Changing the course of my life

 It was all about fear and seeking approval for not being good enough to my mother and my uncles and aunts. It had all to do with my high sensitivity and that something is wrong with how sensitive, weak and sick I am and I thought the same way about me and I wanted me to be fixed and repressed my feelings to numbness if that's what it takes to just enable in my getting better physically so that I appear perfect enough for my mother specially. She couldn't stand to go through episode after episode of my migraines as the nausea and weakness reminded her of appa (my father) who died in the early onset of her pregnancy and it has been a long journey of mother and I so far.

She expected me to be everything and more and it just put me under tremendous stress and fear for letting her down as I was equally confused for not knowing how to be me in the first place let alone filling all her blank spots in her life ideally.

I craved for some form of validation for being just me even if that meant a weak attempt but didn't quite know how to break the shell. And so afraid of letting her down any more, I hid under the shell and assumed that my unprocessed emotions, sensitivity, myriad feelings will not come in the way as I just numbed them down wanting them to be invisible as I too felt that way on the outside as amma had no idea about another's personal boundaries and just felt that fearing for me and protecting me with material comforts were enough to keep me safe in the shell.

My body became a disconnected mess as I was everything physically but no joy reflected from my persona. I started to camouflage in this dissociation further as one distinct part of me I felt had left and was possibly my soul and there's no words to exactly define this feeling of emptiness - it just felt like I had everything but still had nothing - that nothing indicated my own true feelings about what was it to experience life in my terms which was all that was missing. A body without a cause for wanting to be full of  life.

So in order to want to appear fit and physically healthy and not trigger my mother's wounded past, I just shoved down heaps and heaps of frustration, sadness, anger, and just abandonment for how she tossed away her dump pile of criticisms on me for being too sensitive. It's like she had to toxic vomit as an after effect of my migraine and nausea and shame me into feeling guilty by calling upon other elders of the family and subjecting me to her ruminating dose of the challenges of being a single parent and how hard it was to go though it all by herself without a partner and this grieving over my migraines continued well into other health issues as she insulated my shell with her fears of losing me ass well and I had to be mindful of not letting her down and had to be alive for her.

Being alive for her felt like a broken cause and so I borrowed some from my deceased father who was supposedly a good though amateur writer (he had worked in a public sector as an accounts officer) and assumed that by being a good writer was some way to fill in his possible blanks of his short life and that by being an extension to this self assumed cause could possibly justify my being alive. 

Being present to myself and to my feelings was an unknown concept as I preferred staying as invisible as possible in the dysfunctional joint family that I was a part of. It's like so many people come together only to see you but not feel you or understand you and that feeling just made like a floating body with two legs on ground as I just wanted to disappear more and more from life. 

My life, my space, my hurts, my brokenness, my mind, my soul are all new realizations that have started to dawn on me for few years now as Lord Muruga's Vel speared through a life consuming almost near end moment when I thought my fever and cough and the way it shook me up was enough to end my life. Vel was a vision and a reality that just came straight at me while I was seated on the sofa fully exhausted and feeling like I am just done and while Vel Maaral was playing on the tv at that time, this vision of Muruga's weapon came out the tv screen straight at me and pierced into my chest. It felt surreal, it felt like I had reconnected with my soul purpose for experiencing my life just as is and not to enable and lean back into anyone else's misery and call that as my experience.

I have continued to witness Muruga Perumaan's miracles even prior to this incident but my fears and self doubt over seeing, hearing some things which are so out of ordinary made me reel in into the patterns that I was used to and not step into my faith to see and understand the bigger picture that even the brokenness of my soul could not deter from happening. 

Soul remains but the essence of how it wants to express itself through a given person's body and how authentic is that experience of doing so is the unlocking of this soulful experience which I am glad I have begun to tap into. And Muruga Perumaan has been the most giving and compassionate Supreme Soul who knows when to reach out in times of utter need and has pulled me out of a semblance of emotional coma if you will for all these years and has awakened me to a purpose that's beyond the self imposed limitations and environmental dysfunctions. 

It's like when He chooses to give, then He does. His love for me and his life giving gifts through very fragile episodes of my health challenges have made me realize that there's a power higher than fear and that's love. I feel at a loss for words to describe the extent to which His guidance, his timely help, and simply the way he shows up happens. I love Him immensely for letting me be, for nurturing me back to feeling safe and for restoring my trust in my body and to lean in into the truth of his essence that holds my soul together within the true spirit of living life to the best level possible.

I am taking slow, baby steps but I know that loving him back has been a life saving and an incredibly joyful experience and I still go through pangs of anxiety and fear and so on but to break free from the shell of enabling and sponging in another's life story is a new birth in itself. A new life away from the enmeshment of my mother and whether I am with her or stay away, following my soul's guiding light through the shining vel is a beautiful journey of so many discoveries and blessings for me and I can't be thankful enough to Muruga Perumaan for changing the course of my life.

Addressing the inner child wounds

 Inner child wounds are an all pervasive suppressed emotional pain that grows over time and can remain stubbornly stuck within if the right kind of reparenting is not provided. Why is reparenting required in the first place? Why do parents in most cases continue to pass on their inner traumas and expect resolve through their children? Why can't parents face their own inner child issues, emotional neglect, disappointments, anger issues and so on and focus equally on their emotional regulation and release and not just prioritizing on material acquisition and financial success alone?

I have been such an example of a severely wounded inner child and despite my age still carry deep seated self esteem issues and seek approval from others, dependent on team work rather than work as a sole member who is completely confident in her individual abilities, dissociate often in order to cope up with my dysfunctional emotional regulation which had become my pattern unfortunately, and figuring out how to forgive myself and my parent (single mother) and my caretakers who all practiced neglect, and had difficulty to express themselves and were severely emotionally handicapped owing to their own broken childhood and inner child issues.

Therefore physically growing and aging is all that I did anyway but taking the time to look into my buried inner life and addressing my neglected inner child who could not have a voice of her own and grew up wanting to be joyful, to express enthusiasm freely, and be creative in thriving as an imaginative, artistically oriented, and sensitive child who feels deeply her own emotions as well as others is what I have grieved for a while now. 

To liken inner child wounds to that of a limitation or lack is an insensitive approach but to be kind enough to see this buried heaviness as part of one's past and to be alive to it is a beautiful way of seeing the shadow through the lens of inner guidance and accepting this shadow as an integral aspect of oneself and to care and address it with love is being self inclusive and unconditionally accepting at the best human level possible.

Because unresolved inner child hurts and traumas manifest as emotional pain that block our energy fields from growing and receiving positive energies which help manifest our present and future seamlessly and with a sense of direction, it becomes imperative to heal, release and reparent as needed just to check in with the inner child from time to time. And what we cannot do ourselves, we cannot expect others to do it for us and make the inner conflicts and dense emotional trappings go away. 

What has been done to us is an undoing responsibility within ourselves and once we begin to set ourselves free, then freedom of self expression in a natural sense of joy, innocence, curiosity, enthusiasm becomes the authentic self and is enough by itself without having to seek approval or acceptance from others. 

How we finally respond to our lives is all that matters - I would rather with curiosity, empathy, sensitivity, imagination, and pragmatic problem solving and would need my inner child to be my very own cheerleader to live life to the fullest.

Where there is a Vel, there is a way!

Lord Muruga is the beacon of truth and light on Earth. He wields his mighty Vel to pierce through the mid fog and layers of fear and anxiety enveloping mankind in this kaliyuga.

He is pure compassion that shines as divine light in the galaxies as he helps beings, small, big, and alien to find their way home and to put an end to darkness. 'As above and so below' (An ancient quote) and so is his protection that blankets the cold of several souls who are lost and numb in their darkness within on planet earth and reaches out to them as true light and guidance, one lifetime after another.

Muruga is not just a name, it is the identity of the God within each of us because He is the symbol of good over evil, kindness over cruelty, acceptance over judgement, and truth over fake emotions and feelings. In other words, He is pure love and an all encompassing essence whose smell, feel, and touch is as real and as glorious as the ether of early dawn and the golden dust of dusk.

There is no mountain that's unconquerable for His powerful Vel and no mental, emotional block that can limit or overwhelm a person that is too big a challenge for Muruga's Gnana Vel - the Vel destroys them all and restores our faith back in humanity, hope, and courage in order to live the rough tides of the outer as well as the inner life.

The beautiful Vel is an extension to Lord Muruga and a form of His self expression which becomes symbolic of Muruga's valor, strength, and divine commands as an Army General (Deiva Senapati) of the Devas and Divine Chief of innumerable galaxies and planets, including planet Earth.

The Vel can find its way in when we mere mortals feel distraught that there is no way out, and so the weapon and the Master blend as One to call one's attention to organize life from that of chaos and help restore peace and love in the hearts of one and all in mankind.

The Vel is truly an alchemist of one's heart and mind and a transformative tool to remove the darkness from one's soul. Because its presence to heal one's inner wounds can go as deep and expansive and stand tall despite the intertwined knots of the mind or heart or soul, the resulting calm is proof of the healing work in progress depending on how real, how humble and how unique, the seeker's surrender and love to Lord Muruga and His guiding Vel is.

It's indeed where there is a Vel, there is a way then!!

   

Being true to high sensitivity

I was told I was too weak 

and born with high sensitivity which for my overwhelmed mother just Latin and Greek

I was not certified that I was a HSP, a highly sensitive person, in my infancy

For my mother it was a curse a day and a challenge on another relating to me, as I grew on a lack for feeling joyful life potency

It was all my fault I felt as the sounds, smells, crowd, moods and vibes made me withdraw in deep, unspoken fears

But all these were home to my mother as she grew up with her brothers and after losing my father came back home to them with sadness and tears

She wore victimhood as her attire and hiding behind her saree pallu(edge of the saree) made me one too

And disguised her insecurities by making me the cause of her emotional pain, her biting criticism on my sensitivities coming at me out of the blue

It was my fault and which became my stress to be good enough for her

While gulping down medicines, numbing my feelings and repressing my emotions was just my space and then became a vacuum as it stared back as my daily mirror

She never saw what I saw as she 'settled' into accepting that I cannot be 'fixed'

As I felt increasingly that being born after my father's death posthumously made me unlucky and jinxed.

I kept looking for reassurance outside of me that I was okay and 'normal' despite my high sensitivities

And was afraid to confront my mother for making this unhealthy conditioning which was a block on my creative abilities

She denied even as I confessed how another's unhealthy projections can damage one's mental strength and growth as a person

But she merely said a dismissive sorry to end the talk and I just felt angry and my numbness worsen

End Note/My takeaway: I learnt that my feelings which I had abandoned by not being there for it when it needed attention to be heard and validated needs to be reparented and nurtured and regulated, and not allow for it to become lifeless because we can never bring back people who die as it's the end of their destined time, but feelings can always come back to life if you allow yourself to be alive to it as they speak and share.

Undoing emotional abuse

 Emotional abuse cannot be mentally made sense of; it helps though to understand the pattern of the abuser's thought process and also that of the victim in giving in to the abuse. The mistake that the victim makes is to believe that coping up with emotional abuse and NOT expressing it out aloud and seeking support from others is the way it's meant to be - just be an emotional sponge and take in negative energy of the abuser (whoever it be) and try to be good enough each time and after every time post the traumatic phases of going through with it just so that the victim can fit in in the good books of the abuser. 

The trust as it seems to be so blindly placed in the other than in oneself forms the root of all forms of weakness, be it in the mind or in the body. To render oneself powerless and feel like life is out of one's control is the most damage that the victim can out of ignorance of its long term consequence on one's mental health still continue to participate in until they choose to otherwise.

To become detached from the ruminating memories that keeps the trauma alive in the body in some form or the other makes it then a priority to work on. Detachment by force is not key but letting go slowly and gradually by stepping into the new space of awareness and an authentic new birthing of the person that manifests in the rewiring/reprogramming process is the act of walking towards self love and without guilt, fear, self doubt makes it worth it.

The truth to remember is I have not inherited trauma and not a cause for another's trauma as it's made out to be (Generational trauma) but to step into this knowing. Although some deep seated sadness can be logicalized away and understood better by the labeling and validation of the abuser's back story, but it does not take away from the fact that emotional abuse has indeed happened. My mother has been reactive, narcissistic, cold, entitled and exaggerating and has crowded over all my fears by cornering and isolating me in the process of staging her emotional insecurities by projecting them on me through criticism and lack of reaching out to me over and over as if grappled by selective amnesia and self pity that she can conveniently bring on as protection for her behavior towards me and simply emotionally neglecting me in the process. It's as if my feelings never counted for her and I had to be extremely loyal for all the material things she bought and gave me and the umpteen times that she reminded me of my father's passing and months later my being born under difficult labor circumstances. It's just a numbing reiteration from her end that I owe her everything about me and that she made my creation unique and the way it was.

It's all about her and I was all about her and that's my emotional abuse in short. 

To feel like I am a separate person outside of all this feels truly refreshing. And so how to reframe my story of repression, numbing, anxiety, depression and invalidation from a new lens is my growing into this new space now. It will take time but at least I won't feel stuck and expect answers from outside because it's my blessed life and it needs truths and nurturing self care from time to time as it's already work in progress...

From shadow to light

 I am so used to being sad for no reason that whatever reasons I find to snap out of my sadness seems like a distraction and I tell myself that it's only just until I get to numb my feelings, as if numbness is my destination and I just can't get stuck with taking a detour to working on feeling something more than sadness - it's as if I am letting myself be sad and the sad truth is my family has been seeing me this way day in and day out and just accept me as if it's a normal thing with me being all so quiet and introverted but with all my frozen sadness within and which they don't care to see and are hardened by their own veils to bother to look beyond them.

This dead end that I was not able to work past and without anyone's support and believing that I am too weak to support myself in any form or way made it a no way out but to get stuck with this ruminating path that leads nowhere.

I feel more sad having realized the huge hollowness that this numbing has led to and this grieving for being avoidant, dismissive, and insensitive to my feelings as if my life mission for each day is to get past this dead end but keep trying to feel alive to face it every day like a routine. How can I be so self destructive? How can I shut myself off feeling anything but just sadness? My mother made me feel like an extension to her tragedy and frustration, agreed, but do I stay in that as a shadow in order to adapt to this limited interpretation which I believed is who I am all about.

And when coming to the light through this hardened ignorance and thick fog, it feels like I had remained disillusioned in my own make-believe illusion world of living like a shadow to my mother's self absorbed feelings about losing my father and the world is all set against her in some way or the other and that sadness and getting sympathy was her ticket to thriving in a joint family along with her brothers and their wives and their children. What works for her need not work for me and this distinct voice to express what feels like truly me is something I am opening myself to and hearing myself out and trying to be compassionate and unconditionally accepting and give myself some flak for whatever I manage to do or not.

It's very hard to want to thrive in your own space without having to feel like a shadow to another being specially and all the almost realistic imaginary explosion in my head proving that I am this and good enough for that are just ways to cope up for having compromised on my emotional/mental space and for having gotten weakened more and more for carrying a lot of overwhelm, guilt, anger, helplessness, and lack of power and control over claiming what is truly mine.

This staying wrapped up in her shadow has made me doubt my identity, my existence, purpose, direction to take in life, and a yawning wide in coming away from myself as if I need the imaginations in my head to be my shadow for a lack of rebuilding my self from scratch. I am working on it but can't seem to get myself together for my true self seems to be out of grasp similar to a shadow that doesn't know how to survive by itself and needs someone or the other to justify to being one. 

And so all the knowledge, creativity, and problem solving abilities and so on get wasted to being a shadow trail and not wake up fully to my inner light which has been the reason for coming out slowly from being a shadow as I express about it in this writeup.

Clinging to being a shadow as well as wanting myself out of the shadow is like being aware of the obsession but not able to cut off from practicing that obsession which is like a habit.

Freedom of expression

I grew up trained to be in fear and worry about how to be good enough for my mother as she had made a habit of making me feel bad about my body. I feared deep down and was caught up in confusing feelings that the person whom I trusted most made me feel like an outsider to my body by criticizing it so much and quite regularly so that I didn't know if I had to be defensive about it or defend my dead father whom she brought up in every health issue of mine (almost) as he had left us prior to my being born due to a sudden cardiac arrest, and all her broken dreams of a long happily married life with him and their future together with the baby had all gotten shattered. The ensuing anger that she had bottled up kept coming up whenever my health failed to meet her expectations - the point was that she had been through enough already and that my frequent migraines and other not so life threatening issues and maybe one or two serious ones had all been treated by me as dust that need to be suppressed under my life carpet and which I did but not realizing then that this act of suppressing and stifling my feelings in order to look good for her was laying the seeds for being a fake from within. 

When you are not true to yourself and sensitive enough to understand how best to deal with your body, your emotions, and how to process stagnation of your feelings and release them from time to time through some proactive means if possible that could be for your good and more importantly to have someone next to you who cares enough about you to see how far you are going away from yourself is the start to feeling disconnected from your reality - the reality that you create as a response to adapting to someone's mood swings and judgements is the most limiting feeling and that when practiced for a long time becomes your belief that you need to fear to stretch yourself beyond a point physically specially lest it makes you feel weak all over again to seek support and withdraw from giving yourself a chance to come out of that comfort zone. Fear and withdrawal are not healthy means to train your mind to discipline yourself and just rotting in the pent up energy, drive, missed opportunities, and weary enthusiasm is the outcome of lack of self discipline. 

How long to hang on to such dead end habits is the question...Having fought within myself for so long that all the courage to actually face reality seems worn out. I know I will get up not because 'I have to' live but living through it all, pains, suppressions, withdrawals, stagnations,  over thinking, procrastination, lack of clarity in goal setting is something that had made me who I was but to be true to myself in such vulnerable times is who I am now and I am proud of how far I have come despite the emotional abuse from my mother, my long term dormant depression, addiction to stress, self destructive coping up and so on.

I don't doubt myself anymore if I had really gone through so much and just downsize it to make it sound like nothing because it was terribly hard for what it's worth to be your own support system emotionally and mentally and having a huge family like my mother's relatives besides her to live along with makes it all the more harder to release that family makes you biologically and materially nurture you but when they are not with you truly in your times of real need, then it's not worth it to hang on to such memories. 

Families are made and sent to us while we are born and we can't get to choose them but how to navigate through a bunch of people who see you but don't see the depths of despair that makes you believe that you are invisible to them and just cope up with it anyway is the loophole that only unconditional self love can provide. I can't jump through this phase by just suppressing my truths but discovering my true courage by being open to my vulnerabilities and accepting them for what it is is the way to allow myself the freedom of expression.