Just One of the Challenges of Moving Forward…...

Human beings, for all of our love of color, still prefer for things to be black and white. Particularly in our relationship with Self, gray makes us all a little nervous. We want to know whether to feel good or bad about ourselves. We want to know where Self stands: On the success side or on the failure side of being? On the capable side or the incapable side? And, all too often, we’re guilty of making harsh judgments about ourselves, based on the reality factors of now, that do us way more harm than good.

We don’t always get to look pretty as we go through our stages of growing forward. When the processes that take us from one mind-state of being to another thrust us into an emotional limbo, where we feel as if we don’t know if we’re coming or going, speaking affirmative words of wisdom to ourselves— “I’m neither all weak or all strong . . . I’m neither all good or all bad . . . I’m still growing and still learning.”—can calm the qualms we’re feeling and make all the difference as to whether we hang in there, or bust.

It might help us to feel more confident, about ourselves and our capabilities, if we were to remember that until our new mindsets become ripe enough to create full-blown changes in our lives, we should expect to have to spend time in the swaying-bridge zone of experiences where we’ll find ourselves climbing from one level of understanding to another . . . and from one level of belief to the next higher.

Excerpt from From Trouble to High Places: Meditations for Women Who Are So Ready to Cross the Bridges that Lead to Joy! Copyright 2009 Esther Davis-Thompson

Are You Believing High Enough?

How might your life change . . .

if you began to believe that you are a blessed woman?

if you began to know that no experience you’ve ever had has damaged you, only made you stronger and so much wiser?

if you came to the understanding that every experience you’ve had thus far was preparing you to minister to . . . to have a special compassion for . . . someone, somewhere?

if you started remembering that you have an infinite source of power inside you, just waiting to be switched on?

if you started thinking that you are resourceful enough to create the life you want to live . . . have the career you want to have, or build the business you want to build . . . and started realizing that it’s awesomely important for you to believe your visions into reality for yourself and others?

if you understood that the people who hurt you, hurt you because they couldn’t do any better, not because you were less than them . . . or just born to be hurt?

if you suddenly realized that your tomorrows don’t necessarily have to be determined by your yesterdays?

if you could see that you came to this life with a purpose as important as the purpose anyone else has?

if you truly believed that you could fly above all of your difficult circumstances and earthly reasons, to leave miracles in your trail?

Excerpt from From Trouble to High Places: Meditations for Women Who Are So Ready to Cross the Bridges that Lead to Joy!  ©2009 Esther Davis-Thompson

Success!

We swim, daily, in whatever feelings we are having. Stroking, floating, treading steadily through them, we try to go about our lives. And sometimes, if we aren’t mindful and prayerful about what’s going on inside of us, we can get stuck in some negative spaces and stay there much too long.

What if you were abused, emotionally or physically, as a young child? If you spend your days stuck in the pain of those experiences, you will be abused, continuously, every day of your life for the rest of your life, or until your mind takes drastic (and probably negative) measures to relieve you of this trauma.

What if you had your first child when you were fourteen, and you cannot recover from the shame they made you feel? Will you spend the rest of your life concentrating on finding the best ways to hide yourself? Your dreams will not get much of your attention that way. In fact, by now you may have denied yourself the privilege of ever dreaming again.

What if you didn’t finish high school, or college, or the master’s program, and now your eyes fill with tears whenever you attend a graduation, and you feel as if everyone in the world knows and thinks you’re not smart enough? Will you walk around for the rest of your life feeling like you’ve cheated yourself, denying your natural desire to learn new things and to accomplish some things . . . working at jobs below your potential and maybe struggling financially?

It’s how you handle your pains and disappointments that will determine whether or not you will move toward your High Places. Too often we make our pain our familiar, our favorite preoccupation, our most common and comfortable thing to think about. We carry it around in our minds and wrap it around us like a tattered old security blanket that makes us reek of hopelessness and chokes off every single dream we ever hoped to have.

Get ready . . . to jump over that part of yourself that’s attached to this pain. Jump! Cease meditating on your pain and begin to meditate on the path.

From Raising Up Queens: Loving Our Daughters Loud and Strong, 2000 Innisfree Press, Inc., copyright Esther Davis-Thompson

WomanSpace Round-Up for October 25, 2012

Everyday I spend hours reading articles of interest to me from around the web. From time to time I’ll be posting links to some of the articles I think some of you might find interesting. The topics usually include family health, women’s health (specifically), stress reduction, advancements in breast cancer treatments and prevention, wellness/disease prevention tips and tactics, parenting, and relationships.  I’ll spare you the political stuff … that’s already slapping you in the face at every turn, right? (‘Though, for the record, you can’t tell me that in their truest guts President Obama and Governor Romney didn’t want to slap each others’ faces during the debates — after all diplomacy is a learned response and I’m talking pure human response here.)  Anyway… check out my favorite reads from this morning:

In a Marlo Thomas article/slideshow called Simple Tips to Reduce Stress “with recommendations from the likes of Dr. Oz, Deepak Chopra, Arianna Huffington and other guests from Mondays With Marlo“, Deepak Chopra says to prepare to ride out stress “by ensuring you have laughter, exercise, sleep, meditation, imagination, visualization, massage and sex in your life.”  Hmmm… I’m making a checklist now… Check out the article at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marlo-thomas/simple-tips-to-help-lower-stress_b_2010680.html#slide=1644404

Here you can read Allie Compton’s article – Rachel Held Evans, Author of “A Year of Biblical Womanhood”, Spent A Year Living the Bible Literally: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/23/a-year-of-biblical-womanhood_n_2006184.html?icid=maing-grid7|customfirefox|dl11|sec3_lnk3%26pLid%3D225344#slide=1675988

And here… Several good articles from wellnessresources.com about current efforts to conquer breast cancer and other cancers using curcumin (turmeric), quercetin, resveratrol, fiber and more … Good reads for everyone wanting to keep abreast of the developments in breast cancer treatments and prevention, especially those who, like me, have personal experience with this dreadful disease:

Our Power

The spirits of the old

and stronger ones

present themselves

in the midst of my can’ts

to tell me I can.

We have in our mothers and grandmothers . . . those who were survivors . . . powerful examples of how to make it.

They believed in God. They believed in working. They took pride in creating their own home spaces.

One day we look up and realize we’re walking a powerless walk. We still have our power, but it’s unexercised and weak.

We have to re-discover ourselves. Remember? We are the descendants of mighty women who drew the power to create, to work, to dream, to facilitate, to nurture, build, sow, reap, and tear down strongholds as naturally as they drew breath from their God.

I hear them praying. Don’t you?

Don’t you hear them praying and praising and singing and shouting? Don’t you see them dancing their old feet to Faith rhythms . . . stepping everywhere?

There was power in their gratitude. . . power in their praising . . . power in their hope and in their Faith. . . power in their loving . . . power in their trusting in their God-Creator . . . power in their knowing for certain what they believed.

And so it is for us. You and me. And so it is. Hallelujah!

MotherSpace

This post and the next few posts will be about Motherhood … excerpts from Reinventing Your MotherSpace: creating a Good and blessed future For Our Children —

… This is a Work book. This book is about our trying to do some serious Work on ourselves, in the spirit, for our children.

Once, we knew only the space of our Selfhood. (Can you remember when your main preoccupation was with your Self?) But, now we have also the space of our motherhood to be concerned with—the MotherSpace within ourselves. Every wish we wish, every hope we hope, every tear we cry, every fear we experience, every thought we think regarding our children, all emerge from within the substance we hold in this MotherSpace. The MotherSpace is a subconscious entity. We do not, often, ponder our reactions and responses. We seldom stop to think how what we have just said sounds to our children, feels to their feelings, how it may imprint them and what it says about our philosophies of life, or what emotion we’re being ruled by, right at that time. We simply react and reply as our Inner Mother Self tells us to, based on who we are and where we’ve been and what our perceptions are.

The MotherSpace is a unique space. A certain brand of love is evoked in this space. A particular level of abandonment to the MotherSpace is required. Motherhood is not, as we have been misguided into thinking, about producing perfect children. Motherhood is being the sometimes-willing vessel via which our children will learn many of their spiritual lessons.

The MotherSpace is a spiritual space. Whatever spiritual knowledge we are actively knowing colors this space. If we are open to Wisdom, we will be able to serve as instructors and guides, supporters and encouragers to our children. With our Faith, we will be able to withstand the blows to our hearts and our heads—and all of the heat and pressure that are inherent in the mother-role. If we are void of these spiritual things, we can only, at best, initiate frenzied and inconsistent attempts at raising our children and guiding them through the muddle of this life.

MotherLove is what flows from the MotherSpace.

Whatever flows from the MotherSpace is MotherLove—good or bad—and MotherLove is the psycho-emotional/spiritual food we feed our children.

We owe it to our children to find out what we’re harboring in the MotherSpace. What thoughts prevail? What fears? What shames? What guilts? What beauty? What ugliness? What hates? What inhibitions? What idiosyncrasies? What losses? At what costs? Who are we not forgiving? Who are we loving? What have we lost that we needed? What powers have we given away? Who hurt us? When? Where did this tender spot come from? That particular anger? That wish? That strand of Faith? That precious bit of boldness?  

Peace can’t exist in a battle.

Joy can’t dwell in a sad head or a sad heart. If your head is a battleground of conflicting thoughts and negativity, you can’t experience Peace. And if your heart is bitter or broken—if your heart is a sad space where old unresolved problems and failed relationships and unforgiveness sit festering—you can’t know Joy. Faith can’t dwell where you allow fear to prevail. Hope can’t dwell where despair is established and honored. Love fails when you spend yourself nurturing your angers, hurts, and fears. All of these contaminate the MotherSpace. And from the tainted MotherSpace flows toxic MotherLove.

Walk around inside your MotherSpace and look at the tear stains and the laugh lines on the wall and re-experience them. Only then will you realize that the MotherSpace is really a growth, a subtle enlargement, no different in quality, in atmosphere, in texture, in substance, from your space of Self. And it is yourself that you must be concerned with, as well as your children.

One sure way to find out what’s brewing in that stewpot inside you is to become a mother. The Joy, the Faith, the Hope, the Creativity, the Love, that you have stored inside you shine out of your MotherSpace with a brilliance that can penetrate and heal your world. But, so too have all of your past pains and fears and angers and sorrows taken root in you and inadvertently made their way into your MotherSpace. How sad to find out that just when your child needs your Faith . . . you’re full of hopelessness. Just when she needs some tender Love . . . you’re afraid to give it. Just when you need to use a firm hand . . . you can’t get your ownself together. You may need some courage . . . but you’re full of fear. The substance of our MotherSpace is rooted in the past, but it must be evaluated and worked on in the present.

So, we have a special Work to do. We have, for much too long, been hobbled, crippled by our society’s fears and obsessions and imaginings. We have used our heads and our hearts. We’ve gone the way of higher blood pressure, bleeding ulcers, overwhelming anxiety, extra-neous panic and intense fear and emotional strain trying to fix ourselves and our families. Our spirits have been sitting by waiting.

We really do not have to struggle so.

We have to start running headlong into the Spirit for the only safe vehicle to carry us, and our children, into the future. Now, more than ever, our children need a strong, positive, unshakable self-image. We ourselves need a strong, positive, unshakable self-image to be able to Help them. Now, more than ever, they must be fed a daily diet of Hope, Faith, Courage, Peace, Lovingkindness, Joy, and Gratitude. And we must feed ourselves a daily diet of Hope, Faith, Courage, Peace, Lovingkindness, Joy, and Gratitude, if this is what we want to give out. We must purposely fill our MotherSpaces with pure positivity. We must challenge every negative tendency we have in us and recognize it for the harm it can do our children. We cannot possibly parent with the fear of our worst expectations foremost in our minds. We have to alter our old beliefs to fit our new positive hopes and move on from there.

Our children will survive.

We must believe this.

Our sons and daughters will not continue to die on street corners or on our porches from drive-by shootings.

We must believe this.

We will not keep burying our young.

We must believe this.

Our children will know success.

We must believe this.

Our children will learn, not only to read and write well, to calculate and analyze, but to think well and ponder well.

We must believe this.

Our children will daydream. Our daughters and our sons will envision. They will walk strong to their High Places.

And we must believe.

Come, let us reason together. How can we grow our children strong? Grow our daughters like beautiful sunflowers, worthy and wonderful, with faces full of sun! Grow our sons like sturdy oaks with the bendability of willows—able to catch the wind, withstand, and ride. Daughters and sons walking in the Wisdom of the Spirit.

We shall teach them Love songs. And Praise songs. And War songs. And Peace songs. We shall worship with them. We shall preach to them. We shall pray to God with them.

We shall praise their good efforts. We shall lay hands on them. We shall pat their heads and pinch their cheeks and kiss their cheeks. We shall look them in the eye. We shall stroke and purr like loving mother cats. We shall bat at the enemy forces like brazen mama lionesses. We shall breathe Hope into them with our words. We shall speak Tenderness. We shall Chide and Admonish. We shall Reason. We shall Demand and Command. We shall be Patient. We shall have Faith that it is time.

I say it is time. It is time to sound the horn, calling forth this new generation of royalty.

Do You Know How You Came to Be Who You Are?

To reinvent your womanspace you will have to begin to re-create your perception of yourself and the perceptions you hold of your experiences—particularly those perceptions that you find to be troublesome and painful.

Reinvention involves throwing away thoughts and ideas that are no longer (and maybe never were) useful to you, and inviting yourself to think differently.

You will have to apply a healing balm of Divine Wisdom to your emotional wounds.

You will have to hold and rock the baby-girl inside you, who needed to be rocked way back then—or maybe yesterday.

You will have to mother yourself with the understanding and unconditional love of our Creator.

You will have to look at yourself and remember exactly what you’ve been through, and what you’ve done, and what has been done to you, and choose to, unconditionally, love yourself strong about it.

You will have to know that, always . . . always, you did the best you could do, given who you were at that time.

This will free you to move up into a higher space of self-knowing, where you can love yourself better.

For right now, stop censoring your thoughts. Allow them to flow fully from raw emotion—without any self-judgment, guilt, or fear. Acknowledge what you’re feeling . . . what you’re going through emotionally. Sit with your Self and listen to her thoughts as you would the thoughts of a dear friend. Respect Self at least that much. Love your Self at least that much.

Today . . . begin to do your Self the kindness of remembering, in detail, exactly how you got to where you are. Sit with yourself, for as many days as it takes, to begin to understand how you came to be who you are today.

Then you will begin to know what steps to take, what prayers to say, what forgivenesses to offer, and what healing to seek . . . to point yourself in the direction of where you want to go.

Excerpt from From Trouble to High Places: Meditations for Women Who Are So Ready to Cross the Bridges that Lead to Joy! Copyright 2009 Esther Davis-Thompson.

How will you cross the bridges that you’ve ...

Have you realized, yet, that the path to your High Places is not accessible from the road of troubled low-beliefs?

Imagine walking on the road next to a bridge . . . and just as the bridge begins to ascend and stretch across the body of water, you reach the shoreline and you have to stop. And all you can do is look up and wonder what it would be like to cross that bridge.

From where you are, you can only imagine what it would be like to stand, suspended, over this water. And, you can only imagine what might lie at the other end of this bridge.

Walking a ways alongside a bridge is obviously not the same as actually ascending that bridge . . . yet, this is the very scenario that represents reality for many of us.

Don’t we often play things out over and over again in our minds, but always stop short of taking any real steps?

We become familiar with what we presume to be the slope of the bridge.

We envision what the problems will be.

We imagine the fierceness of the wind on our faces.
And we imagine the fear we’ll feel at looking down into the deep water beneath us.

We imagine and imagine until we have gathered enough reasonable support for our initial fear-notion—that something will go wrong if we were to try to cross the bridge. So we don’t cross. In fact, we don’t take any steps on the bridge. We come up with a million and one good reasons why we shouldn’t, yet, we can’t get away from our intuition’s insistence that we should try.

Moving your life from Trouble to High Places is a courageous undertaking that begins as a prayerful urge, and grows from a high-belief-lurching-forth into an awkward, indescribable, half-flying/half-crawling leap of pure Faith.

Your desire to change will come sporadically at first, like little hiccups of longing. But your desire will have to become full of Faith before you can take your first real steps.
Spanning the bridges with your mind, and rocking your considerations back and forth, you will sense yourself living between two different realities—the reality in your womanspace, where your visions are already real and grown, and your outer reality, where your hope-seeds may not have even sprouted yet.

Today, imagine yourself being ready to leap forward.

Imagine the amazing things that could happen if you were to leap!

Know that the most effective leaps are leaps of Faith!!!

Excerpt from From Trouble to High Places: Meditations for Women Who Are So Ready to Cross the Bridges That Lead to Joy!  Copyright 2009 Esther Davis-Thompson.