Well, I guess this dream is also part of the changes going on in me in the last months. Sobriety has me working out and thinking about ‘good and bad’, how I used to mix them up. How we (I!) live in a society which is not sustainable and very much destructive towards itself and the environment. Destructive in all fields of life; bringing up children, politics, living together, media, health and medicine, education, relations, food, agriculture, environment, business, spirituality, well, anything. I find it difficult to deal with.

I am trying not to let my own (financial) desperation seep into my view of the world but, well, somehow I feel I stand here, at the edge of society and looking and thinking: I do not want to join you, I do not want to be like that anymore, I do not want to live like that, I do not want a part in this destruction. I also know that I am a part of it and that the destruction in me is big – specifically towards myself but that well, that has to force its way to the outside too I’m guessing. And… did I, the addict, not ‘just’ design another way to ‘not fit in’ and keep my status of ‘not normal’? Or is it fear of failure which keeps me pointing fingers? Sheer laziness?

I feel the falling of my bike and the snake they are related and trying to tell me what it is I am and where I need to go. I feel I can’t deal with the truth that comes out of that. I fear that one of the conclusions is that I really need to leave the city because it is not good for me. I don’t want to move, I like my place, I have moved 25 times in my life. I do not want to move again. But I also know this environment, the neighbourhood, the flat building, it is unhealthy. It is not a ‘good’ neighbourhood but there are worse. However…. all the people circling my house have a problem with addiction. I sometimes wonder if it runs in the building or, dunno, in the ground if that is possible? Alcoholism, cocaine, pot, it’s all there and it keeps on being there because the people may move but the next one moving in has the same issues – it is unbelievable. I grew up in a green place where the next door neighbours lived 200m away. Now I am surrounded by either addicts or families who live with 5 kids on 55m2. I tried to bring the village to the city by introducing myself to my neighbours, being neighbourly, lending people stuff that I have, using my machines to repair goods for them, I organise a yearly BBQ for the street, I clean the communal garden – but it is not the same.

I am guessing if I had a job or daily responsibility for anything else next to well, myself, the house and the cat, I would not have all these worries and things would not run so deep. But I don’t. And I do think this is my path, this waking up from the craziness of our society. It feels like when the blinds about the alcohol fell away I realised what a crap I’ve been buying into. And now everything shifts. I find that difficult. My past is changing because memories come back which I, not so much relive, but I (finally) become aware of their destructive impact. My current life is changing every day because every day I get more insight in the strangeness, the addiction and destruction that run through our society. There is good too, yes, I see that, and I do realise that we are at a sort of seesaw currently so times are unstable but, well, I find it difficult.

I find it difficult and very hard to find my place in it. I don’t see an entry, anywhere. I have the idea all the doors are closed to me, only the door that says: you need to understand more, walk the spiritual path, that door is open. But what the heck do I need to do there? I don’t even know what spirituality actually means?! Again I feel I need to grow up and there is this baseball bat in my neck driving me on. I didn’t ask for f@cking snakes killing me in my dreams? I want to be normal. I want to find a place where my boat can rest, a haven, not always being out there on the sea in heavy weather doing it on my own in offline life. And I f#cking can’t even cry normally because all my chest muscles are blue and hurt from falling of my bike. I don’t want to walk this road, it is too difficult. I don’t want to feel this much and not know where to go. Next time the snake comes along he can have me.

And just when it all felt like too much to bear, the universe send me a double rainbow today. 🙂 So, well, that was nice and it, I don’t know, changed stuff. Made things less desperate and more bearable. There is always a promise in a rainbow. 🙂

After waking up from the snake dream I put my hand on the cat who was sleeping restlessly. I fell half asleep and suddenly had this belly full of kittens experience. It really felt like I was pregnant with 6 kittens and a bit restless with the upcoming birth. I guess I got into her dream. That was strange. Hope she did not experience my snake dream. Or maybe she was the snake because he kept on banging his head against mine like she does. 🙂

Well, well, a year ago I wished to become clear, to learn to see things for what they are and to become visible for who I am – without the structures that addiction, I and society build around me. I think I am getting what I wished for but might have bitten of a little more than I can chew.

I just Facebook chatted with the 19 bags of empty beer bottles friend. I said ‘Sad here because of my mothers dying day tomorrow.’ He send a :-(. I said: ‘But you can congratulate me on not drinking for a year.’ And he replied ‘I’ll drink to that.’ I am guessing I am to blame for that too, I did not fully explain the trouble I was in, just told him I had to quit drinking.

So… what did I do to cheer me up? Yes, this is the cheered up version of me today :-D. I went to see the bookstore man, spoke for an hour. I am no match for him, my god. It is so strange how this transfer of addiction into falling in love has worked. I am learning every time that I see him that I do not know shit about him. It is so strange. I think I am mostly over my acute falling in love thing but there is still this wish to impress which irritates me and, also killing: a wish to take care of him when he’s not feeling well. Funny that it is accepted when given freely, but when I notice in myself this hmmm, shifting, this, manipulation then he picks up on it immediately and gets very cross. Oooh Life. Still, thankful I am able to work this out while he is pretty much aware of it and we speak of it sometimes. I knew when I got the time to work it out I would learn a whole lot. One of the things I learned is that I immediately make some sort of bubble in which I place the other and I and then I think I know him. Set and done. I knew that if I had the time to hang around I would most obviously come to a point where the bubble would burst. It did. Well, had to several times. 😀

Ooh, continuation on the post before this one on me walking a certain old path or thinking in a certain pattern and then falling of my bike or running into pain in the tram. Well, there is an episode 3: a friend and I were on the beach and I was well, noticing, these 3 gorgeous guys in their fit and brown beach bodies playing some soccer. The ball rolled my way and I thought ‘I might as well smoothly kick it back to them’. That would have been a good idea had my toe not been broken and had I not forgotten about that. The smooth kicking was there….. and so was the pain. There I was smiling through my teeth while swearing inside and my eyes getting all watery. Yes, yes, laugh, that’s ok, my friend and I did too. 😀 I felt so ‘caught’. Ghegheghe 😀

Back home I got so frustrated that I tarot-ed (?) on ‘what about a relations for me?’ and the universe (or I?) came up with the Priestess. Not really a hopeful sign is it? Not really the partying type I would say. 😀 And the funny thing is: I would not even know how to deal with a guy and I KNOW that. The thing is: I find what I am going through so difficult that I think ‘Man’ is The Solution. Loneliness is getting to me, I am guessing also because don’t speak with my friends about addiction. The bookstore man knows, and we speak about it but I don’t regularly speak about it with anyone and I am starting to notice that this hiding is coming between me and my friends. So…  I guess it is time to come out of the closet.

Loneliness is taboo in my life. There is this voice telling me ‘you failed’, ‘nobody loves you’, ‘loneliness is just hanging over from your centre towards another person, it has nothing to do with real contact.’ And the universe provides and just brings this blog on my blog wall: http://www.ishafoundation.org/blog/lifestyle/relationships/should-you-love-yourself/  – food for thought.

It has been a year, now, Dutch clock. Last year today I went to the supermarket at around 3 in the afternoon, bought I believe 6 pints of beer and a bottle of white wine and healthy food and snacks for 3 days. I was allowed anything I would like. That day I read the last parts of the Jason Vale book and emptied all the beers and all but the last bits of the wine bottle. I was done. I looked at the last bits in the glass and thought: I don’t want you anymore. I did leave the glass standing about and I have not washed it since. It turned into fungi after a few days. I guess that is proper. I kept the glass as you can see.

I was shit scared for having a delirium, not sure if that would have been rational but ha, I’m a hypochondriac so of course I was scared shitless. I also felt I had no option: it felt like a do or die situation. Yes, yes, not without drama, I know. I did have tiny lightning things in my brain, things that felt like there was an electric shock going on in my head in the first 3-4 days. Whenever that happened I took water with Celtic salt. (Don’t try this at home) I was guessing it was caused by an electrolyte imbalance.

So I’ve made it to a year. Did I think I would get there? I knew I had to, that’s about it. I found it 1000 times easier not to drink. I am guessing that is due to

– the extensive preparation I did before getting sober, I really studied the subject
– the Bach remedies, Schuessler salts, minerals and vitamins I took to repair and quench urges.
– blogging about anything and everything to get it out of my system
– online help! Yeah! 🙂 I never thought, dared to hope, that the online community would bring about such beauty in people. Thank you with all my heart. I don’t think I could have done this without you.
– Offline help: nutritionist friend, therapist, GP(s) and of course both the book store man 1 and 2.
– books on addiction and sobriety
– the firmness of my decision to quit
– my ability (and need!) to find my own path
– being happy that I quit
– my willingness to open up and stir where it stinks (Dutch saying)
– and last but not least the free online alcohol desensitization training I did. (Yes, still promoting it, and no, still not getting commission for it ;-). If you are interested, check out the blog I did on the subject. It just brings my mind to rest when there are well, urges, tiny ones. I feel it reroutes the neurological path that would normally lead to ‘drink’ to ‘hmmm, why again?’ For me it thus prevents urges.

Ok, it is way past bedtime so here it is, in short:

I AM HAPPY THAT I QUIT. 🙂

I need; to sleep
I want: to sleep and life to be easy but then there is the bookstore man who says; ‘Do you really?’ And I know he’s right, because than I would have chosen another way. I did not.
And what I would also like is to work with an addiction specialist, or several from different fields and look at my posts from last year and have their imput. That would be cool.
I take: Today! Party!!! Lazy sushi: eco salmon and shrimps, seaweed salad, avocado and cucumber all on a plate, no fancy rolling or so. I had no place left for a choice of the 3 cheeses I bought said the Dutchy. 🙂
On discipline: no clue, hoping to work on that with my therapist when he’s back from holiday
3 Things:
– 1 year sober. Crying now. Wow!
– my cat
– I, I did it. MOM!!! I DID IT!!!!!! DID YOU SEE?

Eight years ago this date my mother asked the GP to end her life. That is legal in the Netherlands, under strict rules including evidence of needless suffering and checks from several doctors. My mothers cancer had spread through her body fully. She would have lived possibly another week if she had not asked for euthanasia. I am glad for her she did. She asked me on her deathbed to go easy on the beer.

Bye mom. I still miss you every day. I find it so difficult.

Karma tells me not to forget what I learned

This week I went to my homeland to visit my brother and SIL. It was odd. Obviously my SIL did not tell my brother I had to quit because the only ‘contact’ we had in the hours we saw each other was when he tried to inform me of all the nice types of beer the new store around the corner has. Here I am, smiling and thinking ‘I hope they make you barf, insensitive bleep.’ Which actually happened immediately because while speaking to me so passionately about the beers he actually downed a glass of milk which worked out to be 2 weeks past the ‘use before’ date. He only found out when he was at the bottom of the glass that it tasted awful. It’s funny in a weird way and I actually felt guilty about it.

Next to doing nothing with the rest of my life I am thoroughly (not) enjoying what is happening. The other day I fell of my bike and looking back I think the learning experience was like such: I biked to the bookstore because I was going to fill in for the bookstore man that day. While doing that I allowed myself to step on my high horse and tried to get into that flow of ‘purpose, structure and money’ which is so specific for people riding to work in the morning. It always helps when I bike the same pace as these people with real jobs actually do. So I did and I felt like ‘Ha, this is how it felt when I was one of those ‘purpose, structure and money’ people.

While feeling glorious, in control and unbeatable I met up with a man in an electronic wheelchair who was zigzagging the bike lane in front of me. I called out, saying ‘excuse me’ and he moved even more to the left where I was trying to overtake him. So I said ‘excuse me’ again (sounds like ‘excuse me. DICK!’) while thinking ‘You sodden alco, fucking get out of my way!’ Yes, yes, there’s this thing Craig Nakken spoke about where addicts always point at other for being more addicted and worse than they themselves are. I noticed I was doing that and realised that ALL I had learned in the last year about taking my own weather with me, about not spreading anger but taking it in and learning from my projections, about acceptance, about continous judging narrowing life, had gone out of the window with me wanting to be in control and in the purpose, structure and money flow’.

While realising that I accelerated and hoped I could just get away with this bad behaviour because, what? Because I had earned some cockiness? Life gave me another 20 meters in that mode and that’s when I lay down on the streets. And the first thing I saw when opening my eyes was actually not the tall, blond, blue-eyed descendent of a Viking nurse who helped me later, but the wheelchair buzzing by and somebody saying: ‘Couldn’t you pick another place to do this?’

So… cockiness, arrogance and the readiness to throw all what I had learned about acceptance and humanity overboard. The bookstore man and I spoke about me falling, the picture had not cleared up in my mind yet. I was wondering what the ‘purpose’ of it was because I had an idea that there was. He said: ‘Well, for me, when you rang and told me you had fallen of your bike I had the idea it was important because somehow it broke something between you and me. I don’t know what but it felt important. And from that moment on I knew I did not have to worry about the store anymore because your presence had changed.’ From cockiness to a place where I would be more likely to actually listen to a customer e.g. Well yes! And that what broke would have been my pride and with that my idea of control and omnipotence and the will to impress you, thank you. Sigh, sigh, triple sigh. About learning the hard way…

I learned: if I walk in my old shoes, the cocky ones, where I am looking for meaning and importance through my status in the world, I will meet up with alcohol and I will fall down.

I trew a Tarot card, it was 2 of cups, you can look that up if you like – I believe there is a lot of truth in it. Funny thing is: In my set it is called ‘Equilibrium’, I had the reversed version so…. Tarot says I fell of my bike due to lack of balance. Surprise?!!!! Yeah, why not say it is because of gravity… duh?! 😦

So… was it done there and then? Of course not! Next Monday I went to see the doctors because a toe that had been hurting a lot and had swollen considerably sort of felt like… there where things shifting inside. Now I have very, very, very tiny and non-awake toes according to my former yoga-teacher so things shifting by itself inside…. hmmm…. not good. And the black that was on the toes did not wash off but was actually a bruise so lacking a bike I took the tram to the GP. 🙂

With my elbow having heftily kissed the Dutch bike lane I thought I would be better of not standing in the midst of the crowd in the tram but be seated away from the people. So I found this one, one, one and only empty chair right beside a man who actually barred it because he sat at the aisle side. Immediately I got irritated and went into despise mode while ‘nicely’ (forget the ‘n’) asking ‘Could I have that chair please?’. He looked up with irritation, despise and brusquely moved exactly not enough out-of-the-way for me to pass. Which made me decide that it was a Very Good idea to barge on and take the place. While thinking ‘You do it again, you are forgetting everything you have learned, you are spreading anger and contempt in order to make yourself feel better’. The ‘feeling better’ did not take long.

The tram moved, it was an old model so while trying to work my way into a tiny space around another person I lost balance and tried to gain that back while using my right arm to catch the top of the bench. I missed and my bruised elbow polished the steel frame. With my left arm I grabbed a pole and yanked all my infected tendons out of their sockets. My black and blue knee banged into the bench itself and the man used his foot and full weight to remind me of my bare toes in slippers. I cursed. And again. I think I cursed quite loud several times.

He never came to sit next to me after that. Nobody did actually till new people came in the next stop. I tried to explain but it worked out he did not speak Dutch. Totally his fault then. 😉

My GP immediately jumped for the wound on my elbow, I childishly drew it away saying ‘That’s not what I’m here for.’ GP’s can be so, dunno, fascinated by wounds? It’s like old days when you fall and go to your mom and she starts to poke and clean up. Ieeeehks!

GP’s are funny about things that hurt anyway, as are dentist, always poking a little further. The other day I asked her why she did that. She explained that she could, by poking in my shoulder, feel where the swelling was and determine that indeed the tendons where infected. That actually relaxed me a bit. I mean, sounds better than my idea that they just like doing that. Not?

So, again, she pulled and poked my toes, it hurt but they were straight so I got 2 pieces of tape to keep 2 toes together and that’s it. Either broken or bruised, probably broken because there were pieces moving. Refresh tape when needed and keep on till it does not hurt anymore. Come back when the toe works out not to be straight. After having walked a few kilometers with a heavy backpack on my thin sandals I can add 1: do not carry a heavy backpack with two hurt shoulders and 2: do not walk so many meters on thin slippers AND carrying a heavy backpack. Today I tried both with heavy shoes. That’s better for the toes.

So… on roads that are closing; I feel that because of the process I have been going through certain behaviour is not suitable anymore and when I try to step back in time and walk, what I now call ‘the wrong path’ I get called back. Obviously not all the time and not on every field of development otherwise I would be a saint by now. I’m not but I guess at this point in the post I do not need to tell you that :-D. It is strange, all of this, getting sober, losing non-constructive behaviour, my search for what is right and what is wrong. I found the other day that addiction has been mixing up my life badly because addiction is about thinking that what is wrong is actually good.

I am happy that I quit. I am a bit disillusioned about the status of my life now the 1 year thing is around the corner. I would have wished that by now I was in control, powerful and omnipotent… ok, that I had a job where I was in control, high up and omnipotent and making a lot of money…. eh… Well. That. But still, even though things are not going ok financially I keep on having this sense of being exactly where I need to be. Even when I fell down I felt it was exactly where I needed to be. Ooh, the GP thought so too, she said: ‘It is a nice opportunity for you to start to learn to ask for help.’ Whaaaa! I have been trying to do so, damn, well, that’s a full other post. Did not know it was such an issue (as said by the person who quit by herself and denied detox and addiction counseling).

The bookstore man gave me a book, an introduction on reincarnation. It is really funny because the writer somewhere mentions ‘and of course all these believes of reincarnation have attached to them a system of punishment and reward where both of these are executed in the next life’. And I was thinking: what a bad concepts, how very much unsustainable and silly to keep on thinking in punishment and reward. Nature does not punish, nor does it reward, it only knows consequences. Walk the natural, sustainable path and you (I!) will be ok. That is the path without the opinions and judgements and all that which gets in the way of feeling clearly and having an intuition and instinct which are of use to further us (me) as people instead of misguided by fear and mental, physical and spiritual illness.

All religions, most walks of life are built on a system of punishment and reward. But what if life itself has natural sustainable paths we ‘just’ need to discover? The other day the bookstore man made a remark about me understanding something about him because ‘Well, you are overweight too.’ (He’s got like 5 kilo he likes/could lose but he’s a tiny bit vain). And I thought: How do you know I am overweight? If all goes as it goes, why is it not so that my weight is exactly what it needs to be? Maybe for me to experience that it is nicer to get rid of it, maybe, maybe not. In all that we (I!) do there is such basic thought interwoven where ‘it is not good, it is not good enough, it is not as it should be, things should be different, things are wrong, things should be improved, I should be improved.’ while you know: being addicted is shite, but I would have never gotten to this point in my life if I had not been addicted. And I don’t think I would have been a better person for it. I would have kept walking my ‘purpose, structure and money’ path until I what, would have died? Got an awful disease to bring me off that path?

I would have never realised what addiction is, how I am in the core not satisfied with who I am. How I have used/use work, money, status, alcohol, internet, romantic relations and lately sugar to get away from my feelings of shame. I’m not saying I am at peace with it totally, it fluctuates, but the seed of ‘What is in the way is The Way’ has been planted. That works 2 ways I have come to realise: 1 Work on the bears on the road, 2 if what is in the way is The Way, what is in the way = good because is makes me walk My Way.

And, I mean, what god / system / HP would design a world where everything is flawed in itself? That’s such eh, what, bad concept, useless, not sustainable. When trusting my higher power (natural order; balance between Creation and Destruction, Chaos and Order, yin and yang, you name it), why can’t I trust that things go as they should go? It is not about the smug satisfaction of ‘I’m so good’ it is about the opinion free realisation that existence is existence and that there are sustainable and non-sustainable walks of life and that it is up to me to try to find the sustainable one. And that I would have liked to have done that in a society which is more sustainable by itself btw. That too. Which very much links to the post from Brad which I reblogged earlier this day.

So, I am happy that I quit, currently in an opinion free state of mind where I say: I quit, that is more sustainable.

I need: to get to bed.

I want: to get to bed but actually also finish the movie.

I take: chocolate and cheese, and here and there some 1/2 a painkiller because my shoulders are hurting badly sometimes and it is not funny. I still can’t find an entrance into natural healing of these shoulder issues. It is like that road is blocked too. Can’t read what is in the books, my brain does not take it in and I have never had something like this before so I have no memory.

On discipline: the feeling for wanting discipline sort of comes and goes. The other day I had a dream which told me I am not dealing with this sustainably, that I misunderstand something but I could not work out what. I got so worked up in the dream that I pushed the issue too hard and woke up before the answer came along. 😦 I was in a flower garden then with dramatic red and yellow roses.

3 Things: this post, being acquainted with the book store man and some friends I speak with, about everything, on a daily base lately.

Hope you have a nice sober day/evening/weekend 🙂 For those out there whom are hurting I’m thinking of you, sending you a hug in which you can hide and feel comfortable until you are ready to come out again. Hang in there.

xx, Feeling

On choices and lack thereof. For all of us to reflect.

Well, about stuff

Today’s date in history
– yearly flooding of the Nile
– Maria ascension
– 1769 Napoleon Bonaparte is born
– 1939 my mother is born
– 1945 Japan surrenders after Hiroshima and Nagasaki are destroyed.
– 1961 East-Germany starts building the Berlin Wall.
– 1990 Saddam Hoessein accepts Iran’s peace treaty, this ends the Iran-Irak war.

I can’t remember what I got my mother for her last birthday. I’m guessing it were very chique chocolates. Or maybe I did not give anything because I did not know what is a nice gift to give to somebody who is on her death-bed. I can’t remember.

I do remember us speaking about the presents that she did get. Lasting presents, like an umbrella or a gift certificate to a place she would not be able to visit anyhow. About the insensitivity of the givers; how they denied her death which was quickly approaching. How odd it felt to receive them. ‘Odd, very odd.’ she said. We spoke, and we shared opinions but there was no importance in the opinions, only in us sharing them. We sat together, drank tea together. I remember painting her toe nails.

What else? This continous switching between contact and peace and sadness and trying to dig our heels in to prevent the obvious from happening. And at the other, darker side; wanting the whole shebang to be over, so I could have a beer. Wishing that worked a little too well. She was rushed to hospital at around 14:00 because of a sudden fever. I took the times they were off to what, ‘take a load of’? I drank like I had never done before while taking photo’s of the house and garden. And then they returned unexpectedly. I shocked into being ‘sober’.

That night I rubbed her feet and could feel what part of her feet were non-responsive from the chemo she had received. That killed several nerves and parts of her feet were senseless. I remember being surprised I could point out exactly in what tiny spots the nerves had died – when being so loaded.

Looking back I think that scared my mother badly too. One for me being so sensitive that I could feel exactly what and where, something the doctors could not. And secondly: me still being that after, what they must have realised when I was gone, I drank 5 or 6 pints of beer. My mother always said: ‘If you want to know how much somebody drinks, don’t look at what they drink, look at how well they deal with it.’ I guess that evening she found her answer.

Several days later she died. On her deathbed she asked me to ‘take it easy on the beer’. I answered something like ‘I’ll be all right’ and thought ‘Don’t you dare try to take charge now!’ or something along those lines. It took me 7 years to finally get sober.

I am sorry mom. I am so sorry. This is how it was. This is how it is now, me sober. Thinking of you. Wishing things had been different. Wishing, I fucking had not drunk so much because I can’t remember the good times well.

I am happy that I quit. Though I stll regret quitting so late.

I need: to go out, see people, walk. I fell of my bike yesterday big time. Front break blocked and I got thrown off. Now I have succeeded to immobilize my right arm and shoulder too. It is funny in a painful way :-D. A little more than a year ago me getting sober started with being driven of my bike by a car. Again I seem to walk in a ‘wake-up’ or ‘self-destruct’ mode. Not sure which. Or maybe it is just an accident.

I want: dunno, no wants, possibly less pain in my shoulders, arm, knee and chest. Yes, that would be it.

I take: ha! 1/4 painkiller to get to sleep, my Ayurvedic pills, Bach rescue remedy which I luckily carried with me while falling of the bike, as Arnica (homeopathic stuff). My knee and arm have handful of skin missing but the 2 boiled eggs I carried in my backpack were not scratched 😀 Ghegheghe. I remember thinking ‘I know this’ when flying through the air. Ooh! NEW! Of course bystanders walked up to me to help me and I said: ‘I would really appreciate to lay down for a little longer because I do not think I can stand yet’. How cool is that?! NEW!!!!! I took my time on the ground to gather myself and only got to my feet when I felt I could. Somebody called the ambulance over that whom I had to explain  why I did not want to come. I lay there realising that I did not have to feel guilty about falling because I had not been drinking. NEW!!! Not that I had been drinking the year before, but still. 🙂 I did swear a lot. Ghegheghe. ´FUCK!!! Ooh sorry! FUCK! Damn!! Sorry….! Sigh….´My bike is broken, possibly total loss. 😦

I´m happy that I fell on the pavement. I could have fallen in front of a car. Did not! 🙂 Hurray for the separate bike lanes in The Netherlands! 🙂 And then I got saved by this beautiful, tall, grey eyed blond Dutch descendent of the Vikings guy saying ‘I’m a nurse, our practise is around the corner. Do you want me to help you clean up a little?’ HELL YES! He said he heard me fall from the opposite side of the roundabout.

It wasn’t all that nice. I spend the rest of the day fighting demons in the book store. I had promised to take over one day because the book store guy had family business to attend to. I had a bad case of hypochondria and thought I was going to die of internal bleeding. Well, the internal bleeding has stopped 😀 (or possibly wasn’t there? ;-)) and after I slept a very long night on a 1/4 painkiller (good stuff :-D) I feel better.

On discipline: something is waking up, no promises.

3 Things: nice people in the world, having learned to speak up when falling down, and happy that I fell nicely and with my head on my arm.

Hope you have/had a nice weekend. 🙂

xx, Feeling

Demons attack

Hmmm, tough days in the past. Demons attack. And…. they have been warded off by a hell of a good Bach Remedy mix and a visit to the GP :-). Life is strange. Hypochondria is a bitch. And, well, since I wrote most of this post one day and now continued I have added this sentence to it in hindsight: it’s a funny post. Real Feeling style, but I’m not sure if there is anything in here that can be of help to anyone. Not sure why I’m writing this disclaimer. I think I am a bit afraid that you’ll think I am batshit crazy. Well, I felt I was. Demons, demons, demons.

I’m under pressure for 3 things: 1 year anniversary coming up and my fear of ‘well, you have been sober but you have not improved one bit in your life’. The other thing is ‘if I can not drink for a year, I am not an addict’ and from there on somewhere the realisation that I really am addicted dropped into my mind. I’m thinking that part of this ‘I can do this’ behaviour has been to prove myself, but possibly more the outside world, that I’m not addicted. Keeping up appearances is big in me. Slowly now the realisation is sinking in and shit do I hate it. Walking around with this timebomb, in a world that breeds addicts and there is very little place to hide from the insanity of the outside world. The 19 bags of empty bottles friend stayed over the other night. He knows about me having had to stop drinking, then goes on advertising the beers he is going to drink before he gets to my place and when I move away because I’m full in this alcohol breeze he’s like ‘I didn’t drink a lot’.
‘Smells different to me.’

There was meanness in that. I’m guessing I’m still doing the addict thing where we (i!) tend to point at others who are worse in order to try to get away with our (my!) own behaviour. Nasty. But ha! he deserved it. I do not appreciate my meanness though, it is not within control.

Back to the original post: Again, it is about my transfer of life’s issues to imagined diseases. This time I was having an imagined heart attack. My left shoulder and arm are hurting, sometimes badly, from tendon infections and the pain and my general stress cause tension which seeps into my arm all the way up to the tips of my fingers sometimes. And because of the stress I can’t read or look up what I would need to do heal it.

Obviously… the tendon infection is NOT enough for me, I was thinking…. this pain was masking an upcoming heart attack. I can wake up at night and panick floods me but I don’t realise that. My thinking brain is not on even though it acts as if it is while listing all these signs and totally agreeing with me rationally about the panick situation. When I stay in bed the whole world falls apart in my imagination and I am totally taken in by this horror. The second I sit up right I realise that I am in some kind of weird dunno what. I don’t know a lot of people who have this, but my brother has it too.

So, obviously I did not die the night before last. But the morning was not funny either. Yesterday I was at the bookstore and we threw a I-Tjing on my situation which pointed at hexagram 44. Depending on what book you read it is about addiction (surprise!), or at least the darkness that suddenly pops up again after having been driven away. Or…. innocent signs which are actually signs of a serious disease. And then I trew 44 AGAIN the next morning which is a change in I believe 1 in 4096. So obviously I was about to die of this awful disease (and disregarded the rest of the whole thing which suited me well because it was about man and forward women).

I am very sure that I am EXACTLY where I need to be – apart from the fact that I am not moving in the world as you know it, not doing the work and money things which would be very logical. Events are unfolding and I am walking a scary path but I do think that it is my path – however uncomfortable. Brené Brown’s book has helped me to unveil some of the shame that shrouded my awareness. From there on things unfolded, literally; for days I felt like being surrounded by a big waterlily that kept unfolding its leaves. And so the world, my history kept unfolding itself, situations because reappeared in a different light and again, my history was re-written. That is powerful stuff, and exhausting. And strange, because there is this tendency to think that what was in the past, can not change. It is my experience that it can.

With that experience I got into another ‘world’ – not sure how to call it. I touched upon it earlier in a post. People speak of different worlds and I never understood that, but by now I have come to get a feel of it. It has something to do with what one believes to be reality. I have been moving in something I call a shaman type of reality with the flower of energy unfolding and unfolding and unfolding into eternity. Like this photo, but standing and continuously. I wonder how my ‘mind’ (?) comes up with these things.

The other day in conversation with the book store man I felt this energy donutty thing like below. What I felt included my feet but slightly. And what it did is take energetic knowledge from the outside, internalize it, transform it and externalize it. It was a sort of energetic knowledge exchange thing. It is ‘easy’ to speak simple true words and ‘easy’ to understand in that mode. I just googled ‘energy donut’ and later added chakra, finally found ‘torus’ – that’s what the donut is called. 🙂 I wish I knew somebody who could tell me what it is all about.

And the day before yesterday, or earlier, I lost it and slowly the world started to drop away beneath my feet. I remember somebody writing about tectonic plates shifting. Mine fell one after the next and left me floating in a Matrix sort of reality where all this, dunno, info I used to base my life on was falling away from me. Like seeing your life fly past you but not just in front and in big things but in tiny things and all around like a curtain of little pieces of information endlessly dropping, dropping, dropping. Still, I don’t know what the heck is going on only that this is what is supposed to happen even though it is very uncomfortable.

Another uncomfortable experience: feeling / experiencing the world as such that the flesh is falling of my face and my bones, again, continuously. I’m thinking I need a shaman to tell me stuff. The book store man was in a dark, dark, dark, dark mood so not accessible for any insights on this. He is in a bad place, very much like I was last year and I realise again and again that this so-called ‘falling in love’ has NOTHING to do with anybodies reality but being a projection of my longing for belonging. I don’t know anything about him. Which is/was a good learning experience all in all. Bit dark, bit hopeless, bit sickening with all the longing going on. Bit irritating to be doing the transfer of addictions but… a learning experience. Sigh.

And then I could not take it anymore and this heart attack thing came up. Damn! I even saw a Netflix movie (The proposal) where the grandmother was faking a heart attack. Talk about synchronicity….

Uncomfortable stuff which pops up and….. leaves. I wish somebody could tell me what is going on. And on the other hand, I don’t really want to pay too much attention to it because it very much feels like going crazy. I know I’m not crazy, I’m an airplane. 😀

So, I took a whole bunch of Bach remedies in order to get myself sorted out. Panick mix:

Larch: for faking illnesses in order to escape growing or growing pains.
Mimulus: for extreme fear of specific things like illnesses.
Rock Rose: for, well, against, panick
Aspen: for fear experiences which are based sort of outside the body in the, dunno, I call it the in between, and in this case the place where the scary ghosts hang out, not the angels.
Scleranthus: for 10.001 impressions and not knowing what the hell is going on.
Agrimonie: the addict remedy, for not wanting to look at what is really going on
Chicory: for claiming or wanting to claim, for being the person who nobody would like to help.
Start of Bethlehem: for tiny, medium or big trauma.
Clematis: for being unreal
Chestnut bud: for NOT LEARNING WHAT I SHOULD BE LEARNING.

That’s quite a mix, all in all a quarter tea spoon of drops of alcohol in a pint of water which I kept on filling up after I had a few sips. Did the alcohol bother me? No. Bach remedies are (still?/again) in the medicine compartment in my head so there is no drink link. I cuddled the cat and she backed away though and looked frightened and as if she tried to remember what and why.

The GP congratulated me on being sober for 11 months plus. She also told me that she thought I carried too much and that my shoulder pain was part of that. She said: ‘What you did is very good, and looking at how it worked out I think it is a very good way for you to work it all out yourself. But it seems like it is time to learn to accept help because your body is telling you that you can not bear it anymore.’

‘What therapy do you think I should take?
‘No, health stuff. Don’t go there, go do something enjoyable. You just told me you can’t read your homeopathy books anymore, back away from worrying and do something you like. And learn to ask for help. This conversation we are having is a step in that. You do not look like the person who would be given help spontaneously, you have this closed ‘I can do it all by myself thing’ over you. Work on that.’
‘I caaaahaaaaaaaaaaant…. snif, snif.’
‘Why not?’
‘People will blackmail me into doing stuff I don’t want.’

If there is anything about me which makes me easy to help it is that I’m always honest(like). Wonder what my therapist (Hi! 🙂 ) would say about that. And this answer actually looks VERY much like a control issue. Well, real help, the sort that is freely given and is not an ego thing of somebody is hard to come by. And I can’t even do it myself even though I have been at the receiving end of being forced into ‘help’ and know what not real help looks like. Maybe I should make it a subject or a post. 😀

I am happy that I quit. More so also because again I met with another bipolar person. They seem to come popping up out of nowhere in my life. Apart from thinking I have a heart attack I am afraid that I could be bipolar and the word bipolarity suddenly pops up everywhere. I have self diagnosed BP2, obviously. Well, it would explain A LOT. And then I decide that I do not care because I’m seeing the Ayurvedic doctor and Ayurveda says ‘bipolar is just another imbalance of the person’. How astute. 😀

Noticing how I always make a situation worse in my mind and continue thinking: pfiew, happy that I quit. Hypochondria, one day, one day I will have to look at that too. Not today, my arm is hurting. 😀

I take: Bach remedies and Ayurvedic stuff. Some chocolate but the larger quantities now make me nauseous which is totally unfair obviously.

I need: rest

I want: ha, it all to be over and things to be easy

3 Things: this post, nice chat with the book store man online today, insights, lots of insights, and napping on the balcony in the sun. And of course a long walk along the beach with a new friend but I’m not sure if I can reply the friendship because I am a little bit afraid of her.

On discipline: well, needing to find discipline has sent me all over the place. I am guessing part of my condemnation of not being able to find discipline is driving the demons. Ooh, when laying in bed and being utterly scared, suddenly the fears got a face and a body, like on thangka’s. That was cool because it made me realise that it were demons / fears / things which can be dealt with one way or the other, on day or the other.

Still I have no clue of where I’m heading but I still do think I’m doing what should be done. Which is weird because it has been the other way around all my life. Knowing exactly where I was heading but still feeling that what I did was wrong. Hmmm, food for thought.

Hope you found something in it. Still feel I need to apologize for another ‘out there’ post. Well, this is how my process goes. That’s what I document. It is strange. I never thought I would walk this path. But I do. It is strange to me too but it feels appropriate.

‘My sweater is on backwards and inside out… and you say how appropriate.’

Project sober Feeling.

Aaah, this

A helpful posting of a friend of mine on Facebook spins my mind around: yes, I’m having difficulty with sobriety – not that I want to run off and drink but I am starting to doubt the use of it and that would be I guess step one I guess – so I thought I was doing all kinds of things wrong. But maybe I am having difficulty because I am doing it right. Because I am not drinking. 🙂

Short post, need to be off.

xx, Feeling

1 Year anniversary anxiety

Edit 8 hours later: reading back this is the vaguest post I have ever written, if that is even possible, but eh… some funny conclusions in the end in the ‘I need’ and the ‘3 Things to be grateful for’. It is so funny how these repetitive questions again and again bring original answers. When I ask these questions I never know what the answer will be. Todays answers are those of a new era.

In 3 weeks it is my 1 year anniversary, well, assuming I get there without drinking alcohol before. Which I assume but hey, this is an addiction so it is better not to look ahead and stretch myself thin. But I do. I do look ahead and I do stretch myself thin and I do anticipate catastrophe – not sure what it looks like yet though. So I do as I always do, sit down and write about it to see what comes up.

I changed my mind not going to look at that, or maybe this is what came up. Not sure. 🙂 I go back to focussing on being happy that I quit because when I am there is no issue. I do worry since a few months that I’m not over the top happy that I quit anymore. But maybe I had a serious case of the pink clouds earlier this year :-). I am guessing that feeling really happy pulled me trough the first days, weeks, months which people say are the hardest. Looking back I do not remember any irresistable urges or cravings. Some people have problems with the not drinking. I have more problems with the living sober.

Or possibly, I might come to rephrase that by now: I have problems living in the society as it is. With the given I have, I can’t find my way. I keep on needing to change my reaction to, relation to society; work, money, admin, living, food, agriculture, meat, health, people, man (!), sex (non existent but still), emotional safety, connection, family, environment, general history, family history, family dynamics, emancipation of woman, men and children, politics, GMO, religion, ayahuasca, drugs, alcohol, addiction, my addictive personality, sugar, addiction transfer to ‘love’, transfer of emotions as a system in itself, the health of my cat, advertising, appearance, poverty, systems of abuse and suppression, forgiving, gratitude, meditation, love, hate, knowledge, transparency, destruction, attention, group dynamics, black and white and shades of grey, inside and outside, magic, coincidence, worlds, responsibility, walls, doors, control, rigidity, ease, sustainability, illusion, truth, power, realization, ignorance, consciousness, ubuntu, perfection, criticism, giving and receiving, closing and opening, speaking and listening, growing and destructing, seeing, mystifying and demystifying, expectation and reality. Everything is changing because I am changing.

I feel I see things in the world more clearly but still have no clue of where I am or where I am heading. I now know a lot of what I do not want, but I do not know what I do want. And even the ‘things’ I ‘do’ ‘want’ (book store man) are not really what I want. It is all a mist, a transfer of addiction. I’ve had enough of the moaning about that btw. Met him yesterday for 5 minutes, he’s in a dark place and excluding me. Which is good and logical because my intentions in this are wavering an unclear and I do not even want to be there where I am in that. So… be done with it Feeling, go back to your own place.Truth is hard to bear sometimes.

And then, separate from this addiction transfer there is the poor me part which maybe needs addressing some time because I am feeling it is not helpful anymore to hide but I don’t dare to. Everything is so new. I feel the world is running through me and I still attach to the pain which I feel deeper now I am sober. I also feel the beauty deeper but I have this focus on pain and sadness.

I notice I still have this tendency to sabotage myself before anybody else does. Yesterday I felt it has to do with family dynamics. I can not stand up right because I would call bullshit on our family. (And in that, do you notice the use of the word ‘our’? I would be surprised if in any of the 309 posts up to now I have mentioned ‘our’ and ‘family’ in one sentence. Ghegheghe. Interesting.) In order for my family to function I need to step down and not stand and walk upright. For me to be able to walk upright is to point out the ugliness of the situation of the marriage between my mother and father. That is the function shame has in our family. The group needs to stay together, in order to do that members need to adjust, to fit in.

I need to detach myself, be independent, cut the umbilical cord. And that would make me see what is not allowed to be seen. I do not want to live in this darkness anymore. I want to be able to walk upright, I want to be able to let go. I am feeling like dealing with this is very much like Richard Rahl revealing the statue of himself and Kahlan in the city of Altur’Rang (Faith of the Fallen, book 6 in the series Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind). In this book Richard is enslaved in a world where beauty is forbidden because enjoying beauty would ‘elevate one above the other’ and that would pervert society so instead they worships and practise misery.

I have the sudden ‘insight’ (?) that detaching myself from this ugliness is an important part of my reason for being born in this family. To hold up the mirror to their destruction. To refuse to carry their shame. I did not do that. I went into general and self-destructive mode. Need to get addicted and sober to come back to this realisation. Now I understand my anger towards them from early age on and the intensity of my refusal of them. I did not want to ‘take them in’ or ‘be with them’ because they sowed shame. This is why I need to be alone. Otherwise I would find shelter with the other and not notice what was going on. 🙂 / 😦 It is funny how letting go of pain makes room for insight. Not sure if this post is done but it is enough for today.

I am happy that I quit. Not sure why but it seems to be the path I’m walking.

I need: no clue what I need, or I feel I need nothing. Not sure which.

I want: pfff, no clue either. Hmmm, get outside, finally (!!!) buy a new tea sieve.

I take: Ayurvedic pills and still chocolate. My eating has improved though, real meals from real recipes with posts on Facebook :-).

3 Things; 1 this post and the insights, 2 life :-), 3 myself.

Discipline: things will come when they come. I went to bed at 0:00 yesterday. Which is 2 hours before I did in the last 2-3 weeks. Aiming at 23:45 today.

I hope you have a nice day. :_0

xx, Feeling

I have found what I was looking for

When I became sober it was my wish to get out of the state of addiction and become clear, transparent. To be who I am and not carry along these layers of shame, guilt, pain and misunderstanding of Life. As in such, becoming sober is a part of the path I (want to) walk. I was not sure where and how it would ‘fit into’ or ‘latch onto’ anything existing in this world but I had a vision of it: I wanted to become my core what I now call Self which I had seen in an ayahuasca ceremony. I want(ed) to learn to back away from my reactionist behaviour and not let old emotions, experiences stand in the way of a beginners mind / transparency. Not let old, unprocessed stuff colour new experiences.

Up to now I had not found where in this world I could find anything which could tell me about this road or this place. Up to today. 🙂 An internet search dropped this into my lap.

Vairagya

Fundamentally, Sushumna is attribute-less, it has no quality of its own. It is like empty space. If there is empty space, you can create anything you want. Once energies enter into Sushumna, we say you attain to Vairagya. “Raga,” means color. “Vairag,” means no color, you have become transparent. If you have become transparent, if what is behind you is red, you turn red too. If what is behind you is blue, you turn blue too. If what is behind you is yellow, you turn yellow too. You are unprejudiced. Wherever you are, you become a part of that, but nothing sticks to you. Only if you are like this, only if you are in a state of Vairag, then you will dare to explore all dimensions of life when you live here.

This is what I want. Long road 🙂 but finally an entrance into this matter that I did not have to come up with by myself. And well, a long road but as I noticed in sobriety: every step is one and baby steps are good.

Reading ‘The gifts of imperfection’ now teaches me a lot. I read about 20 pages a day – which, for me is sufficient when dealing with this kind of matter which in me looks to not only change my knowledge, my feelings, my memories and ideas but also my cells, my DNA. One of the things I learned is that now is exactly the time to read it. I had to let go of an overload of shame and sense of lack of worth before I could take this in. I feel the book is bringing me peace. 🙂 A word I would have never thought to find in this blog.

During the reading of the book I relive situations which have caused me pain and shame and also in which I shamed others. I am strong enough to look at them now without loosing my right to exist or feeling a need to drink away my feelings. The disappearing of the layers of shame make room for space and clarity, I feel I can breathe better and experience my body better. This morning I lay on my balcony in the sun and after reading something which resonated deeply with me I visualised myself standing up and suddenly became aware of tension and ‘charge’ I hold in several of my chakra’s – that was awesome. I have read my Anodea Judith book on chakra’s but have rarely actually experienced them. It is nice to learn how to look and feel more clearly now the mist that shame causes starts to lift.

Another thing I found was this post on the Hawaiian art of healing. It really resonates with me.

Ho’oponopono professes that we are all connected beings and if we see something wrong, it is a part of us that has brought us to that particular event/situation. Any event in our life is brought to us through our own vibrations.

In earlier times, if one person behaved criminally then the whole family, clan and village felt they were responsible for that behaviour. Hoʻoponopono was communicated by the village and it was addressed to the ultimate Spirit and Gaia. The heart of the mantra was – “We are responsible.”ho’oponopono mantra “We are sorry.” “Please forgive us.”

I have, from childhood onwards, looked at behaviour of people and wondered why there are so many hurt people and nobody helps them. We let children grow up in dirty slums with no place to play, no money for good food, worse, only money for poisonous fastfood and when it is ‘too late’ and the negativity of their surroundings has caught on to them we shame them, punish them and put them in jail for stealing, using drugs and other ‘criminal’ acts. I always wonder: who is the criminal here? To me it seems we have build a society where there is a definite lower class who carries the burdens of our (?) ‘success’. We do that worldwide by exploiting factory workers in Asia, Africa, we do that within countries where we allow beggars and junks to live in the nastiest circumstances, we allow that in classes, where the kid with the poor clothes and the snotty nose is the scape goat. Wealth creates a definite upper class of haves which lives on the have nots and… is ok with that. And the inbetweens keep striving and striving. The Hawaiian healing system says we, as a tribe need to take responsibility there otherwise we don’t heal. I’m thinking that is true.

I believe this concept of leaching on the weak was present in my family too. Now the curtains start to lift I truly experience how we preyed on my mother. In order to describe the relation between my mother and father I once said; ‘There are people who get cancer, and there are people whom you get cancer from.’ However harsh it sounds, looking back now, with shame lifting and being able to look at what different energy flows we had in our house I am guessing it comes very close to the truth. I am sorry mama, I am so sorry.

And… this is one side of the truth. Getting off track but mentioning it here for later reference: my mother did what my therapist calles ‘subjugation and resistance’. Not sure if he said that about her, it’s just a principle many women, people, live in: first ‘voluntarily’ subjugate to another and from there on…. fight against it! I have it too in relations to men, I feel I use as a way to keep me safe. ‘If I don’t stand up for my rights I will not be seen and not be shot down.’ (raped that is) And then in the relation suck and tease and fight because the subjugation is ‘not really my thing’. Touching on a deep fear here: I fear when I show Worthiness, when being a woman, which is pretty much a given, I will be raped. I think that was true for the environment I grew up in. Not sure though, truth has become something with many faces.

Yes, truth, truth… would come in handy. I am thinking lately that truth is relative to the world we live in and the position from which we look at things. Yeah, yeah, I know, I am 45 and I should have gotten to that point a little earlier possibly :-). I’m getting there… it is just that I don’t want to seem to let go of too many securities all at once. Truth sort of feels like a jar filled with skittles; some people only look at the orange, others only at the green ones and when speaking about their world they speak their orange and green truth. Like I used to think that all men are assholes.

And then there is this:

And then there is this, the different bodies where the use of plaster to heal a broken leg is smart in the physical body but the astral body has totally no use for it.

And then there are all the different worlds people live in, physically but also emotionally and spiritually. I wish I could map it out to understand it better. I could not find a photo to accompany it, it has to do with different planes too. I feel I do a lot of shifts through these worlds and modes and perceptions but I have no overview. It will come.

So, yes, I got of track here, funny to notice that this is another new ‘first time’ that I really start to consider editing a post to keep it more concise and understandable. I’m guessing that this thought pops up because I start to belong to myself a little more and that makes me feel like I don’t fit out and that makes me able to dare to fit in by editing. I am guessing my not editing is, next to not restricting myself in what I write, also a (sometimes not so nice) protest against the world. Yeah, the whole world of course. ;-).

I’ve lost track of where I am with this post but I need to leave so here’s a quick end:

I am happy that I quit, realising now the necessity. Also needing to do my desensitization training more because there is a power inside building up towards the 1 year anniversary which I find difficult. It’s this ‘if I can do it one year without, I might as well….. drink again.’ And it is coming at me from a whole lot of different angles currently, mainly mental things, not longing things.

I need: eh, to go on with what I do AND work on work together. Now I still have money to be able to choose.

I want: to have enough money to be able to settle in this confusing time where I am actually not confused but the world seems more confused to me. It is disturbing and I don’t know anymore where I fit in. Even though I fit into myself better and better.

I take: Ayurveda pills, really enjoying them. Ayurveda diet which currently is: no yoghurt, no banana, apples and pears only cooked (good breakfast! :-)), vegetables only cooked, cheese is ok but no or little meat. I do sometimes have chocolate but ha! I am actually looking at the quantity I am eating and considering eating less and acting upon it. No difficultly. And… no promises. I saw a photo of me yesterday with some tiny kids. I was appalled by my enormity. Need to find a healthy way to deal with that.

3 Things: 1 The gifts of imperfection book, 2 The system that ‘failure’ helps me to sort important stuff out and grow. I’m thinking if I had not worked out what is in the posts of today and the one before I would only be getting sicker and sicker. 3&4 My bravery to look at all the issues and my ability to hold my own space while doing so.

Discipline: still in the phase of doing things the whole day. Netflixing and Facebooking only in lunchtime. This morning I even started to plan some stuff while being in bed (NEW!!!) and my plan for tonight is to go to bed early and break the 1:30 am I’m doing these days. Let’s see. 🙂

Hope you have a nice day/evening. Thank you for reading and being with me on this journey. 🙂 ❤

xx, Feeling

On shame and the difference between longing and belonging

Currently reading Brené Brown her book ‘The gifts of imperfection’ – liking it, the Feeling way. I’m thinking it is a good book, and… finding too that she does not totally own what she’s writing. But, ghegheghe…. I am learning to deal with that. 😀 Starting to realise here that my perfectionism is nothing but a transfer of my own unsolved issues with shame, with not being good enough. And because I do not feel comfortable with (this aspect in) myself I feel that I need to point out other people’s inability to meet The Standard. ‘You are not good enough too! How dare you take your place in this world!’ What to say? Glad I now start to see how the dynamics work. Not happy about it yet, still in the learning phase, a little healing is happening here and there, it is a lot to process.

Opening my eyes to the shame I carry also opens up my eyes to how it got there and how this carry over system of parent to child works. Biologically very logic that we as a species carry over what we have learned of life to children. But not pretty when it comes to shame. I also remember fights with my mother where I refused to accept the shame she wanted to give to me.

Which brings me to this energetic / emotional system inside me I have been wondering about for a long time. People tend to say I am very open and therefore easy to speak with People tend to tell me very private things easily. But I sometimes think that my openness is a sham. I did not know how it worked but now I do. Part of it is a defence meganism: by opening up showing that I am no threat. Part of it is what I call ‘creating a mist’: by speaking about intimate things which are almost close to my heart I keep people focussed on that. But I never show what is behind that; the shame, the feeling of unworthiness, the feeling that I do not belong. Nowhere. I even cultivate the not belonging in my life, even here in my sober blog. I have this believe I have the weirdest sobriety blog around. Which in itself is not a problem, but the way, the intentions with which I set it up and use it as a shield is. I do that with everything. To cover up the not belonging inside. I feel like I turn myself inside out in order to hide the nothingness inside of that.

Belonging :-). I don’t know, it is not within. Never has been. Well yes, it has been in my ayahuasca experiences – but that is eh, real but not daily. My mother favored my older brother till the age of 30 or so. It was common knowledge, my brother even apologized to me about it :-(. He also told me to make less of a fuss too, so she would like me better. I guess I have been fighting for the right to be liked while making a fuss all my life. Children, well, even my cat, can have this ‘how much do you love me?’ behaviour where they test boundaries to see if the love is true. I don’t know if any of that was visible then. There was a lot of aggression in me too because I felt my needs were not met.

I feel my parents have been comparing me to my brother since the first second I was born. I was born as I do everything: stuck at first, wanting to coming out with my head the wrong way up as my brother had done. Then I drew back (is that even possible?), turned and was born in 3 contractions. Screaming so angrily like my mother had never, in all her years of childcare in hospitals, ever seen or heard a baby screaming. I guess that set the tone. My father said ‘Wooow, this one is very different’ and fainted.

That story has been repeated to me from a very young age. I never felt comfortable with it. I even made up that it was not true and that I was adopted. My brother and I spoke about that. We were sure he was real and I was adopted. We decided that based on how my mother related to me even though my brother could most likely remember that I was born and my mother had had a big belly. Kids and their thinking.

Around my 30ish birthday she suddenly came up to me saying something that bugged me for a long time: ‘I was reading a book and the mother had to choose what baby she would keep and what baby she would give away. I have always thought that if I had to choose I would choose your brother but now I think I would choose you. Not that I think I ever have to, but just so you know.’ How is that for an awkward ‘apology’?

Did it make me feel good? No, it freaked me out. First because in my ideal world parents don’t even THINK about having to choose between children – it sounded more like secret wishful thinking than anything else. And secondly because it proved that my mother had been favouring one of us and that was another reason for my ideal world to fall apart: mothers are not supposed to favour children. Life is not safe if mothers start favoring children. And thirdly because it proved that the person she favored was not me and I did not want that to be true but she made it true. I did say ‘thank you’.

Funny how one can be adult but when it comes to mother-child stuff I assume the child roll immediately. No questions asked.

Belonging. I started to mix it up with longing by the time I turned 14, 15. I’m guessing now I was quick to fall in love because I did not find I belonged in my family and wanted personal and physical connection to reassure me. Two days ago I dreamed of waking up in a farmhouse in the night, I was alone in the house. It was cold and pouring rain outside but I walked out to the barn where there was a campfire with family and friends who I knew were having (too much) drinks. While in the rain I noticed I carried a large empty wineglass and a teddy bear. The wineglass was to get drunk so I would not feel the difference between me and the others anymore. I guess in there is, for me, a very important piece of information on the energetic systems  behind my drinking behaviour. I also carried a teddy bear, that was because I was so very lonely. I was ashamed of the teddy bear, ashamed of feeling lonely because it told me (tells me) that I was (am) not good enough to be connected, to belong.

I also noticed this effect of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ in the drinking when it came to my father. My father has Aspergers syndrome which is one of the different autistic constitutions where the person is very brainy, mainly very technical with an immense control of language but has no social skills nor awareness of emotions in themselves nor others. He was pretty powerful in his presence and denying anything human that got in his way. In order for me to exist I had to not be there emotionally. We used to drink to excess together. My mother would hate that and we would laugh. Nauseating.

The night I had the dream my father had been checking my Linkedin profile. That feels uncomfortable. Does mean that he probably is up and about after the cerebral hemorrhage he had last year. We have not been in contact for 7 years now. It still scares me that he is sort of out there and interested. I feel I have no skills to deal with him. I feel sucked into his power immediately, even over a distance, even now he is most possibly a doddering old man. There is a reason I do not see him; I can not deal with it.

On mixing up longing and belonging: I am starting to see now how, and with what intention and intensity I throw this net of projections and hopes over the book store man and claim that it is love. I feel I’m almost there in letting go. 🙂 Good. I would like to be free but I can’t do that on willpower. As with alcohol, I need to do it on knowledge, insight in how and where and when it connects to me. I am happy that I have the time to work out these carry over feelings. Did I tell you he and I sort of ‘agreed’ on doing that as long as I kept ‘the biology’ out of the conversation? Which I understood as: ‘No sending of sexual messages, verbally or non-verbally, energetically.’ (What is the last conversation you had with your book store man?)

Ooh, I am very happy for this blog where I can just pfffffllllll spill all of that out….. Ghegheghe… on book store man, I have been cleaning my book shelfs and brought some 2nd hand books to the young book store man and also to the old. Traded for a beautiful book of Pema Chödrön a.o. He had a friend of 76 and they are both very much into health food, like: no wheat, eco only, nuts and avocado’s and vegetables, no sugar, no meat, no dairy. We went shopping for food and I laughed my head off. Two grandpa’s, both with more stamina and more speed in their walks than I, discussing what to eat and what not and what for. Part of which had to do with weight control!!! Gheghegheghe… I did not dare to put anything in my basket. The book store man saw than and started giggling. Ghegheghe, a tiny, 50 kilo 72-year-old with long grey hair and a long grey beard and bright blue eyes giggling.

Ooh, by the way, they are both old hippie addicts, heroine and alcohol. We spoke on recovery quite a lot. Very interesting. The friend of 76 ended up asking me if I were too critical to actually look at the possibility of taking him on as an intimate friend. I guess that was exactly how he phrased it. Both men are very sexual, must have to do with their diet, or because there is nothing left for them to do? Well, it makes him number 4 in a row of old guys ‘falling’ for me. There was a day, quite some months ago where I wished the Universe would help me find a wise man. Let this be a warning to you and I: BE SPECIFIC when you ask the universe for something. 😀

Is it a coincidence that this shows up in my life now? No, I think I still carry this concept of mixing up belonging and longing on the outside. My body of course is an abundance of Dutch glory, as the old book store man called it. Men tend to take that personally. Alexander Lowen says something like ‘the body is a manifestation of what happens inside’. My body type would belong to women who separate sex from love. That seems to create wide hips, heavy chest and a (well, relatively) small waist. I think it is (also) true. I feel like I use my sexuality as a shield. Daring people. Well, I guess that can be the next subject of study after shame.

There is something funny going on and I am going to put it out here because it puzzles me. Not seriously but still. When I got sober I realised that somewhere down the line, if I ever wanted to have sex again, I would need to start really slowly in order to not fall into old patterns/habits again. I was thinking: I might want to do a Tantra course like my friend did with her husband. A few weeks later I walked into the young book store man’s shop and after a customer had left with a tantra book he commented; ‘God, all these people getting stuck in tantra sex, trying to find liberation…. I will never ever do a tantra course.’

And the old book store man commented this week: I have not done tantra with my ex (he just broke up with her but they are still getting together – similarities all around) but I would really like to do that. How strange is that? I mean, these are people just saying things out of nowhere. It is not that I walk around with this big sign on my forehead saying ‘Tantra course!’

Ok, so I’m trying to deal with shame and kendeng! sex comes up and I am fending with it. Not elegant but I’m not going back to edit it because I think it is relevant. I do not know how yet and I sort of feel that I do not want to know either. :-D. Which, I have learned by now, means I had better sort it out.

I am happy-ish that I quit. I find things a little difficult these days. Specifically with my father and being thrown back in these ancient, almost tribal memories of the campfires we used to have, (be)longing and drinking. And I am sad about these memories, sad about the shame, the energy which is locked inside that and specifically sad about not belonging and feeling like the only options I have is to sort of hook up with an old geezer. Next, that tells me I am way too fucking fat and blaaah blaaah blaaaah, here I go again. Shame needs to be looked at. There is this repetitive pattern in my head telling me that the young guy does not want me because I am too fat and the old guys do want me because I am fat. I guess there is some work to be done. The thought of seriously paying attention to my weight has crossed my mind but I must make sure that this does not happen for the wrong reason. Rejection leads to shame in me, and to the feeling not to belong here. Losing weight does not solve that.

I need: to continue to look at and work out shame issues and possibly with somebody who can bear to listen to it too. Therapy time. And no, I will not risk my shame issues on those who can not bear it. I tried my SIL this week, that worked out to be an ‘adding insult to injury’ situation. 😦 Sigh.

I want: the whole world to be different so I don’t have to change. (Guessing that is not very likely to happen…)

I take: Ayurvedic pills and Mebendazol against parasites in my intestines. It makes me feel very lousy; I had the start of all the side-effects which are listed. That’s when I went to sleep to put my brain to rest so it could not come up with even stronger side-effects. I guess that is something I have learned in sobriety. 🙂 The hypochondria is still there but the dealing is getting a little better. 🙂

3 Things: picked up another beautiful book at a so manniest 2nd hand bookstore; Your child’s body language from Susan Quilliam. It is a photo book explaining what it is you see on the photo’s. They are real photo’s of real situations. The book tells me that there are other people in this world who also see what I see. I always thought I was strange about this. Maybe she is strange too. That is also possible. All that knowledge for Euro 1,50. Secondly I am happy for the nice bike tour with lunch and a book in the park I had today. And for writing this blog or maybe more for the discoveries I made.

On discipline: getting more insight on how I try to shame myself into good behaviour. Which I guess is why it is not working. There is one good thing about my procrastinating: it has brought me to go look for what is behind it, to learn to listen to shame. I’m just in the phase of cleaning up / gathering info so there is no real healing yet so I am not really happy about it yet but I guess that will come. 🙂

Guess that’s all for now. It is late night now. Thank you for reading this. Thank you for sticking with me when I try to sort out these things amongst which the book store man things which must bore you to death by now. Well, rephrase: must have bored you to death months ago. I think I’m getting where I want to go: get insight on my way, the systems of attachment.

Hope you have a nice evening / day.

xx, Feeling