A Martyr at Work: perfection serves no purpose

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been in competition with myself: do more, be more, do better, be better.  

Be the best you can be.  

What’s wrong with that one might ask? 

While it felt good for a while and I got a lot of recognition for it – being the reliable one who could always do anything I was asked to do and to a high quality, I’ve come to realise that it’s just not it. It is like a beast that is always hungry for more, no matter how many times a day I feed it, it keeps coming to the feeding station. It has got to a point where it is becoming not worth the trade-off of sacrificing my body and my connection to something I know is much bigger and far grander than the physical me and something that is in truth my greatest ‘craving’. For what? Just to get something done, tick things off a list and feel safe.  

What is this ‘safety’ that does anything but keep us ‘safe’? I have a PhD in learning that perfection is a hefty wall of protection that is very easy to hide behind. When we make everything that we do ‘perfect’ (whatever that looks like) and get attached to the picture perfect, we leave no gaps for anyone to offer their observations and even to criticise or disagree with us. And by doing that we build artificial borders around us with “no entry” signs and we cut ourselves off even more from people: people whose reflections we need and who also need our reflection to evolve and grow.  We simply cannot be or do without others. 

Yet, this is how most of the world lives. So many of us are lost in work, shopping, netflix, gossip, other people’s lives, complaining… it’s a long list. Waiting for the high of the next fleeting holiday to get us through to the next 6 months, or cup of tea and piece of cake, or task to tick off a list to get us through the day.. all are the same drug of reward, just different flavours.  

I might convince myself that I am reflecting some kind of superwoman to my team and the office with my can-do work ethic, but if I am driven and my body is hard, for being in drive is not our body’s natural modus operandi and it puts the body in a state of hardness much like when we are standing out in the freezing cold with inadequate clothing, and if I’m exhausted and silently resentful, they can still feel it. There is nothing that cannot be felt by another, there is only a choice to feel what’s going on under the physicality or not. And no matter how long I might believe I am staying under the radar – which includes my thoughts and the inner state of my body – no one is inspired by a lie, no matter how artfully and beautifully I might dress it up.  

I reached a crunch point the other day where I got to feel the drive and hardness of how I’d been working and pushing my body. When I overload myself with work and tasks and leave no space for these things let alone anything else, my body feels compressed and I feel joyless and disconnected. I feel out of sync and rhythm with myself, and irritated. There is a feeling of far greater density in my body with no space left for God to work alongside me while I’m doing what I’m doing, and no matter how hard I might try I can’t feel the depth of the magnificence of what we are all intrinsically connected to. Life feels very one dimensional and there is nothing to write about, or say. Rather than stop and allow myself to feel all of that, so that I can offer myself an opportunity to change the unpleasant state, often I will want to bury myself further into the numbness by working more, eating more … finding anything I can to distract myself.  No wonder the saying: we are our own worst enemy. 

But yesterday was different.  

I just allowed myself to accept where I was at and how I felt in my body, to feel how this cuts me off from that deeper knowing of myself and connecting with others, and to move differently. To pay attention to every single movement and bring focus to making it gentle. This super simple process instantly made me feel lighter and more inspired by what’s possible, and mostly that I wasn’t a bad person for having lost myself in overdrive. 

What I also got to feel was that as we refine our choices for how we are and how we move, the choices that aren’t aligned to that same gentle, tender and delicate quality really stand out and feel so much worse than what we  might have previously considered to be abusive.  

And there again is another choice: to react and judge the choice as ‘bad’, or to see it as an opportunity to learn and come out the other end much wiser and to treasure ourselves more. This is precisely how we continuously raise our standards in relationships with others across the board for what is and what is not allowed so that ultimately one day we all treat ourselves and our bodies as the sacred temples that they truly are. 

“Women must rekindle their own rhythms within society and not let society demand of them what is not natural to their body.”

Serge Benhayon, Esoteric Teachings & Revelations,  p526 

By B, UK  

For further inspiration.. 

Choosing function or true focus: how does this support us as we go about our day? The profoundness of self-care at all times.

What happens when we connect to our qualities and commit to making them our foundation for how we live in every moment of our day?

No periods… a message from my body

Six years ago the doctor asked me if I wanted anti-depressants and suggested I saw a psychotherapist for eating disorders. I’d had some big life changes and reacted with a huge amount of emotional turmoil and stress. I lost about 12kg and went down to 42kg within a few months. My periods stopped and I had no energy or enthusiasm for anything in life. 

I thought I didn’t have an eating disorder because I wasn’t obsessed with my weight or my body – I just didn’t care, about myself or anything else. I shut myself down as a woman, to myself and the world, and gave up. 

In the last 6 years my life has changed massively. While a few things have changed on the outside, they are nothing compared to the inner re-vamp that has been – and is still – taking place on the inside. I have energy for life and I actually want to be here and I’m finally starting to love being a woman. 

Not that I wanted to be a man, more that I just didn’t want to be here at all in the first place and secondly, I didn’t want to feel and connect to the delicacy and power of how it feels to be myself, as a woman. 

Slowly, and with the support of esoteric practitioners, I began to see and feel that I wasn’t broken, and – amazingly – there was nothing to fix. I was just hurt, and I got the support I needed and the tools to start to deal with those hurts and to start taking care of myself. 

I got to see that I had been addicted to getting it right, and, underneath a perfectly calm-looking facade, addicted to stress: the drama, the rush, the working things out, the needing to ask 20 people the same thing… just to be sure it was the ‘right’ decision, and that nothing could possibly go wrong. 

Having designated myself as Head Girl of Nailing Life at an early age and made it a sort of secret life ambition, I had this fixation with getting somewhere, being better, and thinking I had to work hard to get there. I even tried to make the Ageless Wisdom teachings into rules and found that it didn’t work. To my disappointment, and exasperation, there was no dogma to follow, no rule book to abide by, no one telling me what to do… and no perfection to be recognised for. Instead, I started to find that the more I let go, the easier life became and the easier I am on myself. I can be in life as an active and responsible participant but without having to think about it, because there is no right and wrong. Just infinite moments of choices to be continuously made that are either loving and truthful, or not, and then naturally results and consequences of those choices. 

I made some changes to my life and started looking after myself; going to bed early, eating nourishing foods and not being controlling about food, generally letting go of that which did not belong in and around me and opening up to people more so I could let people in. 

But my body wasn’t just going to give me a period in exchange for a couple of early nights. It is asking me to make some fundamental and consistent changes to my life: like pay attention to the quality I move in not just once a day while making my bed, but 24/7… and to enjoy and bathe in how deliciously light and expansive it feels to move in and with that connection. 

I joined an online programme to look more closely at my period cycle, and discovered that even though I don’t have my periods, my body is still going through a cycle. Makes so much sense – just because we don’t see the Moon every night it doesn’t mean it’s not there and like its gravitational dance with Earth is not causing tide to ebb and flow. I had known that we’re always connected to cycles, but had chosen not to pay attention to it, or to practically apply it, and so it remained as knowledge in my head and nothing more. 

Following advice from my medical practitioner, I’m now applying bio identical hormonal creams to give my body the support that it needs and I can feel that there is a rhythm with that. My body is trying to ovulate. There are changes to my breasts, how connected I am to my body to be able to actually have a sense of my ovaries, differences in cervical mucus… Once I started to pay attention to it, I saw that my body is always communicating something to me and it’s up to me to listen or not. 

I learned that there are times of the cycle where we are naturally inclined to go more inwards, and other times where the focus is on outward expression of that depth. And I noticed a pattern: that often, when I felt the pull to go inwards, I would counteract it by making life and work complicated and stressful, when in fact, it needn’t be at all. 

Through charting how my body is feeling at the end of every day, I felt more aware of how I’m feeling at different times of the day, not just at the end when I was charting. To me this has been a revelation: it wasn’t something I had to put on my to do list or set an alarm to do, it just started happening without me even thinking about it. I experienced that it wasn’t that hard to connect to my body, just a choice to be made from moment to moment to remember to stay in the flow of that connection and not get distracted or lost in whatever I am doing. I’ve begun to see much more than ever before how much I have wanted to not feel things and not deal with situations, conveniently checking out into the perceived safety of my head whenever things got a little bit too intense. 

Paying more attention to the quality of how I am moving meant that I started to notice the quality of everything else: my thoughts, the space around me, energies coming through me and other people. In a really simple way… not good or bad, just… what does it feel like? 

I don’t have my periods back, but the whole experience is so enriching and supporting me to build a loving relationship with myself where I trust myself and what I can feel, and have my own back. I am loving learning to let go more and more and learning to live from how I feel in my body: do I feel a quality of space and lightness in my body and a steadiness and a consistency that I can trust, or am I in some kind of drama, delay or dilemma? When I stay with the steady consistency, I feel in the flow of life. Standing in the full flow of the stream of life and trying to build a wall, or even trying to send it back the other way is no longer quite the appealing game it used to be.

There is much more of an ease and a gentleness with how I move and am with myself now. I no longer resent my body for reflecting back to me something that I don’t want to see and patterns that I don’t want to let go of and change. I am discovering that being a woman is absolutely delicious and that this ease, grace and beauty in how I move is not something I have to try to make or be. It is already there, within me, and is now beginning to unfold, unfurl and truly blossom. 

By B, UK 

For further inspiration.. 

What do stress and stillness have to do with my menstrual cycle? 

Esoteric Women’s Health

Being truly ourselves and allowing the joy to flow again.. 

Unfolding Sacredness

Long before becoming a student of Universal Medicine, when I was in my early 30’s, I embarked on what I called at the time my ‘healing journey’. Abuse had featured heavily in my younger life and I longed to understand WHY (?)  

It was not that I set out with these intentions exactly, but I had a deep inner knowing that the abuse was somehow still running my life, that even though I had moved thousands of miles away and started a new life in another country, the abuse continued to be the leading character in my life and I had had enough of sharing centre stage with this life experience that I couldn’t seem to shake even when being far from the scene of the abuse.  

I saw three therapists. The first was a woman who came recommended by a friend and when she felt she could take me no further she put me in touch with a second therapist, a man who I was in therapy with off and on for a number of years. He helped me identify sufficient layers of hurt, anger and pain to enable me to get to a place where I was able to accept what had ‘happened to me’ and I was feeling less angry and in somewhat less pain which allowed me to function at a higher level than before.  

Eventually I stopped seeing him. I felt I needed a break. Life was pretty full on and I just wanted to make life about other things, and so I did. For a while. 

During these years of therapy, I clung to the belief that I was a victim. Being a victim answered the limited questions I was willing to ask at the time and made it possible for me to not look any further or dig any deeper. I became comfortable with the victim belief and I wore the cloak of victimhood well.  

In my 40’s I saw a third therapist for about a year. She helped me identify a few more layers but I still felt I wasn’t moving on. I felt stuck. Perhaps less stuck but stuck none-the-less. At the same time, the life that I had been choosing to live was beginning to feel distinctly…. uncomfortable. I had a deep knowing that there had to be more to life than the way I was living.  

It wasn’t until becoming a student of Universal Medicine that I finally started becoming un-stuck. The teachings of the Ageless Wisdom offered me the tools and support to not only peel back the crippling layers of hurt, pain and anger I had been living under for so long, but to address, understand and get to the root cause.  

It was miraculous to finally address and be free of the debilitating energy I had been living in. However, Universal Medicine and the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom didn’t just stop there…. I was willing and open to continue to support myself in evolving further and because I was willing and open, the Ageless Wisdom was able to offer more. And then more and still some more…  

As I gradually return to living in the exquisite new level of harmony I had been keeping myself disconnected from for lifetimes, I am continually bringing long held beliefs to the fore to be pondered on, examined and released if I find they aren’t serving me or anyone else for that matter.  

And so, the unfiltered questioning of what role being a victim was playing in my life.  

In the process of considering this question I reached an understanding that the belief that I was a victim was exactly that – a belief. A belief I chose to sign up to at the time to keep me on the carousel of victimhood.  

What??? 

I was like a horse ready to bolt, feeling horrendously exposed and wanting to crawl back under the blanket of comfort I’d wrapped myself up in to keep me in and the world out. I could feel a part of me saying and then shouting, “I do not want to go there!!!”  

Which helped me to understand that this was exactly where I was going. I have come to know that when I am feeling exposed it means there is something I have been hiding behind to keep me in disconnection from the Divine love within and to keep me from evolving. It is at that point that I have a choice: to either keep hiding under the blanket of comfort OR gently and tenderly hold myself in such a way that I can fully embrace my next evolutionary steps.   

The more I started letting go of the belief that I was a victim, the more space became available for the Truth to reveal itself in the form of a few questions:  In the very moment I chose to disconnect from and deny my own sacredness, was this not first and foremost an abuse of myself in the most profound, even if at first not the most obvious, sense of the word?  

In choosing to walk away from what I know is my innate sacredness have I not forsaken myself as the beautifully tender and nurturing woman I naturally am?  

And in choosing to disconnect from my sacredness, what have I been choosing to connect to instead? 

Any disconnection from my inner most being opens me up to destructive and debilitating energies that leave no space for the beauty of sacredness and, in fact, keeps me in an energy that is as far removed from sacredness as one can get. These destructive and debilitating energies are what kept me contracted, disconnected and in avoidance of the true love I naturally am and that we all come from.  

By contrast, in my ever-deepening connection to my inner self I am discovering a sweet, sentient and sacred part of me I had long been oblivious to. It is only in the peeling away of all the layers I had carefully and strategically put in place in my misguided attempt to protect myself and keep myself ‘safe’ that I have been able to connect to the courage and willingness within to reclaim centre stage and reconnect and return to my inner heart, my inner most…..the ultimate sacred space so worthy of cherishing.

In returning and reconnecting to my untouched, Divine essence, there has been a beautifully loving allowing to feel the consequence of the crushing depth of denial of the same, and the effect it has had not only on myself, but on all those around me.  

As I reclaim that which is at the core of every woman’s being, I bring myself back into alignment with the Divinely gracious being I naturally am, therefore offering this reflection for every woman. In so doing it brings the balance of outwardly-looking power back to where it truly belongs – within. The unfolding of this magical and majestic process then creates the space for men to return and re-align to their natural tenderness, sensitivity and yes, sacredness too.  

Reclaiming our sacredness brings us all back to who we naturally, tenderly and innately are, and once we do so the honouring of the sacredness within, honours and holds all others equally so.  

By Brigette Evans, UK

For further inspiration… 

Do we learn to mask a lack of self-worth as we grow older, or take the steps to address it? Natalie Benhayon writes.. 

What does it mean to have a sacred relationship with yourself? 

Dishonouring Choices, Self-Worth and Their Impact on Everyday Life

Millions of women are affected world-wide by a lack of self-worth – it is our modern-day plague. This lack of self-worth is one of the underlying reasons why many women make so many choices every day which are not only dishonouring of themselves, but can be deeply abusive; further cementing the false beliefs and negative self-talk that we are not worthy of love for ourselves or of being loved by others too. So, we could say that this is a critical topic to bring our attention and discussion to.

Walking with my Awesomeness: Connecting to myself and the World as a Woman

I was on my walk this morning, and as I walked steadily, a deep warmth circulated up my spine. I checked in with myself, feeling into it more, while continuing to walk in presence. What came was a feeling of true power in my steps, a new level of intimacy I have with my body. With walking as part of my consistent daily routine, the level of connection felt with my body has deepened. The power that I am feeling is one, which I have chosen now to live, devotedly connected to this body. The connection with my body is something I have ignored for a long time, until recently.

So this morning as I was feeling in Love and in Joy with myself and in my every step, I felt the whole world walking with me. At that moment I was aware that someone was looking at me — a man, standing at a nearby bus stop.

Being a Woman: Developing my own Self-Worth

I entered my adult life anticipating that I would meet the ‘one’ and have my own family. This picture was firmly set from a young age. It was what being a woman was all about, unless you were unfortunate and ended up as a spinster – on the shelf…

“In modern everyday English, spinster cannot be used to mean simply ‘unmarried woman’; it is now always a derogatory term, referring or alluding to a stereotype of an older woman who is unmarried, childless, prissy, and repressed.”¹

The term ‘spinster’ came with such a loaded image of an unattractive, miserable and lonely woman. It was to be avoided at all costs and remaining single wasn’t an option on my checklist for life. Instead, finding ‘the one’ and having a family would mean that I’d made it … or would it?

Let’s Face it: Accepting and Embracing our own True Beauty

For many years, practising as a Professional Make-up Artist and more recently advising and offering Inner Image Consultations, I’ve noticed that as women we’re still apologising for the way we look. Why do we resist accepting and embracing our own true beauty?

The most beautiful make-up of a woman is the love that she is.

Until we truly claim the woman within, we will continue to mask and hide our Divine Beauty underneath layers of protection that no amount of make-up can penetrate.

Jealousy: Foe or Friend?

Recently I realised that I was often feeling jealous and compared myself to other women, particularly my friends. If they achieved something or were doing well, got a new boyfriend, a lovely dress, anything really, I would feel small pangs of jealousy arise within my body.

In the past I have quickly pushed down these feelings of jealousy and then played the ‘nice friend’, commenting and congratulating them on whatever it is that they shared. Because the jealousy was only a small feeling, nothing too big that only lasted for a few seconds, I didn’t think I had jealousy issues. 

The Colour of Our Skin

‘ … I just have to accept how I am and how I look …‘

These are the words from Laura May McMullan after being diagnosed with malignant melanoma (skin cancer). Laura had spent many years using sunbeds only to be hit with this diagnosis some 12 years after she stopped using them.

The above words from Laura are very poignant. After spending years of trying to change herself, look different and be what she called ‘Mahogany’ in the end she’s had to accept her natural skin colour just as it is.

What Defines a True Woman? – Returning to Be-You-Ty

For many years (actually most of my life) I was lost to myself, trying very hard to live up to a picture (actually a variety of pictures) of what defines a true woman and how it ‘should’ be, without connecting back deep inside me, and listening with care to my body, but instead from a variety of ‘external’ pictures or fixed ways to be defined as a ‘true’ woman.

There was then a time in my life that I got caught up in a way of being as woman that I thought (with the ‘help’ of my head) was ‘natural’.

As a young child I watched my mum who was always crazily busy on this committee and that charity – doing ‘noble deeds’ but running herself so ragged, utterly unable to sit still and intensely self critical in this seeking of perfection. There was a drive and a very fixed idea of what it was to be ‘good’ and ‘nice’ and ‘proper’ – and so, sadly an absence of any tenderness to self and so for others. I actively rejected (and reacted) to this way, as definitely not being ‘it’.