Personal ego

 I didn't realize for the longest time that personal ego was such a main ingredient in one's making good decisions and my lack of vitality which I used to feel in almost every aspect of my life was due to a poor personal ego. I was too afraid to be my own person but tried to acquire skills, studied some courses and tried keeping myself busy with something or the other, but this numbness which felt like sadness didn't go away. It felt as if I kept shooting arrows in the dark and was forever lost in a space that made coming home to myself harder, specially as I didn't know how far I had moved away from myself.

I played the group person part very well because it was there that I had to be the listener the most as I got used to being one and that became one of my hiding spots of sorts as the real me can remain in a shell and just go along with the flow of people's opinions, discussions, and not that anyone cared to know my opinions truly but I didn't take efforts to put forth what I genuinely felt but just sided one person or the other or gave a neutral response which was layered with diplomatic niceness. I never confronted either. On second thoughts, it never struck me that my mind, my ego was something that actually mattered, and just repressed it almost naturally as if it didn't strike me to have a voice of my own. I yearned to have my very own individuality but was not having enough back bone to back it up and expected that I would be supported by my parents but I was viewed as a sensitive, weak person, and the more that I avoided talking my heart out with anyone in the family, the more denser, crowded, and noisy my inner world became.

It increasingly felt like I did not have a say on my life and lost a sense of joy and adventure in exploring my life. It became more and more wired to shoulds, should nots, ideals, other peoples approvals and so on. I deserted myself for the longest time in search of finding the true me. What's right within me is my right to feel connected and inspired being myself and that has been work in progress for few years now. This is not to prove anything to anyone, but just find closure to my stifled voice and bring myself to say that life is really short and the more time I had wasted in being someone else's idea of good enough was never truly enough to be my very own person. And so, stop trying to fit into shoes that don't fit and wear your legs out with your own decided journey to live, laugh, let go, respond, forgive, and most importantly love - love yourself fully to be able to acknowledge or respect the other for whoever they are. 

No amount of knowledge, no amount of learning will make you prepare better for life because they mostly don't. It's what you learn hands on when you make mistakes which is what makes you true to your life and not how insulated and error free you encase your life and be so afraid to fail which is what makes the moving on harder, the drawing the lessons more painful and letting go the mistakes of oneself or the others a ruminative drill in one's head.

Now I get the reason why I took to proofreading, transcriptions editing as some sort of personal mission was because I could get to fix errors and completely sacrifice my time at that and pack the content in some sort of encased, formatted, client friendly document, and each such attempt was a means to bring my broken self together but only for so long. Because not wanting to be wrong, not wanting to make mistakes, and wanting to be accepted was something that I had taught myself from childhood and it robbed my authentic and natural sense of freely expressing myself no matter what. And when that didn't feel possible on a personal level since my personal ego was almost invisible, I tried hard to latch on to something that would/could make me feel like I belong somewhere, like learning some courses, working on some skills, and so on but just remained to live in some sort of void within me as I was not strong willed to make my individuality happen and gave in to the flow or the situations around.

Personal ego makes you who you are and to feel like you are worth it from within is a personal decision to acknowledge your mistakes, to accept yourself, and to stay connected with your essence.

  

 

Don't neglect your Soul purpose

 Emotional neglect to a child in a middle class family is like wolf in sheep's clothing -  the material things are provided and in exchange for making the child feel "comfortable" enough to sustain neglect from parents as a day to day conditioning and thus making them believe that that would be enough to support the child and it would not probably incur any complaints from the child.

The child grows to believe that it deserves the neglect for the way he/she is being if the child does not satisfy the parents expectations whether it is through health, academic grades, extracurricular skills, survival skills, smart personality and so on.

It's like the parents simply don't acknowledge their lack of awareness and just want to manifest their expectations through the child or children. The child is expected to grow by itself, emotionally and mentally, and no support whatsoever is given meanwhile to understand the child's adapting to neglect, and the survival skills if any of the child is to brave it through all the emotional neglect and live in some sort of inner frozenness and lack of trusting and opening up and expressing of what he/she truly needs from the parent(s).

This is why the priority for self care for the grown up person who has gone through severe emotional neglect feels almost alien and overwhelming. 

To uncover such thick layers of parental indifference as in my case was quite painful. I am raised by a single parent and was also part of a joint family consisting of my mother and her elder brothers and their families. It seemed like the elders at our house were so full of themselves and their silly egos and wife controlling habits and simply disrespectful of one's boundaries, whether it is of a child or a grownup, their all pervasive control (specially the uncles) was worthy of numbing myself and shutting myself down to avoid any sense of interaction with them unless it was absolutely necessary.

Joint family broke the image of "my family and my people" for me over the years as it was simply a bunch of broken and temperamental people who needed help and who were of no help, no guidance to us youngsters back then. A lot of projection though from the elders as they liked to believe that they were unique since they all chose to be (mindlessly) together and simply liked the appreciation from friends and their families for still being in a joint family and this was almost 4 decades ago when joint family concept started to crumble more and more.

Emotional neglect is a real pain; it's not imaginary and it's totally true to one's difficulties in coping up with lack of attention and acceptance for who one is from the environment where the child is raised. It's not just parents who raise the child to an extent, but it's neglect that ironically the child learns to grow up to fall back on and gets used to being neglected. 

Self care is not just putting back the care and attention in the self all over again but learning to do so with kindness and patience as a soul/sole purpose of living. It's as much about discovering your inner wounds that were born out of your parents neglect of you and also learning step by step to reparent yourself each and every day as much as it's possible.

Your inner wounds when truly empathized with makes you feel seen, makes you feel whole, and no better person than you to look within yourself. Just choose to be there for yourself over and over as if your entire life depends on it. It truly does matter no matter how late this inner journey might start for you. 

Remember that you are alive to feel your life, so don't hide under the "comfort" or shell of self neglect.

Live life for yourself

 Being a 'Mr.India' in your life where you feel invisible, where your opinions don't matter, where you struggle to fit in, where you are trying to be everything for everyone, but don't seem to have discovered a voice of your own and feel like you have the freedom to say and be so is what I have or had been all along.

But things shifted quite a bit from these past 5 years and it's largely because of a divine portal that had opened and made the truth of all the above known and come to my awareness and helped me feel my feelings as I believed that all the pain of remaining numb in order to go along with the flow of collective consciousness as I chose to remain invisible was all very real.

I have forgiven myself a bit and also my mother and my uncles and aunts for being so indifferent and stuck in their own ego consuming world where others personalities are nothing but just specks of dust in their spiral.

But there's a beautiful shift yet again which makes me realize that letting go my past and submitting all these pains, the pain of being numb and oblivious to my own pain, the pain of seeing others being stuck in their own worlds and not being sorry for their actions as much as expected, the pain of being subjected to others narratives and allowing them to define my life's storyline and not being present enough to my given life and just going along with the drifting for so many years.

In all this lifeless attachments has come the life saving anchor called truth which is helping me be aware and also detach gradually from the pull of the past currents one day at a time. It's really important however to have a sense of what my present is actually and that I am slowly roping into but somehow a good part of me feels undone and just learning to holding onto some remnants of what I am outside of people's projections was what I had been focusing on, but in doing so I am again giving more attention on people's projections and the ensuing feelings and not releasing them and staying stuck.

It's as if I am so used to feeling stuck and look up at others for helping me get unstuck and pull me out of my own mind made mess. This feeling of powerlessness is all pervasive in my life and I can't leave it to outside circumstances to pull me out of this void which I have created as if it's some sort of safe haven to go around and stay encircled in.

I have become so dormantly submissive to this feeling of powerlessness that the weight of awareness of this feeling and truth thereby is the develcro factor but I still feel myself stuck in this pattern of powerlessness. Perhaps the fear of unknown is what I am trying to control and what really happens when you let go not knowing how to reinvent yourself is all contained in this low lying fear I guess. It's not so much fear but anxiety in living an unaligned life which is not stirred up with liveliness and enthusiasm to live and is like the pattern that it was and has been for decades but now becoming aware of it is giving rise to an insecurity of how will I adjust or cope up with all the disintegrated parts coming together and where do I begin?

I lost my sense of centre and have been routed or wired through pain consciousness as my mother's pain and her fears for me were internalized as mine. For so long I have distanced myself, my true feeling, expanding self into staying limited to her fears and criticisms which became my inner voice. It made me hard on hearing my own true feelings and hurts and needs and desires and so much more. I just lost myself under the debris of all these layers. 

I believed her fears to be the lifeline that connects me to her as if I need to learn to limit my liabilities or problems in order for her to be a little relieved from her fears of losing me but in reality I lost myself over and over for decades together. And this is my sore core wound. Her pain narrative of losing my father while being pregnant with me and being afraid that she might lose me too and also her anger at having to 'put up' with my overall sensitivity have all thrown me off my core as I stayed oblivious in a blur and didn't take efforts to bridge this gap for a long time. I am just being now without having to 'try' to be myself and I need to keep asserting this mindfully as a part of me feels so broken and disintegrated and I don't know if I 'll be able to find a sense of closure for the brokenness but feeling weighed down by brokenness is a phase and moving past this heaviness because I have to and because I only live once this lifetime and so owe myself the remaining opportunities to self discover and learn and grow like it's a process and not so much an objective goal which I usually attribute life to.

Living life well and in wholesome awareness and self love is my goal and letting go my past because I need to be seen and heard and respected and loved in an all new sense will help live this goal.

 

New Beginnings and end of many sorts

I was a kid with a heart full of fears

I kept her locked in my frozen tears 

Filled they were to the brim

As the chances of letting them out were slim

Dirty and murky they became aging in dark shadows of the past

As drops of suppressed dew stayed trapped in the green moss of my heart

There seemed only unfiltered anger that grew alongside in this dried up well

Toxic and tired for staying shut for too long and not able to get past the fears in this swelled up hell

Age was just a number as I got stuck in the number of times I had become my mother's emotional punchbag

And got stuck in figuring out and internalized her anger at me as life seemed like a sad drag

I was never out of my head as my inner child was silenced but protested in my imaginations where I roleplayed my suppressed emotions

To hear her out, fear, rage, tears and all was the most human that I thought I was with myself and that soon dominated and catapulted into pain addictive ruminations

The sad kid wanted to be sad and was angry that she was not heard enough while stewing in her trauma And did not know how to reach out to get out of this numb pain with overwhelming layers of her mommy's emotionally dysfunctional drama

All this reenactment troubled this inner child who started out wanting to be a kid like any other 

But stifled her instincts, suppressed her voice, and numbed her feelings, as they became her controlling mother

I was as real as my mother in the outside world was but could not separate myself from the pain of my inner child as she held on to me tight

But stepping up and reaching out to embrace my truth was all that I had to embody to become a loving mother who does not abandon her inner child knotted up in fright

It's a journey to free my other inner children, hope, joy, laughter, as they wait on the other side of the tunnel, and want their equal attention, time, hugs and all

As the tracks change and squeal with new found freedom to just blend in the old with the new

The train of my timeline has made many strides and whistles its journey ahead going from frozen tears to hopes anew

This is a new beginning and an end of many sorts

As my life is inclusive to both fears and fun and not selectively lived in parts

 

Takeaway from my life

The inner child is the joyous, impulsive, curious, unfiltered versions of ourselves that we could learn to get comfortable with provided we learn to embrace our inner child. It's a unique flow of energy and channeling of its own unlike the flow of the collective conscious that we find ourselves mostly immersed in and try to navigate and find a way to feel our experiences.

I kept picking up and observing others thoughts and avoided confronting, challenging, or participating with my opinions in any way as if living in the invisible mode is all I am here for in this lifetime. I was the most apparently invisible person who cringed at any level of attention that came her way and used the guise of supporting others, comforting/counseling others as some of the means to stay away from facing my real inner world myself and hence kept reading others projections of me and the surrounding environment as means of looking out for myself from having to face who I want to be in the present. I was always part of the flow of whatever was around as if I am some sort of inanimate extension to the things around but who just moves around for keeping up with bodily functions.

The 'other' in my mind is more important than who I think I am. A needless sacrifice in retrospect that kept putting myself off the center of my life and kept being in the support others mode for 3 decades and more until I couldn't take being dishonest with myself anymore. This saturation was the overwhelming flow that I was slipping away into and it was my intuition, my soul calling, and a Higher, Divine energy above all else who guided me towards a script that's a beautiful self discovery of sorts in the making.

The letting myself go in this suppressed, suffering in silence inner world that I had locked myself in was something that I had to become aware to release all this unspoken, dysregulated feelings and sadness which again was a lot overwhelming even if there be release but not without triggering all the raw wounds that I had tied with my inner child.

We are not just flesh and blood and materially comforted with beings, but we are a form of energy as we learn to channel our given lives to our goals which bring us joy and connectivity starting from within. 

My inner child desperately wanted some form of support so that I can fearlessly bring out my creativity, fun, and thoughts on varied subjects which was absolutely lacking in the family environment where I grew up in. I soon realized back then that people didn't care whether I expressed myself or not and this I took upon myself as a personal limitation and maybe something I do or in some way I behave puts people off and hence it's better to be as rigidly stuck in playing the role of an outgrown child who silently observes all the drama around her but finds herself completely devoid of the stage within her to feel like she's centerstage atleast for my life if not for anyone else's. This feeling that I don't matter and that my opinions don't matter, and only my mother's vociferous projections about my health sensitivities matter and to which the rest of the family sympathized with was already a lost feeling and I was not resilient or strong willed enough to fight this as I assumed that this is how things are naturally and that I am just supposed to adjust with this kind of environment.

I took this self negation as a way of being and denied myself of real frustration, anger, irritation and so much more as if I can and am supposed be only ideal and not real. To fall out of genuine fostering of relationship with oneself is what I am trying to fall back in within myself. To start loving myself as how I need to be loved and not what I expect from others what love needs to be. 

It's the roots that matter finally not how tall the tree grows to be. Cherish your inner child and let it be, live it be, and just start falling in love with yourself truly for who you are is my takeaway from my life. What's yours?

Take control of your life

 Taking control of my life is the power that has been missing. Years and years of exhaustion, a feeling of having no choice, and simply giving in to avoid confrontation and being resilient in conflicting situations have been the reason why taking control of my own life felt so alien and like an outsider job. The commitment to be truthful to my life, to being supported, blessed, and protected have all been overlooked by me as if I am the dead end to my life and which in fact I was sadly until I went ahead and explored the truth about how I feel about my life.

Not taking control is not an option but expecting that life turn out this way and that is like wanting to stay stuck in imagination, illusion, and layers of falsehood that I assumed I have full access to as they in turn took control of my everyday reality. It was easy to snuggle in the backseat and want for others to drive me home to my purpose and expectations, and just quit taking control of life as if by habit and weakening my willpower muscle as a result -  I became too tired, too exhausted for no reason apparently as I didn't create reasons enough to stay in control and live within parameters of self regulation and balance and had just adapted to limitations and negativity. But all these had to change in the context of how true I was feeling to not taking control of my life and feeling powerless in being disconnected hence to my life source. I had but no choice but be true to all these and it was emotionally debilitating and I felt scattered and lost in an all new space which I could not control with old mindset and patterns but yet had to keep going by keeping faith in myself.

I tried to wriggle my way out of this as this felt like I was doing it all by myself and the moment of truth that faith is not external but how far will I go within to discover my faith in myself was the challenge. And this has been work in progress. 

Control is an authentic coming home to yourself and staying true to your essence and not using it to disempower others. 

Love thy self and love thy inner divinity

 Believing in myself is the real challenge that has endured the test of time. For it was not easy, not deep seeded, not self worthy enough to want to have faith in myself because of the outer environment that I was trying hard to adapt to. It was more easy hence to neglect myself and just believe in what others had to say and which got absorbed as hardened beliefs. 

To believe that I am capable of receiving God's love and to reciprocate a wholehearted heart filled with love has been an on and off broken phenomenon that is so ego protected that it has taken me lots of letting go and as a result feel more broken but yet whole for owning my grief of not entirely connecting with my self and for staying dissociated for so many years.

Now feeling all this repressed pain and feeling my feelings has been healing and triggering many emotions in turns but am happy that I got to address them as much as possible and also learning to let go and surrender broken parts, sometimes fully fleshed out ones to the feet of God.

And so loving Muruga Perumaan without fear, without doubt, without anxiety, without making myself feel low and trying to prove anything to anyone and just feeling good and having faith in my true feelings for Lord Murugan is the most organic that gets humbly put forth to His feet. 

For loving Muruga means being really true to oneself and trusting the process of growing awareness and intuitions, and deepening one's faith through love and not merely knowledge. Because love fills even those kinds of darkness that one would have been ashamed to have been part of at one time and is not a substitute for infatuation, or showoff, or anything that needs verbal or artistic or whatever material expression that we usually associate love to project - it's one's own insecurities that finds a unique expression and which is tried to discover outside of oneself and is a self fulfilling prophecy in its own way.