Spirituality is Unconditional love

 Spirituality without self transformation is not true spirituality. The essence of the all knowing God who manifests as truth and sweeps one's mind off all the layers that are patterns conditioned by one's past is the all encompassing feeling of being protected from it and becoming embodying of His essence through mind and body. As the presence and inclusion and experiencing God is not an outside experience, it begins to resonate more and more  that He is within and that all changes happen from within. One's mind being vulnerable to outside influences, to interrupting thoughts, to distractions from surroundings, from technology, from one's family and so on would just be challenges that come and go but would not feel like they change you or deviate you from your alignment with God - that's the constant despite everyday life situations.

To come to this realization is so self fulfilling and complete by itself that all those situations, memories that made you get stuck to traumatic life experiences from past, differences in expectations from relationships and their disappointments and so on, health challenges, anxieties, worries about future, they all come together but do not have the grip to become cohesive or random knots that seem to block you from within to draw in the essence of your own true self. And so, to be cleaned, flushed, and energized by Muruga's (My life changing God) compassion, His will combined with my surrender to work on healing from within has been like being gifted with a second chance to start living my life all over again.

What is gone is gone, but what remains is the unconditional love to God for all the good things that have happened, and for the not so good and unexpected things that have happened, and the learnings that they have given me is the ability to trust myself that I can keep the faith in Him no matter how life turns out in future - being present with Him as I write this is all that counts.

Discover your true courage

 What it takes to discover true courage is when you come face to face with your fears and are brave enough to share your vulnerabilities with others. Denial of one's vulnerability adds more and more stress to normalize being a human. 

For me frequent migraine headaches meant I was walking on egg shells with my body and the stress from a dysfunctional and crowded joint family meant walking on a landmine where anything happens anytime. It's like I can never be too careful with a highly sensitive system and owing to fight or flight in each of us, I chose to flee or disconnect with my body as pain sensitivity for a spectrum of my health issues(Migraine was one of them) was significant, and my quiet struggle to process with rising fears that ebbed with numbing the pains from time to time through allopathy, homoeopathy medicines mostly was the quiet before another raging health storm that upturned any sense of stability and relatedness to reality that I wanted to establish. I fought this feeling of helplessness but it didn't quite help. It just added more emotional numbing and was woken up from it through physical pain, discomfort and vice versa, as if one feeds another in turns.

I just leaned more and more on numbing myself and not through any substances but overthinking, fantasizing, daydreaming, and floating like disconnected from myself in a vacuum just kept me sustaining through any unforeseen episodes of health issues. I started to relate myself or be defined by my health problems as if my adapting to that would help me stay in survival mode and as I thrived on negative expectations, my highly sensitive intuitions were keyed to alert me before the actual pain episodes start as if proving to me that I was right after all about having to go through this issue for this day. 

Fear before incurring bouts of headache with an exhaustive episode of nausea, vomitings, dehydration left me with no energy to even feel hopeful for good health in the coming days as the next step or steps in the coming days would be to sidestep as much as I can to avoid getting caught in this knot that I seemed to not let go and kept getting wound up in it.

All this struggle to seem to do well in the intermittent time when there were no migraine attacks meant putting on a fake positive attitude and feeling so lonely and empty as if I was the only one in this planet going through this, and my world which I considered to be my family just went around and round me just observing, worrying, dominating, criticizing, unhealthily comparing me with my peers, my cousins, and when I got sick, with my late father (my mother would do that) and just letting me be with my overwhelmed inner world that was stretched and torn from all the overthinking and anxious to feel normal again pattern.

To get it that this is also called trauma and an unhealthy attachment to the way I had conditioned myself mentally owing to lack of support from my mother who is a single parent by the way and who I felt obligated to be good enough for all the money she put in for my medical costs as a working woman made me just want to remain conditionally visible to her - in the sense that she saw what she had wanted to see but never saw my struggle to keep up with this torturing cycle of migraines (I have other issues too but this stood out like a sore thumb) that made me want to stay buried in an unconscious land of make believe personality, confidence, expressing myself fearlessly and so on. 

My inner voice was afraid to speak up as fear ran through the entire length of my body next to blood. Fear had kept me from feeling my life, that there could be more to my life than just coping up with health issues. Not knowing how to process through my fears and not expressing that to anyone, and assuming that people would get me proved to be just a constant stretch of this pattern no matter how older I got. I just had got stuck and didn't know how to grow up despite this and beyond this, as change got identified with only physically and its problems thereof and to cope up accordingly. 

Childhood trauma needs to outgrow through one's age and unless those locked in fears, anxieties, and muffled tears, stifled sadness, and passive anger doesn't get released, until then I will remain a prisoner to my past. And in realizing this, releasing through tears, I have unlocked the way to let myself out by opening the door to looking at things from a different light. That courage is not absence of fears but acknowledging that circumstances no matter how uncertain, fearful, and overwhelming as they maybe can be changed if we choose to work through it, ask for support where it matters, and also accept that there's only so much that we can control. A shift towards a healthy attitude feels a new way to reconnect with my body, my feelings, and that attitude begins by being open to my life's possibilities and life experiences. While I can't undo all the stickiness with fears that I had gotten wound up in, but making this as an excuse to not live life fully is just not a way out. 

The way in to stay connected to my life are through prayers, meditations, journaling, mindful self talks, observing nature, taking long walks, feeling my feelings, sharing them with select few who get me, listening to soothing music, and taking relaxing warm baths are some of the few ways that I have learnt and applied to reconnecting to this new version of me. 

Fear does not bridge the gap between your outer reality and your likes or interests, it just widens it. Your belief in who you are and what you want to do with it needs your focus and attention to what gives you joy. Being mindful of your happiness no matter how small or big it is comes with your courage to own up to it. My acceptance that I allowed circumstances to define me and limit me is an eye opener and the real struggle sustained when I refused to let go those self limiting beliefs is bitter sweet but yet is part of my life experience.

So, my past does hold me captive still but becoming aware of it is discovering true courage to gradually let go and move towards clarity despite the chaos of mind voices.

Find your shore

We don't betray our parents if we love ourselves more

If not helped by them from childhood to love ourselves we grow within sore

Supporting them without enabling ourselves then feels like a chore

There's nothing wrong if we want to be heard more

That the vacuum of not loving ourselves is not some folklore

And their stories and struggles to raise us was beyond a point a bore

Suppressing your thoughts and hearing them out is not going to make them feel secure

In fact releasing them out from your chest through talking , writing and discovering your voice will make you feel good enough more and more

You are not betraying your parents trust by choosing self acceptance and self care

But will come back to them with enough life and strength to understand that your case is not rare

That there are many voices that are like deep waters but come to life when they find their shore.

Acceptance from within

 I grew up thinking that I wasn't separate from my mother and that my wellbeing was when she took control of my life, and boy, she did a hell of a job taking control!

I got so stuck on this idea that since she swallowed so much of self pity for doing the birthing under difficult and tragic circumstances by herself without my father by her side and utilizing her frustrations and emotional insecurities to secure emotional support for herself, I really believed that this would be enough for me to grow under - I too believed that in order to get stuff done, you need to sell yourself short so that others sympathy and their humanity could come in handy to make it possible for you. This minimized version of myself had to fit into my mother's stories that she told me over and over while I  told myself this story that I need  to adapt to limitations, and by that I mean adapting to myself with all my minimized, repressed sense of self. So, that's a story within a story.

It became a habit to look outside of myself for validation and since I never got that fully, I just learnt to survive in a big dysfunctional joint family just dodging people, their intimidating presence, ego centric cold wars, men shouting down their wives and so on and kept myself 'safe' by feeling like the other and that is to completely numb and repress my processing about the people in my family and live depending on my mother's decisions and her obsessions with 'fixing' my health taking me to doctors as soon as I complain of even pains that could be managed at home. My pain resistance and resilience was wrought with anxiety and deep seated mistrust on my willpower and self worth. That was the most prolonged pain that I didn't know I nurtured and just hosted that in my body, my thoughts, consciousness, and made me feel like an outsider to my life.

The real healing, if any, is to feel the pain, release it, let it go fully that I couldn't have gotten everything alright even if I had everything in my control, but the fact that I am giving myself enough rope and less of criticism is a shift in the right direction.

Acceptance of what was and being alive to what is is the best undoing that can happen for me and which when applied day after day is the best way to live growing to your potential and not living in the head in the overall process of discovering the joys of simple living. And simple living means to simply cope up when life isn't fair and be grateful when life is fair, and each of us truly gets what we each deserve whether we really like it or not.

So, all the fuss is only about non acceptance when no amount of coping up makes anything go away but just the fact that acceptance turns the tables around to help face all the blocks that have been brought on due to unrealistic expectations, and the narratives that were spun within your unconscious mind either due to dominating influences which you believed to be true as you just added layers of interpretations through your own thoughts and over time they hardened as your own beliefs. Your own beliefs which may not be good for you when believing in them longer than warranted from the said situations but when practiced like a habit they just spillover festering your consciousness and bringing them into their fold.

Forgetting is hard, forgiving, harder!

 I don't know how do I begin to forgive my mother?

The woman who I assumed is an all time mother that I could hang my dependencies on as a primary caregiver way back in my childhood was washing her dirty linen off living off my absorbing and observant nature, and my quiet while reliving her past and feeling that life is unfair, if things and specially her daughter doesn't live up to her expectations. And so I learnt to survive.

 Survive through her crack and pop criticisms that just was oozing self pity a minute and passive anger in another and confusing me as to who am I supposed to understand more. Oh yeah, I was supposed to understand way more than any child within 10 years could understand - the grief of losing her husband, i.e. my father to a sudden cardiac arrest while she was pregnant with me, and the grief of having to turn her life around and choosing to take my father's job but from the clerical level that was offered by the Government then, and wanting me to be the receiving end of her huge favor like feeling that she superimposed over me whenever possible, and wanted me to consider how lucky I am to have her as my mother. An exaggerated sense of entitlement would be an understatement. 

She lived under an acquired shell so to speak but since it had her choices written all over it, she survived quite well under the disguise of self pity, emotional bereavement whenever I went through headaches and nausea which was unfortunately similar to my father's health patterns while he was alive. She grieved how alone she was and how frustrating it was for her to take me to the doctors who she felt was the first resort to just fix me so that she can go back to her office going while I came home to her brothers and their wives and their children, my cousins, yes, and to this huge joint family that I just had to find a space to fit into. 

It became harder to do so since my emotional and physical belonging was with my mother and so I thought was the safe space as long as she takes control of my volatile health (nothing terminal but was very overwhelming for my sensitive nerves and naïve mind as I lacked health managing skills and discipline as a kid) and just made me feel guilty for being a pain to her every week or so that I complained of the repetitive migraines that was just an outlet from my body for being in pain for want of unconditional love and acceptance from her. Nothing could get her attention faster than my sickness in any small shape or form and she loved getting all the attention she got from her extended family of brothers with whom she and I lived. 

We two were supposed to be a family to one another as I was her only child but she refused to grow up emotionally as my physical issues too didn't seem to outgrow my age and I started to feel outside of my body, disconnected with myself while she continued with her criticisms and comparisons with my father, while making herself the center of my universe over and over and defining my world to revolve around her emotional insecurities that I took upon myself as my responsibility. And I was supposed to in a way as I had been provided with all material needs, and my way of repaying her better be with unquestionable loyalty and blind adherence to her breaking down on my boundaries which she was happily oblivious to. She was living all inclusive through me as if she could get to live longer by doing this or maybe make my longevity more when compared to my father. Either ways, it was just numbing and killing me from inside. 

Self sabotaging is a very insidious pattern of flawed beliefs that seem to ring true to an open trusting child and is often an unconscious receiving of fragile, narcissistic, and self absorbed seed energy from the parent or parents if both of them are alive. But this pattern of thinking like an all inclusive person and struggling to separate oneself from the other (Your parent here) even as you age (I am 42 now), your parent's thoughts, their choices made from convenience to define you, control you, mold you is just widening of this huge gap from within you. It's like losing a sense of clarity of where one's reality starts and where another's begins. And when this applies in your day to day living, it disempowers you as you cannot get comfortable in your shoes and walk your own path, be it in relating to your life, your relationships, your decision making to move away from this familiar pattern of enmeshment which is a sticky and stuck feeling. 

The gap of losing oneself to this pattern and not aware how deep and how far is it taking you away from your growing and learning about yourself as your emotions don't feel real for you owing to feeling used up to making your mother feel good about herself is rather invisible but painful when you start seeing it for what it is. 

To make peace with oneself  by starting all over again to discover the real joy of being alive for oneself and do so with true self love without any guilt, and relearn to take control of one's life, trust in one's physiology, one's mind and heart that it cannot work as per others expectations but has a life and rhythm of its own, and if the parent cannot let the child be for what's worth, then it's their loss. Their loss for not knowing the son or daughter for who they really are and not for who they are supposed to be. 

I am not a made to adjust to convenient choices package that can be praised for being like her mother in certain situations or like her father in some other, and wanting her validation for the real me, repressions, tears, helplessness, fear, overwhelm and all was just a waste of my time because they didn't mean anything to her.

I am not supposed to be in conflict for being in my skin and yet long term dissociation and numbing one's personal identity even if career, ambitions to an extent have helped me get a fix, but what is truly broken is the daughter's trust here for trusting her mother the most and to realize that mothers are not perfect after all is both a relief and also a bitter pill to acknowledge.

Not having a kid and being childless for over 15 years of my marriage with my best friend and my better half has nothing to do with my physical health but it just has 'rejection' written all within me as if I have mothered my emotional wounds so much that there is no space for a new creation, our creation to come to being. 

I have grieved for this earlier thinking it's all my fault and that I am not good enough to be a parent as much as I was not good enough to be the perfect child, perfect daughter despite all the material goodies being provided to me. To live in a survival mode is one thing but to live with shame and guilt is something that even all the ruminating, repressing is not going to make them go away.

I realize now that this emotional block is coming in my way to discovering my many life experiences ahead and that to let it go, I really need to let go being so enmeshed with my mother, in my thoughts and in my consciousness. And I got to honor myself by letting this enmeshment go before my mother's passing, and which will come when it comes, but I do wish to grieve for my being so unconscious to myself and my life and to feel love for my self which is happening through baby steps but without looking back for validation from her and thinking it's her love for me. Because love is love - it's simple, uncomplicated, and learning to forgive oneself from time to time. It's only then that I can forgive my mother.

True Wealth Starts from You

Confining myself to a preconceived set of notions and conditionings define me to playing a repressed person's role which is not really true to her life. It's like all the repressed emotions like anger, sadness, and so many unspoken emotions coupled with feelings of not being good enough for receiving love, acceptance, and trust has made me seek refuge in these bundled knots which have come to my awareness and have loosened their grip gradually over me. It's only that I am afraid to let them go completely as self love is something that I have just begun to grow into and getting impatient, criticizing myself, and expecting some superhuman results from me is something that comes in the way to rising above and meeting me half way through genuine love for myself. The miseries of the repressed emotions and feelings of inadequacy that kept me fake company and feeling stuck have been too much comfort to grow out of.

Setting oneself free seems so hard and yet gravitating to one's miseries so easy as if there is going to be a never ending supply of time for me. We are all bound by only so much time and yet spend a big part of our lives wishing life were different in our past and maybe we could be in a better space today. 

Feeling like we are in a good space is just momentary and it only is a matter of time before we quickly disguise into our old selves and try to be present for today. Either the mind is out of sync or the body. and it's only through some regular day to day jobs, whether they pay us money or otherwise, that we get a feel of being connected both body and mind in the routines that we play out, almost on autopilot. Again the question arises that do we perform our everyday jobs/duties in a numb frame of mind or are we even aware of what we are doing and how well?

When numbing ourselves becomes foremost conditioning of our minds as if the various situations that life throws at us is just to make ourselves adaptable to numbness and through it feel nothing, and which ironically is the result that we set ourselves up for but want to be alive and aware and joyous when feeling and being part of the result manifestation, no matter how small or big the work. How we feel about ourselves and how that translates into the way we perform our jobs determines our attitude for life. 

There is no set pattern to life although our biological ageing seems to give a feeling that there needs to be one - emotional maturing and growth in material gains. How far do we come becoming a success or already a success is governed by what exactly we do and not who we are from within (sadly).

How do we get to a state of mind where we feel we have earned the blessings that we still have in our lives and can we explain logically how much lucky we are when compared to many others? It's hard to actually explain our life's blessings but how far we come materially is the singled out coin that shines in the heap of our blessings - it can be quantified - the more the shine, the more credit points it seems to add to life! But who we are from inside out is the quality that adds to what you earn, your blessings, opportunities, jobs, material gains and all, or all the shine would just be superficially coated and fade quickly.

Recognizing that we are the true wealth and respecting who we are, our uniqueness, abilities, flaws, scars, tears and a lot more is the real self appraisal that we grow to earn as we age through our fluctuating times begins by acknowledging that what we want starts from who we are. And doing what we like, if we are lucky, is just growing to our fullest potential. We don't always get to do the jobs we like but that does not give us the license to like ourselves any lesser. 

The pattern then becomes who you are, who you are becoming and that automatically reflects on what you do. The more that you stay connected to who you are in essence, the more you enjoy the work that you can grow to learn and perform and gain the self confidence to cocreate your life's choices and what best works for you and which ones deplete your energy and time.

 

 

Raise a toast to your humble tea!

 Sometimes just having a cup of cardamom infused tea is all that is needed to let the stress off steam. (There's many other tea spices and masalas that enhance tea's flavour but cardamom is a subtle and lovely mood lifter for me:) ) Tea with few biscuits is like self acceptance on a plate - it's in those moments of smelling the tea and sipping the warmth that envelops you for just a few moments to stay in your zone that is actually the comfort that we seek to rest into. So, tea and that too the non watery ones and the ones with the right amount of milk and thickness and water to bring to boil the tea leaves/powder which is all there is to tea making, to give us a cupful of fresh perspective from a relaxed sense of taking our minds off what is consuming us and to just be there for ourselves just as we are, in whichever situation we are, is the highpoint of the humble tea.

Tea consumes our stress for those few moments you can say and not the other way round!! To just give in to these small moments of times from our mind numbing everyday schedule is one's own quality (tea) time and what better way to be with oneself than by having a cupful of aromatic tea to just blend with our senses and make sense of it in our own mindful ways.

Ta drinking for the sake of tea drinking is one thing and tea with oily, fried snacks is another. Tea undoubtedly adds taste to the samosas, pakoras, bajjis and more, but as a standalone treat when consumed just for tea's sake! 

We need our times of solitude to take our attention away from our problems which again keeps brewing in our minds similar to a bitter tea that has lost all taste and life, and it's my takeaway that don't keep thinking through problems - talk to your friends, parents, or anyone trustworthy (let out your steam) and get yourself off your ruminations(it's like stirring through broken milk that won't hold anything under heat) and don't make them a blending habit with your everyday life and plans. It's the aftertaste of bitterness on one's tongue or in one's life that makes it so not worth it.

Here's raising a toast to the universal tea that ties people together through tiredness and refreshment, through solitude and tea parties with friends, through worries and deadlines, and project victories, tea stays with you to make sense of all the highs and lows of your life.