Rough Few Months

 It's been a rough few months. Relationships starting and ending quickly, work, observation after observation by my principal, and guys in my ward telling me I'm too old for them to date. 🙄 (As if I've never heard that before).

So, I've needed energy therapy more than ever because I've never felt not good enough more than ever. So here are a few thoughts and resources. 

Esther/Abraham Hicks is the master of positive thinking and a motivator on minding your own business about what other people think. I've felt the need to connect to God's love. I also need to focus on love for myself. In the scriptures, Jesus says that the first two commandments are to love God and then love your neighbor (as we do ourselves), but he gave a new commandment to love one another as "HE" loves us. The obvious thought is that we lay down our lives for our neighbor...but here is a new thought: that we love ourselves as God loves us, so we are filled with love and it can become an endless source of love for others. 

Anyways, here is a link to a video that I have been listening to each morning because it helps me see my trials in a different way. Instead of trials, I have contrast. I have the opportunity to think and create something different from what I have been creating. When I get too concerned about whether or not some guy likes me or not I can mind my own business. It doesn't have to matter. I love it when she says that when someone loves us, we can not care and if someone hates us then we can also not care. Because it's not about other people's love for us, it's about God's love for us. All others can fall off by the wayside. I no longer have to look to others for love. I can be my own source of love because of my connection to God, who is an endless source of love.

https://youtu.be/Bwr9b_KTmCA

https://youtu.be/W0oaH6KmEJ0

Bearing My Testimony

 I didn't bear my testimony in sacrament meeting today because I don't like getting up or the potential theatricality that I feel detracts from the real substance of what I really want to say. But, this is a great way to do that without all of the theatrics of getting up. 

I love God and have a testimony of all 3 members of the Godhead. I know we are the offspring of our Heavenly Father, that we pray to him through Jesus Christ. We are to take His name upon us. Jesus Christ ought to be the author and finisher of our faith. He is the only way by which we can return to our Heavenly Father. He is our advocate with the Father. His love for us was expressed through His Atoning sacrifice for us. Our hope is in Christ and it is by Him and of Him, the worlds are and were created. And, we receive communication through the Holy Ghost (Holy Spirit), who is a personage of Spirit. His job is to testify of Christ. They are one God, meaning they function together as a harmonizing unit, each having their own unique role and relationship to us. 

I have a testimony of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, and that the calling of prophets was anciently and is presently pivotal to our learning and growth. We can feel the Holy Spirit testify of Christ by reading the scriptures and the words of living prophets. I love to study their words every morning. They help me hear the things that are important for me to hear each day. They also help me to feel the love of the Lord. 

I am grateful that I'm privileged to live in a country where I am allowed to express these convictions.

In our meeting, it is customary to close in Christ's name (knowing I may have readers who are of a different faith), and so I'll do the same online and close my witness in the name of Jesus Christ, my master. Amen.

Childhood Obsessions and Memories

The story with this is that this came on when I was really young, and I still remember this Saturday Morning Special. Anytime I hear "Og" I think of this story. 

Being 44 and Single in a Culture that Venerates Marriage Above All Things

 I'm going to speak very candidly to my married and unmarried friends who don't understand why or what it is like to be Single in a... I'm going to say culture not church for a very specific reason...a culture that above all other things values marriage more than anything... Even more, sometimes, than living a righteous single life.

The church is pretty clear about marriage and also the inclusiveness of those who remain single far past the "appropriate age" for remaining that way for whatever reason. The purpose of this post is not to delve into all the reasons someone might be single, but to talk about my own and to address the inappropriateness of the cultural prejudices that come, primarily, from those who are already married. 

First of all, I want to honor those people who believe that being single at an older age is a trial. My heart goes out to those people. They want to be in a condition that they are currently not in. I feel the same way about 10% of the time. And, I mainly feel that way when those who are married begin to make judgments about me and my current relationship status. The rest of the time I feel very blessed and love the life that I've been given. 

I come from a family where I never had a happy healthy marriage relationship modeled for me. I've forgiven those people, and I don't view this as being anyone's (like my parent's) fault. Going back generations, there's tragedy on both my father and mother's side. On my mother's side, my grandparents were divorced, and relationships between my family my grandmother's ex-husband were broken to the point where I never even met my grandfather before he died. I don't really even blame him for it. His was the most tragic story. His mother was killed by his father who then in turn killed himself. His sister, my great aunt, possibly witnessed the whole thing, but I'm not certain about that.

On my father's side, there are equally tragic stories. I want to be brief and bypass most of the details about them, but I will say a few things. My grandmother did not marry for love. I guess back then it was still normal to do that. I think she loved someone else who didn't love her, and then married someone else that she thought was a good person... but she wasn't in love with him. I have more in common with her than any other ancestor. Her father experienced the loss of his wife due to the pandemic of 1918. She had the pre-existing condition of Tuberculosis. So my grandmother lost her mother at the age of 5. 

I believe that I carry that grandmother's energy. My entire life I've been attracting men who I think are nice, but I'm not in love with them. There are very few instances where I've actually dated someone I was in love with, and those relationships started to mirror other of my family's dysfunctional patterns, so I had to end those. I sometimes wonder about my being single as a trial, or a blessing, or just a state of being.

I feel like I've been blessed to not have to be in a heart wrenching dysfunctional marriage like those that were modeled to me all my life. I'm a happy person. I love my life. I absolutely would love to be married, but I want to be married to someone I love and who also loves me. That doesn't seem like such a tall order. But, in my life it is. 

People who are married act as if they accomplished some great task... like they have mastered the skill of acquiring a marriage. But, I would like to suggest that perhaps they look at that differently. Being married to someone you love is a blessing. You've been given a gift. 

I am still single because I chose to settle for nothing less than a healthy marriage relationship. One that is based on love. My grandma once told me that I couldn't have that... that I needed to do what she did. 

I actually did try to do what she did but then also try to have feelings for that person (those people, as I tried multiple times). And, I succeeded... But the minute that happened that man (those men) stopped being into me. That's been my life to this point. 

Energy therapy is a huge part of my life for this reason. I believe that there are things God knows I need to change about myself, and how I am with relationships. I have more to learn about myself. I think I need to learn that love isn't out there but inside me. I don't need to be married to feel love. I don't think I've ever really been a person who loved myself or thought I was great until I discovered energy therapy. That has been the most powerful takeaway from my discovery of these tools. 

The Gospel has helped me remember who I am, and energy therapy has given me the tools to really feel like I am enough. And, it has given me permission to love myself AS I love others rather than putting everyone else as being higher than me. We are equally loved by God, and we are to love others EQUALLY... No pedestals. 

I just want to reiterate that I feel so blessed and happy. I love being single. It is not a trial. It is a blessing. And, if I am blessed with marriage in this life I will be happy that way too.

Why I believe in Chakras

 Healing my life

I have experiences that lead me to believe that the spirit, like the body, has anatomy. When I was trying to use traditional therapy to heal. I didn't feel like it really did much more than just allow me to vent. When I saw my first therapist we talked a lot about the same experiences, trauma, and how it was affecting my life at the moment, but I didn't ever feel like I was getting better. For $300 a month, it was a bit of a letdown. After some time I found temporary free therapy through my employer. I was then introduced to the word life trap. I took a quiz and found out I had almost all the life traps. That free therapy lasted one year. I learned a lot. But, I still never felt like I was getting better, and that free therapy only was available for a year. 

Then I entered a phase of my life that was wracked with discouragement. This was my no-therapy phase, granted my whole life up to about 2002 or 2003 was a no-therapy phase, but this was different because I had been in therapy, but it didn't help. I kept the same suicidal self-harming tendencies alive and well both before and during therapy. My therapy sessions ended in Fall 2006, which was really bad timing for a lot of reasons. 

1. My abuser had moved back to the same town I was living in.

2. I had just started a new job.

3. I had just experienced the most excruciating heartbreak of my life, and a realization of something that completely killed my spirit to the point that I no longer felt the will to live.

 I was actively planning to die. And, I very nearly succeeded. However, it wasn't through taking my own life. Self-Harming has been a part of my life since I was very young. My self-harming was in the form of banging the front, back, and sides of my head against blunt surfaces. It would make me feel better to cause myself pain. It would take my mind off the emotional pain I was experiencing. Around mid-October 2006, I started to become ill. I didn't know what was causing it. I couldn't walk, keep food down, and it felt like a weight was crushing me from my head to my spine. After seeing doctors, and them not being able to find out what was wrong with me, I was finally sent to a neurologist. She described what it sounded like to her: the lining of my spinal cord was torn, which happens because of repeated blunt force trauma. I was, very slowly killing myself through my self-harming. I really didn't want to live, but I didn't want to die either. I haven't harmed myself since that time.

There was something about that neurologist that was different from the other practitioners I saw. She seemed to know about my self-harming tendencies (although I lied about it). I could tell that she didn't believe me...that she could see into my soul and know the cause of my suffering. I healed, and a week after that I was back at work. I had headaches for a few weeks, but I got better. I haven't self-harmed since that time. I stopped self-harming without therapy. Instead, it took a lesson directly connected with both my spirit and my body. 

I didn't want to live, but others helped me. My sisters ladled soup and medicine down my throat. At my job, the other resource teacher helped with sub plans and files. And, that neurologist, in less than 10 minutes, told me why I was hurting. It's like my spirit was crying out to please see me. My body was connected to all of the pain of the past and now all of the pain of my then present. 

That occurred 7 years before my introduction to Carol Tuttle's Dressing Your Truth program, which led to my purchasing Chakra 7 (her old program through Mindvalley, which is no longer available to purchase)  and learning about what Chakras are. 

It sounded like craziness at first, just as traditional therapy sounds to some. Why did this change my life? I've felt for a long time that the spirit has an anatomy just like the body does.  When my mind was trying to work through my trauma the effects were very limited, and in fact, I felt that I was damaged beyond repair. In January 2005 I finished reading Reinventing Your Life by Jeffery Young at the request of my free therapist. She was very good, but I felt I was never going to get better. I was stuck in the life traps put there by my abuser.  

The difference of approach of Chakra (my first experience with energy therapy/healing techniques), is that they addressed the spirit and the part of the body that was directly affected by the abuse/trauma.  Traditional therapy doesn't do that.  To western medicine (which traditional therapy has been birthed out of), there is no such thing as spirit. But, my faith ensures me that there is. Western ideas lead us to believe that there is no spirit except in folklore, and in those tales, the spirit is translucent...like a nylon stocking...no anatomy. The idea of Chakras, a spiritual diagram of anatomy that connects with various organs and systems of the body has helped me heal...really heal from my abuse. It has helped me forgive and release trauma. 

Sexual trauma is most likely stored where? In the sacral chakra, where the reproductive organs are. That's the part that was violated, so that's the part that needs to be healed. Actually, I've learned that all of the Chakras are connected to each other, and that sexual abuse hits every Chakra. Every part of my spirit and body had pain from that experience. 

In traditional therapy, people are never told to release their trauma. They share it again, and again, and again. With energy therapy, you share the story and then change the story...change your thought processes. You forgive...and give the negative energy back to the person who gave it to you.  You use sound, visual stimulation, tactile, kinesthetic, etc. to change, not just the mind, but everything. My whole self is different. It's powerful to connect the physical to the spiritual and allow the mind to be lead down a path of healing.  Here are the 7 Chakras. The first 3 need some explanation, but the last 4 seem pretty self-explanatory:

1. Root: Connected with the pelvis all the way down past the feet

2. Sacral: Lower abdominal area

3. Solar Plexus/Power: Upper Abdominal area

4. Heart

5. Throat

6. Third Eye

7. Crown

You can find free YouTube videos about the Chakras. You can find Chakra music and sound meditations. Carol Tuttle has a book that I still haven't read yet. It's called The Modern Chakra Guide: 7 Steps to Awakening Your Energy in Today's World

I just want to end my post by reiterating that I have not had the desire to injure myself for about 10 years. Instead, I nurture my body and spirit knowing they are directly connected to each other. I feel a sense of joy that fills my whole soul and body.

I believe Christ is the ultimate healer. I also believe that medicine, both Eastern and Western can come together for more powerful effects than either of them could produce on their own. This is the value of the Chakra. 

I love the Gospel and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

I look forward to General Conference. I love to listen to the words of Apostles, Prophets, and other servants of God. My testimony was not always as strong as it is today. 

I have had many experiences that some would say should have driven me out of the church. I won't share those experiences here. I have also had times in my life that nearly drove me to taking my own life. My life today is nothing like my life was all those years ago. I had completely forgotten what it was like to be depressed on that level until recently.

 I've been working on a project I've called The Journal Transcription Project where I'm taking all my journals and typing them up. Right now I'm going through my journals from June 1994 and on, and it is painful for me to type some of the things I wrote back then. Two Sundays ago I had worked through September 1994, and I came across a suicide note I had written. It was meant to be a hypothetical suicide note. There are so many thoughts that I was processing as I remembered back to those days. I remembered those thoughts as they plagued me for at least 2 decades of my life. 

 But, there were times when the voice of the Spirit came to my heart and mind that kept me going. It would say, "just hold on a little longer." I've had countless miracles in my life. Some of those have been in the form of friends and people who were the best of examples at a time when I was living a very rebellious life. I appreciate them. Many of them don't know how much they made a difference in my life. One of them influenced me to go on a mission. That mission changed me forever. It gave me a pattern of scripture study that has been the means of keeping me firm in my faith. 

My study of the Book of Mormon has not ceased since. I love that book. I feel the Spirit every time I read from that book. Though I've had hard times since then, I never have felt that God was not there. Even though I don't understand everything in life, and I've had to work through unspeakable pain, I have and will always have a testimony of God's restored church. I will always know that Jesus Christ is really our Redeemer. I will never stop trying to be better today than I was yesterday. And I will always know that God loves us. 

A Shout out to Louise Hay and John Bradshaw: Pointing me to the Master Healer, Christ

 Two things that have made a profound change in my life are the law of attraction and work with my inner child.

I see the law of attraction as more of a phenomenon more than a doctrine. I feel like I'm still in the experimentation phase with this, and I really am starting to see the power of my thoughts in shaping my life. One thing I've heard said is that you don't have to believe in the law of attraction for it to work. It just works regardless of whether you are working with it deliberately or if you are just letting your thoughts go wild and having it work according to the crazy ups and downs that are swimming around in your brain.

I definitely think our thoughts are powerful...especially f we let the negative ones stay in our head. Which is why I really love the work and dedication of Louise Hay. At a time when I was at a very low point in my life, I made the decision to start listening to her morning meditations every morning:

Best Morning Meditation Guided Meditation and Affirmations

Loving life and having a positive mindset has been a game-changer for my life, and these meditations are so good. Another one is about learning to love yourself. I love that she says that you don't have to think of yourself as a bad person in order to change or repent. You can be a good person and still decide to change. I think this is what President Nelson talks about when he says that repentance can be a joyous process. We can decide to be "a better person", "more of who we truly are", or the way I like to think of it is that we can become what God sees in us as our greatest potential. 

Louise Hay: Learn to Love yourself

The other thing I've been doing, working on healing childhood trauma, has been greatly influenced by John Bradshaw. I found his exercise of writing letters to your inner child in your dominant hand and writing back from my child self with my non-dominant hand really to be a powerful way to give a voice to a child who never had a voice. Healing the Shame that Binds You, one of his best-selling books, really stands out as the book that changed my life. I love that many of his lectures recorded. 

Healing the Shame that Binds You - part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6

When Jesus says, "suffer the little children to come unto me", I think of doing this inner child healing work. Christ is the ultimate healer, and when we work with our own selves...our own little inner child, we are becoming more like Christ. We can work on ourselves and in this way we are, as it says in Mosiah 3:19, becoming "as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient...", but we are also, as Paul says, "putting away childish things" (1 Corinthians 13:11). Most of the dysfunction that exists in a family comes from people who have not worked through their toxic shame and therefore are triggered by their partner, their children, etc. and then act out the shame through abuse and addiction. That is what I've witnessed. 

When Jesus was asked who the greatest was in the kingdom of heaven, he pointed to a little child. 

We are every age we've ever been, and our younger selves still exist within us. This is who we must seek after and reclaim. He ultimately heals our wounds, but we have to do the work. I've been proactive about this as well as training my mind to think more positive and happy thoughts and it has changed me. I'm a different person because of it.