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Gentle loving kindness

Image by Jill Wellington courtesy pexels

Reviving a lost art

I’ve been feeling quite overwhelmed lately. There has been so much going on in my life and I have felt pulled in so many directions at once. Distracted, and not fully present, I reversed my car into a lamp post and jarred to a stop. I drove carefully home and I finally pressed pause on the chaos. I sat down and for a few moments I tuned into my body and I asked myself what I needed. Never mind what everyone else who I was giving my energy to needed, what did I need? I was surprised when the answer came back as gentle loving kindness. I decided to explore that a little deeper and to really understand what it was I was craving. Closing my eyes, I focused on my breathing, and once I was still, I allowed my senses to explore the words.

Gentleness brought images to mind of soft pastel colours, the sounds of tinkling music, sunlight filtering though trees, a softness like downy feathers, and my shoulders released and relaxed.  Loving felt more like bright orange leaves in the autumn, dramatic tango music, blood red roses, feelings of intense heat from a roaring fire, and the pit of my stomach tingled with a frisson of excitement. Kindness was all greens and blues, with music that sounded like the ocean waves, springs of gently bubbling water flowing over rocks, the warmth one feels when snuggled under a duvet cover on a cold winter’s morning, and my body felt still. But when I strung those three words together as ‘gentle loving kindness’ I saw in my mind’s eye an endless comforting blackness with tinges of the softest pink, the music was meditative and peaceful, fields of yellow canola flowers stretched as far as my eyes could see, and my entire body softened and unfurled like the tender green shoots of a tree fern. I felt completely safe and nurtured. Such is the power of words. It’s been a long while since I’ve taken the time to engage with my senses and allow my body to tell me what it needs. I realised I have been so very busy taking care of everything and everyone else, that there wasn’t a drop of gentleness in my own existence, I wasn’t being loving towards my own body, and I was being very far from kind to myself. I had lost the art of living with gentle loving kindness.

Image by Shvets Production courtesy of pexels

How do we lose this art? We became overly busy. We became focussed on the doing part of life and we relinquish the space for simply being. In today’s fast paced world, people are moving at such a rapid rate, constantly chasing the next goal, the next opportunity, growing and reaching, striving, pushing, checking, balancing, following, or leading, judging, or ignoring… and seldom do we stop and simply be in the exact moment we are in with nothing else on our hearts other than to experience the beauty of the moment. Mental health issues are escalating, small children start school already beset by anxiety disorders, depression is rife and tensions are high. We are living out of resonance with our natural state, we have abandoned the principles of gentle loving kindness. It seems trite to say we are human beings and not human doings, but I feel there is definitely something there to be considered.

We push ourselves to the limit and if we find we are tired we drive ourselves even harder. We step over one another to get ahead, and we focus on goals and achievements rather than the journey and the joy. The divorce rate is shamefully high, and we appear to have lost the ability to love ourselves, never mind one another as we compete and divide and separate, needing more to be right than to be together. We have become too busy to show kindness to strangers or more importantly to ourselves. We drive ourselves harder and harder and we compensate when our bodies try to tell us something is wrong. We take medicines to subdue and hide symptoms that should never be ignored and we stop listening to our intuitive self. Under the relentless onslaught of demands we place on ourselves, eventually things begin to go wrong. Stress, injury, illness, and suffering become our reality and when we eventually crash our car into a pole, we cry out in despair, “Why did this happen to me?”

Image from pixabay courtesy pexels

Take an honest look at your life and ask yourself if you are living gently, lovingly, or kindly. Try to think back to if you have ever lived that way, or when last you did live your life by the principles of gentle loving kindness. When last did you truly prioritise your own wellbeing, the wellbeing of your family, friends, neighbours, and perhaps even total strangers. When last did you offer a helping hand to someone in need, or help an elderly lady cross a busy road. When was the last time you considered the environment, your carbon footprint? When last did you stop in your unending busyness to smell the air after a summers rain, or notice the nest filled with chirruping baby birds in the tree outside your home. When last did you notice that there are soft green leaves pushing through the cracks in the road, and thrill at the strength and determination of the plant trying to make its way to the sun. When was the last time you hugged your children, or lay on the grass and looked up at the clouds holding hands with your loved one? Have you ever looked around you at the massive skyscrapers reaching for the sky and marvelled at how, what began as an idea in someone’s mind, was slowly developed and coaxed to reality through the labours of many people. Do you take the time to appreciate architecture and the careful juxtaposition of the different elements with the surrounding buildings and landscapes so that they enhance one another and create beauty in spite of their unnatural existence?  Or have you been too busy driving yourself to achieve without taking any time to cultivate a balanced life.

Image by sora-shimazaki courtesy pexels
Tune into your senses

How about if tomorrow you wake a little earlier, just five minutes, and instead of reaching for your mobile devices and launching yourself into the onslaught of information, frantically scanning in case you might have missed something in the night, you just lie there with your eyes closed.

  • Feel the heavy warmth of the bed covers, the softness of the fabric of your pyjamas.
  • Feel the skin on your feet and say hello to your toes.
  • If you are lucky enough to have a partner then become aware of the soft rhythm of their breathing, or perhaps smile as they snore and grunt in their sleep.
  • Tune into the environment of your room and taste the air with your nose. The residue of yesterday’s perfume on the clothes you discarded at bedtime. The comforting smell of fabric softener on your linen and the accompany joy of knowing you’ve slept in freshly laundered sheets.
  • Let your ears tune into the surrounding world, the birds, perhaps the sound of the wind, passing traffic, maybe someone else is stirring in the home.
  • Then gently  and slowly stretch out your body. Breathing deeply, allowing the ripples of movement to spread from the bottom of your feet, right up through each muscle and limb to the top of your head. Raise your arms slowly above your head and stretch fully and luxuriously. 

Release your breath and then softly open your eyelids and allow your vision to swim into focus. Take a moment to notice the room you are in. Pause and remember the moment that photograph on your dresser was taken. Pull the memory to the fore and allow your heart to expand as it recalls the details, the excitement, the joy of the moment that was worthy of photographing. And then swing your legs over the side of the bed and sit up. Be amazed at how easily your body functions, or perhaps be grateful that you are still able to get up unaided. Those precious few minutes where you slowly engaged all of your senses, allowing yourself to emerge from the cocoon of sleep gently, lovingly, kindly, sets the tone for the day ahead. You can still live a full and busy life, but if you can mindfully begin to press pause in between moments, just long enough to engage your senses, and fully appreciate the moment by playing with the imagery in your mind, that simple act will begin to bring balance to your life. You will engage the incredible power of gentle loving kindness and your life will flourish as a result.

As always, I offer you my understanding of things. I encourage you at all times to question and decide for yourself what you want to accept and onboard. I am always interested to hear your opinions and I encourage feedback. However, it is essential to understand this vital truth as we journey together:

We don’t have to agree on a single thing to be kind to one another.

So, disagree with me by all means, own your different perspective, but please remain respectful of other’s beliefs and journeys.

Treat yourself with EMpathy and EMbolden yourself to dream. EMerge from your learned way of being, allowing yourself to celebrate life as you EMbrace your full potential. EMancipate yourself from your limitations, EMpowering yourself to live with greater clarity and joy!

Until next time, be kind to one another and honor yourself as the unique and incredibly special soul that you are.

© Copyright 2020 – Janice Melmed

14. Reviewing your life

Are you living fully in all four aspects of your life?

As discussed previously we have four aspects to our existence. Physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Living in balance/harmony requires involvement with all four of these aspects. Neglecting any part of our self can lead to us living without full clarity, feeling dissatisfied and frustrated… not quite fulfilled or incomplete.

We all have a primary aspect that we tend to focus on and that is absolutely good and well. This in itself is not problematic, it is more about the aspects that we neglect that give rise to problems. Hard work (physical) without heart (emotional) is simply drudgery. Hard work that you love (emotional) without any understanding of how you contribute to the bigger picture (mental) can become unfulfilling. Hard work without connection to your worth (spiritual) may well feel empty and uninspired. If you are full of great ideas (mental) that excite you (emotional) and yet you never take any action (physical), you are likely to feel frustrated or unfulfilled (spiritual). You can play with the different combinations and you’ll see clearly that unless you are engaged in your physical activities, emotionally present, knowing what you are doing and why you are doing it, and bringing yourself joy or worth, you will be missing something in life. You will not be living a balanced existence.

So how do you remedy this imbalance. It starts with taking a long hard review of your life. You’ll need to be brutally honest with yourself about what you are spending your time on, how you feel about it, figuring out why you are doing it, and what you are getting out of it. I spent years working 12-14 hours a day, six days a week. The seventh day I slept. I was all work and no play. I didn’t spend time exercising. I didn’t take time to be joyful, I simply worked because I had been taught that service was my super-power and unless I served tirelessly without question, I had no worth. I gave up my emotional health to a set of prescribed rules that were ingrained in me from the day I was born, and I never learned to question them. I automatically dismissed as wrong anything I encountered that challenged that thinking. I was derelict in my spiritual aspect and had no connection to myself. I was not raised to be conscious of my own value. What I wanted didn’t matter. My role in life was to serve, regardless of what I thought or felt and it was preferred that I didn’t feel anything at all. I was taught that I had to be grateful for any opportunities that I was given to serve, since I had no inherent value of my own. The more invisible I could be, the better, and I was to never rock the boat or have an opinion of my own, or question authority. There was significant punishment if I ever stepped out of line and so I learned to do as I was told, because it was all I was worth.

My life pretty much deteriorated over the course of thirty years until I collapsed completely. It has taken me a very long time and a lot of hard work to discover who I am, and what my value is. It is taking even longer to change the habits of a lifetime and to move away from that ingrained indoctrination and brainwashing. My mother was mentally ill and had little to no control over her thinking. My father was so involved in trying to keep her happy that I was never a priority. I have had to examine my life with uncompromising honesty and have had to learn to see where I allowed this all to happen. For once I accepted that I was no longer a victim to what had happened to me, I could begin to take charge of making the necessary changes to begin living my life, on my terms, in a manner that I chose, that brought me joy. There were so many warning signs along the way. My whole being tried so hard to bring me back to resonance, but I could not hear the warnings and I would not see the signs. It isn’t necessary to fall completely apart to redirect your life. If you are living mindfully, paying attention to your four aspects, you will spot the signs of imbalance and can make minor adjustments along the way to recalibrate your life. You will know when you are balanced because you will be at peace, you will have purpose, you will have drive, and you will have joy in your life. Start today. Start the process of self-examination, you won’t be sorry. Remember that…

Nothing is a problem, until it becomes a problem for you, and then change is inevitable.

As always, I offer you my understanding of things. I encourage you at all times to question and decide for yourself what you want to accept and onboard. I am always interested to hear your opinions and I encourage feedback. However, it is essential to understand this vital truth as we journey together:

We don’t have to agree on a single thing to be kind to one another.

So, disagree with me by all means, own your different perspective, but please remain respectful of other’s beliefs and journeys.

Treat yourself with EMpathy and EMbolden yourself to dream. EMerge from your learned way of being, allowing yourself to celebrate life as you EMbrace your full potential. EMancipate yourself from your limitations, EMpowering yourself to live with greater clarity and joy!

Until next time when I shall introduce you to self-examination: a time to get real with yourself, be kind to one another and honor yourself as the unique and incredibly special soul that you are.

© Copyright 2020 – Janice Melmed

A grandmother’s conundrum

The moment I first met my granddaughter

What role do I play?

I am a daughter, I have two daughters, one of my daughters just had a baby and now has her own daughter. We have no living grandmothers. My mother’s history is shrouded in mystery but it seems she was adopted at birth. She never knew her own mother, and the two ladies who adopted her had passed on long before I arrived. She too had no known grandmothers.

My father’s mother passed when I was three or four years old. I have two memories of her and neither are warm or fuzzy. I remember her banging her walking stick on the floor and glaring at me for putting my elbows on the dinner table. That stare was so intense it was terrifying. The other memory is of her playing cards with my dad and I think I committed the cardinal sin of burping. She made me drink so much fizzy bicarb I threw up in her sink. That led to a smacked bottom and being sent to bed in shame!

My own mother was mentally ill. She was a terrible mother. She was however, oddly enough, a warm and doting grandmother at least until my girls became teenagers. At that point she became more like the way she was with me growing up. She was a very difficult woman as a result of her tortured mind.

My mother-in-law didn’t take to me at all. Firstly, I wasn’t Jewish and that was unforgivable in her eyes. Even though I took steps to convert, I was always somehow ‘less than’ in her estimation. She was manipulative, dismissive, judgmental, and not at all supportive… until the granddaughters arrived. Then she wanted to be in our lives, focusing on the children, advising me on motherhood and instructing. I had no tolerance for her by that stage. Her particular brand of loving was gushing and doting. My daughters have very warm memories of her and being a grandmother appeared to give her huge cache within her social group. I experienced her as judgmental and felt she was constantly checking to see if I was making the grade. Over the years we worked our way round to a grudging acceptance of one another that in time, developed into a warm respect, ultimately deep affection, and even love, but it took a tremendous amount of work.

So now I am a grandmother. It is a role I have always dreamed of, however this is uncharted territory for me and I have limited resources to draw from to influence and guide me. I think the best course of action would be for me to draw a line under my dubious history and start fresh. Raw instinct and pure love drove my mothering and I certainly left no stone unturned in my efforts to ensure my girls knew that they were loved. I made many mistakes as I pushed and shoved my girls through life, controlling them too much and not giving them room to make their own mistakes. I never wanted them to be hurt and I taught them what I believed was the right way to live to get ahead. I did the very best I could with limited knowledge and understanding. In spite of how little I knew and having never felt love in my own life, I believe I raised two strong independent girls who became women with enormous hearts and an immense capacity to love. I know that I also caused them pain and heartache and I am not proud of all my parenting. At the time I knew nothing about conscious parenting or parenting philosophies that I have since discovered as my understanding of the human psyche has evolved. Rolling over to the next generation, I believe that I get to choose what to take forward from my own experience.

Some people perpetuate what they have always known, creating more of the same. Abused people are vulnerable to becoming abusers; children of addicts and mental health sufferers are susceptible to addiction, co-dependency, and a host of mental health issues of their own; or sometimes people work hard to create the complete opposite of their own childhood experience. Have you ever noticed how very buttoned up people often have children who prefer to colour outside of the lines? Strict disciplinarians often give rise to rebels or those who run outside of society’s restrictions. Another approach might be to take a balanced approach and acknowledge what worked for us growing up, discard, or better yet reframe what didn’t, and create an expanded, more meaningful experience for our little ones. This approach requires a mindful awareness and a well-balanced emotional mind. Often, we need to do quite a bit of work on ourselves to achieve that. For me, the most thrilling realization though, is that we do get to choose.

My primary aim with parenting was to ensure that my daughters knew that they were loved, something that was sadly missing from my own childhood. I didn’t consciously know that I was choosing this, I was far from mindful or aware, but everything in me instinctively rejected my own childhood experience where I was shamed for my very existence and made to feel guilty for my every action. I am satisfied that I have successfully changed the dynamic of so many previous generations of daughters on our maternal line who grew up unwanted and unloved. However, with my granddaughter, I feel drawn to a gentler approach.

Throughout my later years I have met so many really incredible women, who have great gifts to offer humanity. Yet many of them are held hostage to self-doubt and insecurity. They were all loved, for the most part they grew up in secure families, and yet they struggle to honour their own needs, or to identify with their inherent power. They find themselves terrified of standing out, of being different, of leading the way… they prioritize the needs of others over their own well-being. They have been taught how they should show up in life and they struggle to express themselves in a more authentic manner. This has led me to believe that feeling loved is only one part of the journey essential for development of one’s full potential.

So rather than imposing my will, choices, and desires on this little one, and teaching her how I think she should be in life, I would like to support and nurture her as she discovers who she truly is. I would like to learn from her how a free-spirited individual expresses themselves when they aren’t hammered into a mould of someone else’s determination. Loving my granddaughter in a manner that allows her to love herself first and foremost will, I believe, open the way for her to evolve into the fullest, most vibrant version of her infinite potential. That feels like a really honourable framework for our journey together.

I am a grandmother, and whilst my role may be an indirect one, a supporting role for her journey, it somehow feels like the most beautiful opportunity to embody grace in this lifetime.

As always, I offer you my understanding of things. I encourage you at all times to question and decide for yourself what you want to accept and onboard. I am always interested to hear your opinions and I encourage feedback. However, it is essential to understand this vital truth as we journey together:

We don’t have to agree on a single thing to be kind to one another.

So, disagree with me by all means, own your different perspective, but please remain respectful of other’s beliefs and journeys.

Treat yourself with EMpathy and EMbolden yourself to dream. EMerge from your learned way of being, allowing yourself to celebrate life as you EMbrace your full potential. EMancipate yourself from your limitations, EMpowering yourself to live with greater clarity and joy!

Until next time, be kind to one another and honor yourself as the unique and incredibly special soul that you are.

© Copyright 2020 – Janice Melmed

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