life without rage, anger and resentment

I have become very aware of other peoples anger, resentment and rage.  I hear their frustrations on why the world is so harsh to them, why other people should behave in a better way, why others should change, why the world should bend to their ways.  I started this blog around two months ago to try to express some of my feelings and as a way of tracking my progress.  I have not returned to work yet and I missed thinking about things and doing things.  I realised I enjoyed quite a lot of my job and was seeking a way to get my brain back in the right gear to work again.  I had that startling realisation of what it was to let go and ever since that day I have tried to let go of all my stuff that I have been carrying around for so long.  At my counselling session last week I was lead through an exercise to help me join up two opposing parts of me.  It was one of the best moments of my life as my creative side and my procedural sides merged and grew together and finally came to rest together.  I did obviously resist the joining up by the splitting of the blog but I caught myself up and I am alert to the signs that I sabotaging myself.  I have noticed many people who are not joined up this week, I have noticed many people reacting with rage, resentment and anger.  Right now I am working on living a life free of that and I welcome calmness, acceptance, and inner peace.  I no longer wish to be driven by out word approval but by myself awareness, self acceptance and self love.  What will a life free of these things bring me? What will a life truly loved for myself be like?????  I have been reconnecting with all the parts of myself and putting an adult perspective on the many parts of my inner child that was scared and hurt.  I am now a grown up.  It is such a lovely thing to be at the age of 43.  I wonder what a world of people all at ease with themselves would be like.  A world where its ok for everyone to be themselves, free from greed, exploitation, judgement, guilt, shame, anger, fear, rage, unbridled materialism, competitiveness, bullying, blame and the myriad of other negative emotions.  Am I turning into Pollyanna or am I just looking for the impossible.  Last summer a friend told me his parents gave him the great gift of peace of mind.  He brought me to a place where I experienced that too, but it was fleeting, but it was beautiful.  What would the world be like if we all had peace of mind.  Oh mam give all that hippy shit a rest is the answer my daughter would give, but recently she has been listen to john Lennon's imagine, X would say that will never happen because ..... and give me some answer he beliefs to be an absolute truth rather than an opinion probably based on his belief that most people will exploit most other people.  My inner child would say yippee will there be bubbles and ice cream there? my inner parent would say, in fact my actual only living parent would say;peace of mind is all very well but have you got the school uniform s ready for tomorrow???? Well have you????  I now recognise when I project myself onto others and it is fun to imagine what they would say but I do not know what they are thinking and never will unless I ask and they tell me.  What if they said that would be wonderful a world full of people at peace with themselves, I am glad that you have found peace, I hope that I will too.  

I attended a wellness seminar yesterday and my counselling session today.  Yesterday I learned about mindfulness minutes.  To give ourselves 5 one minute mindfulness minutes throughout the day.  I also learned  that you need to work at wellness all the time.  I have finished the first stage of my journey now.   I am well again.  Stage 2 is to learn how to stay well.  That will be such an exciting journey.  A wonderful life.  I will meet such nice friendly, open, caring, peaceful and joyful people on it, I will also meet the opposite and all the spectrum in between.  I think I might pause here a little catch my breath and enjoy a few moments of calm say farewell to the past and take the brave step into the future like the fool into the unknown and start on the next stage in my cycle of life.

Wherever you are and whatever stage of life you are at remember that the only certainty is change.  If we stay stuck in our rut we will never venture off the road and see the flowers, birds and other possible paths and parts of our lives.  I no longer regret all the blinkered years of single-mindedness.  I did what I had to do to keep going, but now that I am complete and all joined up I go forward with an open mind , open to all the wonderful opportunities and possibilities out there, the ones that will help me have a wonderful life.  I matter because I am Jane, because I exist, because my life and my being enriches the lives of others and without me the world would not be the same place.  I value my uniqueness.  Today I realised that my children needed me more now than when they were babies.  I am glad that I am a grown up and can help them to grow up too , but not too soon and not before their time.  My one wish for them is that they learn how to be mindful and self accepting at a far younger age than I did and in so doing break the transgenerational cycle of shame and guilt.  

I am woman, hear me roar
In numbers too big to ignore
And I know too much to go back an' pretend
'cause I've heard it all before
And I've been down there on the floor
No one's ever gonna keep me down again

CHORUS
Oh yes I am wise
But it's wisdom born of pain
Yes, I've paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to, I can do anything
I am strong (strong)
I am invincible (invincible)
I am woman

You can bend but never break me
'cause it only serves to make me
More determined to achieve my final goal
And I come back even stronger
Not a novice any longer
'cause you've deepened the conviction in my soul

CHORUS

I am woman watch me grow
See me standing toe to toe
As I spread my lovin' arms across the land
But I'm still an embryo
With a long long way to go
Until I make my brother understand

Oh yes I am wise
But it's wisdom born of pain
Yes, I've paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to I can face anything
I am strong (strong)
I am invincible (invincible)
I am woman
Oh, I am woman
I am invincible
I am strong

FADE
I am woman
I am invincible
I am strong
I am woman

I am woman. 

 An this is a ne one for me but I learned to upload youtube video today and who can resist kareoke. 

Would you belive this was originally recoreded by a man only to become such a female anthem.

I just want to dance around the kitchen to this.

True beauty and power.

Who could not fail to love that.

The last one is for the little child in us all who still has the imagination to believe in magic wands.


Happy Friday
I am strong I am invincible, I am woman
So go off and get in touch with your womanliness, yes you can do it even if you are male ;-)

what causes disease

what causes disease
Extracted from an aritcle by CLAIRE O'CONNELL

Probably every biological process has a microRNA or set of microRNAs behind it, but when we began our work about three or four years ago nothing much was known about them in the immune system at all,” he says.

“Then we began to find them in the immune system. We began to find they were very strongly regulated by Tolls , and Toll Four was inducing loads of them.”

In particular, their research pointed to microRNAs having roles in keeping inflammation under control.

“We have found that microRNA is very important for dampening down the inflammatory process – through a negative feedback effect they fine tune the system,” says O’Neill. “We have stumbled into a set of molecules that are probably important for the resolution phase of inflammation, so microRNAs are very important for returning the body to normality after an infection.”

This summer, O’Neill’s team will start another research project on microRNAs in the immune system, teasing out a potential tug of war between microRNA 155 and microRNA 21 during inflammation. So far this work, which was funded by Science Foundation Ireland, has looked at how the microRNAs affect cells. But with a grant from the European Research Council, O’Neill can now progress the research to more complex preclinical models to get a more complete picture.

“We are very much on a frontier here,” says O’Neill. “We are really fishing now in the world of microRNAs, to see are they relevant and can they affect disease outcome.”

And knowing more about the mechanics of the volume control will help inform the use of microRNAs in diagnosing and treating disease, he adds.

I found that article facinating.  Connectivity is the buzz word of modern society.  We are all connected.  this over connection can disturb those of us who need quietness and space to process the world.  Part of the healing process is  processing  what has happened in our lives to bring about the disease.  This is not always practised in a holistic way by conventional medicine, and the physical process which bring about disease is not always fully integrated by alternative medicine.  We are at a point in the evolution of science and the understanding of the mind body link where both communities are beinning to see the other side of their so called rivals.  I had a wonderful experience when my daughter was in hospital last week.  My second daughter has been treated for a medical complaint which went away and recently came back.  The first time I went to every quack in the locality, and here I use the word quack in an affectionate way, as quack is a sound made by a bird and is the best way we can describe another creature, that is a duck, trying to communicate with us.  We do not know what he is saying but we know he is communicating, anyway back to the point.  I have discussed the alternative therapies with him in the past and this time decidied to go down the conventional treatment method only and have as yet not tried to quack.  But amazingly he considered the question my daughter asked him about the connection between a new vaccine and her disease the last time she was in hospital.  This time he told me that he had investigated it and said that it is worth a try and although there is no scientific basis for it working there have been trials and cases where it seems to work.  This is such a huge growth in his attitude to non scientific treatment, just because we don't know why it works and we cannot prove that it works does not mean that it does not work.

I found the above article this morning and I believe that the mind body connection, the wholeness of being, the fact that disturbances of brain function , which has hitherto been called mental illness in in fact a full body illness and cannot be treated in isolation.  We need to heal the whole person in all cases.  We dont not know how our thoughts create the physical disturbances as yet but research is getting closer with the advances in neuroscience.  Philosophy, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, logic, medicine, alternative therapy, religion, art, music , all of the world and our experiences go up to make us who we are.  We often go through the world blind to the guides there to help us on our path, we forget that all our lives are joined.  We are each the centre of the universe because the universe is infinite but infinity connects us.

To quote my late father :"they are all out of step except you".  They a were all marching to a different drum and I did not know that there was more than one drum beat in the world.  We are all connected, all the drumbeats go to make up a cacophony of noise and wonder, sometimes it is in harmony and at other times in disharmony.  Our search for connectivity and wholeness is a search for our tribe that beats the same drum beat as us.  But when we want only one beat, the one the we know the sound of, the one that we have heard all our lives we close our ears to the possibility of learning a whole new song and to all the other musical instruments in the world.  I value openness, I value honesty, I value knowledge and now I have found a new value one that is completely new to me , I value the difference in others , I do not need to live in a world with only one drum beat I live in a world full of all sorts of sounds.  Time for a new therapy for me , music and sound , it unlocks so much of our minds and unlocking the mind is the key to unlocking the soul.

Today I will not look at what is the evidence for that truth that I thought about.  Today I will be open to everything, I will listen to all sounds, and not just one, I will take off my glasses and marvel at the uniqueness of all sounds; the beautiful birdsong, the clicking of the keyboard as I type, the weird sounds the dog and child are making, the accidental music of the electric guitar as she learns to play, the squeak of the sliding of the fingers down the string, the buzz of the electrical equipment, the hum of the fridge, and that lovely singing of the thrush outside my window.  We are all connected but we can only experience that connectivity if our senses are attuned to the world.

Perhaps the scientists that discovered the micro RNA were so open to working out how things worked that they did not dismiss anything they encountered in their search for knowledge.  I think that it is a lesson to us all , and to me in particular.  Open up to the world around you be situational aware, there is some much out there to enjoy.   I was thinking about the many people who have shown we the way on my road to recovery and think of them as signposts, because road signage is very much part of my work, and I need visual metaphors to understand the world.  I have long mulled over the poem Autobiography in 5 parts which I have read and reread since I first discovered it many years ago.  When we are looking for a new street we can find it with the help of our signposts.  Be open to them and stop and carefully read them when they appear as they have been sent by your subconscious to show you the right path for you.

Loose the rigidity that keeps you in your rut and follow the signposts that the world is offering you to new an fantastic places.
Happy Thursday.