I spent my first Saturday trying to properly heard 16 adolescents in treatment. The level on awareness to stay on top of all the moves and noise , wore my ass out. I took a 3 hour nap when I got home. I only got about 4 hours of sleep last night , I got up at 5am after laying down at midnight. I was paranoid I would over sleep on my first real day as an employee not "officially" in training. I did not make it to the gym tonight and I had to get my NA meeting covered by someone else. Instead of wasting time beating myself up over no gym, I'm just going to give myself a break and let it go. I'm paranoid if I don't do things perfectly right, I will be consumed by what ever it is I fear happening.

I'm watching Shawshank on a marathon and because of my super nap and the subject matter, I find that my heart is very full and warm. Relationships formed when you are in the lifeboat with someone else are incredibly special. I'm friends with you because I will be consumed by insanity if you are not here with me. Interdependence, is what we were designed for, not solo existence. "Hope is a good thing".

Hope is very hard to find when you lose it. If it is gone long enough, you forget there is/was ever such a thing and the dark becomes the norm.  

This is probably journal stuff but.... I have been really rocked by the death of our recovery friend. I'm a little stunned at the fact I can't stop turning it around and over in my head. I have first hand experience with having years clean and then slipping away into the darkness of relapse. The insidious thing about an addict in relapse is the disease robs all the memory of recovery ever working, of having friends of, having purpose.  It's as if it never existed at all, just leaving a World Trade Center size hole in your spirit and your only vaguely aware that something, some something used to fill that spot but with what you are unsure. You discover a new darkness, a new despair a new fresh depth of nothingness every moment your eyes are open. You can not see the hands reaching to help you, you cannot comprehend the concept of hope. I don't know if it was luck, divination or mere chance that the last time I ended up in this condition, spiritually dead and shut down, I heard the voice a man that was paid to take care of me in the mental hospital. He managed to wake up the dead part of me and I remembered who I was. The NA showed me the path to sanity and peace. I guess our friend never had that opportunity, no one was paid to wake him up and none of us could.  I will remember him and his recovery when it was alive and well and deliciously off beat. He is yet another heartbreaking cautionary tale about separating from the herd for whatever reasons I may think are valid. The further I get from you, the closer I am to forgetting who I am. When that happens it's only a matter of moments before the dark descends and I forget you were even here and that I ever saw light, and that anything ever mattered.

One year and 83 pounds later............I can't believe I have a gym membership. Someone a fat queen is grabbing her chest and yelling no.......

That was a tough one.

I came face to face today with a caldron of pain that I sat fire three years ago. The last time I saw my Stepmother was 3 or 4 years ago. In a Xanax fueled rage I fired off several searing , scathing, bitter emails to her unleashing my father's secrets and any dagger I could hurl to hurt her. White hot venom spewed in me and hurt burned through me like a Salem Witch back in the day. I was angry, not just angry at her and the way she did or did not play a part in the ending of my parents 33 year marriage, I was taking out my anger at my dad on her too.
I was stunned today to find an old woman living in my fathers house. Her face completely shifted and gnarled. She had no makeup on so I caught her in a moment of non-concealment. I was just stunned and frightened that she had such a darkness about her, a dark unrecognizable distorted countenance. 

I knew from instruction what I could say and what I couldn't.
 I was only permitted to say I apologize for injecting so much pain and confusion into your life with my words. An excuse  would only invalidate the apology. It was her turn finally to tell me what she wanted to. For nearly forty minutes she detailed every single hurtful thing I had said , done and caused. Face to face. I saw each hurt come alive as the spilled from her unpainted lips.  The most surprising thing that happened as she went through this speech she had rehearsed for years is she casually threw in that she wanted in her mind to have my dad present when she let loose. No, I tell you what , the real surprise is how much compassion I had welling up inside me as I watched a bitter angry old lady account for all of the misinformation, gossip, misalignment I produced in her life. It was not shame, guilt or remorse I felt, it was the compassion I would have gladly given to a thousand strangers I had met. In the in end all I could tell her was above my apology I would never intentionally inflict hurt or pain to her life and that I would try my hardest only to be an asset to her. She then accepted my apology which was really neither here nor there, she got the chance to say the speech that she had been honing to a sharpened edge for years. I would have understood if she had refused to even speak to me, so the acceptance was very benevolent.

I wasn't responsible for all of the painful slings and arrows she told me to day, not by far. Some of the stuff she talked about had little to directly do with me, BUT make no mistake my toe was in that water. Since it is doubtful, she will ever get to address the rest of the cast list of assassins , I stood there and let her get it all out of her head and heart. This is the beginning of the real amends. I was able to stand for myself and for the others by proxy, the others  who hurt her so badly. 

I never felt like smarting off, I was completely encompassed by the love of spirit.  I feel like I can sit at the big boys table at NA now.. That wasn't a pat on the head and a "So glad you feel better" response. This was a real stand there and allow her to react however she needs to. It was hard and uncomfortable and I wanted to be free of this resentment more than I wanted to put myself in a favorable light by interrupting with excuse.

Confused. Tired. Confused. I've got so many thoughts and emotions swirling that I am stumped. I worked the first two real shifts this weekend, where I was not "training", and I was expected to hold up a real part of the work. It's been 12 or more years since I put in 17 hours in two days. I know regular people do it all the time and I'm thankful  for shot, but it has me so off center that I'm wanting to over eat and sleep. It was uphill at the gym earlier this evening and I stopped  about 20 minutes early when I got to cardio. I do NOT want to gain my weight back but i feel so out of control. I missed the Men's Dinner this week for only the second time ever. I had to do some watering in the garden and I wanted to go work out. I have nothing to do tomorrow except a butt load of laundry

My Three Songs from Gladewater Opry, "Rose Colored Glasses", "You Take Me For Granted" and "Broken Lady"

http://youtu.be/Aib6PCyELKM

The first over nigh shift

I finished my first pay week of working at the treatment facility. What I feel from 4 days work is that the work they do there touches my spirit deeply. This morning when I was scooping cereal into the young peoples breakfast bowls before they woke up was a deep amount of real spirit stirring gratitude. I measured the sugar and put a scoop in each bowl and then place small plastic containers of whole milk beside their place settings minutes before I woke them up.

I've been on their side of treatment countless countless times. I knew the night staff was busy doing things to allow our day time care to take place and it was other worldly being on the other side. I felt like a parent, putting things out, doing their towel laundry and folding them with the client number on each one visible. Even as I shined a small light into each of the dorm rooms to check and see if they were in bed, I remembered the sensation of waking up in various facifacilities I was in when the night staff shined the light in. It never made me made , it never irked me it in fact made me sleep more soundly knowing I was being looked after. Now I have the flashlight. Funny how life can swap the roles for you sometimes.

I like taking care of things for people in my everyday life but doing things for these kids who have been so lost makes my chest warm. Even when I was leaving the facility and I looked across the pasture where one of the actual foster home that houses students sits. It's a giant stone multi-story that looks like some farm house in Scottland. I was grateful in a different way than I had known before. Even though my home life was really messed up and one or more of my parents never could step up emotionally for me. I never woke up an an unusually cold spring morning without two people there that I knew where my parents, that food was in the kitchen that power would come on when I flipped a switch, that clothes were clean and they fit me and I never worried about someone coming to kick us out of what I knew as home.  I never NEVER touched a light switch and wondered if we had electricity, and have that be a regular normal thing that I dealt with as a young person. Those were my basic physical needs and they were always met. 

How can you relive a whole lifetime is 3 minutes. Pain is pain and lonely is lonely. I guess I have just enough similarities to those parent-less children to  see my pain reflected in their circumstance. I'm grateful I know how to feel that and even as I type this, I could burst into tears if my family weren't bustling in the house .  I'm humbled by the fact that I can feel so deeply for strangers. I'm grateful that the pain of youth didn't get the chance to finish me off as an adult so far. I left good thoughts on each of those cereal bowls as they slept this morning, light barely breaking as tall skinny pine trees danced in the bitter cold wind of a spring time cold snap. I was present. Really present and even if  the staying awake from 12-8am slightly skewed my senses, it was an experience I wouldn't have wanted to miss. I've never been a parent or even wished to be but on a very small scale I got a glimpse into the care parents show their children when their children aren't looking. There wasn't a job detail I was shown to do last night that I couldn't find  care for. It was humbling to do what I could to help those young men's chances at finding some piece of information or hope to hold onto and maybe, just maybe make a difference for themselves. At 16 could I have been intervened upon? Probably not, but I was very desperate to be seen and acknowledge and I just as easily could have found it in a program like this. I just wanted someone to see me and say, "Hey, I see the real you andyou are okay". When Branch Dividian in Waco went up in flames and they talked about David Koresh, I had a small hunch that had I ran into a religious sect and they could convince me they loved and valued me, I could have been sucked in. So if I had been shown the 12 step program when I first began to bleed to death, I think something about it would have spoke to me. I like making someone Else's way a little bit easier. I like being support team. It is the spirit of service I guess. If your going to be possessed by a spirit, all in all, it's a pretty good one, but also pretty frightening at times.

Grateful, grateful, grateful. Moved and moved and moved. Thank you for this experience.

Had a talk with a friend of mine. He keeps recycling old girlfriends that weren't good choices to begin with. It made me thing of this quote, " We trade what we want, for what we want now". That is why we never get what we want because in the moment when it is uncomfortable or lonely we trade something that makes us feel better in the now and get further away from what we want in the long term. Sticking it out, waiting, surving the "in the MEAN time" is hard. IT's why we settle for what is available now. It's clear to me when my friends to this but hard to spot in myself when I do it. Take food for instance. I want o be fit, but I settle for a large pizza NOW.  I hope today, just for today, I keep my sights on my goals and don't settle or stop because it doesn't get here fast enough. I  also hope i'm willing to wait, even if it's painful or boring. I want want a freedom for settling for what is convenient and learn how to wait things out that take time. I"ll never get anywhere if I trade what I want for what I want now.

Ideas that excited me from the book "Darkside of the Light Chasers"

Everything we hate, resist or disown about ourselves takes on a life of it’s own and it undermines our feelings of worthiness. 

When we make peace with ourselves we instantaneously make peace with the world.

We choose to forget who we are then we forget we have forgotten.

Find compassion in your own mistakes then the mistakes of others will not affect you.

We attract whomever or whatever  we need to mirror back the aspects of ourselves that we’ve forgotten.

Within ever desire is the mechanics of it’s fulfillments.

Our fears stop us.

We see in others what we like and what we don’t like in ourselves.

We cannot see ourselves. I am your mirror and you are mine.

The Ego is our false and ignorantly assumed identity. So ego then is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with it’s result : a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and to, to keep alive the fiction of it’s existence.

Transformation itself only takes seconds. It is a shift in perception, a change in the lenses we look though.

When you come face to face with an aspect of yourself that you hate, express it. Express it with the same intention of releasing all your judgments, your shame , you pain and your resistance to taking back this disowned aspect of yourself.

The pain of perceived flaws cause us to cover them up. When we deny certain aspects of ourselves, we overcompensate by becoming their opposite. We create entire personas to prove to ourselves and others that we are not that.

We are dominated by everything from which our self becomes identified, We dominate and control everything from which we DISidentify ourselves.

You must be willing to spend time exploring your own inner world. “If you do not go within you go without”

Pain is passed down from generation to generation and if it’s not questioned will never break the cycle.

The pain you experienced when you were 3, 5, ,6 and so on is just beneath the surface of your consciousness. Until it is transformed it is always there driving your life.

                                                                                                                             

Prejudice is passed down and so is pain, guilt and shame.

Pain has it’s purpose, it wants to guide and teach us about higher levels of awareness.

Every word, incident and person that still has an emotional chared needs to be retraced, faced, replaced and embraced. Then we face the incident, owning up to it’ss reality as part of your past.  We need to become fully aware of the influence it ahs on our life.  Then we look at the incident from a different perspective which allows us to replace our negative feelings with positive ones.  We take control of our lives by choosing our interpretations. That enables us to embrace our disowned past and unplug ourselves from other people.

It’s our perceptions and our interpretations that affect our emotions not the incident itself,. It’s our perceptions and interpretations that deny responsibility and lay blame..

Each of us has to make a conscious decisions to alter our world by altering our interpretations.

To overcome fear we must overcome our fear and we FACE IT and REPLACE it with love.

We have to set aside our harsh judgments and come to terms with the mistakes we’ve made.  We must know that we worthy of forgiveness . This divine gift teaches us that part of being human is making mistakes.

Forgiveness comes from the Heart not the EGO. Forgiveness is a choice.

Desperation comes from the gulf between God and Self.

                                                                                             

If we don’t challenge our most basic beliefs we won’t grow as spiritual beings.  Our lives will simply run along lines established by our parents and we will never go beyond those boundaries that were set when we were kids.

Boldness has a genius, power and magic to it.

When we realize that no one is coming to save us or do it for us, and that our old wounds are there whether we love them or hate them, we realize that we are the ones who have to fulfill our potential.

I knew that to truly change my life I would have to be uncomfortable.

Prayer without action is dreaming.                    

If you tell yourself that you are going to eat healthier foods and don’t do it you are broadcasting to yourself AND the universe that you can’t be trusted. If  you say to yourself your going to get a new job next year and don’t do it your sending a message that you cant be counted on . Even if it is a small task you are saying to yourself and to the universe  you don’t keep your word.  These broken promises wear down our self esteem. Each time you do what you say you are going to  you are telling yourself and the universe you can be trusted and counted on.  Then you can work on larger goals.

Notes I have taken from my re-reading of Eckhart Tolle's "New Earth" so far

Notes from the re-read of “A New Earth” by Eckart Tolle, thus far.

Cam human’s defy the gravitational pull of materialism and materiality and rise above identification with form  that keep the ego in place and condemn them to imprisonment within their own personality.

Ego is no more than identification with form, which primarily means thought forms.

Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much

Language consist of 5 basic sounds produced by the vocal cords. Do you believe some combination of such basic sounds could ever explain who you are or the ultimate purpose of the universe or even what a tree is or a stone at their depths?

You can only feel the joy of being when you are out of your head. Being must be felt. It can’t be thought. The doesn’t know about it because thought is what the ego consist of.

Whatever the ego sees and gets attached to are substitutes for BEING it cannot feel.

Letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.

Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.

 How do you know this is the experience that you need? Because this is the experience you are having.

The ego will quickly find a new for of identity, it doesn’t matter if it is a deeply unhappy one or not. The ego craves to latch on to anything it can use as an identity.

                                                                                     

If the shutters of the house are closed, the sunlight cannot come in.

Awareness and ego cannot coexist.

A long standing resentment is called a grievance. To carry a grievance is to be in a permanent state of “against” and that is why grievances constitute a significance part of many peoples ego.

A grievance will also contaminate other areas in your life,. One strong grievance is enough to contaminate large areas of your life and keep you in the grip of ego.

The past has no power to stop you  from being present, only your grievance about the past can do that.

What is a grievance? The baggage of old though and old emotion.

Every ego is a master of selective perception and interpretation. Only through awareness can you differentiate between fact and opinion. Only through awareness are you able to see.\

What constitutes insanity? Complete identification with though and emotion, that is to say your ego.

Whatever you fight, you strengthen and what you resist , persist.

Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. That is why it is called THE PRESENCE.