Thanks Brandy that was nicely put.

Hi Lisa

Its clear your hurting, please know that you have been heard.

I’d like to comment on your last post

It doesn’t matter how hard I work. It doesn’t matter how much I care. It doesn’t matter how much time I devote to something. I will never be successful if the people around me do not want to see success.

That reads like your measurement of success is being determined by others? Which gives these others allot of power over you, power that is not thier to have or maybe even not want. (If I’m being honest when I give away my power to others it usually in a subconscious attempt  to exert power over them, to get them to like and approve of me which is also a power game.) Either way the task would be to take your power back. I know easier said then done. A first step may be to tell us what does success look like to you, what would it feel like. Is their any connection to your vision of success to how you view others viewing you?

Movement creates Life, Stillness creates Love, to be Still, yet still Moving is everything. – Do Hyun Choe

I like that play on words, Still yet still Moving. Life ups and downs surrounded and supported by a calm compassionate Love, a love that includes self love. That is the sound of AUM…

“Aum” is a word that, what can I say, represents to our ears that sound of the energy of the universe, of which all things are manifestations. And “Aum”, it’s a wonderful word, it’s written A-U-M. You start in the back of the mouth, Ah, and then, Ooh, you fill the mouth, and M-m-m, closes it, the mouth. And when you have pronounced this properly, all vowel sounds are in that pronunciation: “Aum”. And consonants are regarded simply as interruptions of “Aum”, and all words are thus fragments of “Aum”, as all images are fragments of the form of forms, of which all things are just reflections. And so “Aum” is a symbol, a symbolic sound, that puts you in touch with that throbbing being that is the universe.

And when you hear some of these Tibetan monks that are over here from the Rgyud Stod monastery outside of Lhasa, when they sing the “Aum,” you know what it means, all right That’s the zoom of being in the world. And to be in touch with that and to get the sense of that, that is the peak experience of all. “Ah-ooh-mm.” The birth, the coming into being, and the solution to the cycle of that. And it’s just called the four-element syllable. What is the fourth element? “Ah-ooh-mm,” and the silence (stillness) out of which it comes, back into which it goes, and which underlies it.

Now, my life is the “Ah-ooh-mm,” but there is a silence (stillness) that underlies it, and that is what we would call the immortal. This is the mortal, and that’s the immortal, and there wouldn’t be this if there weren’t that. — Joseph Campbell

If you want to hear AUM, just cover your ears and you’ll hear it. Of course, what you are hearing is the blood in the capillaries, but it’s AUM: Ah – waking consciousness; ou – dream consciousness; and then, mmm – the realm of deep, dreamless sleep.
AUM is the sound of the radiance of G_d (transcendence).
The point is that this AUM heard in silence informs all things. All things are manifestations of it. Now you are inward turned.

The secret to having a spiritual life as you move in the world is to hear the AUM in all things all the time. If you do, everything is transformed. You no longer have to go anywhere to find your fulfillment and achievement and the treasure you seek. It is here. It is everywhere. (You are It, as am I) — Joseph Campbell

Movement is Time creating Life – AUM – immerging from and returning to Stillness which is eternity creating Love,  supporting Life – AUM

My story is a sad one of half a lifetime that has been ruined by my inability to deal with my situation.

It may be more accurate to say that you are dealing with your situation only not achieving the desired results… though you are likely achieving the subconscious ones.  Maybe its semantics but in my opinion how we tell our story is important. In the end its the story we live in not the moment of life as it is, which is a reason we suffer.

I like how Richard Wagamese put it: “Life is hard. There are challenges. There are difficulties. There is pain. As a younger man, I sought to avoid pain and difficulty and only caused myself more of the same. These days, I choose to face life head-on — and I have become a comet. I arc across the sky of my life, the hard times are the friction that shaves off the worn and tired bits. The more I travel head-on, the more I am shaped, and the things that no longer work or are unnecessary drop away.
It’s a good way to travel. I believe eventually I will wear away all resistance, until all that’s left of me is light.”

I’ve been looking into the Zen notion of non-duality and spontaneity and what that means with regards to facing life head on, as it is.  Uncertainty, doubt, fear, suffering these are things when faced the impulse is to back or even run away. The Way suggestion is to lean in. Funny its the same advice you get in the military when you find yourself ambushed, turn into the ambush and press into it.

Funny / Sad we suffer more from the stories we tell then from the actually happening. If true, a task on the path is to master ones stories, vice letting the stories master you. Either way you will suffer… still depending on the path you just might end up with better stories. Keep an eye out for victim and villain stories, thier often a sign of justifications, projections, shadow…. all the things we do in order to suffer in place and stay stuck.

Just as it is often the case that we are sad because we are sad, we suffer because we are suffering. Begs the question if its possible we suffer more form the notion of suffering then from the event where we were disappointment by a desire not turning out as we hoped and or willed it might.

I’ll be honest to saying I’m not sure how to respond. I hear you, your pain and frustration of not being heard or seen by your family as you need and as a parent that has done thier best deserve.

I don’t wish to be cruel, and I am not saying your wrong to feel entitled or desire for respect and consideration. I’m saying, with regards to emotional mastery, the idea of entitlement and desire, (this is a tiny buddha site), is creating much of the suffering that your experiencing.  In that regard your decision to limit interactions may be the most loving for all involved.  Yet I suspect that that decision is also a source of suffering. It really depends on which suffering you accept and the best path to get you were you want to be as you move through it. I’m hoping you move though it vice getting stuck in it.

I don’t feel that what you need is justification for your feelings or experience which can only harden hearts. I’m hoping you find ways to move though the suffering, feel what your feeling instead of getting stuck.

I have to apologize I don’t usually engage in relationship posts and will now bow out.

I wish you peace.

I enjoy Richard Wagamese – Embers, One Ojibway’s Meditations

Short little meditations on life I found helpful in centering and contemplation.

Life is Sometimes hard. There are challenges. There are difficulties. There is pain. As a younger man, I sought to avoid pain and difficulty and only caused myself more of the same. these days, I choose to face life head-on —
and I have become a comet. I arc across the sky of my life, the hard times are the friction that shaves off the worn and tired bits. The more I travel head-on, the more I am shaped, and the things that no longer work or are unnecessary drop away.
It’s a good way to travel. I believe eventually I will wear away all resistance, until all that’s left of me is light.

This meditation I came across when I was missing my Mother

Me: I miss my mother sometimes. Really bad.
Old Woman: Maybe try missing her really well.
Me: How do I do that?
Old Woman: See that sunrise? See how beautiful the colours are? How clar and clean the air feels? How good it fels inside of you?
Me; Yes. It’s wonderful.
Old Woman: She lives in that. So maybe just say, ‘Thanks, Mom” when you see and feel things like that.
***
I miss my mother really well now. – Richard Wagamese

Thanks for your story and reminding me/us Lost1Flow that if we can create even just a small space to flow that surprises can happen.

I wish you well as you re-engage with your flow. 🙂

Stillness is what creates love,
Movement is what creates life,
To be still, Yet still moving
– That is everything! – Do Hyun Choe

Movement is  time, stillness is eternity. Realizing the relationship of the temporal moment to the eternal—not moment, but forever—is the sense of life. Realizing how this moment in your life is actually a moment of eternity. (Love) – Joseph Campbell

Regret, like all emotions when grasped onto blocks flow, traps one in a imagined past of ‘should of’ giving birth in the same moment a mourned for future that cannot be of ‘if only’.

True regret can point one to different paths in the present and if skillful then released, but my experience and observations is that regret is the emotion we tend to hold onto more then the others. I wonder if thier isn’t a perverse pleasure of holding on to our disappointments and failures so tightly while discounting out gifts so easily.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.― Fernando Pessoa

How does one stop? By stopping.  I suspect that stopping is so easily difficult is that we attach our emotions and experience to time.

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas…. – J Campbell

How does one stop? Stop naming and break the dam that hinders flow. We stop by flowing – a ironic paradox .

Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.  ― Richard Siken

Cry until you laugh… I recognize that person on the floor… We are such wonderous, messy absurd beings.

Hi Sprteflower – I like that username – what led you chose that, and did you intentionally leave out the i – sprite  – a small being, human in form, playful and having magical powers? (I wonder if its not time to embrace a little of the sprite in only to see what ‘powers’ such play might revel?)

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

Thanks for sharing your story.

Your post reminded me of something I read long ago

If you have a nagging feeling that you do no measure up to the person you imagine you ought to be, the generic label for what you feel i shame. We have shame when we persistently feel that we are not acceptable, maybe unworthy, and are less than the good person we are supposed to be. Shame is a vague undefined heaviness that presses on our spirit, dampens our gratitude for the goodness of life, and slackens the free flow of joy. Shame is a primal feeling, the kind that seeps into and discolors all our other feelings, primarily about ourselves but about almost everyone and everything else in our life as well. 

Shame can get us in touch with the most beautiful part of ourselves, a warning we that we are becoming a person we do not want to be, But shame is often an unhealthy feeling of un-worth that is distorted, exaggerated, and utterly out of touch with our reality. Most of us carry both kinds of shame – shame we deserve and shame we don’t deserve.  – L B Smedes

Reading through your post I suspect the shame your experienced is undeserved yet in holding on to this undeserved shame it is also a warning that it is this holding onto this undeserved shame that is leading you into being the  person you do not want to be.  The irony of being caught in a loop of being ashamed about being ashamed, trap I can relate to.

You mention – My path has been successful from the outside – suggesting that you have overcome the objective experiences of your past, a indication that you will continue to do so and to which you should give your self more credit. It seems it is the inner stories you are telling yourself that you can’t get past. In other words its possible that its language that is keeping you stuck in undeserved shame.

A meditation practice I like is creating space and stillness as I remind myself that I am not my thoughts, there are thoughts, I am not my memories, their are memories, I am not my emotions, thier are emotions, I am not my past, the past has past, I am not the words I use to tell my stories, there are words. The map is  not the territory, and words are not the things they can only point to, there is no requirement that I hold on the them.

<p lang=”en-US”>“You likely have parts of your own history you’d rather forget, same as I do. But when I actually wrote these things down, when I got up close and personal with them—yes, there was pain, and yes, there was hurt—by giving them a name, I stripped them of their power. And what I learned is that lies (undeserved shame) will always be worth fighting against. Because what you’re left fighting for is the truth, and that is the most freeing thing in the world.”
― Joanna Gaines, The Stories We Tell: Every Piece of Your Story Matters</p>