30 Days of Gratitude

As part of my quest to change my outlook on life and to reprogram my thinking, I decided to participate in the 30 days of gratitude exercise I had seen others do. Someone asked me to collect them all and post them as a blog, so here goes:

Day 1 30 days of gratitude; I am grateful that I have a job I enjoy and have not had any time since I've been in SA where I did not have a contract

Day 2 of 30 days of gratitude; I am grateful for my beautiful, healthy, intelligent and all round wonderful children. I love them so much it makes my heart ache

Day 3 of 30 days of Gratitude: I am grateful for my husband who loves me unconditionally and understands me better than I understand myself

Day 4 of 30 Days of Gratitude; I am grateful for my friends. I have wonderful women (and a few blokes) in my life that keep me entertained, listen to my problems and are always there for me.

Day 5 of 30 days of gratitude: I am grateful for my beautiful home, our stunning views, my pool and our gorgeous garden. I feel very blessed to have a warm place to live when so many have so little

Day 6 of 30 days of Gratitude: I am grateful that I've been lucky to travel the world, to experience such a wide variety of cultures which have enriched my life, to have been all manner of places from sharing a meal with a family on the floor in a long house in the jungle in Brunei to tea at Buckingham Palace with the Queen.

Day 7 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful for the many talented people who create art to entertain us, artists, dancers, singers and any other form. Today I'm taking the family to see 'Burn the Floor' and I am really looking forward to seeing the talented dancers perform

Day 8 of 30 Days of Gratitude: today I am grateful for my sight/vision. Even with my eye disease at least I can function fully other than some issues with driving after dusk. I work with someone who is blind and I cannot imagine the challenges she has or the level of dependence she has to have on others

Day 9 of 30 days of gratitude: I am grateful for my internal strength, that with all of the traumas of my past I did not break. I survived it all and turned it around and created the life I wanted.

Day 10 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I am grateful that the Universe redirected my career. Due to circumstances beyond my control I could not do radiography in the UK and I ended up taking a path that led me to gaining the skills I have now and this enabled me to be a specialist in Data Quality and to consult in a field which has very few other people and makes me very marketable

Day 11 of 30 Days of Gratitude: this may be an odd one, but I'm grateful for social media. FB allows me to watch my friends’ children and grandchildren grow and reconnect with my past. Twitter has enriched my life with new friends, invaluable when you move to a new country. I've met some friends for life on Twitter. I even still have some old MySpace blog friends still in my life!

Day 12 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that we are finally able to start renovating our house. The stair rails go in today and they start with the guest room and outside patio next week so we'll finally have a proper shaded place to entertain

Lucky number 13 in 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful for Sharon my therapist who is helping me to 'reprogram' my past thinking and to become a wholly integrated person by healing my past

Day 14 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that my children have found partners that fit in so well with our family. Our family is loud, chaotic and far from normal but Josh and Amber just accept us all and fit in seamlessly. (Now give me some grandbabies to be grateful for!)

Day 15 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful to live in the Mother City. Cape Town is one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen from the mountains, the oceans, the vineyards - it has beauty from every angle.

Day 16 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful for Cordelia who cleans my house and does the laundry so that I can concentrate on work. Without her my weekend would be all cleaning rather than all fun and I would be a very dull girl

Day 17 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that I still am lucky enough to have my Mom still with me, despite being so far away.

Day 18 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that today is a public holiday and since I decided to also take tomo off I have 4 days off! So I'm grateful for long weekends :)

Day 19 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful for my animals. Pixie, Panda, Lola and Blue are a huge part of our family and I love them so!

Day 20 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that I've found a hairdresser I can trust with my hair. Off to see Leandra today for a cut and colour, and think we may make a big change :) Maybe red? Chocolate? We'll see!

Day 21 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful to live in Hout Bay. We love this little village. It has everything you need, and most of the things you want and is close enough to the city for work, but far enough away you feel like you’re on holiday all of the time surrounded by its beaches and mountains.

Day 22 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I am grateful for my health. I have arthritis but it is manageable, it hinders me only with walking and I can cope with that. So many have struggles every day with critical illnesses and I am lucky to be relatively healthy.

Day 23 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that Trevor has bought himself such a gorgeous house, that he has a job, and that he has such a wonderful girl to share it with him. It's nice to see him happy and settled with someone I know will value him and support him and knows him so well and fits in with our family so perfectly.

‎Day 24 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that all of my children have been fortunate enough to go to University. That they have all found careers which suit their aptitudes and interests.

Day 25 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful for all of my family back in the US and in the UK. Family by birth, family by marriage, family by spirit… I'm grateful for what you all bring to my life.

Day 26 of 30 Days of Gratitude; I'm grateful for 'coincidence' (which I don't believe in as all things occur in these ways deliberately). The torrential rains occurring while our builders were here revealed a massive leak we never knew we had. So for those little things we think are synchronicity - I thank you universe!

Day 27 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that my girls live with Norm and I and that we have so much love in our home.

Day 28 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that after so many days of rain, the sun has finally emerged which enabled the builders to make lots of progress!

Day 29 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that as we have so many days of pouring rain and cold, we have somewhere warm and dry to live, that we have plenty food to eat, that we have love ones around us, that we have friends we can count on and that we all have each other to laugh at (umm 'with', of course I meant 'with' hehe)

Day 30 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful for books. I love to read and I am grateful for the writers who put their heart and soul into their writings. I'm grateful for my book-club and the lovely ladies in it.

Living on the Fault Line

I usually blame it on being a Virgo, but I am one of those people who always look for someone or something to blame for anything which does not go to plan. I recognise this as a character fault but now as my therapy is removing my blinders from my eyes, I see that the actual root cause of this is lack of trust.

I find it very hard to trust. I’ve always just thought I was a sceptic (or a Virgo). But last night during my therapy session I had a moment of clarity. Actually it was all explained to me by the therapist, I don’t want to steal her thunder J

 Last night’s hypnotherapy took me to a place in my childhood which greatly troubled me but had pretty much been forgotten. As I ‘arrived’ there my heart started pounding and my breathing was difficult.

We had some goats when I was a child. I was taken back to a scene where one of the goats had been murdered. (is it murder if it is an animal, in this case I think so) I was standing on the periphery of the group of adults all surrounding the dead goat which was lying with its internal organs pulled out of it. I could remember the adults saying that the goat had been a victim of sexual abuse by the neighbour ‘boy’ who was in actuality a grown man, but his mental age was the age of a child. He terrified me as a child and I could not bear to be near him. He could not speak, he grunted and drooled and flapped his hands violently. To a small child this was incomprehensible. I can’t imagine the life his parents had, caring for him and protecting him from society’s lack of understanding.

From my current adult perspective I could not imagine letting my child see a goat which had been sodomised to death, or to discuss the details of this openly in front of my child. I do remember watching that same goat being born, it was a twin and the mother had the babies in one of our outhouses. That was not traumatic however, it was fascinating and natural despite being bloody and seeing my goat taking strain it was part of living in the country and having animals.

The two people who were revealed as needing me to ‘heal’ a trauma were my maternal aunt and my uncle. She is still alive, albeit in her 80s. She is an evil woman. And I mean the word – not just using it as a descriptive term – she had evil in her heart. She has since been diagnosed as being mentally ill – bipolar, psychotic, schizophrenic, she has a few errors in her system shall we say.

As I started talking ‘to her’ in my hypnotic state I started to think of all of the things she had done to me as a child. The filth she lived in and I hated to visit. I cannot imagine why my Mother would allow me to sleep in that hovel. There would be bugs, filthy dishes, dog hair and poop everywhere. They also would drag me and my cousin out of bed at 5 am and force us to help deliver newspapers. I hated the black ink that would stain my hands, the smell of the printed papers; I would be nauseous and shouted at if I complained I felt sick from it.

I remembered my aunt stroking my hair while she thought I was asleep and saying to me, ‘such a beautiful child. Just as well you are beautiful as you will be a whore like your Mama and it always helps to be a beautiful whore.’

When I was 13 she had me drive her to a bar. I had never driven a car in my life, only a tractor and I promptly had a crash. She lied to the police and we managed to get away with it.

I remember when I was a teenager she would give me barbiturates to take and arrange ‘dates’ for me which consisted of me going out with random guys, and waking up confused and disorientated later. God only knows what ‘deals’ she had made for me or what happened to me while I was out. Once I awoke, having been thrown into a shower fully dressed with 2 gay men who had found me lying in a crumpled catatonic heap at the bottom of the stairs in my aunt’s apartment building. At first, they thought I was dead, but then realised I had overdosed and carried me inside and put me into a cold shower to wake me up and forced me to vomit. I thank my guardian angels that it was gay men who found me, and that anyone found me at all before I did in fact die of an overdose.

As a child I had imagined it was my uncle who was the evil one. That he had encouraged or organised her evil escapades. But in my hyperconscious state I had clarity which revealed to me he was as much a victim of her twisted psychosis as the rest of the family. I remember when I was about 3 years old he taught me to read. He would patiently sit me with on their farm and tell me about all of the animals and teach me my letters and read to me.

I do not remember my mother or father ever reading to me, maybe that is because I learned to read so early on my own. Somehow I doubt that. But it makes me feel less sad to think that.

So it is no surprise that I find it hard to trust. I was raised in such dysfunction and chaos. I was taught at a very early age that no one can be trusted or relied on, that the world is a dangerous scary place. This mistrust has created dysfunction in my adult life. I have a huge need for control. If people do not see things my way, do things my way, react in the way I expect it throws me. I get fiercely angry over the most inconsequential things. That is the legacy of my dysfunction.

However with each foray into my past, with each level of purging and purification, with each person I manage to forgive and let go of the hurt they caused me, I find that my hip is getting stronger. My posture is improving; my overall levels of stress are lessening. My ability to see my own character defects, to accept them and try to overcome them – these are all getting stronger along with my physical strength.

It is no wonder that the pain in my hip restricts my ability to push my pelvis forward or to abduct my knee, both are movements associated to sexuality and all of my mental pain is rooted in the sexual dysfunction and shame associated to my bizarre childhood. It is almost as if my frozen hip joint is starting to thaw, I visualise a glacier, slowly chipping away, slowly melting…leading to complete mobility and hopefully an accompanying peace in my heart and lightness of being.

Rainbows

Things just get more bizarre...today I was telling my boss about the session on Saturday and she was as fascinated as I am about the helicopter.

But when I told her about my spirit guides (or guardian angels or whatever you choose to call them) I was facing the window and as I started describing them a rainbow emerged right in front of my eyes!

Crazy? Coincidence? I don't know, I just feel a big change coming towards me....I'll just fasten my seat belt and hang on for the ride.

Helicopters in my Mind

Yesterday I had my first past hypnotherapy session. She took me back to a 'happy childhood memory', through when my mother was pregnant, when she gave birth, to before her pregnancy. There were no traumatic memories that came through, just an incredible feeling of sadness.
The only odd thing was that while under at some stages was so distracted by the helicopter outside that I could not concentrate. The sound was so loud it sounded liked it was landing in the courtyard outside. When I mentioned this S said she did not hear it, that she only heard the children cough and once the tap was on or something, that she is hypersensitive to anything which can intrude on the client.
How can that be! I clearly heard a helicopter very close to me? S said it must be part of my memory as it was not part of the present. So I need to ask my Mom about this.
I felt 2 distinct presences. Both Native American, ancestors I feel. A strong, muscular brave who would appear when she mentioned protected or safe or other key words. The 2nd an old NA woman with a grey braid. She appeared on words like love, worthy, cherished...sh ewould hug me. I feel she may be White Buffalo Woman. I then woke up.
Then she told me I might be very tired and maybe it was the power of suggestion but I came home and slept for about 10 hrs, got up, went to bed and slept til morning!
I feel great today.

It's Never too Late

I am still enjoying the sessions with my therapist, I didn't spend the whole session crying this time, so I guess that is progress?

She is having me keep a dream journal. I never remember my dreams but she tells me I will start to do so now that she is bringing stuff up, some of the dreams may be 'venting dreams' i.e. letting things go.

The 1st week I was actually not getting rested as I kept waking every hour or so in a panic I had forgotten my dreams.

I have been repeating my trigger word 'Peace' as often as I can think of it. I am a terrible road-rage-aholic and try doing deep breathing now to help. I am trying to think before I speak and not snap at everyone like I normally do.

But I think the thing I have benefited most from is her constantly telling me the things I did not absorb as a child:
I am worthy
The things that happened as a child are not my fault. I was a child.
I was not protected, and that abuse of trust by both my parents, grandparents and family, and later my 1st husband is what has made me so brittle and hard on the outside and so fragile on the inside.

She is breaking through the tough shell and helping me to strengthen that fragile interior.

She explains to me why my Mother is reacting the way she is with her own health issues. She is reinforcing to me that my responsibility is towards my own family here in SA. That if my mom chooses to just give up and stay in bed, to live her life in fear, then that is her choice and I have to honour that choice.

She is teaching me that I am strong. That the things I have been through would have broken so many others. That the fact I was brave enough to pick myself up, start my life over and to create the life I wanted is a testament to my strength.

It is almost as if she is giving me the parenting I never had as a child. It is something I need to get healthy mentally. To balance the hard and the soft.

Peace for the Physicals

I have decided to start going for hypnotherapy. I didn’t really think it was something I a) needed or b) would work, but I felt the universe pushing me towards this and I am a firm believer in listening to the universe if you hear it shouting at you.

My 1^st session was taken up with my ‘therapist’ “S” getting to know me a bit – she asked a few questions and she did 2 ‘tests’. The 1^st was to determine whether I was a ‘right brain’ or a ‘left brain’ person as there are different approaches the therapist will use for the 2 different types.

I am almost smack dab in the middle which I found rather interesting. I think that is my Virgo sun and my Gemini moon which drive those 2 opposites. My logical Virgo and my scatty Gemini battling for supremacy? Nice to know some part of me is well balanced at least!

The other test was to determine whether I fall into an ‘emotional’ or a ‘physical’ relationship model personality type.

If asked without understanding what the 2 meant, I would have guessed I was an ‘emotional’ as I am a volatile, easily triggered person who reacts first and thinks second. However she does a very long questionnaire and we discovered that I am a 98% physical.

The 'physicals' have these core values, prioritised as follows:

1)      Relationship / sex

2)      Family

3)      Friends

4)      Career / financial security

Career and financial security are only important as they enable me to have my family and relationship here in SA.

My primary need is to be loved and I need romantic gestures. This really surprised me as I am sooo not a romantic. But I do thrive on the validation which Mr Kitten gives me – he tells me daily I am beautiful and that he loves me. He seldom buys me flowers however he will make me coffee in bed and buy me choccies, so those are good enough for me on the ‘gesture’ front!

My primary fear is rejection or abandonment.

I found this all very enlightening.

We did do a brief session of hypnotherapy and she took me to meet my inner child. Then she asked me to visualise a word – I had no conscious thought of where this word was generated, but the word ‘peace’ came into my head.

So this is my word to help me reprogram my inner child ‘dysfunction’. She is helping me to understand why I react in the way I do to outside triggers, and hopefully to get to a point where I react only to the actual situation without overlying my previous history onto each current situation and therefore react irrationally.

In other words, she is trying to help me find that inner peace I so desperately seek.

Healing in Altered States

Last night I went to a hypnosis event, there was a speaker over from Portugal who is a psychiatrist (I think? or a therapist?) annyyyway, she is here and she was presenting on 'Deep Healing in Altered States' and just talked about some of her personal experiences with treating people.

One of the things she mentioned was a patient who was coming to her for phobia of fires, she could not even bear to be in the same room when a fire was lit. She regressed her patient and found that she had been in a fire - when she was still in the uterus!

The patient had no knowledge of this, but she rang her mom to ask her and found out that yes, when her mom was 5 months pregnant she was in a fire. By discovering the root of the issue she was able to heal the patient.
I found this fascinating as my daughter has been seeing a therapist for her anxiety issues. She is the only one of my 3 kids who has these issues with fear and anxiety, yet she comes off as the most confident of the three.

When I was pregnant with her, her father had beaten me so badly that he dislocated my shoulder. He was kicking me and punching me, I curled up into a tight ball to protect the baby and luckily all the damage was done to me, not her.

But then maybe she did get damaged - maybe her soul has been damaged. Maybe the high levels of fear I felt were passed to her - and she has internalised this energy?

However, she has no idea of the depth of the abuse I suffered from her father. I do not want her to know that. Not because of shame, not because of anything other than I don't want that to contaminate her relationship with her father. The damage he did to me and the issues we had between us were between us. I always felt that the 2 parents in a divorce should not involve the children in their dramas.

But now I am in a sticky spot - do I tell her this? Do I speak directly to the therapist and not tell C? I just want to help her heal - I do not want to rake up any past issues for her to deal with.

Any advice is welcome - even from you secret readers who never comment or tell me you read my blogs....I know you are there! I am asking the universe for advice and I await the response.....if you are my messenger then come chat.