Blog Archives

Love is a Reflection of My Free Choice & My Ability to Respond Powerfully.

7/28/2016

I love from my inner strength.
I love from my personal power.

My power
creates healthy love,
which manifests itself through
caring, knowledge,
responsibility, and respect.

My love is a reflection of my free choice
and my ability to respond powerfully.

Love is romanticized as a mystifying
random whirl of passion
that happens to us.

Falling in love is thought to be the culmination of love.

Yet, love is only meaningful and lasting
when a person chooses to love responsibility
and welcomes the opportunity
to allow love to grow and deepen with time.

I will love myself by genuinely
caring for my own well being.

I will choose to love those people
who deserve my love
and respect its strength and power.

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Phenomenal Woman, That's Me.

7/24/2016

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Phenomenal Woman
Poem by Maya Angelou

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman

Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

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To Be Beautiful Means to be Yourself.

7/18/2016

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“To be beautiful means to be yourself.
You don’t need to be accepted by others.
You need to accept yourself.”
~Thich Nhat Hanh

The most important decision of your life,
the one that will affect every other decision you make,
is the commitment to
love and accept yourself.

It directly affects the quality of your relationships,
your work,
your free time,
your faith,
and your future.
Why, then, is this so difficult to do?

Feeling worthy requires you to see yourself
with fresh eyes
of self-awareness and love.
Acceptance and love must come from within.

You don’t have to be different to be worthy.
Your worth is in your true nature,
a core of love and inner goodness.

You are a beautiful light.
You are love.
We can bury our magnificence,
but it’s impossible to destroy.

Loving ourselves isn’t a one time event.
It’s an endless, ongoing process.
It begins with you,
enfolding yourself
in your own affection and appreciation.

Notes Taken from Tiny Buddha

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Wanting is Seeking Elsewhere.

7/17/2016

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Wanting is the urge
for the next moment to contain
what this moment does not.
When there is wanting in the mind
the moment feels incomplete.

Wanting is seeking elsewhere.
Completeness is right here,
right now.

I remember,
I won't be happy as long as I am
wishing for something else.
I will not be satisfied with a relationship,
or with a friendship
if I am waiting for
the other person to change.

I loose my power
and give it away to them
to change my joy,
define my moments in life.
When I can do this myself.
As well, I loose the power
over the beauty of this moment,
this day.

When I accept
what I have
and what I am
and what I see,
in this moment,
I am fully alive.

In this moment
I feel the joy of knowing
that it is all that there is right now.
And that is o.k.
I can bring great peace and great joy
to my day
by being in each moment.

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Remembering a Friend who Taught Me About Love.

7/15/2016

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We cultivate love
when we allow
our most
vulnerable & powerful selves
to be deeply seen
and known,
and when we honor the
spiritual connection
that grows
from that offering with
trust, respect, kindness, and affection.

Love is not something we give or get;
it is something that we nurture and grow,
a connection
that can only be cultivated between two people
when it exists within each one of them--
we can only love others
as much as we love ourselves.

Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal,
and the withholding of affection
damage the roots from which love grows.
Love can only survive these injuries
if they are acknowledged, healed, and rare.

Are we practicing love?

Yes, some of us are really good at professing it
--sometimes ten times a day.

However are we walking the walk?
Are we being our most vulnerable selves?
Are we showing trust, kindness, affection,
and respect to our partners to our friends to our family?

It's not the lack of professing that gets us in trouble with our partners,
it's failing to practice love
that leads us to hurt.

To love each other
in the process of becoming real
is perhaps the greatest single act
of daring greatly.

Brene Brown - Daring Greatly

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July 13th, 2016

7/13/2016

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I have so many moments in my past that
I beat myself up about over again and again.

And the majority of them are stories of me
saying something stupid,
doing something awful
or any combination in between.

Yet I go over them, over and over,
until the path to those thoughts
becomes worn down and easy to travel.
I find myself going through them
without even actively trying.

Rumination becomes a means to escape uncertainty.
And maybe some fear.

Yet, It brings me no joy,
makes happiness retreat in the opposite direction
and can be so tiresome.
But what we did
and who were
in the past are
just stories.

They only exist as ideas in the present
and belong as much to us as anybody else's story does.

We are who we are at this moment
and who we become in the future
starts right now.

Step by step,
moment by moment,
choice by choice.

Of course we need to take responsibility for past actions
if they have had a negative effect or caused harm
that needs repairing,
but for things we can’t change,
and chapters that have ended,

And, we can let the path
to those thoughts
grow back over
and leave them behind.

So today, right now, I am going to
Start a new story.

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Women, Often are the Caretakers of a Relationship and Becomes the Pursing Spouse.

7/10/2016

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In our society, women tend to be the caretakers of relationships. They usually pick up on distance sooner than their lovers, and they are often more in touch with their attachment needs. So in their role in the relationship dance there is more often the woman pursuing, and often is the more blaming spouse.
Men, on the other hand, have been taught to suppress emotional responses and needs, and also to be problem solvers, which sets them up in the withdraw role.

If I appeal to you for emotional connection and you respond intellectually to a problem, rather than directly to me, on an attachment level, I will experience that as "no response."

This is one of the reasons that the research on social support uniformly states that people want "indirect" support, or, emotional confirmation and caring from their partners, rather than advice.

Often men say that they do not know how to respond on an emotional level. But they do!

Men do it when they feel safe, most often with their children. The tragedy here is that a man may be doing his best to answer his wife's concerns by offering advice and solutions, not understanding that what she is really seeking from him is emotional engagement.

His engagement is the solution for her.

The most destructive belief is the belie that a healthy, mature adult is not supposed to need emotional connection and so is not entitled to this kind of caring.

Clients tell me, "I just cannot just tell him that I am feeling small and need his arms around me. I am not a kid," or "I have never asked for that. I don't feel entitled. I shouldn't need that."

If we cannot name and accept our own attachment needs,
sending clear messages to others when those needs are"hot" is impossible.
Ambiguous messages are what keep us stuck.

As partners in a relationship we find that it is so much easier to say, "Why aren't you more talkative? Don't you have anything to say to me?" than to open up and ask that our need for loving connect be met which is vulnerable.

Often times partner admit, "When I feel irrelevant, I criticize back. He rolls his eyes, his tone then becomes contemptuous and I realize my responses don't matter to him. So I criticize him more and he retreats. We are off, and the destructive music plays on!"

Rather they could find an easy answer. Pausing and thinking about the pattern of the dance and the music playing, "Wait a minute, what is happening here? We are getting caught up in a silly fight and we are both getting hurt."

This is the first step in stopping the pattern of that destructive dance.
Recognize the music.

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Love is a Reflection of My Free Choice & My Ability to Respond Powerfully.

Phenomenal Woman, That's Me.

To Be Beautiful Means to be Yourself.

Wanting is Seeking Elsewhere.

Remembering a Friend who Taught Me About Love.

July 13th, 2016

Women, Often are the Caretakers of a Relationship and Becomes the Pursing Spouse.

Author: Jo Ellen Fletcher, M.A.Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist

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Author:
Jo Ellen Fletcher, M.A.
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist