Wilma on Support for self-care

My brother's granddaughter Tessa supporting a younger bridesmaid.

I have a dream. I dream that we women support each other’s self-care so we become strong basecamps. From being a strong basecamp we then can co-create a new earth where we joyfully embrace each and every day in peace and harmony.

In this Monday’s post; Let other women take care of your self-care, I shared an aspect of that dream which was the regular coming together as we once did at the village *well* to share and receive guidance for our daily troubles and challenges. I lamented that with no longer doing the laundry at the village *well* many of us have lost the intimate connection and shared wisdom that such frequent coming together provided. Instead we are tending to live isolated and distracted lives, with at best superficial connections happening at work and in social contexts.

On the other hand I was heartened to read in your comments that some of you do currently receive support in a variety of places. Belinda recognized that;

I am fortunate to have a strong circle of wise women in my work — women who are intuitively caring, nurturing, accepting and understanding. These wise women around me are like a balm for the figurative cuts and bruises that I sustain every now and then.

Let other women take care of your self-care.

Thanks to support with my 'self care' I am now harvesting these pears AND my happiness.

Last week I talked on Peggy Nolan’s The Stepmom’s Toolbox Radio Show about martyrdom. I have included the link as all her and co-host Erin’s radio shows are available for downloads so you can still listen to them. That is a great win as they cover heaps of issues every woman struggles with.

What hit home afterwards was that we have become so isolated, so alone in our quest for a way out of our misery. It is sad to see how little support we are getting. We all seem to be yearning for guidance and wisdom from other women we love and trust to make sense of the things in life that do not seem to be right. Like never being acknowledged, not knowing where to put our love as it often gets thrown back into our faces or misused and last but not least we do not even know how to take care of ourselves.

Has it ever been different?  Were there times when we had access to wise women who could help us out?

Wilma on Martyrs need support

"Yeah, yeah your food is coming", but soon all this demanding work will be all over for this mother. Lucky her.

This is our second week of talking about martyrdom and I’ve still got plenty more to say on the skills required to become martyr free.
You certainly could see my point in this Monday’s post; How to kill of martyrdom, that children are takers and they will get their way with a martyr every time.

However children being takers is not the issue, they are only one of the many daily challenges that recovering martyrs have to face up to.

Diantha explained this clearly for us with her comment;

You are right about children (and husbands) taking until one is just a puddle on the floor. For years I thought it was THEIR fault until I wised up and realized I PLAYED INTO IT! Gulp. Truth can be a hard teacher…

Yes Diantha, the critical first step is to own up to the truth that we martyrs play into it. We allow children (and husbands) to take advantage of us. It is easy for us to look external to ourselves for the cause of our troubles. It is much tougher and requires honesty to recognize and acknowledge how we are the cause of our troubles.
I’d like to add, if you have martyr, people pleasing, doormat tendencies, you will play them out everywhere, not just within the family, but at work and with your friends as well.
How we cause ourselves to be treated as doormats is invisible to us. This is where we need gentle friends to support us and reflect back the wholesome ‘what is so’ of our martyr behavior.

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.

What happens when instead of an old fashioned partner I become a sponsor.

John being encouraged by Wilma.

In last week’s post I wrote; “Great base camps understand sponsorship.”

Bringing up that whole idea of sponsorship and making ’ME’ - base camp – a prosperous structure has unlocked something huge in me.
I never considered that any personal relationship could have a sponsorship theme as well.
If I look back, most relationships, be it with partners, relatives, friends or with works colleagues have been one of limited possibilities because of that.
As I went through life, I have learned to look after myself, not to expect too much, to keep score so I would not become a doormat or a victim and to compete for mostly everything from attention and love to promotion and opportunities.
Most of my adult life I have been going it alone, I relied on myself and in my previous marriage I never considered my needs.

Now when I look at sponsorship, I get a whole new view on how a relationship could be.
I could become the sponsored one as well as a sponsor AND have everyone in the relationship fly.

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.

How mother and daughter manage the fear driven corporate world.

. My daughter is entering a world that is new to her; the corporate world and boy is she learning. It moves me deeply to witness her innocence and total bewilderment at it all. It rocks me to my core, to see her discover the levels of incongruency and manipulation that exist, to see through her innocent eyes just how ugly and inhumane the world of work has become.

The precarious bridge between the two different worlds, one driven by fear and the other coming from love.

I am very grateful that my beautiful, generous, bright eyed and bushy tailed daughter is turning to me for guidance to make sense of this new world.

I am grateful that recently I’ve gotten a real sense of knowing just how different the world can be, so I do feel I have something of value to offer her and to guide her with.
And I am forever grateful for the movie ‘The Secret’ and the wide spread popularity of the Law of Attraction.
These new concepts and explanations on living have totally intrigued my daughter. They also gave us an aligned way of looking at what is happening to her at present and they provide insight into how she can deal with it all in a very different way.
She knows that if she is not careful she will end up living like most people in the finance world; wealthy but fearful and with a huge loss of inner self worth.

An Irish woman and a Dutch woman, what are they up to in the South Pacific?

. Gloria Steinem once eluded to the fact that  “Any woman who chooses to live like a full conscious human being, looking beyond what is currently so, will need her sisterhood to keep her on track.” So true. I too believe that everybody who wants to tackle becoming a fully conscious human being, needs support, big time. How come?

Wilma and Ann-Marie, and yes we are working! The WomenLikeMe way of course!

Because the status quo and your familiar patterns will worry and wonder where you are off to, when you go for full human beingness.
They have no idea what you are doing and thus will reel you back in when they think you venture out too far.

Sorry folks; there IS more to the 10.000 hours success story. Of course!

. As always there is a bit more to the story of 10,000 hours than we think. How come the Beatles and Bill Gates could stick to doing what they were doing and avoid the trap we normal mortals seem to fall into most of the time? I am talking about the trap of stopping just 2 inches from gold, of giving up before we hit the jackpot.

John and I on our way to striking gold here and loving every minute of it.

There is no doubt we are all doing things, we are all striving for something.
But how come they kept going until they made it and we don’t.

Let me begin with a story.

How am I going? Anywhere near my 10,000 hours yet?

. Blogging scared me and being in business frightened the heck out of me even more. And what about all these current new paradigms that are promising everything I absolutely love but which I find so hellishly hard to understand and practice. So you can imagine that reading about putting in 10,000 hours practice to master these difficult paradigms and these things that scare me, didn’t do my insecurities any good. Not one bit.

Women like me, whom I met on my way to my 10.000 hours

It left me with the question ‘Where am I at with my 10,000 hours in my quest for living life wholesomely different doing all these new things?
I’ve only just started, so how long will it be before I can see the results and more importantly how do I know I’m on the right track and doing the right thing for me?