Let Go, Stay Present and You Shall Receive

I feel like things are coming together. I’m working through my issues. Slow and steady progress. Yesterday I looked myself over in the mirror and decided I liked what I saw. I look fairly healthy and happy. I think when you look at yourself, you really do focus on individual flaws. You don’t look at the whole picture. It doesn’t even matter – everyone is beautiful and perfect in their own way – but even if you want to get superficial about it, you have to be fair to yourself and look at the whole picture. Stand outside yourself and take a look. Chances are it really isn’t as bad as you think it is.

The other day I had a small performance with a dance team I am on at a special event. The event had guest speakers, and I decided to really be present in the moment and pay attention. I only saw a couple speakers, but they were really relevant! One of the presentations was about starting your own blog! I just started this one recently, so I was quite interested in what the speaker had to say. A friend also shared with me the concept of the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) called Tapping. Basically you tap places on your body, sometimes reciting affirmations, and it helps alleviate negative feelings, either emotional or physical. I’d never even heard of it before, but I’ve already made use of it! The Tapping World Summit site has some good videos that even talk about facing your problems. Right up the alley of things I’m trying to do right now!

It’s so funny how life just opens up and brings you what you need when you finally open up and ask for it! I always felt like no one thought like me; no one understands me; everyone around me is just not on my level at all. Ever since I decided that I needed to accept people for who they are, and that maybe I shouldn’t be writing them off, suddenly I’ve found all sorts of people who think like me, understand me and even inspire me! The second I stopped being obsessed with finding something was exactly when I started to find it. So cool how that works. You often hear about that concept as far as people looking for relationships, but it works with more than just that. You just have to be open to noticing things and letting things come to you instead of targeting something and muscling your way towards it.

Take advantage of every moment. I could have been annoyed at having to listen to speakers, and I could have left. But I stayed – and I was rewarded with some very interesting information. Stay grateful and stay open to everything life has to offer. You do not have a crystal ball, and you do not know the depths of what something has to offer. Be present in the moment, and take full advantage of the opportunities that come your way. You may be surprised.

I think it is a really good practice to look back over the previous year and make note of just how much happened. I find it helps me have hope for the future. Normally, I would just feel “stuck” and like I’ll never meet people; never find such-and-such activity; never [insert your own dream here]. But when you look back over the year, you notice just how much life can change in such a short time. This time last year I was just about to discover the dance studio that is now the joy of my life. Less than a year ago I met the boyfriend that changed my life and got me started on this journey simply by being himself and making me see past the judgments I usually hold for people. I changed jobs, went to concerts and took a trip to Hawaii by myself. I discovered the book The Untethered Soul which is now my Bible, and I can’t imagine life without the knowledge I learned in that book. So much has happened. It is pretty amazing and exciting to know just how much changed, and to know that just as much will change over the next year!

Life keeps going and life keeps changing. You never know who you will meet and how it will impact your life. You never know what new realizations you will make that change your outlook on life forever. Look for growth and positivity, and you will find it.

Issues with Sex and Love

At this point it is pretty obvious that I have some issues with my body. I think the fears that started as a child grew and formed complex protective apparatuses to keep me from dealing with them. Not only that, but I project that back out into the world in the form of judgment. All my rationalizations are correct – you should love someone for who they are inside, not what they look like; sex in the media is objectification of people, especially women – but that’s not the whole story for me. Those came after the fact. I cling to them. It’s all valid, but underneath the valid points are some nasty issues that have to be resolved.

So the first step is to be comfortable with my own body. I have to love all parts of me all the time. I have to see myself in all kinds of situations and love what I see. I have to be comfortable with it. I am human, and I have to realize that I do the same things that other people do - I just don’t see myself doing it. I’m not looking at myself. I don’t get to look at myself. I have eyes, and with those eyes, I’m looking at everyone else.

After absorbing the deep truths involved with that, the next step is to slowly incorporate outsiders. I figured I’d watch some movies without looking up their sexual content for once. I swear I thought someone had recommended The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to me in the past, but now I see that must have been a huge joke. The movie is filthy and graphic. But, a perfect opportunity for me to work on myself and see how I’m progressing, unfortunately.

The sexual content in the movie seemed to slowly escalate. I guess that works with what I’m trying to accomplish. The first encounter didn’t show anything, though it would universally be seen as disturbing. The next encounter showed a whole lot more, and was even more disturbing. I’m happy to say that these parts didn’t bug me too much. You know why? Because no one is going to get turned on by this stuff. Everyone is disturbed by it. Rape is not okay. So as far as my own issues are concerned, I felt safe watching it, because I didn’t have to defend to the imaginary people of the world inside my head that it was bad. The people of the world agree with me. I felt horrified by the rape, but I didn’t feel the extra feelings that stem from my own issues. Well I did a little, but nowhere near how I usually feel.

So then was the consensual sex scene. That’s what got me. First of all, SO FREAKING GRAPHIC. That is the most graphic thing I have ever seen in a movie. Ever. Granted I’ve always refused to watch movies with nudity and sexual content (THIS IS WHY!), so I have no idea if this is typical now. It really proves my point. It was horrible. It may as well have been porn. I swear it basically was. Granted, I’ve never seen porn, but I mean, I get the concept, and THAT is very nearly it. When the scene was over, I sat in my sinking emotions, which turned to tears, and I sobbed into my pillow. The chemicals of fear, disgust, discomfort, hatred and pain stung.

You know what though, it wasn’t as bad as it has been in the past. The feelings, that is. Maybe because I wasn’t in the minds of others, trying to figure out how they were feeling about the scene. I find things don’t hurt me as much when I’m single. When I have a boyfriend, I always flip out about whether or not they’ve seen it and what images they have forever floating around in their heads. But when I’m single, I have less to stress about. I don’t have a real-life example to analyze. And thank god, because I am nowhere near ready to throw that into the mix here. I need to get comfortable seeing this stuff BY MYSELF before I start worrying about how other people see it. I mean, I don’t WANT to be comfortable watching this stuff. I really don’t. I don’t think I SHOULD. I don’t think anyone should. However, I think my reasons have a lot to do with me and my issues instead of the moral and objectification issues. I can still think that way, but first I have to deal with my underlying issues with it. I can be against it but still not want to cry, curl up in a ball, shut the world out and hate everyone after seeing it. That probably isn’t healthy. Basically I have to become comfortable with it before I can allow myself to hate it again. I have to hate it for the right reasons, and not confuse my own insecurities and issues with the actual objections I’m saying I have with it. (Aka, I’m still right! I’m just also wrong…)

So I watched the scene again. And then one more time. Desensitization, anyone? Honestly, the shock did go away a little bit by the third time. But the bad feelings and the tears still came.

Oh right, and then there was another, louder, sex scene. Because it is so necessary and vital to the plot line. What the hell.

I thought about that episode of 2 Broke Girls that I saw recently. Two Amish boys spent time with the girls while on Rumspringa, and the girls tried to turn them on, which was really easy, because the poor boys had never been exposed to that stuff before. So they got turned on and then felt ashamed. I wasn’t turned on, but still, am I feeling shame? Am I ashamed of this stuff? Is that the problem?

Originally, I viewed sex as an expression of love. Well, those ideas got attacked by society, the media, and the people around me. Everyone just wanted sex for sex’s sake. Physical release. Physical gratification. That disgusted me. Everyone made sex dirty. They made me believe all sex was dirty.

The books I’m reading say that when sex is used as a means of communication, aka an expression of love, it is holy. And when it is used for the ego, it is unholy. My problem is that you shouldn’t be able to give two meanings to something so intimate. You can’t have sex with one person and have it mean nothing, and have sex with another person and have it mean everything. Either it means something to you or it doesn’t. You don’t get to put a different meaning on it each time. Just because you are having sex with someone you love doesn’t mean that sex means love to you. If you can have unholy sex, then sex is just physical to you, and you just happen to love the person you are doing it with. The sex itself is still UNHOLY.

As always, I get into other people’s heads. Because now I can’t see anyone in our modern-day society viewing sex in the right way; in the holy way. I kind of just don’t see any validity in love anymore.

There it is. That’s my problem. I no longer believe in love.

And these books don’t help at all.

So I grew up thinking people fall in love. People fall in love based on who a person is; based on soulmates and true love and destiny; compatibility and happiness; viewing life the same way; having the same opinions and same views on how people should live their lives; wanting the same things out of life. True love. Everyone is looking for it, and people usually find it and get married.

Then I saw everyone around me turn into a hedonistic sex addict. There’s divorce and cheating everywhere, not to mention an obsession with porn, strip clubs and loveless sex. Then I felt like love didn’t exist – it is just a mask to make lust look a little more respectable. Sometimes lust doesn’t even bother wearing the mask.

Now I’ve discovered that the concept of love that I’ve been so attached to is really just looking for a band-aid on all your fears and insecurities. Someone to make you feel good and worthy, since you can’t make yourself feel that way. You have to make yourself feel that way. You can’t lean that heavily on a relationship to provide that for you.

So basically, “true love” doesn’t exist. Sure, love exists. Love is within all of us. We want to love and accept everyone in the world. But romantic love – having one true love – the whole concept behind marriage and fairytales – that doesn’t exist. Like, at all. And if you find it, like The Untethered Soul says – you’ve failed. You’ve failed to conquer your fears. You found someone who will avoid those areas for you, and you will stay wounded and incomplete forever.

Well, there you have it. I’ve uncovered some very real problems here. I’m learning to accept and love everyone around me, but I’ve completely lost faith in romantic love. Let’s see what I can do with this knowledge now.

Don't Idealize or Vilify

I think I’ve been idealizing my ex. Honestly, I needed to. I needed to be able to fix my fears and love the perfect soul that he is before I could begin putting the human components of reality back on. In my head, I picture a table setting, where the tablecloth doesn’t match the silverware, plates and centerpiece. You have to remove the silverware, plates and centerpiece in order to change the tablecloth. Once you’ve smoothed out that new tablecloth, then you can start placing the other items back on it. I feel like that’s a good picture of what I’ve been doing. I removed the tablecloth of fear, put down a tablecloth of love, and now I’m starting to place the items back on top.

I’ve been aware that all my confused feelings could have to do more with me and this journey than with him and his place in my life. I have old posts as proof! I’m very much aware that I need to settle all that before I can start thinking anything that affects the both of us. They are some pretty powerful emotions though.

I think that’s an important lesson for anyone. Sometimes the emotions you feel towards people have more to do with you than they do with the other person. Be careful not to vilify or idealize people. They are just human. Love and accept people, but know that everyone has their own problems. Everyone has fears and bad habits, and those are going to come out eventually. There is good and bad in everyone.

Communication Failures

Communication failures can press all kinds of buttons for people. When everyone is trying to get their own points across and make connections based on their own understandings, and the concepts aren’t processing as it goes from one person to another, tempers can flare. Everyone wants to feel like they are being listened to and understood. When you feel like that isn’t happening, anger can happen.

At that very moment, you have a choice. You can get upset, and further deteriorate the situation, or you can figure out what the failures are in the communication and calmly resolve them.

Today I had to deal with this. A co-worker and I are setting up a system, and the process requires both of our expertise. We ran into a problem. Based on his knowledge, he thought he knew what the problem was, and he started asking me questions in language that I did not even understand. Meanwhile, I understood better what was happening, but didn’t know exactly what the problem was. So I was asking for him to do things such that I could resolve the problem.

So both of us thought we knew what the problem was, and we were both failing at communicating the details.

Then we had a meeting where we had to explain our progress to our boss. I felt like my co-worker was explaining it all wrong and misleading our boss. Our boss asked questions in my area of expertise, but my co-worker kept talking, answering them to the best of his knowledge. I tried to interject, since this was my area, after all. He kept talking. I tried to interrupt. He kept talking. I decided to wait for him to stop. Eventually I successfully interrupted such that I could clarify everything in the language of my expertise, which my boss understood, as well. I perceive that I clarified some things, but who knows, really. And I may have made some points that could be seen as rude - trying to draw parallels between this situation and one he had been through recently.

My boss and I uncovered and fixed the problem. The co-worker still wasn’t clear on what the issue was, and had some questions on how it affected his area of expertise. The short answer is, it doesn’t. But somehow we weren’t communicating that to him in a way that processed, because he was still worried.

Basically, my co-worker and I both got pretty defensive, and then he was mad at me. I couldn’t find him, so I wrote an e-mail explaining the issue and how we resolved it (I told him I would, to document what happened) and I apologized for getting frustrated and expressed how we seem to talk in different languages due to our areas of expertise, and how that is confusing our communication such that no one’s point is completely getting across. I said I’d work on communicating my points better. I also said maybe we should hear each other completely out before trying figure out how both of our perspectives fit together. When we jump into each other’s comments and start making our own assumptions and try to force each other to speak in our own language, it just doesn’t work.

He didn’t read the e-mail.

Then I was mad at myself. Mad that I got frustrated. How could I have handled this better? I’m doing all this soul-searching, applying the concepts of seeing things in a more relaxed and loving way, and yet I still managed to walk right into this mess.

Lost in my thoughts, I comforted myself that I’d done all I could do, and brainstormed on how I could handle it better in the future. Then I asked myself, what do I do now? My intuition suddenly spoke up.

Talk to him.

Here I am propping myself up, telling myself I’ve done all I can do, but I did nothing! I just e-mailed him. Maybe I was scared to talk to him. I just wanted it to blow over. I expected him to come talk to me. I expected him to read the e-mail and be fine with everything. I don’t get to get off that easily. I have to go talk to him.

So I did.

At first he didn’t want to talk to me. But then the communication started flowing. There were times I completely agreed and supported his comments, and other times that I had to bite my tongue or think really hard about how to word things. But I held it together and explained myself well. We even talked about how to improve the communication between us in times like these. It ended up being a really good talk.

Things happen. It’s all in how you deal with it. And if you get off track, just ask yourself honestly: What should I do now?