You can’t change your sister however you can continue to work on yourself

You indicated that you must fight to get some peace which suggests to me that you’re aggressively engaging in the issues with your sister.

It is of course an irony that one fights for peace. You can fight as in go to war for peace but wars come at a huge cost to oneself and the lives of others. Or you can fight to find inner peace.

There is a hermetic riddle: As above so below, as below so above. As above so below – we allow ourselves to be influenced by outward factors. As below so above – we influence our outer experience by becoming the change we hope to see. Both truths are at play in every moment. The person at peace is awake to how they are influencing and being influenced. It is possible though not the goal (you can’t change others) that by finding inner peace that you influence your sister to become more conscious of how her actions affect those that love her. I know probably not what you wanted to hear

You also said that “Things always seem easy for everyone else”. I can guarantee you that you are correct in using the word “seems”. We can never know another’s thoughts, experiences, or troubles. The path to peace means letting such judgments go and stopping the comparison we make based on what we imagine other experiences are. Peace exists in the moment that you allow it to exist.

Lastly Hate is a strong word and words hove power so I might challenge you with the idea that you can love a person and still not like what they do. You can love and still hold them accountable for there actions. (it would not be love if you didn’t). This change of perspective may sound as if is semantics but I think its more then that. Only in Love will lead to the experience peace that you hope for.

Every time I have a day where I feel I’m rebounding to my old self something happens to break me.

You are at an age of transition. Moving from one stage of life into another. Life/Love asks of us, sometimes demands of us, that we grow and if we resist we might experience a lack of energy and emotional fortitude. What your experiencing may be related to wanting things to remain the same but different.  (Your family unconsciously may want you to stay the same)

You want to rebound to your old self while at the same time wanting a new self and new experiences so not surprisingly easy to break.

In this stage of life its ok for you to rediscover yourself with the understanding that the validation you seek may not come from your family. It would be nice and in time they might understand however you don’t have to wait for that. Its time to create new boundaries.  No need to rebound to your old self when a new self is waiting for you.  “You can’t step in the same river twice” anyway

• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Peter.

I think your right. The place to start to move forwarded may be with forgiveness and doing so perhaps refrain your story

Forgiveness is an Art – especially when it comes to forgiving ourselves, which is always entangled with our ability to forgive others.  We forgive others as we forgive ourselves.

Very much recommend the book ‘The Art of Forgiving’ by Lewis B. Smedes

Also Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells a story ‘the Crescent Moon Bear’ which is about forgiveness and can be found in her book, ‘Women Who Run with the Wolves’ Or in audio CD “Theater of the Imagination”.  (Yes, the book intended target is women but men can learn a great deal from it as well. Especially when one embraces symbolic language and doing so realize that the symbolic words masculine and feminine are not about gender. The symbols are informed by gender but do not represent a gender)

According to Clarissa there are Four Stages to Forgiveness:

to forgo – move forward, don’t let what happened stop you from living your truth

to forbear – to abstain from punishing – holding yourself and others accountable but as punishment.

to forget –  and in do not dwell – We don’t forget what happened to us instead we do not dwell

to forgive – finding a place of being able to say yes to the experience As It Was without attachment.

To clarify when I mentioned the practice.  I was talking about something that we work on in the moment and not only when we set time aside and meditate. Mediation is where we practice the practice while practice is an intention we set in each moment we experience.

When you become aware of your consciousness becoming fixated on the past, memory, fear, wall…. you pull it back, create space, breathe and see it for what it is, the past that does not need to have any influence on the present.

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality”. -Seneca

Memory is a trickster. As you mentioned what you remember is hazy. Yet you are judging your past from the perspective on what you have learned years latter. Your 12-year-old self didn’t know what you know now so judging her by what you know now is unskillful. We all feel regret for some past action or other, but all the regret in the world isn’t going to change the past. The best we can do is that when we learn better we do better.

Its clear you have learned something about yourself from the experience and realise that such actions are not who you are or want to be… so I don’t see the point on remaining fixated on the memory.

I can certainly relate you your experience. I have a good job and work with good people but at the start of each day I feel empty and it’s an act of will to get started. In my case I think the nagging something I feel comes from the thought/intuition that I’m not doing the work I ought to be doing… That there is something I’m missing… probably relational. Only I don’t know what it is that I can do about it.

You said “I just feel as though I’m mum, wife and teacher but I’m not feeling the joy and wonder that I use to feel.”

I’ve been reading ‘The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself’ by Michael A. Singer.  Michael suggest contemplating on the question ‘who am I’. As you do so he takes you down that road to discover you are not what you do, and more then that you are not your thoughts, mind, body, feelings, memories or experiences… The Self, capital S, is the ‘I’ that is conscious.  You are not Mum, teacher, wife but the I that observes the experience of mum, teacher, wife… you are not your thoughts but the I that observes thoughts…

At first, I thought that what Michael was suggesting was at best semantics, however, I started the practice of reminding myself that ‘I am not the experience – I am the I that is observing the experience’. What I am finding is that doing so has allowed me to create some space to detach from the experience and the anxiety I was feeling.  It’s a subtle change of perspective which I trust will eventually lead me to observing what lies behind that nagging something that I’m missing – not observing

The words we use have power. Most people associate the word diet with restriction and privation.  If we do so the mind will likely fixate on what we are depriving ourselves and the desired goal of being healthy is over whelmed.   Not only are we more likely to binge we insure that we feel quality and deserve to be punished…. Feeding negative self talk that we aren’t good enough and deceive to be unhappy and unhealthy.   Defeated before you even got started

Instead of a diet as restrictions chose a diet of abundance the abundance of becoming.

My own experience awakening to my diet was that over 65% was grain based. Even though I lost weight by exercising and keeping the amount of food down to the needed calories after a few weeks I would just binge. I felt so hungry and craved more and more salt and sugar/grains.  It seems today’s processed grains will provide short bursts of energy and feelings of fullness for an hour or two but act like sugar in the body, triggering the body to store (weight gain) resulting in inflammation and blood-sugar imbalances.

Talking to a naturopath and nationalist he noted that my diet (as in what I was eating not what I wasn’t eating as restricting) wasn’t balanced. That I needed more fats and protein and less dairy and grain. He suggested that I avoid grains and dairy. Not as a restriction but to avoid.

After two weeks of avoiding grains and adding butter back into my diet I found I wasn’t hungry between meals and lost 8 pounds.  I used to crave, really crave, chips and pizza and when I binged that was my go to. I can say that after three months of avoiding grains and -30 pounds I don’t crave anymore. I sometimes think about buying chips and such again but it’s a muscle memory physiological thing more then a craving.

I was at a work function the other week and pretty much everything they served all the junk foods. I partook. After just a few moments I notice that my body wasn’t feeling so great and that I didn’t really enjoy those foods anymore. I didn’t feel deprived but instead grateful that my body new what it needed and didn’t need and that I could hear it.

You might like ‘The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself’ by Michael A. Singer

“There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind – you are the one who hears it.”

“Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself, or give it to yourself. Nobody else can.”

“Eventually you will see that the real cause of problem is not life itself. It’s the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes the problems.”

“Imagine if you used relationships to get to know other people, rather than to satisfy what is blocked inside of you. If you’re not trying to make people fit into your preconceived notions of what you like and dislike, you will find that relationships are not really that difficult. If you’re not so busy judging and resisting people based upon what is blocked inside of you, you will find that they are much easier to get along with—and so are you. Letting go of yourself is the simplest way to get closer to others.”

“How would you feel if someone outside really started talking to you the way your inner voice does? How would you relate to a person who opened their mouth to say everything your mental voice says? After a very short period of time, you would tell them to leave and never come back. But when your inner friend continuously speaks up, you don’t ever tell it to leave. No matter how much trouble it causes, you listen.”

“To attain true inner freedom, you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them… Once you’ve made the commitment to free yourself of the scared person inside, you will notice that there is a clear decision point at which your growth takes place.”