Me and out-of-integrity family.

My daughter's first taste of a snowy Holland.

I am proud of myself. I am resembling more and more the woman I desire to be.
A woman who can lead a family, a woman who gracefully yet purposefully handles life and the humans in it.

Let’s face it, that is what most of us want to achieve isn’t it? 
Getting out of a muddle concerning our loved ones and how to organize our lives.

Being in-integrity plays a big part in achieving that and I am chuffed that I recently passed an integrity test with flying colors while dealing with a very out-of-integrity family member, my own daughter.

Now I am not picking on my daughter here, all people are out-of-integrity and family members are no exception.
In fact the whole world consistently slides into out-of-integrity most of the time and nobody makes a big deal about  it or notices how it complicates life.

Wilma on Fear of Losing Love

My daughters who do love me.

I so want to acknowledge all your sharing in the comments on this week’s post; My fearful pursuit of love and its pathetic results. Your comments are a beautiful example of our connectedness; how we all have fears and how we all are committed to moving beyond them.

I got to see how in talking about my fear of losing the love of my daughter by saying ‘no’ to her, it had many of you share similar fears. Jodi summed it up well;

the tug and pull of saying no vs. feeling you should say yes to validate your love but then deciding to say no and struggling with how to say no–gosh it’s all so frustrating.

While most of us have this fear in some form or other, the flow of comments made it clear to me that our fears are completely unfounded.

Wilma on Love-in-Action

Here is the Alpaca jersey /jumper /sweater /pullover

I appreciated all your lovely support from the comments to this week’s post; Love is the real Father Christmas.

The big realization for me was that I find it easy to be love-in-action when I’m not attached to the outcome, when it is something  like working with natural fibers which I innocently love and delight in.
I agree with Megan and Nadia:

We can manifest more easily when we are coming from love and being relaxed.

However have you too noticed you stop being love-in-action when you are not relaxed?
Have you noticed too that when you desperately want things to happen, when you deem it to be an important area of your life; for me they are areas such as money, relationships, and business, being relaxed and love go out of the window and so do the miracles?

Wilma on setting boundaries will give us ‘enough’

Learning about enough has its rewards, an afternoon swim in the river.

I certainly touched on a hot topic with my post this week on ‘When is ‘enough’ enough‘.
Especially as we are all bloggers, all wanting to  get to grips with this ‘insatiable beast’, the blogosphere.

Evita, Megan, Patty and Suzen all echoed Zeenat’s sentiments when she said;

I open my computer…and i seriously don’t know what to do first…check the blog..check the email..check facebook..twitter…then reading commenting…I know its never ever enough..cause i almost always reach my favorite friends posts last!

When the heart guides the mind, the dance can begin.

The place our heart took us to.

The mind had a lot to say when Tess Marshall of The Bold Life Blog invited me to write a guest post. However the heart jumped up, settled down that mind of mine, gave Tess the biggest virtual hug you can imagine and then both the heart and the mind went to work.
The guest post is now pubslished.
The result is worth a visit, Tess’ Blog is a blast and as for my article, well see for yourself.

My daughter and I on ‘why should you?’.

I am back. Thanks to all the encouragement and preparations to make the heart strong, my daughter and I had an absolutely super time together. Even the weather played along, we just had sunny days, all four of them! Yes, I did get the delighted shrieks when she saw the food and no, we did not go to a hotel in the end. She chose to stay in her flat and I honored that. She was sick of the city and being cooped up inside working those long days, so she requested a lot of walking just to be outside.

Our wonderful time together, resting at the beach.

So walking and staying away from the city we did.
In hindsight it was actually great to stay where she lived because that gave me, as her mother, a peek into this side of her life. As a proud mother I am very pleased to say that she had her small room beautifully organized. She used very clever storage systems and her whole set up worked a treat. It all looked very neat, workable, clean and tidy.
But the communal area outside her room was a totally different experience altogether.

Forget unfair and luck, integrity is what counts.

‘By living from integrity, you align yourself with the way the Universe works. When you live out of integrity you get unreliable results. You might think the world is unfair and picks on you, which it does not.’ (WomenLikeMe on Integrity) The unfair, random acts we think we receive from the Universe are generated by our own randomness around being in and out-of-integrity. Ouch. Being in- and out-of integrity guides our doing.

Sitting and enjoying the sun while being fully in integrity. John is getting the drinks

It ultimately  determines whether we end up working with the laws of the Universe and getting wholesome results or working against the laws and achieving randomness.
So what is this integrity that is so important to have the Universe effectively and pro-actively on our side and us being a reliable partner it can work with?

No matter what I have been told, I am NOT selfish, I AM base camp.

Growing up I always heard, ‘Don’t get too big for your boots, young lady’! ‘No, you are NOT the center of the Universe and you do not put yourself first. Don’t be selfish.’ And like everybody else, I too was constantly told what I could and could not do and nowhere was there any talk about ME looking after ME and finding out what I wanted. It actually was all about staying small and being told NOT to deviate from the behaviors I had been taught.

Now I am wised up, I demand breakfast in bed, wherever we are.

And I took all of it on board.

Sure why wouldn’t I have? It was dished out mostly by people who honestly loved me, so why would I not believe it.

But life is never that simple, is it?
A lot of what I’ve taken on board during my life is now showing up as extra ballast that is sinking the ‘ME’ in me.

My daughter, my heart and that little voice of mine.

My corporate daughter wants a dose of her Mom. She asked me to come visit her for a long weekend and then gave me an extensive list of what home cooked meals she wanted me to bring along. However after placing her food order she did stress that it was not all about filling up her empty freezer. I didn’t have to bring anything with me; just seeing me was really what she wanted. Oh, how that made my heart melt.

Another special time together, Halong Bay, Vietnam.

Just hearing ”Mom, I want to see you” made my heart leap up in the air and I immediately started to dream up what fun we could have.
Special mother/daughter times are so precious.

Exciting and tough; this learning to play a totally different game.

. I have been hard on myself. I honestly could not figure out why it took so much effort to come to grips with this new way of living. After all, it seemed to be such a no brainer; replace a fear filled, limited life with a joyful life that I would absolutely adore. However I omitted to realize the vast scale of this turnaround that I am asking of myself, my mind and my heart.

Learning a new skill in a new game, walking besides the rice paddies and yes I did slip.

I got to see that it does not serve me to underestimate how big the change is when you choose to live from love instead of fear.
I never knew how big this step was.
It is huge to change this complex life coming from force and overwhelm into a simple life in which I peacefully come from love.
My biggest fear was that simple meant boring and that I would lose out on exciting things.
Now simple carries a different meaning and stands for having an extraordinary life operating from love, knowing there is always enough and being proud of who I am.

The unknown got to me; what is next with our Garden of Eden?

. I am good most days, I really am. Most of the time I peacefully accept that there is an invisible bigger plan and that all I have to do is trust. It will all work out so long as I am doing my bit by being love in action. And then WHAMOO, out of the blue comes my mind, like a screaming banshee to shatter all this peace. Like it did this week.

Waiting for the next miracle.

For 2 whole days this screaming banshee of a mind would NOT shut up and its voice successfully jolted me out of my peaceful state.
What was the cause of this entire racket?
It suddenly realized that our time here in this glorious Garden of Eden might be coming to an end. The lease ends in September and we have no plans as to what to do next. Not yet anyway.
So all hell broke lose; my mind became totally consumed by the want to have a linear plan about what’s next.
It just wouldn’t stop.
It called me all sort of names; stupid, ignorant, a dreamer and it brought up every weak point that it could possibly find.
Most of all it completely went to town about miracles; it sure had a lot of negative things to say about that.

This tantrum took me completely by surprise, although I do know that the mind tends to do this when it feels insecure. All it seeks is reassurance that all is well and that I CAN perform miracles. Knowing this didn’t make it any less annoying though.
In the past this would have resulted in a number of weeks of upset, nagging John about what we were going to do. I now, thankfully have ammunition to overcome this mind attack on miracles and put it to bed, pronto!

How I dare to ignore the recession.

. I am sick of the world’s boom and bust way of operating and these stupid recessions. All this agony caused by selfish grabbing based only on ‘What’s in it for Me and forget about what happens to anybody else’. I am totally over accepting it as normal and over how it endangers my two daughters’ future.

Let's go for life and dare to live; like this sailing I did in the Southern Ocean on a replica of an ancient Pilot Cutter.

Just look at how this recession paralyzes everybody with fear and look at what it is also doing to us as a whole.
We have become fearful at work AND slaves to the money for goodness sake. Our personal greatness and indigenous power is constrained by our preoccupations with meager survival issues. Surely we can do better than that!

Marianne Williamson keeps stressing too, this is NOT us, this is not how we are meant to be living. We are powerful co-creators, capable of living magnificent lives; with a partner like God we don’t have to be restricted by fear or smallness, playing a game of just surviving.
With the mighty God in tow or with God leading the way, we should be in for the ride of our life and not on this piddly little path we are presently on.