You cannot hide from the Karma You have Created

People who have created a false power for themselves through tangible means are the same people who owe the biggest karmic debts. 

A tax offset is a fancy term for what the IRS uses to tell anyone at all that the reason their tax refund has been made smaller or is nonexistent is because somewhere along the line of government “help,” somehow, in the eyes of the agencies who claimed that money, a person has either not paid a debt in terms of students loans (all clear here), child support payments (again..all clear), and lots of people now know, too, unemployment compensation debt owed on what the state of California calls fraud.

This is not my stating that anything on my end of things was fraudulently had, because from my vantage, and because I know the story in completion, it is not fraud. However, to the state of California, it IS fraud and they wanted that money.

So, they took it. Of course, I now have to file certain paperwork with the IRS, because I am not the party who created a reason for an offset. Of course, as per usual, the person who did create it – that person cannot believe it. That person refuses, flatly, to call the treasury department to find out that I am correct. What this person does not realize is that, where the government and debt are concerned, if you owe them they are going to get what they are owed.

The last time I wrote about Karma it was about how we create it through our intention. This time it is about being the person who thought they were going to get away with every ugly thing that they wanted to see happen, with everything that they did in order to create a false sense of power for themselves through tangible means, with everything that they did that was not backed by the purity of thought.

You see, I am sitting here with a smirk on my face, when really, I should be damned angry that this…person…has refused to do what I have suggested and call the phone number that I was given by a family member. The reason that this other person will not call is NOT because they know that there is no way that I would lie about this, but because of one thing – they aren’t right.

Aren’t right

I was on the phone the other day with my good friend Gator. We were discussing things that are happening to this other person and her words are ringing in my ears right now, because her words are the very truth. Her words told me that the thing that this other person was exhibiting were not only things that point to mental illness, but that the illness is the tangible proof, not only for me, but for that other person, too, that karma is being paid…and not by me.

Arrogant people already aren’t right in a lot of ways, but the one way that they are not right is in the assumption that there is nothing that they have done that would cause them to owe any kind of karma debt. We find this is not the truth through Bernie Madoff, who rightly was served up his karma bill the moment they found him guilty of all of the white collar crimes the man committed. When it is that things outside of ourselves have control of our inner world, and when it is that we are more dependent upon the tangible things more than we are inclined to go to our inner resources to get our answers, we experience false power, even though we believe it is real power.

And when we are talking about arrogant people, the only answers they care about are the ones that they believe will serve them more than will the very truth of things. In this instance, the very truth of things is that this is not my Karma debt to worry about, and it is not my ego that needs to accept my error, and not me who has to atone for anything, at all.

Do I expect that other person to man up and deal with it properly? No. No I do not, because this is someone, even for as many years as this person has known me and has had the opportunity to see what it looks like to be stand alone, upright, with nothing to hide and nothing to sweat, has refused to see things in a manner that is directly from the soul. This person does not trust intangible things, and this is a person for whom the phrase “show me MY money” should be tattooed on to their forehead.

Please don’t get me wrong – I enjoy what money can do for me. However, I also know that there are things that can replace money in terms of getting tangible items, and I know that an outer resource like money is but a tool by which a life is built, but more than anything else, in reality, while money carries the energy of power, that power is finite because once the money is gone, there is no more power being derived from it.

This is the thing that many people are not willingly learning, that money is a tool, that it does not give anyone any power, and that without it, those who want to believe that they have any real power will be shown, in no uncertain terms, that the thing that they thought they were and that at least one person I know very well is now experiencing is a direct result of the nature of their intent at the onset of the unreality of tangible things carrying power for any person at all.

Yet, money and power and the like is not what I am writing about. I am telling you all that if you think that what you did a long, long time ago will never catch up to you, and whatever it was that your purest intentions were at the time you made that choice, think again.

When we set out to right things in a manner that not a lot of people would think is the right way to do things, and we feel like we have to make excuses as to why it happened, and when we cannot accept that what has happened is our being blatantly told by the Mother Goddess that we have a debt to make right, and we have not bothered to make those things right within ourselves, we will pay a debt that we will not see coming at us, and if we are not accepting a lot of other things that a lot of other people have told us is the truth, our pain from that truth is going to be HUGE.

When we cannot see ourselves as someone who is not owed, who is not entitled, who is not all of those overblown ego things, and we have, over the years, chosen to hurt other people for the things that we knew were not right, knew were not their things to have to deal with, knew that, at the time of the thing that caused the debt, our intention was different than the words coming out of our mouths, we cannot understand why it is that suddenly, we are having a down turn in our own thought about how powerful we truly are.

You are not powerful, neither empowered, if what you have done, are doing now, intend on doing, is meant to do good things for you while not also serving a higher purpose for others. You are not powerful if you believe that, when you had your pretend power (money), you could do and say anything to anyone at all and they would, because you thought you were powerful, do anything for you, because you had money, and you had the thought in your head that you were untouchable. You are not now, nor have you ever been, anywhere near as powerful as you think you once were if you have used bully tactics to get what you wanted. Spirit does not appreciate the shake down and more than that, Spirit will not tolerate it.

Eventually, all of that false power, and all that you have said to others that was meant to hurt them, all that you did that was not the most well-intended and backed by a real sense of integrity, every single damned thing that you knew was not the right way to do things, all catches up to you.

An abuser will end up losing everything that he thought gave him power through the manipulations and the bullying, perhaps not through having only to deal with those things themselves, but more, through the very people who they actually abused.

Whether or not those people retaliate in the manner that most would is irrelevant, and the only relevant thing involved there is that the victim of the abuser eventually WILL end up the victor, because the bottom line is that it was not the intention of the abused to rile the abuser. On the other side of that is the abuser believing that they are untouchable in terms of what their victim can do to them in the manner that they’d done to their victim.

What any abuser never understands and likely will never understand is that the energy that they have put out into the Universe is what brings the lesson back to them – NOT the person who they were bad to. While these abusers will do and say and threaten all they can and all they want to, they do not see the thing that they are creating for themselves.

They are creating for themselves a falsehood, a lie that they are somehow the most important person, that they alone are deserved of the good things in life, even as they were the largest, moronic and gaping asshole that even they, themselves, knows. They do not realize that Spirit, while it is that, at that moment, when fist hits face, is watching, is giving this person every chance She can so that the abuser does not have to suffer what Karmic fate they create for themselves.

Yet, create that fate they end up doing, and by the time that it all starts to really take tangible place, those who are wrong end up not knowing what the hell it is that has happened. They will, if they do not understand the way that energy works, continue to do the same things, again and again, and lots of them never learn, and end up coming right back to another lifetime to go through it all over again. NO matter how much I remind a lot of people of this one truth, they still ignore it as though it does not apply to them somehow.

Karma is the great debt collector, and no matter how much running and hiding anyone does, it will catch up to you.

Yes, I am suggesting that everyone and anyone really and truly think about what you are willing to go through because you cannot see past your own god damned high and mighty self, to the point that you are willingly hurting people because you cannot accept that maybe this time, it was not someone else, and maybe this time, you are who has to pay up, even if you don’t want to. Even if you don’t feel like it. Even if you try hard to get out of the thing that you have created all on your own.

You can’t escape your own Karma.

I said it.

Deal with it.

I Love You All !

ROX

 

 

 

The Battle

It is at the time we feel the weakest that really, we are our very strongest

If you asked me what my greatest battle is at this moment, it is that while every other part of my life seems to be falling into place, the part that can be called “financial” seems to be the one where I have always had the biggest blockages, not only now, when I have a clue (and when I need more clients), but always, even when I was younger (and it seemed that all would always be well with me because I am a big thinker…apparently the world is still very scared of thinking big. I am not.), and now I am learning not only the value in bartering, but also, in the things that I know have never worked in the past being more and more attractive to me to use in the Now than they were useful to me at the time they were in manifest.

However, I do not want to talk about something so sensitive, because really, I am very sensitive about my income because it all hinges on what other people can pay, and right now, there are not a lot of us on this planet who can pay a whole lot for really very much at all. Instead, I want to talk about the idea that we have always known that whatever did not work in the past might work now (because we also know at this point that if we can see our “choices” as “options” that even merely the change in the word, even though it means the same thing, is a change in the energy which surrounds that word.), and more, the ideas that we have now are able to be tried, but that maybe, just like the stuff that we have to battle with now that has always been there for us to battle, period, that the things we came up with in the past were created in the past so as to understand and use in a current “Soul Battle.”

Soul-Battle

Inner battle. The battle with the Self. Warring on the Astral Plane …no matter what you want to call it, it is all the same. When we have come to that place called “rock bottom” and we have found ourselves fighting back tears and wrong assumptions and one day, we are given the energy from Spirit that tells us, through other people, that what we have gone through we did not and will not go through it all alone – this is when we know that we have been engaged in a battle royale with someone else, and not in a physical sense.

Not in a physical sense

Our biggest battles are normally fought with ourselves, but always, the way that it happens is that someone else brought to us the idea that whatever it was that we put energy toward was not what their ideal of that same thought energy was, and therefore a battle ensues. The battle of the egos, that is, and the battle for nothing more than just being able to be thought of as “sane.” And I know a whole lot about that sanity thing, because having been through a lot myself, I should be anything but completely in my right mind right now. The battles that we are given are ours for the choosing, and sometimes we choose the right ones, and sometimes we choose the worst ones, and sometimes we choose on behalf of someone else, and that is when we are at our highest best.

The Battles we fight should be thought of as the fire which refines us

I write a lot about how the fires of life are what make us who we are. It is through all of the battles that we go through, mostly the ones that we go through with ourselves, about how we should go about something that make us the nuttiest. What I mean by that can be well exampled by a marriage that has gone very, dearly wrong and one which those within that boundary have found themselves at a loss for the right words to tell the other.

The Overlord of Doucheland

A woman can be married for almost twenty years, and in that time span can be told, or actually, bullied by her husband, not for the right to call himself the head of the household, but for what he perceives as being his right to lord over the woman, because in his mind, he is the powerful overlord, but in the minds of many, many people, he is not more than merely the Overlord of Doucheland.

Without giving regard to her status as “full on human being,” she, too, like the property, becomes part of that property. While he fills his days and nights with his own perceived and overblown arrogance, she is there, waiting for some sort of clue that she is a valid human being. While she knows that she technically IS a valid person, it has become so dearly her position to let him have his way (because we all know how douchey sumbitches get when they can’t have their way – they become large,petulant toddlers having constant tantrums) so as to NOT upset HIS balance of things, that somewhere in the chain of events of years gone by, she was forgotten as being completely human.

So, many years go by, and said wife makes friends, and those friends, she finds out, also have the same issues at their houses with their own Overlord of Doucheland and it dawns on them at that point that they are totally NOT alone in their pain. They find out that there are others on the planet who are like them, and they seek these others out, only to find out one thing: they are all very tired of the overlords, tired of living in Doucheland, and really, they are done with it.

Yet, the Overlords, they have no intention of letting their one prized possession go, because without these woman-things, they have no one in their own midst and their own minds who they think they are better than. When it is that the women in these situations finally have had absolutely enough and they tell these wannabes that they, the women, are pau hana, or done working, with the Overlord’s crap, it is when all hell breaks loose and suddenly the overgrown toddler throws an overgrown tantrum. (In some houses the Overlord is not a guy but a very clueless, full-of-herself and wants nothing that is not in HER plans, douchey woman who can then be referred to as a “manchick.”)

And this goes on and on, for years, in lots of homes. No one realizes it until they get to that point where they either try to save the Overlord one more time, or, finally, they choose to save themselves. It is when these people choose to save themselves that these moronic spouses of theirs get REALLY ugly, with their words, and sometimes, with the violence which can ensue. And the violence is all a measure of control and fear, until one day, the prized possession no longer cares, because they’re tired of being afraid all of the time, and by my stating that they no longer cares, it is not because they do not care that they threatens them or man handles them, but that they no longer care what others think of them anymore.  Eventually, basically, and one day, the opinion of other people no longer matters because, eventually, we all figure out that at the end of the day, when our heads hit our pillows, it is only ourselves and the grand Universe there with us.

It can be dangerous, physically, (Been there. Done that.) and sometimes, it warrants our needing to seek an outside opinion (again, been there, done that…) and even some help to get us through where we have been, what we have seen, when it all catches up to us, and it is through the outside help (mine’s name was Angela…yeah…peculiar that her name was Angela, right? NOT) that finally, when the dust and the bloodied self of the Soul have stopped aching enough to have clarity about anything, this is when we know that we are meant for other things and NOT for being in servitude to another human being, and namely, not an abusive spouse. 

The battle in this situation was my own, and there are two women on this planet who know it well, and no, one of them is not my therapist even though both of them, because of me, should be easily able to earn their PhD in Psychology. These are my two best girlfriends, both of who could also be and have been the woman in this story. Together (outside help and opinions) we thought ourselves through and out of the situations we found ourselves in.  I will be the last person on the planet who will tell anyone that they don’t have to worry about abuse or being abused, because I know different. That is beside the point. There are reasons that we all go through what we go through, and all of it is learning, all of it is meant to refine us through the fires which we are forced to walk across, or go backwards in to the jaws of the deaths we have already gone through.

What being bullied and abused has taught me to this point

I have learned through those who have been close to me and also less than kind to me for years and years and years that I am one who will choose her battles and who will never NOT choose them again.  I am one who likes the challenge brought by the words being said to me “I don’t think you can do this. You are not good enough at it…” and also one who will not ever back down from being bullied by anyone, ever again, and it is not because I wanna fight, but because I am not afraid to make it known that while I might be a skinny little twerp, I am a powerhouse in the soul.

What the bullies in my life taught me was that I am not one who should be ashamed of merely being me, for real, without apology, because they believed, maybe, at one time, that who I am, for real, is a threat to them. The only time I am a threat, when anyone is a threat, is when we are made that way by them so that they can have a reason to feel threatened by anyone. It is another way of their controlling us by their stating that we are being threatening. Anything at all that seems like it hurts, hurts, but sometimes, what hurts does so with grand purpose.

With Grand Purpose

I have many friends and acquaintances whose life stories can be thought of as nothing short of miraculous that they made through their own battles  alive. So many things in our lives claim us for long periods of time and when we choose to think of them only as being a pain in the okole, that is when they are only a pain in the okole. When we decide that one day, we would like to not be in the positions that we have found ourselves in, we also decide at that time to allow Spirit in and let her do what She will with us.

The pains we suffer are with grand purpose, are meant to teach us what we do not want to go through and more, who we are in relation to ourselves.

The Battles we fight are ours to choose, so choose wisely.

You are learning how to be who you are, for real. Stop fighting who you are for the sake of making someone else feel better. It is not worth it. You will never not be you. They will never not be them, and sometimes, you always being you, and they always being them is enough to make anyone decide that the battles which will ensue (because really, we ALWAYS know who we WILL fight with, and more, who we will be in permanent fight mode with, forever, sometimes.)

I LOVE YOU ALL !

ROX

PROJECT:Shades

Operation SoulShine

Foran Toy Drive

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The Universal Law of Dying

Everything in consciousness begins and ends

As a society, here in America, we have made an art of trying hard not to die physically, not to age, at all, not to “get old”and most of the time, if not all of the time, it is at this same time that we build our outer selves up without regard to the inner self, that we will go through another sort of death. The death of and simultaneously to the Ego.  It is not what you might think it is in that, when there is an “ego death” it merely means that you have been given hints and clues and sometimes in a lot of cases told by those who love us the very most that we need to check ourselves because on the outside it appears that physically, we have wrecked ourselves.

However, there can never be any sort of death to anything, really, unless and until the soul is ready and prepared for whatever it is that it is making new for the body in which it lives. The Soul can never die, even though the body does. The soul shows its indicator of an internal soul-sickness through the physical body. My best example of this is when someone is addicted to anything at all. There is always something on the inside that goes away first, or maybe is pushed somewhere in the deepest recesses of the Self that the only part of the person as a whole is the Ego. When the person lives from the ego, eventually the sickness of the soul shows itself in many ways and more ways than not, when we are talking about people who are addicts we are talking also about people, by and large, who are not well in the soul. This does not mean that they are sick and perverted (okay so lots of them end up that way, but…) but it means that if they are sick and perverted that the illness that is embedded into their soul has rooted itself through the use of numbing agents, which could be drugs, alcohol, sex with people who anyone should know better than to have sex with, let alone care to see naked…all of these things that keep a person looking for more of it are what were once habits and are now addictions.

The addictions are formed for a need of something, and that need of something is normally ego directed. When someone comes to me to help them sort out the mess they have called their lives for many years, and when they know that the things that they are doing, and the people who they are hanging out with and who are also portraying in themselves those ways of being that we can also call “ours” and we have the very nerve to tell these people about what is their sin, without looking at what is also our own sin, we are not realizing that the Ego has neatly taken over, to the point where a person needs to be numb, by their own hand, to stave off the pain of their lives.

The Pain of Life

Because of the people who I work most closely with (musicians and artists and weirdos, oh my), addiction in the lives of others is something that I see right away. I sense it there through the pain they bring through to me through their words, and after some observing them with other people, their actions, I find that more and more these days, people are simply looking for an end to the pain. In my world it happens a lot – a musician finds me and either brings to my attention someone who is horribly addicted, and a lot of the time, they are not aware that in their own lives they are also suffering an addiction. They are not aware that they are medicating themselves in the worst way that they could possibly come up with, and they do not realize that whatever it is that they see in others and point out in others is the same thing that is alive and well within themselves and that, to a point, they are calling it out of themselves and making healers like me aware of the thing that they have actually had to come to me to find answers about.

The pain of life is that thing that makes you cry when you don’t want to, and it is that thing that is masked by the things that cover it up and that we grit our teeth while smiling and tell others “I’m fine” over. Our society has made it so that we equate addiction with someone who is a bad person, and really, it is not that they are bad but that they have had such a bad time in life to that point, and because they find it shameful to have to admit to the idea that they have fallen to their own lowest point, they feel that they must hide the pain. Sometimes the hidden pain is because of a person’s not wanting to give that painful energy to their loved ones, and sometimes that painful energy is brought out of people because of their loved ones. Sometimes it is the remembering of the things that were said to and of us while we were little children and that keeps on haunting our thoughts and invading who we are for real.

And like all else that is here and in this lifetime and evident in our consciousness, so, too, does the thing that came along to eat our souls and allowed our egos to get so fat come to an end, because we either allow the healing or, sadly, we allow the addiction.  When we end our pain with an addiction, while it marks another beginning, it is also the end of your own sense of self and reality of sanity. The process of the addiction takes its toll in that the more we delve into that energy, the more that we will try to make excuses and good reason for the addiction. This is something that I had to learn, because as I said – addictions do not have to be drugs or alcohol, as they can also be the pursuit of things and ways of being. In my case and in order to quell the pain of the physical violence in my marriage that was also accompanied by the pain that was the emotional abuse, because I was referred to as being “stupid” all my life, and more, because I was told that since I might be easy on the eyes to some men, that “thank God she (me) is pretty because God only knows she is not intelligent enough to make it on her own…she will marry well and thankfully will be able to sponge off of a man.”

Now, think about how awful that might sound to a little girl who, at that time, I was not older than 7, and you couple it with the idea that my whole life to that point the thought that was “women are not able” to do a whole lot for ourselves, so since that was their truth, and since it was that I was in their charge, at that age, and even though it hurt me, and even though I know now that it was probably the cruelest thing to say to a small child, namely a girl, and while I know that even then, it was not the truth, without realizing it. Telling children things about who they are supposed to be according to someone else, telling them that what they look like is going to save their lives, telling them things that make you feel better but makes that child worry for years to follow…this is the beginning of addiction.

I became addicted to learning, to knowing more, to being the most intellectually superior person in all of that part of my blood relations’ lives. And because of this, while I might have been technically way more book smart than they were, I was not emotionally well, and that is when the other addictions followed. I was addicted to trying to be better than them, and already, because I was who I was, I had no idea that I was not better than anyone, but neither were they, and these people who I no longer talk to damaged me to the extent where I will not deal with people who want to show everyone how great they are. This is what they taught me, and for me, doing things to me that would make them accept me as the me I would fabricate but who totally was not me became the thing that I though would heal me. Changing for them was not ever going to happen, and eventually I ran myself ragged until one day, I no longer could be that person. I could no longer remain addicted to spending money on things that I thought i wanted, but I wanted them because I thought it would change their mind about me.

The difference now is that I no longer care what they think. I no longer spend time thinking about how I might stick it to them, and I now longer give a rat’s ass about how they think I am living my life. I am living healed, and I needed just to no longer engage in the habits that became addictions to me, all the way to an alcohol habit that lasted about three years, and I chose to no longer try to numb myself with things outside of me. I chose, instead, to heal from the abuses.

I chose to heal, because I could feel my own energy level becoming what it was not meant to be, which was very depressed and at times, raging through the depression.  One can imagine that I really needed to get over whatever it was that was making me feel like everyone else was correct in their assumptions about me. Where it was that they were calling me a drama queen or an attention whore, it was not either of those things. Instead, because of the things that these people put me through for many, many years, it was that culmination of all of the energy that was given to me by them that had finally taken its toll. And it was, very dearly, I could continue the madness of trying to fit who I was not, just so that I could have their love, or I could choose to save me.

I chose to save me.

In choosing to save me, I also chose, at that point, to live my life from the Soul rather than the pain that was caused by the ego. Folks have it wrong when they believe that the Ego is something that only makes us arrogant. The Ego, when it is allowed to run amok, is the part of us the tells us to remember the pain as being the most important part, when really, the pain is there to tell us that there is a difference between what is real to us, which should be Love, and what is not real at all, which is the pain caused by the love that is conditional and is what others tell us, even without saying so, that we are not good enough for them to Love us if we are not willing to allow parts of who we really are to die to their expectations.

The Universal Law of Dying tells us that we die more than one time, and that for the most part, it is needed in order for us to experience Growth

To die a death of the Ego is to grow in the soul. We die an ego death whenever we figure out why it is that we are in emotional pain and the moment comes that we decide to deal effectively with our pain. This is the reason that I insist that people who seek my help, who want Spirit to help them, are required to feel their pain. When we feel our pain we can also feel all the way down to the Bones of the Soul. If you have never asked anyone who has had an injury that has injured them all the way to the bone, they will tell you that the pain is so intense that they are not sure they will be okay from it, that they will make it through the time they need to heal physically from the injuries.

When we hurt from things, much of the time it is not difficult to know where it is that our emotional pain is coming from. It is when something that we ourselves cannot change but that will change the very fabric of our own personal lives happen to us that we know, for real, what is the pain that is all the way down to the Bones of the Soul. This is when, for some people, addiction starts. It starts with a person looking for a way to escape their reality, and so ensues the madness that comes with any kind of addiction. It escalates from there because of the fact that when we seek outside of ourselves for the pain to go away, we know that it is temporary.

The Universal Law of Dying tells us that when something has come to an end, and the lesson that we need and have always needed to learn in order to heal from certain pains in our Soul, that we will know it. We will know that we no longer have to feel that pain and are healed from it, the emotional trauma finally ended, when we can think about what happened that brought us to the point where we needed to deal from the outside, or at least believed that we needed to, and when that trauma is really not so traumatic for us anymore. While it is that the energy of the things that have happened to us won’t ever be different, we know that one day, as long as we realize that there is an end to everything, just as much as we know there is a beginning, and that all we need to do is to accept what we have gone through as ours to heal for us, we will also realize, very dearly, that everything that starts also ends.

Even pain.

No matter what kind of pain.

I LOVE YOU ALL

ROX

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The Violet Flame

You are the representation of The Violet Flame

When I started this blog it was filled with a lot of angry energy. If you went backwards to the beginning of it, you would notice that over time, as much as I have evolved, so has this blog. It went from confessional, to testimonial, to venting and ranting, to silence and now, to this. 

This would be what my version, perhaps my interpretation of what The Violet Flame is. 

It is the Voice that no one but you can hear, and not with your ears, but with your Soul, and is the part of you that is never accusatory, does nothing to make you hurt. Will not ever abandon you or leave you with no means of Soul survival. 

You are the Violet Flame, are the very Fire in The Belly of The All That Is. It is because of your One Light that is added to all of the rest of the Light in the Universe that there are people who share air with us all and who need us to be that Light, that Voice in the distance, the one lone voice in the wilderness that is Life. 

It is You, You Who has battled the ghosts from the past, the ugliness of right this moment, and the fear of the future, who has bothered to care, not only about others, but about yourself that has made it so that you would be able to shine brightly in the dimness that is confusion, that is all of the pain illuminated within you. While it was that you believed that the illumination of your Soul was the glaring light from shame, it wasn’t. 

It was that the fire burned hot enough within to make it known to you that indeed, You Are the Violet Flame. 

When you thought and believed that the madness would never end, there you were, in the mirror, looking back at yourself through the windows of the Soul that are the eyes and through the grief that was brought to you through a “happier means,” or at least what was supposed to be, at the very least, happy. Regardless, you went through all of that so that you could be here, right now, to find out that indeed, it was not that someone stamped out your fire, but that it was embers which never went out, and the embers that continued to be the thing that you hoped for, because within the energy that was the heat of the fire in manifest through the embers that could be called your will, your strength and your Truth of Being, you are here, you are now, and you are really and truly the manifestation of what is The Violet Flame.

It was the broken heart that you thought would never heal that brought out of you the energy that is The Violet Flame, and it was the crushed Spirit and weary Soul within you that made you take notice, not of who you were not and never were, but who you know and what you know you have never not been, and you have never not been a shining example of Love, of patience, of the ability to Love, even to the point where it was unreasonable or even safe for you. You stayed, not because of anything other than the fear that was there. The fear was real. The weakness, real. 

Yet, so, too, were the embers which remained to glow within you, was the energy that was the Warrior within, the one who would remain and battle for you and in your place. Her face was the same as yours, but you were not this person who someone else told you that you were. You were, instead, a Strong One in Manifest. You needed to polish your shield and sharpen your weapons, for yours was not the battle that was outside of you only, but also within. It was within where the lies were forced to be the truth that you never believed, and it was the dull ache that you kept alive within and that prodded you on and on, to glow into the Forever that is the Universe, the Universe that has always been your Home. 

You have nothing to fear, and no need to be worried that you are not every bit as wonderfully glowing as you have been told you are. 

You are The Violet Flame….and You wear it well !! 

Aloha …I Love You All !
ROX

Help The Sisterhood Of The Soul tell the world that Domestic Violence and Emotional Abuse are the reasons that we have so much violence in our communities. Violence at home breeds violence in our communities.  Please visit, “like” and “share” the PROJECT:Shades page on Facebook.

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Chick Wisdom Will Never Fail Us…

For all the things that we each go through, there isn’t anything as awesome as the Wisdom which comes from Being a Chick!

Making use of the feminine wiles is not for the faint of heart!

There are a lot of lessons that we learn each day. Some of them are good and make a positive impact. Some of them suck ass but still make a positive impact. All of them are needed. None the less,when it comes to having those conversations with the air, and when we feel like once again we have screwed things SO up that there is nothing that we can think of to make them be better or even different, into the brain comes something which I have termed as being “Chick Wisdom.”

Chick Wisdom

You can call it a woman’s intuition, or your can call it a Divinely Purposed “thing” that all women seem to possess (and hell, some of us even use it!), but I prefer to call it Chick Wisdom.

Yeah, this post is specifically for the girls and women of the world, namely for those of us who haven’t yet been through enough to know how to effectively bounce back from things which may, at the time they are happening, piss us off and break our hearts, but really, all we were doing was learning.

None of us can have any sort of Wisdom without having to go through a few things in life. Things in life aren’t always all bad. When we hear about the lessons that we learn most of the time we are prone to believe that what it is that we had to go through was somehow bad. If you learned from what you went through, and you know that you cannot do whatever it was that you did, you learned. If your heart ached but the ache dulled and then you woke up one day refreshed and feeling better than you have in a long while, you learned. If you went through shit, and experienced shit, but you are still in the mindset that all it was was shit, then you didn’t learn shit. It is that simple. Really.

You can try to get your point across, but if it is that your words befall deaf ears, and you continue to push and try and do what you think you have to in order to feel better, then you ain’t learned a thing.

When we are compelled more to think before we speak or act, think about how a certain thing will affect another person and we are more inclined to impose onto them not only our opinion but also the energy that tells them that no matter what, you are right and they are not, you are not utilizing your own method of the chick in you trying hard to scratch the surface of the issues which are yours and yours alone. While there are other people in your life who might make you miserable, the idea that they are who is responsible for how you feel is preposterous and it is so because you are choosing to let these things happen and choosing to let their shit be your shit, too. And that only makes you feel like a dumbshit, really.

Take it from a professional part-time dumbshit…utilize that Divine Chick Wisdom 

Every single one of us has moments where we lose our clarity and fall victim to our own dumbshit tendencies. I do it a lot. I am sure that I am not the only one who does, but I might be one of the few who will own up to it. Doesn’t matter – we cannot go on through life being a dumbshit, and more, we cannot go on through life trying to not be a dumbshit all the time.

What we can do, however, is we can acknowledge that we have been a dumbshit, can bother ourselves with the idea that we are only human and then can use our Inner Chick to guide us through the maze of madness caused by life.

Survivors of domestic violence and emotional abuse sometimes suffer from a largess of dumbshit tendencies, and the truth is that we are only human, and that our own tendencies toward making bad judgment calls and even worse decisions will take over if we are not allowing ourselves to simply just accept that we are not going to always get things right, that we are prone to making choices that might not be the best ones we have made. The beauty of this is that if we know that we are going to screw things up, then we should know, too, that the bigger the dumbshit thing we do, and the more work it takes to come back from that thing, the wiser we will be for the effort and more, for the dumbshit thing that we did.

You are human. You are going to make all kinds of mistakes. Deal with it. Learn from it.

That way the next time you have the opportunity to be all the dumbshit you can be comes to you,  you will have had enough experience to know the difference between doing a dumbshit thing and using that Chick Wisdom you worked so hard to develop.

It isn’t that hard to make bad decisions. It is only hard when we cannot accept that we did. You were born for a reason, and that reason was to learn throughout the course of your life, yes, even and especially as at one time the victim of someone else, and then eventually, your very own Survivor!!

…and no one who survives anything terrible can possibly be a dumbshit ALL the time, can they?

Nah…I didn’t think so either…

I Love You All!!
ROX

Our violent society is a peek into our lives at home

A violent society is a society which got that way through violence “at home.”
We can keep on telling ourselves that “it happens to other people, not us,” but the truth is that our violent society is a larger picture of the violence in our private lives and private homes

We can deny it all we want, but there is nothing in the news that tells any one of us that we are not living in some of the most violent times in any of our lifetimes. We have failed ourselves by shunning our gentle human nature and have called our inborn human ability to Love as being weakness, but the weakness is not brought to us through means of over-loving each other. Our weakness is caused by the fractures in our collective thinking that prods us to try to one up one another, to compete against and try to best each other, and when we have finished making yet one more mess that society has to clean up, we want to ask how it came to be this way.

The answer is easy. The answer is right before our eyes, and the answer is something that we as a whole have decided to call “normal,” but I defer to the idea that any time anyone of us hurts through means of another’s physically violent act it is because the person who lashed out at someone else came from a place where he or she witnessed a whole lot of violence, all the time, and this is how said person responds to what it was that they were taught. 

We don’t think of the larger picture, of the thing that we have created. We want to blame our born rights to bear arms and to protect our homes and our lives from the monsters that lurk in the night. We want to take away rights of good people who would do no harm to anyone ever, not in the context that this is being written in, and we want to blame society for problems which. at their onset, were problems that were hidden from the prying eyes and the judgment of a society where there is no mercy but for that which is doled out in favor of pats on the back rather than a change in the collective thinking.

We want to strip good people of their rights to feel safe while coddling those who would bring our nightmares to full life and in our faces and we want the same society which has shunned those who quietly suffer in many ways to fix a mess that it has survived on, and we want to take away things that are no anywhere near what we, in contrast to it all, need to add to in many ways.

The only way to fix this mess is to teach another lesson

We have come to the place in our lives collectively where it seems that the majority still is the major deciding factor in all that we do as a unit. But what we are not doing is fixing a problem. What we are doing is covering it up with yet one more law which will not govern the lives of the violent in proactive ways. We keep sending them to prisons before we even think to send them to rehab and we keep on enhancing the idea that if someone is beaten up or stabbed or shot that spending time with other violent people is somehow going to make whatever it is that we are trying to accomplish seem like a far away thing for us. The reality is that these people are the product of a lack of Love, because not everyone who grows up in a violent family or who grew up or grows up in a lesser-than-desirable-in-the-eyes-of-society neighborhood is expected to be a violent person. 

Exposure to violence begins early in life, usually at home, and becomes “normal” for a whole entire segment of people who do not know better than to beat the hell outta someone in order to get their point across.  

It is not rocket science that this would be the truth, is not something that someone has to start a rumor about for it to be known and accepted as the quietest reason as to why it is that there are children who grow up without two parents in the home, accepted as why we need more prisons and why it is that we need all the shrinks in our society that we need. 

What we need is not hard to figure out

We, as a whole, badly need to restructure our lives around a mission in our private lives which is based and founded upon Love. We think that we lack economic strength and we want to believe that violence only happens in neighborhoods where the main income for a family is through the local Dept of public Services office, but this is not the truth. The truth is that societally, we have failed ourselves. We have made it a good thing to label harsh corporeal punishment on children as being a parent’s religious right to ‘discipline” their children, and we have made hazings in both high school and college level athletics a thing which sorts through the pansies in our midsts for the tough guys, but what we rarely think about is that someone at one time in history made it the rule to hurt people, to make them out to be too soft for a world which will chew us all up and spit us out as though that is what we all have to look forward to.

Well it isn’t and it never had to be! We are who changes the thinking of the collective whole by being the first one to take action on what it is that we want to see happen in the world around us which leads to things changing on a community level to an entirely different level of change where we can see it and feel it sweeping through our lives like a strong desert wind at sunset.

Violence has become our shameful birthright, but it doesn’t have to stay this way. I have said it before that light kills the darkness and that only love can kill the demons within us all.

Only Love can tame the fires of hatred and anger which leads us out of our homes and into a society which does not realize its own frailties and neither accepts that we are who made it the way that it is now. 

Since when was it ever ok to make people hurt rather than to help them grow? Since when was it that we chose to just turn a blind eye and more, when the hell are we going to be the first one to stand up and be bothered by it enough to do something about it?

When will we bother, guys?

I Love You All !! 

ROX 

 
  

Cry

Society sees crying and a show of emotions as a sign of weakness. Yet, in the world of the domestically abused, sometimes, tears are all we have.

The fact that my Sun sign is in Pisces makes it so that when I feel something, some sort of energetic or volatile pull on my emotions, if I am presented enough with all the facets and all the stuff that will take prior to said such emotional happening happens, if it is that the thing at hand is emotionally strong, I will likely end up in tears over it. This is not to say that I am not already an incredibly emotional person who feels every little nuance in a situation, but it is to say that personally I know that when we cry we are not only feeling what we have to feel at that given moment, but we are getting rid of toxicity that was not ours to begin with. This is the very reason that I tell anyone with whom I should have contact in regards to the issue of being physically assaulted for the very first time – that they NEED to cry.

Tears are a gift. Even though we end up with puffy eyes and our sinuses end up being very clogged from all the draining of our emotions, when we cry we very literally release the toxins which were built up within us throughout the time that we were only experiencing the emotional part of being abused. And of course the emotional part is way harder to get over than the physical bruises, but what only an actual formerly beaten person will tell you is that the emotions you feel after that initial attack will leave a person feeling an entirely new set of toxicity, and it is this level of toxicity that will compound the idea that you have already gone through all sorts of emotional stuff and now here is  yet one more thing to have to deal with that you know you never cared to deal with but are now very well in the middle of it.

I know this monster well because this monster is the one that lives in the back of the closet of my mind, taunting and haunting me with the mental images, not only of my bruised,  battered and broken self, but also and more importantly, the illuminated and bigger-than-it-really-is image of that angry face, the gritted teeth, the wild look in his eyes, and that illusory background of anger that he said was caused by me.

Let it be well known right at this moment that the first time you were abused, no matter what way it happened, that at that moment you were changed, forever. At that moment you were stripped of trust in others. At that moment your entire world became enmeshed and laced with a fear that is foreign to you, a fear that now lives in you because someone else placed it there and did so with force.

At that very moment in time, you became someone who you no longer knew, at least not the way that you did prior to that one very intense moment. You became the thing that you told yourself that you would never be – your spouse or partner’s victim. The very word “victim” makes people think that you are somehow weak, that you should have had more back bone and above all, the thing that a lot of people will tell you but have no clue is NOT the truth is that they would never let it happen to them.

I am so sorry, folks, but abusers are not the type to tell you when they are going to toss you around physically, and abusers are not going to clue you in to when they have totally lost their mind and are now going to go ape shit on you and physically harm you. There is no abusive person on the planet who is also going to tell you what they are up to and there is no mental health expert who will make me believe that they are the very ones who will unwittingly tell you that they are going to physically harm you. It just won’t happen that way. The way that physical abuse begins is at that point where the abuser cannot “break” you or your spirit, and if you are one of the luckier ones then you will know that a broken spirit is never up to those trying to break it and it is very much a case of if you will allow them that leeway – I allowed that leeway, but you don’t have to.

You never have to let someone else tell you that they are going to physically harm you even though they will say it a whole lot. You never have to believe that you are not worth someone else’s good effort at showing you that you are somehow the effort to be with someone who will not treat you like property. You never have to do a whole lot of things, and at the point where fist meets the eye or the jaw or the ribs, the notion that you do not have to do anything that you do not want to do flies out the window along with your sense of normalcy.
And it is your sense of normalcy that gets shaken and your sense of normalcy that becomes diluted with someone else’s version of “normal.”

Getting hit is not normal. Being told that you are all what someone else tells you that you are is also not normal and what is further not normal is the fact that in a whole lot of cases, many of us will allow this, out of fear or whatever the hell else it is that you can think of, to become the color of “normal” for an abuse victim because this is the “normal” that their own abusers grew up with. It is never normal for anyone to have to fear what another person  might do, because what they “might” do they ultimately and one day end up doing anyway. To tell an abuser that you are leaving them and that they need to deal with it is just inviting them to conjure ways of hurting you further.

In fact, it is evidenced that once a woman reports the abuse to authorities or when she chooses to leave him the abuse victim is neatly placed in a more dangerous position than she already was. Hence, the reason that I am all for provisions made to the abused through nonprofit agencies and government providers. When it comes to abuse and the leaving of our abusive partners it is the paper trail which matters and not only how the abuses made you feel. The reality is that the abuse is not done once you leave and the propensity and possibility of it still happening and more harshly once you are gone is real. More abused women are killed after they have left their abusers and not while they are stuck in the middle of the madness they have been forced to call their lives.

This, folks, is the reality that becomes that of an abused person, and the statistics you read and hear about are real. The textbook descriptions of what we go through are not real because these explanations do not give credence to the idea that bruises and bones take time to heal, that spirits crushed need time to become revitalized, and further, there is no textbook that adequately explains what it is that all abused people go through. And what we go through is quite a lot.

Hence, the reason that it is good to cry, the reason that when it all first starts it is good and needed to feel and explore those emotions and deal with them as best we can at the beginning of things without the benefit of therapy. In fact, to allow the tears to flow is therapy. It helps rid us of our sadness and our grief, helps to ease the bewilderment, and most of all, allows us to feel whatever emotions that we are feeling at the time it all comes to the head that, in most cases, ends up happening and it does not matter how long it took for your attacker to start in on you with the verbal and emotional abuse because at the onset of those things happening it is but a matter of time before the physical abuse begins.

So please, by all means, do yourself a favor and cry.

Sadly, you earned it…

I Love You All
…Roxanne…

You cannot make other people "get it"

Too often, the abused turn to people who cannot understand the depth of the issues

I won’t bother to “out” the person who chose to run his mouth today about an issue that is really not a huge thing. I also will not go on to tell anyone who it was whose fracture of peace that was hard worked for almost wrecked, just because that person felt a little bit disgusted by the remnants of what someone else did. While I get it…really, I do…it – the ‘it’ that caused this havoc today, and surprisingly no, the “problem” has not seeped into my marriage to this person, was such a minor thing that it really is making me wonder if who in the lives of the abuse survivor and survivors-in-training are really listening to the people who are going through the mess called domestic abuse?

If you don’t listen, you won’t have a clue


This is not meant to insult anyone reading this, but if you are a loved one of someone who is being emotionally abused and you are not listening to what it is that they are telling you and if you are willing to compare your own childhood with your own abusive father to what it is that your loved one’s children go through, please stop. Though the technical similarities are there, I know, for a fact, that no two situations are alike, so please stop behaving as though you know how to fix your loved one’s problem because, no, you do not know.

You want to be there, and that is fine, and you want to help, and that, too, is fine. What is not fine is the idea that you think that what you yourself have been through in any way at all somehow validates that you know better than the victim does. Again – no, you don’t, and there is no more bigger an insult that someone who goes through the abuse can receive. You cannot begin to know what is happening, are not qualified to give advice, can never fix things for them because the bottom line is that you do not know what to do and your attempts a trying to get your loved one through their time of heartache, though appreciated, may only serve them with more grief.

Believe me, I know this one personally. If I didn’t, I would not have anything to write about today.

You cannot make things better by making your abused loved one feel like he or she is not doing enough to get out of the very volatile situation by making a phone call to the nearest shelter or even to the police.


From experience I can say that yes, calling the proper authorities when your loved one is being physically harmed is the best thing that you can do for them. Yet, when there is only an exchange of words, and this is not to tell anyone that verbal abuse is less damaging than physical abuse (because it is lots worse on the victim, and yes, I know this one, too), there really is nothing that calling any authority, any shrink, any person will do to help. And please, spare me the “they don’t want help. If they really wanted out, they would get out.” To those who would think and believe this, let me give you the biggest “go fuck yourself” that you have ever had.

You do not know what it is that abused people go through, even after their abuser is not in their lives. You do not know how to make it go away, and you can suggest all you want what you THINK you would do, but you are not in the situation and you cannot try to make an abused person get into your head when most assuredly it is YOU who needs to get into theirs.

To suggest that any abuse victim or survivor LIKES being told who they are, what they do, blah blah blah, is just adding huge insult to permanent emotional injury that the abused person has to heal from all on their own, and your adding your two fucking cents to a matter that you know nothing about, that you have not researched and that you are basically clueless about only pisses your loved on off. You are not helping the problem. You are adding to it, and you are quietly being placed on that list of people who abused them as well. Watch your mouth and your ass, because you do NOT get it and if you say horrible things to them about their life situation, you are just as creepy and clueless as is their attacker. You know nothing when it comes to what other people go through, and you will remain to know nothing as long as you continue to flap your fucking jaw muscles about an issue that you have some very real feelings about but not an ounce of real knowledge. Knowledge is key in these kinds of things, and without a scrap of even knowing at least your own part in their pain, again – you are no longer a part of the solution but have, without realizing it, become a part of the problem instead.

Way to go, hero!
Duh

…and arguing with an abused survivor or with someone in the middle of their crap over what YOU think they should do is like a sin against God and mankind


The term STFU completely applies here, because getting up in the proverbial ass of someone whose life is in utter turmoil is just like telling them what to do. Telling them what you would do if you were in their situation is a bad thing. You do not know what the hell we go through, so shut your sorry ass up and no, you WOULD NOT do all those things that you are telling your loved one to do. Stop turning them into your newest science project in societal bullshit. You do not know what you would do. You are telling your loved one this because you are not in the middle of the same pot of shit soup that they are in and you keep making it seem that they are somehow indebted to you for being the foremost expert on something that is foreign to you.

If you have not been hit by someone who outweighs you at least by 100 pounds, shut up. If you have not been bullied by someone who outweighs you by at least 100 pounds, shut up. If you have not been afraid of someone who outweighs you by at least 100 pounds because you have a memory of what happened to you and you cannot go through that shit again, please, shut the hell up, really. You cannot glean from television or the internet enough knowledge to get your ass out the door in terms of and in regards to having been abused in some way, shape or form.

Again, please, shut up. You do not know what the fuck you are talking about. Unbeknownst to you, and I am just telling you this as a favor to you – you, not so coincidentally, do not know it all, and no, your fucking big fat graduate degree does not make it so that you know more than a survivor or victim of domestic abuse and family violence. While you may know a lot more about whatever it is that you studied, unless you studied psychology and at least have a passing interest in the thinking of the abused…shut…the…fuck…up…today.

One more time…


You want to know how to help your loved one? That’s easy – shut the fuck up and listen to them, because that is what all abuse victims and abuse survivors really do need, just someone to listen, to not judge them, to not put their own two cents in about how they feel about the abuser – talking about the abuser to the abused only places the attention and your attention on something that you do not need to further etch in the abused person’s head.

Shut your foolish ass up and fucking listen. Listening will give you the opportunity to really know what it is, even in a very tiny way, what it is that they have gone through, what we have all gone through, and what a lot of us always go through, even after the abuser is no longer in our lives.

The very best thing that you can do for your loved one if you really want to help them is to simply just be there and to listen, because anything else you tell them will fall on deaf ears, as their entire lives are lived on the idea that they must always look over their shoulder, must always sleep with one eye open, must always have that sixth sense that tells us that we have to be careful…

Since we know that we have to be careful, perhaps, too, you might also want to be careful as well.

Wouldn’t want to be the cause of yet another fight, or worse, another bruise caused to your loved one because you had shit to say, now, would you?

I Love You All…(yes, even you idiots with no idea of what you are advising to your loved ones)

Rox<3

(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. If you want to exact change and cause a Stir, you can contact Roxanne by clickinghere. Her latest book, “Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens” can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)

Gratitude (Or "What Christmas is really all about")

Gratitude is hard when you think you have nothing to be grateful for

When it seems that you have had everything that matters to you stripped from your life, and when you believe that there is nothing left for yourself, Be Grateful.

Be Grateful, even for everything that someone else has put you through


As difficult as it may be for some of us to be grateful to the creeps who made us fear everything and everyone, namely them, it is good practice for healing to be able to forgive and to build an attitude of gratitude toward our oppressors, and it is because without them we know not the things that we are and have always been capable of. When I say be grateful, I really mean it, and I say it because it brings to you a feeling of peace, a feeling that you can get through everything and anything that comes your way.

Be grateful for the things that have been presented as challenges in your life, because without the challenges, we cannot ever know just how deep the well of strength is within us, how strong the person who we really are and who we really have been all along really is. Without oppressors in our lives we do not know what needs to be seen to and repaired, and we can never begin to heal without it. We can never begin to understand who we really are without something or someone there to tell us what they think we are, and what they think we are is so far removed from the reality of who we really are that once it is that we have been goaded, or hounded, or belittled, or even beaten, into knowing who we are, we never know and we can never return to it unless we are paying attention.

This is not my telling you that I am fine with the abuses that many have suffered, but it is to say that whatever happens to us is meant as a lesson, if not in trusting people we shouldn’t, then in trusting ourselves to know that we can rise above everything that we have been witness to, everything that we have been told we are but are not, everything that we see as mean and horrible and things that cripple the soul. Without the tears we cannot know the depth or the joy that laughter brings and can never really experience it because there is nothing to measure it against. Without the pain we can never know what feels right, and without the daggers sent straight to the middle of the soul of our hearts we can never find out that every heart, no matter how broken, has the propensity to heal.

Without the ugly things that visit our lives we cannot know the depth and the worth of the beauty which resides within us all.

Take the good, the bad, and the ugly, and you come up with something beautiful


If there is one that I am very familiar with it is the depth of the soul of a person who lives their lives outwardly, lives their lives as though the only thing that counts, that has ever counted, was what they could accomplish in the material world, but there is nothing in the material world that has roots in the material and no matter what anyone thinks, it never will and it is because all of those material goodies came from a thought – a good thought, or perhaps even a very bad one, but none the less, the soul is where everything starts, because the soul is where our most precious treasures really are.

No matter what ugliness is part of your life right now, as Polly Anna as it might seem, you can turn it into something beautiful, something that somewhere along the Path that you are on right now will culminate into being something gorgeous and real and permanent and yours – you just have to believe that it is, and most of all, you must first have gratitude for it, even as it is still in your mind and in manifest and lives only as an intention.

And speaking of intention, never forget that it is the intention of a thought, of a desire that matters most, and not the thing itself. It is often said and widely believed that it is not the reward as much as the journey to the reward that we all pine for, and in the case of being grateful it is the one thing that matters the most. The journey to wholeness is not one for the weak of heart, the meek of soul, but it is the journey that all abuse survivors eventually must take, for without the drive to want to further your life, and without the desire to see things in a different light, there is nothing else that will lift a person out of the pit of hell called their life at present moment than knowing that one truth. No journey has ever been taken without also taking the very first step. In this case, the first step is simply believing, which, in an abuse survivor’s world, is something that must be relearned as it, too, is stripped of us.

Yet, once we have it back ( I refer to it as my “Girl Mojo”), there is nothing and no one who can stop us. Nothing. Not one person. It is this way because we have used the Spiritual muscles built up by hurtful words and action taken against us, and it is this that carries us through to our highest learning. It is the experience as an abused person that prompts us to become survivors, and once we are survivors, we then become fighters, and in our case, the fighter never does not reign victorious. We go from being just a survivor to being a reigning and victorious Soul with a heart and mind to match, and by my count, that is a lot to be grateful for. We find that we can handle almost anything that comes our way, and if we cannot handle it at that very moment, we know that our moment will come. It is not a matter of if, anymore, not in the case of the survivor of domestic abuse and violence, but rather and only, when.

It is Beautiful to be Grateful…

A person living in the Light of Love and with Gratitude in their heart is a person who has begun the Journey to healing. If we can manage to rise above the anger, above the shame and above the remnants of what we thought our lives should have been, we can manage to see to it that everything in our lives brought us to this point, to this place where we can stand atop the proverbial mountain, look out onto the world that is our lives, and see that we have much to be grateful for, see that we are not so without that we cannot manage to also see to it that we are a better beacon of Light than we are a purveyor of the darkness. Abuse survivors live their lives shrouded in darkness that is not their own but becomes theirs once it is that someone whose darkness is not bigger, but whose darkness is backed by all the power that they have within them.

People who have survived such things have not used every bit of what they were granted at birth, and in so knowing this cannot use it if they do not realize that they have it. We all have it, and once we can take hold of and harness it, there is nothing that we cannot do – not one damned thing, and this is the most beautiful and most important thing about Gratitude.

Gratitude is a Light unto its own. It sheds light on the things that are of importance to us, and breaks us free of the belief that we want more than we deserve, and we do not realize that wanting is different than desiring. Want leaves us feeling empty, but desire fills us with hope and banishes the fear which has permeated the Light within us for too long. When we can be filled with Gratitude our lives begin to change.

So, be in the Light that is Gratitude – YOUR Light that is Gratitude, and find within the one Christmas gift that has been yours all along…

I Love You All…
…Rox…

(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine ‘Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, “Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens” can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com) 

Learning to Trust again, to Love again takes a lot of Soul Work

“It’s like the wind…I can’t see it, but I can feel it…” (Victoria Kristine White)

It is a rare occasion when I will quote another person’s words, but it was this young woman named Victoria,a woman with whom I am only familiar in a Facebook kind of way. Yet, her post this evening sent my being stuck for words a bit of a kick in the ass, and I know what it is that I wanted to tell you all, and yes, it relates to all that we have, as survivors, been through.

Regaining our sense of trust in others begins with our own ability in our sense of Trust, not only in ourselves, but also with the Soul, with the Spirit which guides us and with the idea that everything in the world, other than what you see materially, begins with a thought, and this does include those things which can be counted as ‘intangible.’ It would be cliche’ for me to write something about Christmas, but in trying to keep with the whole  holiday spirit, I guess this would be an attempt at my reminding people that we cannot know how to give anything to anyone until we can first give ourselves a chance to grow. If we do not allow ourselves to grow, we will not be able to heal, and if we cannot heal, we cannot trust, and if we cannot trust, we can never really truly know how to Love again, no, not even ourselves. While this is a very ugly thought, it is the truth of the matter.

It took a lot for me to trust, as well it should have, because trust is the thing that is the hardest for people to rebuild within themselves. Mistrust is where doubt is created, and the first person we doubt is never someone else, but only ourselves, and we project it out onto other people, this feeling that we cannot let go of, at least not right away. It is too hard to let go sometimes, because we know that the risk is too great. Risk is what got us into the messes that we found ourselves in and it will be the trust that we will rebuild within that will help us to climb out of the despair that has enclosed us in a shell that might look like us, might act like us, might technically be us, but it is so not who we really are.

First, you must remember

The first thing that you must remember is that you learned how to mistrust people and that just as you learned how to do that, like much else, you will have to relearn trust. It is a sad truth that abuse survivors end up going through more than we bargained for when all is said and done, but the beautiful part in all of this is that you get to pick how you want to come back, and you get to practice talking to people, practice not talking about you so much that you give away more than you even have for yourself. It took me these last three  years to come back to me, to know and to reinvent me, and it has been a bitch of a time doing so, but it has also been a great time that offered me the opportunity to grow into this outrageous, fiery, passionate person who is full of Spirit and is deeper than the very recesses of the Soul within. This is who I am. This is who I have always been, and I Love Me, just as you should also be so inclined to Love You.

“…don’t you even worry pretty darlin’, ’cause you’ll find Love again, I Know…” (Tesla, “Love Song”)
The thing that I am asked all the time by other survivors of domestic violence is if I am scared to Love another person, and to that question I simply explain that I never lost Love for people and that Love is the thing that will carry you through everything and anything and will always be the thing that you will find will heal you faster and better than everything else.

When a person is abused by another person who has promised to Love them and that person chooses to fracture the trust that an abuse survivor has built up, it is hard to imagine that there is any Love there at all, but there is, and the Love that remains is the Love which has always been within ourselves. If we continue to believe that the Love we deserve is outside of us, we will always be chasing it, and we all know what happens when we chase something or someone – they run. They run like fire burns old newspaper – fast. The reason that we chase is because there within us is the person we were the last time we thought we had to go out into the world to find what already lived within us. We were made from Love, which means that we do not have to chase it because it exists within us and never will die.

Love does not die, even the shattered remnants of what it was that we were told and shown was Love from someone who themselves could not fathom Love because to them Love equals ownership. Love and trust are not borne out of a need for someone else to control who we are – yes, I said need. We seek the approval from someone outside ourselves to validate us, and all we get is the version of ourselves that someone else wanted or wants and is never really the person who we know we are, and the person who we know we are is the best person we can hope to even think to be because it is ourselves in our truest essence. There is nothing quite more beautiful than a person – a woman – who knows who she is and who is confident in herself, who Loves all of herself, even her quirks and the little things makes us who we each are.

It is not only the Romantic sort of Love that I am telling you about


Love is the highest form of respect that anyone can show another person. It was a long time before I could even think to tell anyone that I Loved them, but these days, after a whole lot of work on myself, it is a daily thing for me to tell someone that they are cared for, that even if it seems that they are unlovable, that I Love them, and when I say it, I mean it.

Yet, being able to tell another person you Love them takes a lot of trust. You must trust that you can give that piece of your Self away and you must trust your Self not to get hurt when they do not say it back – not everyone is comfortable or feels safe saying that they Love someone, anyone, and even if they don’t say it, you know it because like Ms. White posted, Love is very much like the wind- you cannot see it, but you can surely feel it, and that is what matters the very most. It is important that we realize this about us, that we are able to Love, and that we are able to Love from the moment that we are brought into this life. Because someone else takes away the Love that we have for them, chips it away by being horrible to us, it does not mean that the Love within us dies. Love does not die. It is like Light – you can have all the darkness in the world and it can engulf you, but once the tiniest sliver of Light is shone, there is no more darkness. This is what Love does.

Illumination

Love illuminates our Selves, and with that illumination we are able to Light the world with the flame within which is our true selves. Once we have illuminated who we are and once it is that we have seen, through that illumination, our own flaws and imperfections is when we can know within that we have reached a point where we never thought we would ever be again. While there will still be much work to do, and while it will be that no one but us can reclaim that piece, it is a freedom like no other to no longer fear that we are not able to Love or to be Loved.

Being someone else’s victim hurts in many ways, but being able to come back to who we are is like water for a thirsty person. Love drenches us in its healing nature and brings to the surface the ugliness that we have allowed to rule us and it sets the standard for who we want to be and who we want to grow into. Being abused makes us shrink into ourselves, makes us believe that this is all we will ever be – defeated, bruised, Spiritually maimed and scarred in the soul. Yet knowing that scars mean that healing has taken place is the salve that brings us back to Life, back to who we are, and makes us know that everything is going to be alright.

If we can believe that we can trust ourselves to do anything, then we should also believe that we will be able to Love again, in every way imaginable, and that what we asked for in the past has come and gone and now we can Love the person we have grown to become. We can take the ugliness, the hurt, the anger and the pain and turn it into the beautiful thing that we have become. We can turn someone else’s trash and the rubble of what was and what became of us in to a beautiful piece of art, original and raw and primal and screaming from the inside, out.

We can choose to be who we are and we can choose to Love who we have become, and we can do all this all on our own. Yes, it will take time, and yes, you will cry like a woman in mourning, and yes, you will feel cleansed and brand new. One day you will wake up and just know….

One day, you will just know…it is like the wind…you know it is there, and you know it because you can see the evidence in the birds which fight it in flight, and even though you cannot see the wind, you can feel it.

So, too, is the nature of Love. You know it is there. You cannot see it.

You can feel it.

I Love You All …
…Rox…

(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine ‘Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, “Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens” can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)