Family Dinner in Holland.
This week’s post ‘Me and my out-of-integrity family members’ touched on a couple of sacred cows; integrity and families.
However it was more than that, it was a post where I declared one of the ultimate examples of ’The Emperor with no clothes’.
I said; “We live in society that is mostly out-of-integrity most of the time and nobody makes a big deal about it or notices how it complicates life. Dealing with out-of-integrity behavior is draining us and is giving us grief big time.”
I chose the example of me and my daughter because we women if we do not have daughters of our own at least we are all daughters with family dynamics to negotiate our way through. Sure enough your comments reflected how you could see my example in your own lives.
The most common emotion it brought up was ‘frustrated’ though stronger words such as ‘infuriating’ were thrown around. Frustration is certainly an indicator that things are getting complicated.
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.
Birds hate interruptions too. John will you leave them alone!
Your comments to this week’s post; ‘Interrupted thinking creates half-baked Me’ certainly deepened my thinking about this epidemic of constant daily interruptions.
I want to start by emphasizing that interruptions of themselves are not inherently bad, a modest amount of interruptions are great and a fact of life. This is not the issue at all. The issue is the constant stream of them and our lack of vigilance in recognizing the insidious consequences to our quality of life and quality thinking because of constant interruptions.
So what is the cost of lots of interruptions?
The look of my current blissful uninterrupted life.
Ever opened the oven door and thus interrupted the baking?
Of course you have and so have I with dire consequences.
My interruptions have caused many potentially beautiful creations come to an early death. Before they had a chance to rise, many cakes have fallen flat on their face so to speak.
Okay, so I have ruined some baking, I can live with that.
But what if interruptions are being the death of my heart-centered creations?
What if interruptions are so plentiful in my life that my creative self never has a chance to fully express itself, that its thoughts never have a chance to rise?
Can I be so casual about that, can I live with that?
Hmmm.
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.
Our cat knew she was loved and never went in a frantic fearful pursuit of love.
To live life differently something has to fundamentally shift and for me it is my understanding of love.
I have the strong impression that love is THE most powerful energy and the key to become the change I want to see.
Thus I deem it worth coming to grips with.
One of my first understandings is that I actually do not understand ‘love’ very well at all, which is a bit of a shock as I use the word ‘love’ quite often.
There are also a lot of things and people in my life that I love.
However my recent observations have revealed that . . .
My relationship with love is one of fear, fear of losing what I love and it has nothing to do with love itself.
I hardly ever go to that place of love with the things and the people I love, where I do go to is a place of fear!
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?
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!
Wilma and Ann-Marie working on do-ing enough during a WomenLikeMe meeting.
‘When is enough enough’ is a question I am sure Shakespeare would have loved to tackle if he had had a blog.
But seeing as he didn’t, I will give it a shot.
Life is busy.
There is a lot going on.
I have things to attend to, people to take care of and many tasks to complete.
On top of all that, I also have this blog as part of our fledgling business.
I am rushed off my feet most days and while at the end of some days I am knackered, I still question if I have done enough????
Hello Hello! What do I think I am so knackered from? What do I mean; have I done enough?
Yet, that question does pop up.
In the worst case scenario it causes anxiety and feelings of overwhelm. I even seriously consider that indeed I might not have done enough and that I should go and do some more.
Jeez, here I am knackered with a lot to show for it and I still want to flog this tired horse because it has not done enough?
If you too get a feeling that something doesn’t compute here, high five to you, because it doesn’t.
It does not compute as there will never be a state of having done ‘enough’.
NOT in this world, how it is today anyway.
Even if I did work harder, I will never be able to answer; “when enough is enough.”
When I was pregnant, I was totally in love with my life. It rocked.
In this week’s post Learning from experience to do things differently Wilma shared how she created a different world for herself in order to gain access to her indigenous self and to LIVE her life even though she did not initially know how to do it.
Her desire to do life another way was strong enough to propel her forward into the depths of the unknown in order to be free and LOVE life.
She has certainly achieved this.
She has arrived in style.
Wilma loves her life, it oozes from every part of her, it is in every cell in her body and she is IN love with everything that she does, from washing the dishes to writing her blog posts to spinning and knitting to dealing with the fresh produce from the veggie garden and to building her WomenLikeMe business.
She is consistent, she LOVES it all.
John, noticing that I am not where Wilma is at, asked me this question on Monday “Ann-Marie what do you love doing?”
Learning to do things differently alright on my 17 days ocean trip on this vessel.
I was in my late forties when it hit me how boring and dead end my future looked.
We had a nice freehold house, enough money to do what we liked with, I had a great job as a career consultant and yet it suddenly hit me that there was nothing left to explore, that there was nothing left to discover!
I had that horrible feeling of boredom, of having seen and heard it all and I probably had, within the confines of the life I was leading.
My job as a career consultant contributed to my awakening as well.
I so often saw that predictable career paths and work solutions were not as crash hot as they were first made out to be.
I heard a lot of work and career related stories and I noticed that people who chose a different way, people who carved out their own path were far more interesting and joyful to talk to than the ones that had gone down the what we would call ‘normal’ route.
The ones who had successful careers according to the definition of society were often pedantic, dumb, self absorbed, arrogant, not observing what was going on around them and absolutely scared of everything new.
Being made redundant for them was death, they often could not see their way out and they were hard to deal with.
Creating the Experience to Learn is where the gold lies.
The Little Voice, the ego was the topic of this week’s post as Wilma shared how a weekend of guests sent her into a mind spin of upset and how she got herself out of it.
We are all familiar with our ego; the martyr, the doormat, the manipulator, the stronghold, the unknown quantity or as Patty put it; “I like to think of her as my martyred caregiver. She gives and gives and gives, and darn it, why can’t people just see all that I’m doing for them?”
Most of us agreed that in order to be free of the ego we first must be present to it, to be aware of it, what it says and the results it causes. The Little Voice is powerful beyond measure and something not to be taken lightly, it has many ways to hide out and mask its appearance, and it is cunning and operates under the radar.
Next Page »
RSS
