[Butterfly_Faerie]

<font color=purple>Daybreak - Meditations for Women Survivors of Sexual Abuse </font color=purple>

<font color=blue>Honesty </font color=blue>

I commit myself to being honest with myself & others today.
I deserve honesty as my way of life today & every day. In the past I did not feel safe enough to tell things as they were or even to see things as they were. This deprived me of closeness with myself. I needed to cover for others to protect them. I no longer need to do that. In fact, my growth is in direct proportion to how honest I am. My first responsibility is to speak up about my needs & feelings, even when I fear that doing so will affect others. I will not be oblivious to how I affect others, but neither will I try to alter myself by anticipating their responses.
When I make my feelings secret, the one I hurt first & most is me. For how can I see clearly while hiding certain aspects of myself? Remaining as true as possible to myself each day builds my self-esteem & lets me feel right with myself.

<font color=blue>Awareness </font color=blue>

I allow my awareness to be healing, freeing my actions & feelings from judgment.
The constantly rerunning old voice that says to me, "You are not good enough. You failed again. You are stupid, naive. You went the wrong way. How could you have been so shortsighted?" might need to keep talking, but I do not have to allow it to provoke a reaction from me. I can be aware that it is running without stopping to engage it, without using it as confirmation that there is something inherently wrong with me. If I simply observe it as something passing through, it loses its power to turn me against myself.
I seek to be aware of myself in each moment. To breathe deeply from the belly & notice all my attachments without becoming defined by them. To be aware & release my feelings & actions from judgment, I learn who I am & notice my place & right size in the universe.

<font color=blue>Filling Up </font color=blue>

I allow the growing up of my true self to fill me. I allow my achievements to count.
Without self-esteem, no matter how much I worked on myself or how many goals I achieved, nothing seemed to add up. I still felt empty. As soon as I accomplished something, my lacking self-esteem said, “Well, if you accomplished that, it must be nothing.” Thus I was able to discount things that would have built mighty pride in someone else. While this deprived me in one way, in another way perhaps I should be grateful, for it kept me searching for the wounded part of me that needed my attention.
Now that I am giving that wounded part attention, I am beginning to fill up. I am growing to trust myself, knowing I will no longer deny my wounds. The result is that all I have done & all the strides of my growth are beginning to compute & count. There is no longer a hole in my bucket.

<font color=blue>Solitude </font color=blue>

I take the quiet time I need each day to nourish my intuition & my desire for a peaceful mind.
Sara Orne Jewett, mentor to Willa Cather, wrote to Willa in a letter: “A quiet hour is worth more to you than anything you can do in it.” This can be a hard lesson for many of us to learn. We may have used keeping overly busy as a way to avoid our feelings. It may feel very frightening for us to be faced with free, unstructured time. Yet we crave peace. We crave ways to value our being rather than just the doer in us. And we cannot explore deeply inside ourselves if we are not willing to take the risk of becoming quiet.
When I am quiet, I hear my inner guide. I hear the birds sing & sense the harmony of nature. I feel the life force within me. I know I am more than my mind or my body. I am cradled by the universe. [/quote]

<font color=blue>Air</font color=blue>

The air teaches me about stillness & motion & how each has its place in nature.
Air is always in our presence. We often focus ourselves through breathing, by noticing how the air passes into & out of our lungs, by how the deeper we breathe, the more we move out of our survival stance & into an expansive state of being.
I can relate to air both as the element that gives me life & as a source for change. The wind blows in & swirls up a storm, then passes to stillness. In me also there are storms of emotions that tend to feel never-ending when they are present. A deep sigh may remind me that they, too, shall pass.

The past deeply imprints us & certainly matters, yet it is important for me to realize that life has a continuous flow & I am part of that. I ritually give to the wind the pain I have worked through, the pain I am ready to part with.

<font color=red>Website: </font color=red>

http://open-mind.org/Daily/


<font color=red>~Sundance~</font color=red>

<font color=blue>"Never react emotionally to criticism. Analyze yourself to determine whether it is justified. If it is, correct yourself. Otherwise, go on about your business."</font color=blue>

<font color=black>Norman Vincent Peale</font color=black>

[bug]

I can not find the words to express how much this post meant to me. I have not been on the site for a week or so. Today, my mother called me to say that my brother, also my abuser, was in town and that he was sick and was coming to her house. she lives next door to me. She also said that they we all to get together at my aunts house in a day or two. I simply said, not me. She said she thought I should. I said it isn't going to happen. She started crying. I said goodbye.
I simply can not feel for him the way she thinks I should. I can't understand how she can even ask me to. She knows what he did to me. She was there. She is the one who made me protect him for years and years. Not only that, he doesn't even care what he did to me. He made jokes about incest and laughed about what he did to me. I am so tired of it all. I'm tired of feeling guilty for feeling the way I do. I haven't asked my family to feel the same way I do. I haven't even asked them to listen to how I feel. I just ask that they respect my feelings. But they just can't do it. When I read the first paragraph of the meditations I knew I wasn't alone. It made me feel so much better. I even asked my husband to read it. He is very supportive and I am grateful for that. Thank you Sundance, thank you so much for posting this today.

[gloria]

I can only say Thank you...thank you.

gab

[Butterfly_Faerie]

You ladies are both very welcome. I'll post more meditations on different issues since it seems that people like it.

Hope all is well.

<font color=red>~Sundance~</font color=red>

<font color=blue>"Never react emotionally to criticism. Analyze yourself to determine whether it is justified. If it is, correct yourself. Otherwise, go on about your business."</font color=blue>

<font color=black>Norman Vincent Peale</font color=black>

[Beautiful_Pain]

Thank you sundance



<font color=purple>Pain can indeed be a beautiful thing</font color=purple>

[SweetCrusader]

Thank you Sundance. I also relate to this. And I think it relates to survivors of all kinds of abuse, not only sexual abuse.

You are such a big help to everyone on this forum!
Big, big hugs to you! (((((((((((((((((((((((Sundance)))))))))))))))

SweetCrusader

"Blessed be the cracked, for they let in the light"
-Author Unknown