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The bird's message a story of courage and fire as a deep truth awakens the felt experience of self worth here on earth at last This message is just a few lines long, but the journey to embody self worth can be decades. Our self worth is imprinted on us as a young age, embedded in our psyche so deeply, it's hard to know where to begin to undo the negative messaging. Of course, it's rarely intentionally put upon us, but often as a result of unresolved traumas in other people. We absorb the energies around us and then process them in our own ways, coming to conclusions about ourselves, and our place in the world. Understanding the messaging and beliefs we took on and replacing them with new messages; and taking action outside our comfort zone are two things that can help. It seems to be a process of daily actions, daily rephrasing, and constant vigilance in watching our thoughts. And the stakes are high and the change needs to start now! How amazing would it be if we could just close our eyes and leap into a new version of ourself, not where all our supposed “flaws” are fixed, but simply a version where we have deep self worth! Do you know how free and powerful we would be!!? Well, the time is now. What has become very clear to me, is that low self worth is very destructive, not just to ourselves, but to others. When self esteem is low, it is very difficult to be generous. We think that putting ourselves down is humble, but it actually forces us to invert into self absorption and feeling sad. We focus so much energy on proving that we ARE worthy, or on earning love (which can't actually be earned since it's unconditional!) that we can't share our inherent gifts and love with the world. Self Worth is our birth right. Self Worth is integral to living a fully expressed life. It is the basic ingredient in being able to give to others here on earth. It is time to take a stand, for ourselves and those around us, so that the world does not miss out on the one in a trillion phenomenon that has graced this world - ourselves. Yes, you were right all along. Self worth is the single most important aspect of your existence and a non-negotiable requirement of receiving your heart's desires. Deep self worth - feeling truly worth of being a live - is a lot like love. Is it not love that gives and sustains life? Building Self WorthBuilding self-worth is serious process that usually involves digging deep to the wounds that echo the deeply embedded low self worth beliefs that run the show of our lives. These wounds are usually from traumas, early childhood ones that often later get reinforced by adult ones.
Healing and reprogramming happen at a level deeper than thought, and much research has found that the way in is through the body, mindful awareness to it. Some healing modalities that I'm finding helpful include somatic experiencing ancestral clearing meditations. The most important part is to find someone you trust to do this with you. I do NOT recommend using a book or audio and doing it alone, because reprogramming trauma beliefs requires an external regulator outside us - essentially acting as the calm parent we didn't have when our nervous system was being wired. Some may find doing it alone works, but for me, someone with cPTSD and a child of an alcoholic, doing it alone was actually harmful. Please email me if you would like more information.
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Drawn to Life I’m rebranding my art to “Drawn to Life”, which is resonating with me even more than “Amused to Life”, the working title of my poetry collection. I so badly want my art to become a business, full time, but I’m not quite there where I have a full line of products to offer. So rather than a being a business name (like I had with D’inkling Publishing years back) it’s the name of the process I am going through to heal. My intention above anything else is to heal from the trauma of the past 10 years since I left my day job along with the essential security and self worth I needed to function. Although not perhaps my deepest spirit's calling, that job gave me a healthy community, dignity and an amount of freedom and control in my life I have not had since starting out on my own path, (which seems both obvious and counter intuitive). Leaving my halfway prestigious career and financially secure life left me vulnerable to the defaults of my programing, attracting very scary people into my life. People who since high school had been few and far between, rushed into my life in droves. Or maybe I just noticed the weird patterns more when I left my day job, which means apart from some really good friends from high school and college and some rare birds since, my whole life had been one long nightmare. I knew it yet I didn’t know it. It was addiction and quick fixes to numb the pain and fill the emptiness I had felt ever since growing out of the make believe phase of childhood. It was an endless search to find a conceptual understanding that would solve the problem and set me free of the emptiness and feeling of unlovable ness. A It was a life in which behind nearly every thought and motion was the question “ok, now am I good enough?” How does one serve others from such a broken place? So how to I show up as myself where I am genuinely despite being so lost. By sharing my journey of drawing myself back to life My only hope is that through drawing I will find healing and parts of me that have been hidden since I can remember will come to life. That I will literally and figuratively draw myself to life in every waking hour that I’m not wading through Excel docs to put food on the table. It is my dearest desire that I stumble upon an art form or practice that resonates with others while also healing me, so I can be a living artist instead of the dying one I am now. Everyday I spend working in Excel and not doing my real work is another death - and this is no exaggeration - it’s simply how it feels. 10 years is way too long to be working on something and making no progress… But seeing clearly now, there is opportunity for a fresh start. I am so excited for this new beginning! Love, Amanda Ianthe  How interesting that it's not what we DO that makes us fascinating, radiant, magnetic. It's the relationship that we have with ourselves inside, our alignment with our truths, that attracts the people, relationships and experiences into our lives. This musing was inspired by a fellow graduate of Made to Do This, who wrote:
"I want you to picture a person who, when you walk into a room, you are drawn too. A person that radiates light. A person that is full of self assurance, completely comfortable in their own skin. They don’t have to be surrounded by a crowd, but there is a quiet assurance that they are right where they should be and they are there with intention. They are honest and REAL.....What’s 1 word you would use to describe that person- just one." I noticed two categories of answers - one was to describe the person on the inside - "loving, peaceful, self assured", and the other describing more the person’s impact on others on the outside "radiant, magnetic, attractive." The first is the cause, the second is the effect. It made me remember something I've always deeply believed - that our inner selves are what attracts people to us - in a new way. It's more than being a good person deep down (aren’t we all) and it’s more than thinking good thoughts about others. It’s the relationship we have with ourselves that really defines who we are inside - how we feel inside...and how aligned we are with our deepest truths. And this alignment and these feelings are what attracts our experiences. This really touched me. It's become clear that I am in need of a new shift in how I talk and speak to myself inside to get through some blocks that have been challenging me for the past few years. I can see a new life opening before me. When I first heard someone associate the heart and love with action and doing, while something about it resonated, it didn't feel very intuitive to me. But when I thought of the connecting link being courage it started to make more sense. It takes courage to act, especially outside of our comfort zone, where courage isn’t necessarily the absence of fear, but the willingness to face it and go forward anyways, thus conquering it. And then there’s the idioms of “lion-hearted” or having the “heart of a lion", which means to have the courage of a lion, a courageous heart. What’s interesting is how the heart is also associated with love, which made me explore the connection between love and courage. It doesn’t seem to be commonly taught, at least not explicitly. I think about years ago when someone told me the opposite of love isn’t hate, but fear, while the opposite of hate is more like attraction or admiration. Fear is contraction, love is expansion. Courage is the ability to face fear and go forth, and although courage isn’t exactly the opposite of fear, maybe it takes love to be courageous and face and conquer fear. It’s also kind of funny to think that the Tin Man and the Lion in the Wizard of Oz were redundant. Maybe Dorothy needed only two friends - the scarecrow and the lion. Since the heart is what the lion needs to have the courage.  You know those times you feel inspired, in the zone? And words emerge that don’t feel your own? It means you are tapped into creative flow. And this is where we want to go. But so too are the words we hear all day not our own. We just identify with them more because we’ve been thinking them so long and so often. They too are just an energy and come from somewhere else - many are societal and ancestral messages, and older more primitive thoughts we pick up when we are based too much in our brains' default processing mode. And there's nothing to be ashamed of that we are receiving them. They are out there prevalent and hard to escape from. And there's nothing to be ashamed of for believing them either. It's hard to break free from the main "stream" of thought. Look at it this way. The important thing here is that those beautiful insights that feel like they are from the divine or something outside ourselves are just as real as the more mundane or actively self destructive mind chatter we hear all day. In fact, I would argue that they are more real. More than just profound truths, they are actually closer to who we really are. The work for us is to get into that receptive state to receive those free flowing inspirational thoughts more and more. And to do this, we must first stop holding onto the old ones, particularly the lies about us not being worthy (worth is our birthright!) and decide we will no longer believe in them. Watch them pass by like a thief in the night, which is what they are, a thief of joy. Even mundane neutral thoughts can take us out of the present and act as a barrier to joy. Finding the things that bring us into a state of calm contentment, helps us to pick up (like radio signals) on the happier thoughts, the inspirations, the wisdom; and if we are lucky, be graced by a state of flow where there are no thoughts at all, only joy, our true essence from simply being alive. Hi. I'm Amanda. I have never formally introduced myself, and because I still don't have my elevator pitch down in short enough form to put on my home page, I thought I would turn my introduction into a blog post. So here it goes.... Although I have loved playing with words and creating imaginary worlds since childhood, I spent over a decade of my adult life in technical consulting - analyzing data and organizing information into spreadsheets, reports, website content and marketing materials. And while I loved the problem and puzzle-solving aspect of this work, I never felt fully fulfilled, and for a while I thought that was just because of something wrong inside of me. In 2012, when I began exploring a career in what really got me excited (story-telling, comedy, collaborative adventures in children's education), I adopted the belief that the issues I struggled with in my technical career would simply fall away now; that by following a dream I considered more aligned with my spirt, things would get brighter. I was very very wrong. In fact, the opposite happened when I left my day job in 2012 and started to work on my creative writing. First, I found my issues magnified: the self-worth I struggled with in engineering consulting, despite having an engineering degree, grew five fold in the creative field, where I had no official degree to legitimize my work. (Yes, what I needed was to find a sense of self worth that wasn't dependent on the external world, but I wasn't there yet) Second, and what really blindsided me, was when faced with all the time in the world to create whatever I wanted, all I felt was despair and sadness, even when I was well-funded with my savings. I was finally pursuing this beautiful dream I had since 2002 to create books and television shows out of the lofty goal to help others from having to suffer like me. Yet, I didn't even know how to dream about my own life, day to day, week to week, year to year, on the way to that big goal. I was completely numb to what I even wanted in life, to the ability to even dream for myself. As I had originally suspected, my emotional struggles, the gnawing emptiness inside me I had felt since I was a teen were not the result of trying to fit into a less than ideal technical career. It was something much deeper. In my 20s I had been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, and had very intense emotional outbursts, but I thought I had outgrown it. Really I had just learned to fit in with society, to mask a debilitating twisted sense of self worth. And the more I stuffed that down, the more depressed I got until I finally came to realize that what was going on inside of me energetically was a form of trauma that results from repeated experiences in early life growing up with an alcoholic parent, something I had never addressed head on. My emotional struggles, the gnawing emptiness inside me I had felt since I was a teen were not the result of trying to fit into a less than idea technical career. It was something much deeper that was causing both the emptiness and the self betrayal involved in pursuing something that is not aligned. So when the structure of the day job was removed in 2012, all that unaddressed trauma and pain came at me full force. And although I had a desire to help others by sharing my inspirational stories with the world, the desire was still rooted in the need to justify my existence, to fill the emptiness I had felt my whole life since my teens.
The emptiness wasn't going to be filled by simply diving into my creative career. It wasn't going to be filled by saving others so I could validate my existence. The trauma was built into my cells, and not even reading self-help books, journalling or meditating was going to reprogram the traumas. Well, not on their own. And not on my own. Because some kinds of traumas are too great to hold space with alone. What I needed was to become vigilantly aware of every belief I held inside me about my self worth, to write them out daily and then also write the opposite. AND, even more importantly, to do this work in the safety of a warm community guided by someone who had experienced similar things, reached the other side and now shares it with others with the upmost integrity. What I found from the process of looking at my beliefs around self-worth, was that I held the ridiculous notion that I could not have what I want, especially the things I wanted most. It suddenly all made sense. No wonder when I went after my most passionate dreams, I felt even more pain. Because deep down I believed the bigger the desire, the less likely I could have it. With this awareness, the next step was to retrain my mind. One simple way was to write down the opposite of the negative belief, and create mantras around it. Another, which I am working on now, is to take steps every day outside my comfort zone - practice achieving the things I want, in small ways first, before getting to the bigger things. All in the context of being a part of a supportive loving community who share these values and are on a similar path. Now, as I continue to work on my creative projects, my intention is to put myself out there more, to show up and be visible - going live on Instagram and Facebook; practice selling simple things to learn to trust that I can be an entrepreneur; and take the focus off of me and my self-worth, and more on how I can be of service to others on similar paths. This has led me to some side projects in writing workshops and strategy consulting to help me build the courage to more confidently share my artistic projects with the world. I hope that sharing my journey will help others on their path, and that some day I can touch the world with my creativity. Destiny, by definition, is meant to be fulfilled. It is our thoughts and old programming that keep it at bay. One of the nay-saying voices I have had in my head - probably for many years, but only recently became very aware of - is this: "what if I'm destined for a sad life? What if it's written in my genes that I won't bloom into the full potential that I am?" Although there is no way to know for sure about destiny, I've decided for myself once and for all where I stand on the matter. No one is destined for a life of despair, of unrealized dreams and desires. That is not a destiny. It's an unfulfilled one. And while this perspective doesn't solve things alone, it helps to liberate us by bashing down one more wall, one more limiting belief that holds us stuck.  Like the seed of an oak tree, we have the map to our potential. When we aren’t expanding and growing, it's because we haven't found the soil, water and sun; the love, the good thoughts, the nourishment to bloom into our greatest truest selves.
Luckily we aren't a seed blown by the wind and have free will. So long as we are a live, we have the possibility of creating the environment (much of which is the thoughts in our own head) to live true to our dreams and desires. Our dreams and desires are our birthright. They are meaningful, and we are worthy of them. But they are only possible if we let go of the old stories, the negative beliefs we learned growing up. The process starts with catching our thoughts and turning them around. What we believe becomes true. So if we believe we are meant for despair, that's what we'll find. But that is the truth with a little "t." There is a deeper Truth, the map of our soul, which is the real Truth. And we need to get our psyches aligned with THAT Truth, so we can live the lives we have always dreamed of. Follow my poetry on www.instagram.com/dinklingpublishing
I've heard about forest bathing several times in the past month. First on Instagram, and then today for the third time on Facebook. It seems so intuitive that we would feel a deep connection to nature, and long to be there more. It's so cool Japan made it part of their health system!!
Squishy Blueberry's latest adventure. This is number 3 in a series of drawings called "Where's Squishy?"  A few years ago, I started noticing how books like Brave New World and 1984 seemed to be coming true. While maybe they simply predicted the future, what if they also helped create it, by planting the seeds in our minds? Was this all really inevitable? What if we started imagining, very specifically, the good news we want to see and hear? More than just broad concepts of "peace," but very detailed stories of GOOD things happening. Would that help usher in a brighter future? Well, that's what I'm trying to find out. I know it's not as exciting of a read as a dystopian novel like Hunger Games. But with the right mix of humor and sarcasm, I think envisioning good things can actually be quite entertaining and humorous. Imagine the News is not about putting our head in the sands and seeing the world through rose colored glasses. It is a way, as I see it, to take a hard stance and rebel against what is going on today in the world. What we focus on grows. Let's focus on the dreams!  |
Author:Amanda I. Greene This is where I share thoughtful, and sometimes unpolished, musings in the form of philosophical explorations, inspirations, poems, and artwork.
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