Difficulties with The Law of Attraction?

Is the Law of Attraction working in your life?

That is a really simple question that you may find difficult to answer.

I can tell you irrevocably that yes it is working in your life right now and always has been.

How can I possibly know that?

It is a very simple natural Law of our existence here on this blue planet.

If we take the capitals out of the phrase and see it as a natural law of nature in the same way as there is no need to capitalise the sun rise or that night follows day follows night or the life cycle,  the law of attraction becomes an easier phrase to look at and determine what influence it has on us as individuals as well as in the much wider picture.

Put at its simplest the world we see and experience is a projection rather like a cinematic film of what we believe is the truth in the world. ( world used here need only be what we experience on a day to day basis not necessarily the whole World way out there beyond our personal view and experience)

The law of attraction therefore is the action caused, expressed, and witnessed by us in the form of those projections which in themselves originate from our very own thoughts and beliefs of what the world around us holds.

For example if we see, feel and think the world as infinitely benevolent we will attract all sorts of variations on that theme.  People will help us and care for us, give us gifts and praise and support our endeavours.  We will be repulsed by negative thoughts and people; the TV will only be attractive when programmes supporting our view are being shown and the books we read will be ones that show empowering situations where the ‘good’ survive and the games we play will be ones where communities are built and people or animals are looked after.  What we see out there in the world will support our beliefs and validate them continually.

The opposite is if we see the world as dangerous and malevolent and that we are in danger of being attacked or used or abused in some way.  Then the very action of our ‘danger’ thoughts and belief attracts the ‘danger’ to us in the form of potential abusers or attackers or maybe we become suspicious by nature.   We will be repulsed by warm fuzzy experiences that are not real to us.  We will be drawn to all the worst kinds of negative stories in the press and in our choice of TV programmes; the books we read will be the ones that reinforce our beliefs that the world is out to ‘get us’ one way or another and the ‘games we play may well be of fighting and death.

These examples are of necessity quite black and white to illustrate here how the law of attraction works and in fact we all are more likely to have a combination in lesser or greater degree of both depending on what area of our life we are looking at in particular.  The fact that it is working constantly without fail for each and everyone of us is without doubt.

We continually attract what we see and experience to enable us to witness our own truth, confirming and validating the rightness of our beliefs and judgements of  the world around us.

So where does this leave each and everyone of us?

With a whole shed load of self responsibility.  And this is where it gets tricky because many of us would rather blame others for our predicaments and praise ourselves when life is good.  We are never very good at learning that our own negative experiences are caused by  ………… our own beliefs and thoughts.

Our belief system is something we acquire from our experiences as we are growing up from the time in the womb onwards (and some would also include past life beliefs). Now many of those beliefs may have been ‘given’ to us by the people we love who cared for us as we grew up, or from others who have treated us badly, or from our religions or our cultural background but, as soon as we can acknowledge the fact that they belong to us individually the next natural step is to become responsible for our own ‘view’ of our world.

The way forward is to become ever increasingly self aware, firstly of our own thoughts and judgements that we all have on a daily basis and secondly in choosing to change them if they are not serving us well.

The most important step is in deciding that you want to become deeply aware of your own beliefs that cause you to project the negative aspects onto your world as validation e.g.

I never win anything

Hospitals always cause problems

Doctors are useless

I am ill

I have this condition that makes my life hell

My life will never get better

I always mess up my relationships

Nobody will ever love me

I am fat and ugly

I am thin and ugly

and so the list goes on and on and on…..!

The effect of changing our beliefs as individuals will not only be beneficial to us but will have a huge impact on those around us, freeing them up from being part of our negative  film/projections and so enabling them too, to look at themselves in a different light.

To discover the root causes of your belief systems and what influence they are having on your life takes courage and committment.

I can promise you that if you take that path your life will be changed for the better as you eliminate or change the, sometimes deeply subconscious beliefs that are driving your life without your awareness.

What is your ‘world’ view?  Can you be the change you want to see?

I would love us all to clean up our energy and life force and use it for positive benevolent creations.  Let’s vow to make the law of attraction work for our own peace, health and happiness and that of world peace which naturally follows  on from our personal work.  Can you imagine a world with the majority of people choosing positive benevolent beliefs over the negative ones; of people choosing to make a mutually beneficial difference?

What a wonderful world that will be.

Discovering and then changing your detrimental beliefs can be quickly achieved with the help of Meridian Energy Psychology Techniques .  http://www.anndenman.co.uk/meridian_energy_therapy.html

With blessings always

Ann ♥♥♥

Christmas Presence

How are you feeling about your Christmas Presence?  Are you looking forward to the festive season or are the decorations and carols already making you feel tetchy?

Christmas is of course a Christian festival but there are times I’m sure in other cultures and religions where ‘families’ dominate the festivities and those who find themselves alone can feel the pain of separation and loneliness even more.

Many people who are alone or choose to be alone at Christmas find their own way of coping with what is happening all around them; they may deny Christmas in their own world and not have decorations or send cards or presents  etc. but when we feel alone and left out of everything that is happening, all the jolity and the giving and receiving, it can become something that causes us pain on a deep level.

Where is your presence going to be this Christmas and what would your world look like if no presents were shared only your individual presence?  What if we shared only our selves and our happiness with everyone and our credit cards were put away?

So much in this world today is measured by how much money we have to spend equaling success and at a time such as this is it any wonder that those with less feel even more impoverished when they look at the wealth of ‘things’ they are expected to buy to make their friends and families happy?

What makes us all happy on a deep level is to be loved and to belong and so if we find ourselves alone with no-one to share this season with how can we feel love and belonging?

Happiness is about how we arrange our minds and not how our world out there is arranged.

If on reading this right now you are beginning to feel unhappy about your life and what Christmas has to offer you then SMILE and give yourself a hug because you are loved and you do belong.  That may sound far too simplistic but just try it … when we smile all sorts of good things in our bodies are triggered and we can actually start to feel better.  Belonging can seem more difficult to attain but if we can take a huge leap in perception and see everyone else as if they were another part of us, another aspect we can then share in the belonging too. We are able to feel the pain of those suffering in the world when we witness it which means we can also feel the joy and love that we witness. We can look at a family or a group of friends and feel their joy as if it were our own because we are all connected, we are one.   It just appears that we are ‘apart’ when in fact they are ‘a part‘ of us.

Gratitude is the other tool we can use when we feel impoverished in any way at anytime.  When we can start each day thankful for everything that supports us such as the sun shining, or a dry day, the rain that replenishes our water supply, having a roof over our head, or a bed to sleep in, eyes that can see and ears that can hear, for maybe the relatively small amount of money we may receive that feeds us, etc.etc.  then we can start to feel our presence within that context as being so much more enriched.

So back to your Christmas Presence ….. how will you be present-ing yourself  this year?  Will you be loving yourself and grateful for all that supports you which will make you able to give love and gratitude to those you meet or spend time with regardless of physical gifts?  Or will you shut yourself away within yourself or your own four walls because you feel bereft of anything to give to yourself or to anyone else?

The choice will always be yours to make and remember Christmas is in your heart not in your purse or wallet.

With my love and blessings ♥♥♥

Tags: Christian, Christmas, enriched, families, festive, happiness, heart, impoverished, loneliness, money, presence, presents, seasonal, success

The Much Bigger Picture

Today the wind is blowing off the sea so the waves are big and thunderous as they hit the beach.  The sky is black in places and in others the sun is trying to break through giving the light a strange yellowy tinge.

Standing on the top of Rock Walk this morning, a cliff that looks over the beach and harbour at Torquay, I was reminded of how small we are; tiny dots on this planet rather like the grains of sand on the beach.  From my vantage point people on the other side of the bay looked like ants and I could see the beach but not the millions of grains of sand that form it. Everything that exists on this planet earth creates something that can be beyond our imagination.  What is this planet earth?  Are we the nucleus of a cell?  If so that may suggest we are one of trillions and trillions of cells making up a gigantic body of what?  I’m sorry I may have lost you already!

Let me begin by saying I am no scientist and so apologies to those  scientists who could pull my story apart.  This for me is a process of looking out in order to go within or the other way around sometimes.  It is my version, my understanding and how I make sense or actually create even more questions about us as humans and our world and universe.

I was enthralled when I was studying for my Anatomy and Physiology Diploma at how amazing and brilliant the design of our body is.  That feeling has stayed with me and is constantly tweaked when new scientific discoveries are made.  When scientists examine one of our cells they discover that inside each cell we have a mini universe, parts of the cell circling around each other just as planets circle the sun.  And even more amazing is that as they look inside smaller and smaller particles within that cell with stronger and stronger microscopes they find the same principle applies as they find what can be called miniscule universes.  When they finally arrive at one of the tiniest particles, the quark, they discover that their own thoughts can re-arrange these particles.  That is amazing!!

Scientists have discovered that our universe is contained within a double membrane that appears to have holes in it.  Can we look at this and see a cell?  Also that there are other universes out there.  Are they more cells?  Is the ‘big bang’ theory that may have begun our cosmic existence actually the same as the minute cells that joined and grew and became each of us, trillions of times bigger than those original cells?  Is our cosmos still growing simply because it is still in infancy , just as we grew during childhood?

Whether we look through a telescope or a microscope we can see infinity, the macrocosm and microcosm of existence.

This much bigger picture may be beyond your ability to visualise but if we go inside and begin to understand how our body works then we can begin to understand how we can and do create our own reality.  If the miniscule quarks are affected by thoughts then every cell in our body is able to be influenced by the way we think.  More importantly we can also know that our thoughts can and do affect other people’s quarks.

It has been established that if we witness an act of kindness we produce more serotonin, the feel good hormone.  I think we probably have all experienced our heart expanding when we watch or listen to someone else being kind; the teenage boy helping an elderly person across a road; a mother holding her baby with such tenderness; lovers with their arms entwined.  The tears of empathy can flow at those times.

On the other side of that coin how many times have you felt worse for witnessing kindness because it expands your lack?  I know I have been there shortly after my marriage ended.  The world seemed full of loving couples and the more I felt alone the more couples I saw.  I am sure you can relate to that in some way in your life not necessarily couples but some lack that has been highlighted by other’s gains.  And so the tears of sadness can flow.

Both of those examples above are about how we perceive our world, full up or sadly lacking something.  And that is the key; if we choose to see the world full of things we can’t have the universe or those tiny quarks are influenced by those thoughts of lack and rearrange themselves to provide us with what we believe is so. In that place of lack other people find us difficult to be around because our energy is so contracted and low and so it goes round and round until we can find a way to break out of the cycle.

When we can look at our world with gratitude and love we change our selves on a fundamental level.  Happiness is something we decide on ahead of time, it is not about what we see or experience or how our life or work place pleases us, it is about how we arrange our mind.  To be a channel for peace and love, to give what we want to receive, to know that our life is perfect, even in our darkest moments, is to be happy ahead of time.

If as you read this your thoughts of ‘well if you had my life you wouldn’t ask me to do that…’ spring to mind I want to share an idea with you.

If we squeeze an orange what comes out of it?  Of course orange juice, it’s an orange and it makes no difference what did the squeezing or how.  If pressure in the sense of life challenges is applied to you or me what comes out of us?  What comes out is what we have inside of us.  If in the moment of pressure we react in a certain way i.e. with anger or judgement or kindness or love it is because that is what is in us to be squeezed out.  It has nothing to do with the circumstance or person that put the pressure on.

Next time I feel like reacting with a negative emotion or thought I will stop and think, not only of what is inside of me but what I am creating in my world and the lives of those close to me.

Smiling from a dull grey Devon.

Who Was I Today, Who Will I Be Tomorrow?

On Friday I went to a staff meeting at The Eddystone Trust, a charity that supports people with an HIV status.  Although strictly speaking I am not a member of staff  I do work there once a month offering Reflexology.  I am in uniform, white tunic and navy trousers with little make-up.  However today I arrived in mufti and was met with some surprise at how I looked. They saw a different Ann and not only this but I am a different person when I’m not in uniform.  I am sure that everyone who has ever worn some kind of uniform for work knows exactly what I mean.   I’m also sure that we are all different people when we are outside of the work situation.  We wear different hats or embrace different roles.

So ‘who am I’ becomes a moment by moment question in my day.  Sometimes I am a therapist, sometimes a carer, sometimes a best friend, daughter, mum, grandma, web designer, PA  etc.etc.  For me I do feel differently and behave differently depending on the role I am in.  Rather like an actor on the stage embodying a new persona except I don’t give it much thought usually as most of the roles I slip in and out of during my day are done subconsciously -  until someone comments as they did today.

My thoughts have since moved on to this life I am in now.  Is this just another role?  This role called Ann that I have taken on, with all her hats/sub-personas, is ‘my life’.  So what does that mean?  Does it mean that as I am playing a role I can manipulate who I want to be, what I show the world?  Can I change who I am in a much bigger way than just with the different hats that I wear in my everyday living?

I believe that the answer to these questions is a big YES!  I believe that there is very little that we can’t change in our life.  There are some obvious physical things that we may not be able to change but we can certainly change how we feel and therefore deal with those things.

If the core of each of us is the same, the unconditional love, compassion and gratitude of the divine, then the overcoat we put on called our human identity is something that is unique to each of us.  This uniqueness can separate us;  make us successful or not; make us attractive or not; make us lovable or not; we become what we believe we are.

WE BECOME WHAT WE BELIEVE WE ARE.

In essence that is what happens to me in my different roles, I become who I believe I am in that role.  So, in much more subtle ways, if I believe that I am unwell I will produce continuing ‘unwellness’ to prove what I believe.  And as a Mother I know that when I have been ill with a cold or something similar when my children were small and needed looking after, I believed I didn’t have time to be ill and so got over things really quickly or just plain ignored the symptoms until I could find the time to be ill.  I appreciate that not everyone has the ability to do that but my point is that what we focus on happens.  I would focus on looking after my children as my priority, regardless, until I didn’t need to have that focus anymore then I could focus on feeling unwell and sort me out.

So when we focus on being in that role, in any moment of our day whether at work, play, in relationships or alone we can choose to therefore believe anything in and of that role.  We can be as creative and experimental to our heart’s content.

I am no good at making a fruit cake, now I know that I am an ace at making sponge cakes but fruit cake, no.  In my role as ‘failed fruit cake maker’  I create the circumstances really well, though not intentionally or consciously, that will prove me right time after time for as long as I think that I can’t make fruit cakes.  I could continue to say ‘I can’t make fruit cakes’  for the rest of my life and continue to prove my thoughts and words correct!   In my life I know that by creating the role of ‘failed fruit cake maker’ I have not had to carry on the family tradition of making excellent fruit cakes like our Mother did.  Maybe I don’t want to have my fruit cakes compared with those of my younger brother and my sister – yummy to both of their fruit cakes – or maybe I have other things I’d rather do so I continue to wear the hat that says ‘failed fruit cake maker’.

That example was quite light hearted but even so it may make you ask which came first, my inability to bake a good fruit cake or my knowing that I can’t, that perpetuates the belief?  On the surface it seems quite simple 1) I bake a fruit cake that turns out to be inedible and more like a house brick  2) I now believe I can’t bake fruit cakes, end of story.  But I followed a recipe and all the ingredients were there, the method was all done in the right order, it was baked as recommended but still it failed so what was really going on?  The belief that was driving my actions was my thought ‘I don’t want to be compared’ or maybe, and this may be more truthful, ‘I don’t want to be the one making the family Christmas cakes and Christmas Puddings every year’.

When we take a good look at the different roles we are in during our everyday life we can find some very creative aspects of ourselves.  This can be fun and we all know without doubt the roles we excel in, those times when we are in the groove and things just fall into place without seemingly any effort.  But why is it that not all of our life feels like that?  At those times we need to look at what we are really asking for.

Do you ever find yourself  wearing the hat called ‘I am a worrier’ and feel that if you are not worrying about someone or something then you are proving you don’t care?  What is your belief behind that role?  Is it really that you feel no-one will need you if you are not helping them or solving the problems?  That your role is one that no-one else can fill, like a parent?  I know I’ve been there  a few times in my life.

We see what we believe and what proves our truth always, and as a worrier this could manifest as; frustration at jobs not done properly unless we do them;  our phone always ringing with people needing a shoulder to cry on; family members not fulfilling their roles;  children having accidents; always being the one to clear up the mess, pick up the tab etc. etc.  We have to prove in the outside world what we know and believe about ourselves inside and this can be ‘I believe that something bad will happen and I won’t cope’ hence the accidents, or ‘I believe I have all the answers to the problems’ hence the problems we attract.  That is the Law of Attraction.  It takes courage to change that way of thinking because we cannot believe that we really do create those things by our thoughts and influence what happens to others along the way.  That can be very frightening.

Now I don’t know about you but I certainly want a life filled with joy and laughter, peace and love where I do the things I love and attract the people who feel the same.  I live from my heart centre, that place that recognises you as me, and so I consciously create my thoughts to be positive and empowering for everyone I meet because that is what I desire in my life.  And when life doesn’t come up to scratch I look inside myself to find the ‘why’ of it and never blame others for just turning up when I asked for a kick up the backside to remind me to stay awake and aware of every passing thought.  This is what I call taking the ultimate responsibility for my thoughts, words and actions in every moment and remembering that whichever role I take on in any moment will have an effect on someone else’s life and I want that to be a good one.

Speaking to the me that is you with love.

Tags: ann denman, beliefs, body, compassion, gratitude, joy, meaning, my life, responsibility, Role, Self Help, stage, Unconditional Love

God, the Pope, and the rest of Us.

What , you may ask, am I going to write about here?  Well after the Pope’s visit to the UK I began to remember past things in my life and what they meant to me then and to think what they might mean to me now.

God was not discussed in my home life as a child as far as I can remember, though as children we did eventually go to a Church of England Grammar School which meant that religious services were a part of our everyday schooling.  We also attended Sunday School, Girl’s and Boy’s Brigade and later Church Youth Club, the occasional Sunday Service and one adventure away with CSSM which hosted children’s Scripture Union holidays in Devon, all of which were attached to the local Baptist Church.   My sister Linda was the one who took this all on board and became attached to the Church and still sees the Church community where she lives as her family.

I don’t remember much about the CSSM holiday except it was one of the places where I was told to shut up when I sang and far more traumatic in the moment were the stag beetles crawling around the school assembly hall where we were all sleeping in our sleeping bags on the floor.   It was the one and only place and time where I felt incredible homesickness.  I don’t remember how old I was but probably it was before I went to Grammar School, maybe 10 or 11 years old.  Linda and Michael were there too but it didn’t make any difference to the way I felt.  School trips and trips away from home to other relatives had never made me feel this way.  I didn’t belong and I certainly don’t remember Bible studies or discussions at all, only the singing of hymns that I was ‘not allowed’ to join in with.

The next time I felt I didn’t belong in a religious setting was when I was 14 years old.  My best friend and I were at the Church Youth Club and were sitting discussing boys!  We were talking about some older boys who rode motorbikes, some of the original ‘Greasers’ of that time.  I loved and still love motorbikes – the freedom of the wind in your face and the speed you feel in every cell of your body through the vibration of the tyres on the road and the powerful engine!   Anyway back to the youth club, later on in the evening the Reverend who was the Club leader took me to one side and started to tell me that he felt I shouldn’t be associating with the motorbike crowd and certainly should not go out with any of them.  I was 14 going on 30 in that moment.  I told him that instead of telling me what he thought I should be doing or not doing maybe he should be encouraging me to bring them along to the Youth Club to show them another way of living – with God?  From that moment on, in my soul, I left the Church.

I remember as a teenager going to see Billy Graham, the Evangelist and a passionate Scorpio, in London and being so scared of the hysteria in the crowd that I didn’t actually go in and listen to him.

When I was running a Play School in my village when my two eldest children were in school I remember inviting the Vicar of the local C of E Church to attend our Christmas event where the children were celebrating with a Christmas Nativity play.  I went to the Church and invited him personally.  At the time he was non-committal  but took the written invitation.  He never turned up and I heard no apology from him either.  However I did know that he attended the Nursery School event which was similar.  This was held opposite the Church and the people who attended were his more affluent parishioners.  I was bitterly disappointed, not for me but for all the children and parents who he ‘shunned’ in some way because they all knew he had been invited and had chosen not to attend.  The event was a beautiful day, the children acted and sang their hearts out and we filled the village hall with joy.  He missed a wonderful communion of spirit.

I worked with a young man who was training to be a Jehovah’s Witness in the early 90′s.  He would come and sit with me and study when I was doing a night shift at a school for children with Autism.  He would share with me the bible teachings he was learning and the responses to questions he may be asked.  I offered in my own inimitable way other ways of interpreting the passages he read to me.  I know he was confused by what I said and unfortunately I have no knowledge of whether he attained his ‘membership’ or not.  But this idea that there was only one true interpretation really frightened me and I was once again faced with the narrowness and bigotry of an organised religious institution.

These are some of the events in my life that stand out as memorable when I think of my relationship with God.  Who is this God that puts fear into people? Who is this God who creates hysteria?   Who is this God that makes Religious Leaders create such separatism in his name that it beggars belief?

Of course it is not God who creates these things but the egos of the people speaking in his name.  My relationship with ‘God’ has always been solid.  He is the Divine spark that is in me and each of us.  I also believe that in giving this spark a name it actually devalues the essence of the experience.

For me we are all part and parcel of the huge big picture that is our world , our universe, our cosmos that goes on and outwards ad infinitum.  For some this is called God, or Jehovah or Buddha, or YHWH to name a few.  For some God is ‘outside’ of us mere mortals.  For some God’s word is final.  For some the Son of God is the most revered person.

The separateness that the world religions create with their them and us approach and teachings is what causes the most devastating consequences we will ever see as a human race, war and terror in the name of God.  The Pope in one of his speeches suggested that there needs to be some conciliation between Churches of different faiths – or rather that was what I heard – and he is right but I would venture that it needs to go a whole lot further than that.  Appreciation and acceptance and gratitude for other world views on religion and their practices is the only way forward.  But to do this we all need to abandon the fear that this idea creates.  Did you immediately think ‘I can’t accept …… or ……. ever’?  What fear did my statement cause for you?

The fear is held in us by our egos and it is our ego that is so afraid to lose something that ‘it’ can use to limit and control us.  It is my view that the world religions all hold a core belief that is truthful and holds integrity but it is the men who lead these that are being controlled by their egos too and so corrupting the ‘word’.  They are afraid to lose the ‘power over the people’ that they desire and believe is their own and other’s saviour.  They are afraid to accept all as themselves, as  I AM That, I AM.

Inherently within each of us is an unconditional love that is Holy.  That love can set eyes upon anybody, no matter their circumstances, their religion, their atheism, their fear, their personal tragedies, their personal joys and see only to the heart of the unconditional love in the ‘other’.  That to me is God in action.  That is how we are all connected as one being.

Our daily judgements which identify our core beliefs are the things that we need to be aware of.  This is because our judgements are the very things that separate us from each other on a holy  soul level.  We need to become observers and be observed instead of judging and being judged and this can start right now, this moment.

In my past experiences that I have shared above I did make judgements and along the years these have obviously been shown to me again and again.  Why?  Because I didn’t ‘get it’.  I didn’t understand what I was being shown because my only frame of reference was what I had grown up with and concerning religion it mostly didn’t fit me.  I have been confused for a long time and it took me years of my inner knowing being at odds with what I experienced before I finally accepted that I could be OK just as I was.  I didn’t need my ‘God’ beliefs to be validated by another who I was being told knew more than I did even when what I saw was in conflict with that.

So my journey has been one of growth and inner knowing, one of confusion and repeated examples of dichotomy within organised religion, one that I am still travelling as I endeavour every day to ‘see’, not with my observational eyes but with my heart eyes, the love and divinity in all that I meet.

Devoted to you.

Tags: Baptist Church, beliefs, Buddha, Church of England, CSSM, God, Jehovah, joy, meaning, Scripture Union, The Pope, Unconditional Love, YHWH

What Does Synchronisity Mean, with Dr Wayne Dyer?

We are usually taught that co-incidences are random events that come together more by chance than planning. However if you believe, as I do, that there is no such thing as a co-incidence or if you are unsure of what this means then you will be interested and amused by this short video by Dr Wayne Dyer on the meaning of co-incidence and synchronisity.

Tags: co-incidence, Dr Wayne Dyer, meaning, synchronisity

The ‘Gift’ from my Parents

When I consider the idea that I have chosen my Parents all manner of thoughts arise.

When I was a teenager I would have answered ‘No Way!’ because I went through a stage of disliking my Parents and their authority over me.  When I became a Mum myself I saw things differently; now I understood far more about why they wanted to keep me safe and protect me from what they feared.  And now as I have witnessed my Dad’s last months here over 13 years ago and as I now witness my Mum’s last, however long she will be here, I am looking at this question in yet another way.

To go back to how I saw them when I became a Mum myself I can now say that their protection borne from their fears gave me some mighty lessons to go through.  My Mum had issues from her childhood that I was not to know about until she was in her seventies and these old scars of hers and her continual pain was to colour her life and reflect on to mine in ways that as a teenager I couldn’t understand.

My Dad however, I believe, had spent his childhood away from his parents and was greatly influenced by his Grandfather.  Dad was a silent man in my memories.  He loved peace and quiet and with four children I guess we gave him many unavoidably noisy times.  I learnt from my Dad to be silent.  It was by far the easiest way to deal with everything.  And I guess my Mum was also silently holding her pain.  They were excellent teachers!

So I chose parents who were silent!  As I approach my 60th birthday I am finding my voice at last.

‘Silence is golden’ was oft heard in my childhood home along with ‘children are to be seen not heard’.  My Parents love me, I have never doubted that, but what I chose to experience (silence) gave me another choice; to stay silent as I was shown so well or to find my voice and speak about what I experienced.

I had grown up nurturing a fear that could have consumed me, I was afraid to speak out loud or sing.  Ahh now that’s another story, singing.  My Mum and Sister have the most beautiful voices sopranos or contraltos I’m not sure which but as it turned out way above my range.  I was constantly told by many people during my life that I couldn’t sing and should shut up, so I did.  When I came to Devon 3 years ago I decided to have singing lessons.  I found a wonderful teacher who wasn’t shocked at my very rusty vocal chords.  I still can’t sing well but she enabled me to open my throat for the first time since I was a small child and the tears flowed.  What I learnt was that I tend to mimic and as a female tenor I was unable to mimic my Mum or Sister without sounding painfully off key so it was no wonder that they objected to the sounds I tried to make.  Staying silent to me wasn’t a choice it was a necessity to get by in my family, at school and later in my marriage without ridicule.

I have always loved my Parents but I have many times lacked understanding.  I cannot know what made them who they are, what beliefs borne from fears they held that decided on the judgements they would make in everyday life that would affect me.  I can only guess at what created their silence.  I can know what created mine and that was the way-showers who were my Parents.  I learnt really well, I was smart and took their lessons on board like any good daughter would and so I have been silent for a long time.  Not afraid of their fears, what made them silent but afraid to be heard.  I had created my own fear that became a belief I was to carry for a long time and would use to judge others as loud or OTT or more honestly I would be envious of their abandon.

Abandon…..I realised that I learnt to be contained in my silence and abandonment was something I longed for.  To dance and sing and laugh and shout in joy.

My fear of being heard translated into not being heard and I have struggled with that one too.  What we fear we create!  I have spent many years feeling unheard, how ridiculous is that when I look at my past?  But I created it……all by myself, perfectly.  How clever am I?

When we start to look at the judgements we make and back track to the beliefs and then back to the fears that hold the belief we can realise just how creative we are.

If I am able to be that creative then I am going to ensure that I get rid of all the fears that I unknowingly (for now) may be holding and start creating from a place of unconditional love instead.  Watch out because here I come….blazing a path to joyful abandon.

From wide awake in Torquay.

http://www.anndenman.co.uk

Tags: abandon, beliefs, Dad, fears, joy, Mum, pain, parents, protection, Self Help, silent, singing, teachers

One Song Project

This is a wonderful project for healing our oceans.

What If…?

Today I have been speaking to a friend about the things that we have in our belief system that we may know nothing about.

As children we learn a set of values from our parents,  siblings if we have any and our peers.  These arrive in our body and memory as beliefs.  Many are given to us before we can speak the words or form conscious decisions about what we want in our belief system.  But they are powerful and will continue to drive our thoughts words and actions until we can  discover them and consciously decide if they serve who we are now.

Some of these may be beliefs that now limit our ability to function well in the world.  For example if you were always well fed and were given everything you asked for as a child you may as an adult not understand why that no longer works for you.  As an adult you now need to form relationships and work to gain the same belonging and sustenance but you have no experience of those things.

In that example the belief that ‘you will always have what you want provided for you by someone else’ now has to change.  This for most of us is a natural progression but some may find that hard to accept in adulthood and find it challenging to fend for themselves in the world.  It can also be difficult to form relationships based on expecting to be given everything without having to give back as we may have done in childhood.

I think most people would agree that the example above is about normal growing up.  But what of the challenges you have chosen that you know nothing about other than that they are negative and you keep being blocked or stopped by the same old same old? So……….

What if you chose your parents? In asking this question there is no need to believe that it was possible to choose who your parents were.  Just ask the question.

What wonderful attributes do/did they teach you and challenge you with?

What negative traits do/did they hold that teach you how not to be?

These are just a couple of the questions that you can ask about who your parents are in your eyes.  In your eyes is the important factor.  This is not about how others see them, this is about your experience of your parents.  In answering these questions you will begin to see what beliefs they have given you.  Some you will love having whilst some may well turn out to be limiting to the person you are now.

Take a while to think about these and write down what you think or feel that your parents have given to you to work with.  Let me know how you get on.

With love and blessings. Ann

http://www.anndenman.co.uk

Tags: attributes, beliefs, body, limiting, memory, negative traits, parents, Self Help