The Practical Art of Manifestation

I was very happy to see this as a meme, as many of these principles helped me to leave my dysfunctional marriage and heal my life.  

The Goddess, The Serpent and The Sea: Building Pathways of Light

"Closed for Repairs"

Who Knew?

A Note to my Son - the most heartbreaking read I've had in a long time

I never said thank you for that time you put your hand on my back and told me it was OK to leave. I’d left you sobbing on your bed. You were in fifth grade then. Arms lean muscles reaching to cover bone. Lanky in form, but small in frame and wailing when I said that I was leaving your dad. Even though I was raising you, I had no legal or biological claim to you. Leaving your dad was leaving you.

I came back a few days later to take care of you. Your moon face beaming at me. And we pretended like nothing had changed, your hand warm in mine as we walked home from school. Your shoelaces dragged, untied through the gutter as we crossed the street. Without being asked, you did your homework. If you were good enough, sweet enough maybe I would stay.

When your dad and I finally split up for good, you were 16 and no longer good or sweet. Your voice dropped and hung flat. “I don’t give a shit,” you said. “It doesn’t matter to me.” The gaping holes in your teeth replaced by braces. The round of your eyes bloodshot red and lidded with weed.
Now, you are gone from me. On the day you collected the posters from your wall, you couldn’t stop shaking your foot. Even your voice trembled. I could not see the scabs under your shirt, but I knew they were there, trying to stake a claim to the pain you tried to cut away. I recycled the empty bottles of tequila in your room. Most of the calls have stopped—the substance abuse program, your CPS worker, the counselor from the county shelter.

You call me when you need something. A place to stay. A tent. Money. And I can only sometimes bring myself to pick up the phone when you call. My stomach tightens and heat rushes to my cheeks. Joy, longing, and anger collide. I tell myself that I don’t hunger for you. I pick up the phone. We, for a moment, pretend not to be strangers. Mother and son. And that still exists even if not bound by blood or law. On your 18th birthday, you called me back to ask me to sign over your college account to you. “You’re not in college,” I said.

I want to be angry because it gives me something to feel that takes the pain away. But I remember how we were.

~Tara Dorabji, excerpt from "A Note to my Son"

Read this full post at loveinshallah.com

JK Rowling: 'I am prouder of my years as a single mother than of any other part of my life'

JK Rowling, the best-selling author of the Harry Potter series, said she is “prouder of my years as a single mother than of any other part of my life”.

The writer, who is president of charity Gingerbread, added she wanted to give hope to any single parents suffering “stereotype or stigmatisation” after being ostracised herself as an “unmarried mother”.

Rowling added writing the first of the Harry Potter novels with the help of state benefits to look after her daughter, Jessica, had “not been my plan”.

She has now used her position at Gingerbread to rail against the “particularly offensive” language of “skivers vs strivers”, saying “such rhetoric drains confidence and self-esteem from those who desperately want, as I did, to get back into the job market”.

Rowling, who separated from her daughter’s father 20 years ago, said her belief that she would immediately find paid work was a “much bigger delusion” than believing she could write a children’s novel.

Rowling has since been estimated to be worth around £560m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, and went on to remarry in 2001.

 She has now said she wants to use her position at Gingerbread to campaign for the rights of single parents.

 “I certainly identify with the results of a survey among single parents conducted last year which revealed that childcare costs remain the biggest barrier to work, closely followed by a shortage of flexible jobs: exactly the problems I faced when Jessica was young,” she said.

 She added: “I would say to any single parent currently feeling the weight of stereotype or stigmatization that I am prouder of my years as a single mother than of any other part of my life."

“Yes, I got off benefits and wrote the first four Harry Potter books as a single mother, but nothing makes me prouder than what Jessica told me recently about the first five years of her life: ‘I never knew we were poor. I just remember being happy.’”

Read full article: www.telegraph.co.uk

No one can keep you from lifting your heart

I do not need to seek God.
 God is already here
 waiting to be found,
 soaked in my reality.
 My journey is to be one
 of recognizing God, always.
 already present,
 and surfacing that presence
 A Prayer
 Refuse to fall down
 If you cannot refuse to fall down,
 refuse to stay down.
 If you cannot refuse to stay down,
 lift your heart toward heaven,
 and like a hungry beggar,
 ask that it be filled.
 You may be pushed down.
 You may be kept from rising.
 But no one can keep you from lifting your heart
 toward heaven
 only you.
 It is in the middle of misery
 that so much becomes clear.
 The one who says nothing good
 came of this,
 is not yet listening.

 ~ Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, The Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale About That Which Can Never Die

DON’T ASSUME THE POSTURE OF A WILTED FLOWER

"When you slouch, you are trying to hide your heart, protecting it by slumping over. But when you sit upright but relaxed in the posture of meditation, your heart is naked. Your entire being is exposed—to yourself, first of all, but to others as well. Through the practice of sitting still and following your breath as it goes out and dissolves, you are connecting with your heart. By simply letting yourself be, as you are, you develop genuine sympathy towards yourself. When you sit erect, you proclaim to yourself and to the rest of the world that you are going to be a warrior, a fully human being."
 ~ Chogyam Trungpa,  Ocean of Dharma

 Art by: hollysierra

Awakening Women Institute

Take care of all our children

"If I had an opportunity to stand on a mountain and make my voice heard across the land, I would yell, Take care of all our children. They are the future, they are sacred, they deserve our care. Whatever we don't spend on them in terms of care, opportunity, and love will haunt the next generation in terms of more violence, sickness and apathy. And it will haunt us all on a spiritual level, because allowing children to starve and go without education is a crime of the spirit. ~Charlotte Davis Kasl

 Art by Elisabeth Slettnes

Some of you should be worried....

Placating overworked moms

“Telling women…that motherhood is the most valuable job in the world is not just a patronizing pat on the head…it’s a way to placate overworked moms without giving them the social and political support they actually need to make their lives better.” ~ Jessica Valenti

Painting by Billedkunstner Elisabeth Slettnes

The Ladylike Trap

"Inherited wealth and power enforce patriarchy pure, and envy of this ladylike trap makes the rest of us behave against our own best interests." ~ Gloria Steinem

Responding to Intensity in Children

Typically, emotional intensity results in a range of behavioral outbursts that can be internal (including moodiness, anxiety, and depression) or external (yelling or crying, temper tantrums, and physical expressions of anger or frustration). Regardless of how a gifted child chooses to demonstrate his or her intensities, there are a lot of things parents and educators can do to help lessen the outburst and help teach coping strategies.

• Start early by helping the child talk about his or her emotions – Trust me, they may not want to – but taking the emotions from some raw feeling to a tangible thing that can be defined is an important first step in learning to control the behavior. Further, the development of an emotional vocabulary can assist in providing a common language with which to discuss emotions and behavior.

• Help the child discover his or her unique escalation cycle -Work to discover both your child’s and your own escalation patterns. Gifted kids have considerable talent for pushing a teacher or parent’s buttons. Knowing the things that push you over the edge will enable you to remain calm during emotional outbursts, whatever form they may take. Further, helping children discover their escalation pattern will give them a chance to learn to manage and redirect the feelings before they become too overwhelming.

• Develop a plan to deal with the intensity - Once you and your child has identified the escalation cycle, work with the child to make a plan for what to do when he or she is overwhelmed – when life becomes too intense. Important aspects of the plan should include relaxation techniques, ways to redirect his or her energies, and things to do INSTEAD of the internal or external explosion.

• Create emotional distance from the explosion – Should the explosion happen anyway, it is important to remain calm and create a distance between your emotions and the child’s. Anger and frustration always beget more anger and frustration, so it is really important for the adults working with the child to stay emotionally neutral.

• Take a breather - This goes for the child and the adults. The best way to create the distance I talked about above is to remember to take a break and calm down.

• Focus on the behavior you WANT to see, not only the inappropriate behavior you are seeing – Remember to focus on the good behavior you want to see. All too often we get into a pattern of responding to the negative behaviors strongly (because these behaviors emotionally hook us) and not responding enough to the positive behaviors. The result – more negative behaviors. So do a mental inventory and make sure to focus your time and energy on the positive behaviors.

• View behavioral outbursts, whether internal or external, are teachable moments – Yes, they are frustrating and annoying. Maybe even infuriating. But they are still teachable moments. Take the time to redirect the behavior, focusing on teaching the GT child how to understand and redirect the behavior.

The bottom-line to all of this: Intensity is not a bad thing in and of itself. Intensity is passion – the kind of passion we use to create.

~ Christine Fonseca

 Read more: christinefonseca.wordpress.com

Options....

She had wings

Awakening Women Institute

Not anymore....

I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet. ~Mahatma Gandhi

You have wings

"From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings." ~ Helen Hayes

Where did this crazy idea come from?

On apologies...

88% of child abuse is directly related to alcoholism

This is, no doubt, a sensitive subject for many - but an important one to address in order to give children the childhood they deserve.

1:10 children in the United States are estimated to be living with an alcoholic parent and 88% of child abuse is directly related to alcoholism. There are a multitude of ways children are being abused in a home life of this nature: physically, developmentally, psychologically, sexually, and most often - through neglect.

The price innocent children pay is undeniable and, lets be honest, entirely unnecessary and undeserved.

Many thanks to our fellow advocate for providing the information for this blog post.

themamabeareffect.org

facebook.com/mamabeareffect

Still a tough one to swallow, but getting easier all the time...

"And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation - some fact of my life - unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God's world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could no stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes."
~The Big Book