Denied Emotions – Learning To Live And Love God's Way

The Bully Inside

As I have described in previous posts, here at my high desert home, there is a seemingly endless list of things that need attention, fixing, doing, building, planting, creating etc to make it a truly safe, secure, comfortable, self-responsible, enjoyable and beautiful home, and the sheer magnitude of this list really get me down at times. I often feel overwhelmed.

A few days ago, I had a really important aha moment regarding all this work. I realized that my real emotion about it is that, most of the time, I DON’T WANT TO DO IT. Sometimes I have been able to hire others to help me, but the Law of Attraction for me has been full of challenges in finding or keeping help. I end up being stuck with the thing that needs fixing or doing, and no one to help me.

I have frequently FORCED myself to do the task, at times thinking that God and Her Laws must want me to be more self-sufficient and stop relying on my brothers to do all this work for me. I do after all have expectations and demands towards men, so some of this overwhelming frustration is also God’s Laws at work on those errors in my soul.

But in this aha moment, I suddenly recognized that the gut-twisting resistance and overwhelm to these daunting physical tasks has a much bigger message for me: Forcing myself to do things I don’t want to do is not loving. It is not honoring or listening to the tightening in my gut that is trying to communicate to me. It is an emotion that needs to be felt, not overridden or ignored, but really allowed its full expression—so it can be released. And this I don’t want to response to all the physical tasks parallels the resistance I have to feeling emotions. I have that same feeling when I am faced with the truth about my self and my sins, and the causal emotions of childhood pain. I really don’t want to do or feel any of these things!!

It is no wonder I have not made progress on this journey to God. I have been swept up in the two biggest time-wasting eddies of all: 1. No soul-level desire to see the truth about myself—mostly my sins against myself and others, and 2. No soul-level desire to release causal childhood emotional errors. Jesus has explained that the soul simply cannot heal without Truth and soul-based desire. I have tried really hard to use my willpower to make things happen, but without the cooperation and desire of the soul, it just won’t work.

Jesus has said so many times that forcing ourselves using will power to do something we really don’t want to do at the soul level is very unloving to ourselves and thus actually a sin. I have heard him say that over an over, but I never really understood it, because I never felt it before. Instead of engaging in this unloving demand of ourselves, he has encouraged us to feel the emotions of how much we don’t want to do it. But, until my aha moment, I only accepted this intellectually. It sounded good. And I have occasionally visited the emotion of not wanting to, but didn’t really connect it with that small clenching of my gut every time I had a task ahead of me that I was willing to push myself into. Now that I have allowed myself to connect the feeling in my gut with my soul’s cry against being pushed into things, I don’t think I can ignore it anymore.

It is easy to see how this ties in with so many childhood emotions of feeling forced to do all the typical things of childhood: eat your peas, stop crying, clean your room, do the dishes, go to school, go to church, get a shot from the doctor, get woken up to go pee so I wouldn’t wet my bed, shut up or someone will get angry, etc. All these things may sound normal or even harmless, but every time we are forced against our will, and not even allowed to express our unhappiness about it, the frustrated emotions get stuck in our soul and body. I have a feeling there mountains of such emotions within me.

This new understanding is also helping me to see that I have not been listening to, valuing or honoring myself, my soul. The Law of Attraction has brought me a lifetime of experiences of others not listening to me, and not giving value to what I say, think, or feel. Now I can see why. I am ignoring myself too.

Unfortunately, I also get down on myself—judge myself—for ‘not wanting to’, among other things. I believe I should deal with these dark emotions in me if I am to become a loving person. I should want to become a loving person. I should get over this resistance and want to do these household tasks if I want to have a nice home. I should face my fears about doing them wrong, and having things leak and break due to my incompetence. While facing our fears may be a good thing, I still need to feel about why I have these fears, and why I don’t really want to face them. And judging myself is totally against God’s Way as well, and it too will completely halt my progress towards love. Wow, so many blocks! Perhaps I will gain some more clarity about that sin as I work through the ‘I don’t want to’ issue.

So I ask myself, “Why, at the soul level, do I so much not want to do these things?”

I suspect there are many soul-based reasons for my current attitude, but so far, the one reason that jumps out is that I feel forced to do them. I feel like someone is bullying me, and I am angry about it. My parents, like most, bullied me—a child only has to feel threatened to feel bullied— but now that I am an adult person, I am actually bullying myself!!

All this forcing and bullying is very unloving and will thus cause me to continue spiraling down a path away from God, not towards God. It is impressive how powerful the soul is— that I didn’t even start to ‘get this’ at all until the other day. Sometimes our resistance to truth is that strong.

The way forward from here is to:

Stop the forcing
Stop ignoring and lying to myself about my real feelings, and explore why I have wanted to ignore and deceive myself
And feel viscerally, deeply and fully all the emotions contributing to why I don’t want to feel the causal emotions, do the household tasks etc.

In the spirit world, apparently, the teachers of Divine Truth only give us one issue at a time to work on. And for me, right now, this is the one.

Truth I Haven’t Wanted To See

In my last blog post, (Discoveries About Anger), I shared some insights I had recently had about my continued issue with anger. Well, it turns out, my soul issues are even more serious than I thought.

A few weeks ago (mid-November, 2016), I flew to Queensland, Australia to attend the second of the Assistance Groups that Jesus and Mary gave on Understanding God’s Loving Laws in the the Education in Love series. [More information on these lectures can be found at: Divine Truth Assistance Group Information]

It was announced at the Friday evening introductory session, that Jesus and Mary had noticed an increasing problem with inter-gender issues occurring in the Assistance Groups, and that they were going to start enforcing God’s Loving Laws in order to resolve the issue. On Sunday morning, that enforcement came to be, and along with 7 others, I was asked to leave the event. Jesus explained that I was one of ten women who, aware of it or not, were in such rage and anger primarily at men, that it was causing a significant imbalance in the ratios of men and women in the audience, and creating an atmosphere where neither gender feels safe to feel their emotions. Men were being repelled by us women, keeping them from attending (only 24% men, 22% if you subtract the men who had stayed over from the first session).

Here are the emotions shared by the ten of us women:
1. wanting to emasculate men emotionally and sexually
2. desire to gain power and control over and bully other women
3. and have an arrogant delusion about our own goodness

I felt like I was in shock when he called my name. I have believed that although I wasn’t making much progress on my anger issues, I was still headed in the right direction. I believed I was feeling key emotions. I believed I was sincere in my desire to bring my life (although slowly, and with struggle) into harmony with God’s Laws. I believed I must be making at least some progress with all the emotions that have come up. Even now, I am struggling to let the truth of what Jesus said settle in my heart. And for me personally, he explained, the sin was even worse, because of the total denial of these emotions within me.

After hearing this truth, I stayed at the resort and attempted to feel whatever I could in the privacy of my room. I felt some anger and frustration. But as I was doing this, I realized that I didn’t even really understand what rage was. So I did some research on the internet. It turns out that rage is different from anger. It is the emotion caused by the repeated denial of anger. The anger apparently grows and festers to the point where we want to destroy things and people. That is rage. And that explained a few things for me. Firstly, I have never really let myself feel any rage. The emotions were just too ugly—the desire to kill or destroy people, for example is a rage emotion. Now the emotions that Jesus described made more sense. These are the kinds of emotions that come from lots of suppression of anger.

I also searched on the internet for resources on releasing rage, and found something that seemed helpful: (http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/TMS_Recovery_Program#Feel_Your_Feelings ; part II, the audio on rage), and was able to follow along with a counselor who walked a person through some rage release. It was frightening to allow myself to feel the honest emotions that came up of hating and wanting to destroy my parents. There was so much rage that came about how my needs were frequently met with anger, ridicule, denial, condescension, blame, inconsistency etc from my parents. I can see how all this has led to my desire to control, gain power, and bully all who I believe are a threat to me or want to control or negate me.

In addition to this major feedback, Jesus also spoke to me (when I first arrived to the event) about this website and blog. He asked if I still had comments allowed on it. I said I did, but that I wasn’t attached to them and would easily remove them. He assured me that emotionally I did have attachment to people commenting. He said that I also have an emotion of wanting to involve others in my emotions, which was evident in the blog. And he pointed out that in our short conversation about it, I was demonstrating resistance to Truth about both issues. I asked him if I should not do a blog while I am in my current condition, and he said there is nothing wrong with doing a blog [if it is in harmony with love]. Of course he wasn’t going to tell me what to do, but it appears that I need to work through these emotions he mentioned, and look honestly at my motivations behind my website and blog.

I have a tendency to be hard on myself when I don’t succeed at something, or when someone points out my failings. A part of me wants to go into hiding until I get it right, until I am finally a loving person. One thing I need to keep in mind is (I have a tendency to forget) that my purpose in attempting to engage God’s Way is learning about love. I am going to make mistakes. I am going to discover things about myself that are not loving. It is going to be confusing because of the false things I was taught about truth and love as a child. Yet one thing I am hearing, as I listen to audio recordings of the first session of God’s Loving Laws that a friend shared with me, is that God knows that we want to learn Her Way, and God has compassion for us in the mistakes we make as we get there. I need to develop that quality—to have compassion for myself, rather than pummel myself with criticism because I am not a loving person yet.

From what I am learning from Jesus and Mary, it is apparent that in order to become that loving person, I am going to need to grow my sincere desire for Love and Truth, grow my desire for honest self-evaluation, and a mega-dose of desire to feel all that is causing such unloving emotions. That’s a lot of desire-growing. We’ll see how it goes.

I also want to take some time off from doing this blog to feel emotions related to all this feedback. As hard as it is for me to see right now, truthful feedback is always a positive thing. It is a loving correction that has the potential to put me back on course towards love and God. It doesn’t feel that way right now. It just feels confusing and overwhelming, but I will let myself feel these emotions too.

Discoveries About Anger

As I mentioned in my last blog post Murphy Meets God, God’s Laws have been helping me to feel lots of emotions around not getting what I want, and having lots of things going ‘wrong’ (according to my definition). That has been a regular theme since acquiring this new home of mine in March, and mostly that is still the case (October). Some things have eventually been completed, and some things recently, like the bathroom tiling, even occurred without incident. Wow, do I celebrate those triumphs! But several projects continue to be a struggle. For example, I did end up having to drill a whole new well, at the cost of around $15,000. And I still do not have a functioning toilet, shower, or solar system.

So with eight months of crazy, frustrating events, I have had countless opportunities to explore my anger issues, since that has been the primary emotion that comes up when I don’t get my way. But actually, anger is an emotion I have been working on for about six years (or at least I thought I was working on it), since I learned about releasing emotions from Jesus and Mary. All this time, I have been attempting to release anger by bashing my bashing pole or my punching bag, and yelling into my cloths, but it is still there. It is still in my soul. All of God’s Laws have been attempting to help me deal with this life-long anger issue, but I have not been getting to the root of it. I have gone through immense frustration at how anger just keeps arising in me. My lack of success with anger tells me that there must be emotions underneath the anger that I am not releasing—emotions that I must be highly resistive to.

Only in the last few weeks, I have been making what feel like small but important steps in my journey to release the anger from my soul. God has finally been able to help me see some Truth about my anger: I actually want to be angry at others and myself. The reason for that is that I have a well established false belief that anger is how you get what you want. I really believe that. And I haven’t really felt that anger was wrong. It was just what I was taught to do. It is what my parents did, and probably what their parents did. I was taught that anger is the method to get things done when things aren’t going smoothly. Anger is the only method I have known. And it appears to work! How could such a useful tool be wrong?

But it is wrong, and it betrays a total lack of understanding of free will and love. I am being shown that in using anger, I am firstly putting all the blame on others, and actually attempting to punish and shame others (and sometimes myself) into doing what I want. Blaming, punishing and shaming I can, at least partly, feel as sin, because I’ve felt lots of that done to me, and it hurts. It damages people. So making this connection between anger and these more obvious sins is an important step. It is helping me to feel a little more of God’s perspective on what I have been doing with anger. And the fact that I use it in an attempt to get people to feed my demands and expectations and addictions to certain outcomes, is another layer of the sin involved about which I have much more to feel about.

So having awareness of these two things: a big false belief about anger, and the attempt to blame, punish and shame, are important. However, it won’t change much with just the awareness. From what I understand, I need to unravel some pretty entrenched belief systems and go through a repentance process of inflicting this anger upon the world (and myself). And that is going to involve feeling much more deeply the errors (sins) involved.

Then I wonder… if I stop projecting anger, what do I do when everything is going awry, when I feel rage bubbling up, and the bashing isn’t working? This is where I am venturing into very uncomfortable territory. I have been practicing feeling the horrible feelings that arise just ‘before’ or underneath the anger. I tell myself, ‘be humble, be humble, and letting really yucky feelings come up that I can tell I really rant to avoid. What I have discovered is a whole bunch of emotions around how much I don’t feel cared for, and without my ‘friend’ anger, I also feel so powerless to get what I need or want.

Not feeling cared for is an emotion I have been working on for a while, so I haven’t been feeling so terrified about it lately. However, just recently, God has shown me that I was feeling a little less terrified of this emotion because of resistance, not because I had made great progress on it! The thing is, there are so many layers of this issue, so much emotion locked inside me about how unloved I really was at the emotional level, that I am only letting myself feel it as the true will of my soul dictates. This is not an emotion I can use will-power to push through! It is so terrifying to feel how emotionally abandoned I was as a child that everything has to be aligned before each layer of that injury opens up for me to feel.

My terror of powerlessness is a little different. That one has become much closer to the surface, right under the anger every time something goes wrong. I am absolutely terrified of having no power to control my environment. For years I have had dreams where the brakes or steering go out, and I have absolutely no control of the vehicle I am driving. Now those dreams are making sense. Naturally, this gets down to how terrified I felt as a child of that powerlessness—powerless to protect myself from the anger, expectations and demands of me, powerless to find dependable love and emotional support, powerless to stop my body from wetting the bed, powerless to avoid the addictions that I was groomed and forced through anger and control to fulfill in my parents. I have resisted the Truth of this damage because I so wanted to believe my parents loved me in a pure way, and had my best interest as a priority. Sure, there were times of love. There was consistent support of my physical needs, and even support of a number of childhood desires, but there was such a strong undercurrent based on unloving projections, denials, untruth, manipulations, control and outright angry attack, that great damage was done. I am learning that God’s perspective of how most children on this planet are treated is totally different to how we are taught to perceive our childhood. And God’s perspective is that pretty much everyone is greatly damaged and that most of that damage gets established as children by our families. Slowly, I am opening to God’s Truth about my life. And it is very confronting, and certainly comes with it lots of painful emotions.

The other key element to letting go of anger and becoming a loving person, is the love factor. I need to keep growing my desire for love and truth. I need to build my faith in love. Currently, I don’t actually trust love. Real love, as God knows it, has not played much of a role in my life. I don’t have much experience in its positive outcomes. Jesus teaches us that love is a gift. And for it to be a gift, we cannot expect it from people, which is what I have been doing. I have expected people to be considerate, be true to their word, do their work well, etc… in other words—be loving to me. And when they didn’t, I would get angry—proof that I had demands of them. I can see that this is an attempt to get, from those around me currently, the love and consideration I didn’t get as a child. This is how addictions work, but the problem is that addictions don’t work, and they cause damage to others as well as ourselves.

To transform myself from an angry person to a loving one, I will need to work through a pile of blocks: Why I want to keep ‘doing anger,’ why I don’t want to take responsibility for my Law of Attraction events and the emotions they prompt, why I don’t want to trust love, why I don’t want to feel the sins of my unloving actions and belief systems, and why I don’t want to feel the emotions that would free me from my past and block me to God’s Love and Truth. And as I move through these blocks, then I will be able to long more successfully (pray) for God’s Love and Truth, and be more humble to feeling each painful emotion as it arises.

I have found it to be very helpful to let myself feel why I don’t want to feel all the emotions that need releasing. That seems to be the key to the deeper stuff that is driving my anger.

I cannot even imagine the impact on my life the clearing of these anger emotions will have. That’s going to be huge. And its quite exciting to ponder. Thank goodness God and Her Laws are always there to help us work through it. I am definitely going to need the help.

Murphy Meets God

Murphy’s Law: What can go wrong will go wrong.

God’s Law: What needs to ‘go wrong’ will ‘go wrong’.

That second part is me using poetic license with a fundamental Truth that all of God’s Laws are designed to teach us about love. Yet sometimes God’s loving Laws feel to our mistaken souls like everything is going wrong.

So this is how it relates to events in my life right now…

Once I made up my mind to find my new home, my soul space, where I could work on bringing my life and my whole soul into harmony with God’s Way, things flowed wonderfully. God’s Laws seemed to work overtime to support me in this endeavor. And even an amazing flow of money showed up (see Transparency). But now that I am actually getting to work on the many projects here at my new home, God’s Laws are supporting me in some much more difficult ways. The Law of Attraction has been hugely challenging, with event after event of big delays and things going ‘wrong’, mostly due to mistakes being made left and right: my own mistakes, mistakes of those who had the property before me, and mistakes of people I am hiring to help me create my home. I appear to be losing a race to get the house set up (with power, toilet, shower etc) before winter sets in.

I have learned, thanks to Jesus and Mary, that in order to come closer to God, I need to unravel my emotional addictions and my facade, so that the painful emotions I have been avoiding could come up to be felt and released. And I understand that this great unraveling will look very messy and involve lots of difficult emotions, but I didn’t expect them to all come up at once! Or at least, that is how it feels. It seems that nothing has being going well since I found this place (except for the money thing). It seems that many of my tears lately are simply because I feel so overwhelmed with feeling completely opposed in my attempt to create my new home and get it comfortable by winter time.

Here are a few examples of what has been going on:

1. When I first put an offer on the place, there was a geodesic dome that I was planning on living in while work was done on the straw bale hogan house. The front window of the dome had a small tear in the vinyl, so I was making inquiries about replacing it right away. Before I was able to compete the sale (by the end of the escrow period), the winds had torn through the window, and succeeded to shred the whole dome to pieces.

The dome is now just a frame that would cost around ten thousand dollars to re-cover, and vinyl has a poor lifespan, so I decided to use the frame for other purposes (make a greenhouse out of it eventually). This also meant that I would now have to live in the hogan while it is being worked on, which has been very dusty and messy, but preferable to me than a travel trailer. Lately, however, I have been questioning this decision, as I am so tired living in dust and mess.

2. I have always considered myself to be a good gardener. I have done it for 30 years. But my new land and its highly alkaline, clay/sand dirt (can’t even call it soil) seems to suck any nutrients right out of the plants I have tried to grow, and I have failed miserably, even with lots of amendments and manure tea. Every plant I tied to start from seed has died.

3. When I first got here, I bought a generator. It was refurbished by someone who was cleaning a water tank that came with the property, and they were very confident that it was a great deal at $350. After using it only a few times, it blue a piston…shot right out the side of the engine. No warrantee of course.

4. Then there are issues with the hogan house itself. The chicken wire on the straw bales walls was not ‘stitched’ properly, making an unstable base for the mud, and no lime (used to make natural finishes more rain resistant) was used on the exterior walls, so mud washes off where the rain hits it. (And a lime coating can’t be added over an ordinary mud finish, or it will peel off.)

5. And the sand stone slab floors in the house were never leveled, so there is a 2 1/2 inch difference between the doorways and the middle of the room, which means I have to go through each stone and level it. Extremely tedious. Thank goodness I actually like working with stone.

Leveling floors one stone at a time to correct mound in middle of house.

6. The wall finish of my hogan house is basically cob, which is a mix of sand, clay and bits of straw, and when I bought the place much of it was in great disrepair. To protect the straw bale structure, and keep critters out, this was a priority to remedy. It requires a certain ratio of clay to sand in order to be sticky enough to hold together (not enough clay) yet not crack (too much clay). I had a very frustrating time with numerous batches of cracking mud before I finally came up with the right mix using the unique sand and clay from my land.

Exterior wall showing crack on right and a new patch on left (which will match more once it weathers).

7. Due to the many breaches in the exterior walls, there were chipmunks and dozens of mice and crickets living in the house when I first moved in who seemed to hold loud parties all night long. I went through months of catching mice one by one in a Have-a-Heart trap that I rigged so the Houdini mice couldn’t escape (they can get through a 1/4 inch by 1/2 inch opening!), and the crickets I got good at catching with a large plastic cup.

8. Another major priority on this place was to get a new roof because the old one had blown off in sections, and the valleys of the roof were done backwards, capturing water and running it under the lower roofing. So as soon as I had possession of the place, before the money came in, I ear tagged what resources I had to get that rolling. I had a company all set up to do it, and at the last minute (days before they were meant to get started) they canceled the job. Now that might not seem like a big deal, but here in Arizona, there is a limited window of opportunity to do roofs at this time of year so everyone is clambering to be scheduled. Timing has to be after the hurricane like winds we get every spring, and before the monsoon season, which typically starts July 1st. This cancellation meant that I was now scheduled into the monsoon season. I was lucky though as monsoons started late this year, but that didn’t help my stress level. One of the few successes in this saga of trying to get things done is that I now have a new roof, gutters and tanks!

My home with its new roof and one of two new rainwater tanks.

9. But the challenges continue… Two weeks ago, a man I hired to install a solar system for me accidentally dropped the power supply wires for the well pump down into the well! It wasn’t really his fault as the installer did not secure the wires at all. He was unable to fish them out, so I have had to contact a well driller to pull out the wires by pulling out the well pump, which will cost me many dollars. Meanwhile, the solar system, which was supposed to take only a few weeks to install, is now on its second month.

This last one about the dropped wires really got me. Its kind of like, OK, God, there must be an emotion (or a hundred) that is bringing all this difficulty to me, which I am not getting to, regardless of regular feeling/prayer sessions. What am I missing? I was so looking forward to finally having power, pressurized water, a hot shower, and a flush toilet, which I have been without this whole time. I am really tired of camping. I am really tired of everything going wrong. I even entertained the thought of packing it all in, and finding a finished home (since I can afford it now) on less acreage where I could avoid my fears and addictions and spend time doing easier, more enjoyable things than confronting every addiction I have. But a more comfortable life will not bring me closer to God, Truth, or knowing who I really am (which includes my soulmate). So on I trudge, apparently facing every addiction known to man.

One of the immediate emotions that comes up for me when something comes up due to a mistake or goes wrong is anger. I am getting more sensitive to when it arises, so I have been ‘working’ on it regularly, but all that bashing my tree trunk post in my house with my rubber hose and screams of frustration into my pillow may, at best, only made a dent in the issue. But with all that has been going on lately, and the fact that I have been feeling so many emotions about things going ‘wrong’, something did happen that feels really helpful. I was in one of my attempts-to-pray-and-feel sessions, and I did receive an insight. It turns out that I have some false beliefs that go back to childhood about anger and having unloving expectations and demands of people (including myself) that have been keeping the anger solidly in place all this time. I could bash and scream forever, and unless I unravel these false beliefs, I will remain enmeshed with anger. This is really good news. And I will share more about these discoveries in my next post.

Until then, May you be in a good flow with God and Her powerful loving Laws,

Jennifer

Teepee Poles and Cloudy Weather

Back in June, when summer came quickly to heat up my new desert home, I was outside in front of my house watering my newly planted trees and bushes in the cool morning calmness, and a truck came down the normally quiet dirt road that I live on. This was especially unusual this early in the morning. It wasn’t one of the regular trucks of the neighbors I see go by.

As I usually do, I raised my hand in a neighborly wave, and the truck slowed to a stop. I made my way across the sandy distance to see what the person, a man, I could see, wanted. He was a Navajo who had seen the teepee poles standing on my property and was curious about them. I explained that I did not put them there, and wasn’t sure if they would ever have new ‘skins’, or what I would do with them. but in the mean time, I enjoyed the fact that the birds loved to perch on the end of those 20+ foot poles, as they were the tallest perches around.

The Teepee poles on my property where the birds love to perch.

The man explained he was a horseshoer on his way to take care of some neighbor’s horses, which explained the early hour, as horseshoers like to do their work when it is not so hot. We chatted a bit about natural horse hoof care and nature, and he asked me if I was alone there. I was. Then as we chatted, he asked again. Are you alone here? Asking once seemed normal, but twice? Hmm. I chose to ignore. I do have the tendency to think if I ignore this, it will be fine. Or maybe it was that I don’t want to face the fact that I am alone here, and don’t really want to feel about that. The thought instead was, making some new friends would be nice.

He asked if he could stop by on his return, see the teepee site, and swap nature stories. I agreed, imagining sharing a casual ‘cuppa’ as they say in Australia (ie a cup of tea).

I had a nice experience with a Navajo elder a few months before, when the elder came to pick up a bed I had posted on Craig’s List. So I was telling myself it would be another nice connection, a friend to say hello to as they drive by these remote dirt roads.

An hour or two later, I heard the truck returning. He parked by the teepee poles, and as is a Navajo custom, he stayed in his truck until invited out. I invited him to see the poles. He was a big guy.

We chatted about the ceremonies of teepees and sweat lodges, and I noticed he repeated himself often. It was kind of irritating, but I still wasn’t really feeling the situation.

After about 10-15 minutes, we started back towards his truck. He had a cold, so I told him, ‘I would shake your hand, but you have a cold’ (he’d been coughing into his hands repeatedly). Yet he put his hand out anyway to shake mine. I didn’t want to be rude (addiction), so I shook it, despite my desire not to (lack of self honor/love). He kind of pulled me towards him as he shook my hand. Ick. Another warning if I had been humble to feeling. Then he opened his arms the way people do when they are requesting a hug. My honest feeling was this feels bad, but I feel obligated to be nice. So again in my addiction of pleasing a man and ignoring the growing list of yucky vibes, I agreed and started to give him a hub. That is when it became obvious to me what was going on. He trapped me against him and attempted a kiss. I of course turned my head and tried to back away. He had me trapped. I got angry. At this close proximity, I could smell alcohol on his breath. I didn’t fight him or struggle, but said slowly and deliberately and with what I believed was authority (but was more a mix of anger and terror), “Take your arm off of me.” “Take your arm off of me”. Finally he did.

“Its time for you to go now,” I said. He asked for a final hug, as in ‘no bad feelings heh?’ What?! You gotta be kidding!. I said, “Sorry, pal, you just lost that privilege.”

He got in his truck and drove away.

And I cried the rest of the afternoon.

It has been pointed out to me, and now I too see patterns in myself of not telling myself the truth, not seeing the whole picture of a situation, not trusting my feelings, or not even recognizing or feeling when something is off. How does that kind of denial get established?

I was telling this story to my friend Julie, and she explained that she learned to pick up on expectations from men and confront them immediately with something like, “I am not interested in sex or a relationship; I am just being friendly, so don’t get any ideas.” (Not her exact words but something to that effect).

I had not learned that lesson.

This relatively gentle but effective Law of Attraction incident could have been a whole lot worse. But it didn’t need to be (at least right now). It was terrifying enough as it was, and I was able to access a whole bunch of emotions around the event, yet I can tell there is more than I am willing to feel right now. Some of the issues are: Why didn’t I feel the truth here?… which leads to… Why didn’t I WANT to feel the truth? Why was I willing to put having a friend above the truth of the unloving situation. How did I come to so habitually ignore my feelings and well being in order to please the male?

Ignoring my feelings to please the male is obvious. I was trained my whole life to sacrifice myself and please both my dad and my mom, lest I receive their rejection and rage. And my mom was a great teacher of this error too, as she demonstrated throughout my life this very damaging habit of compromising her self-love and self-worth in order to please my dad (and society in general). So I learned this pattern very well. And it is so damaging!

The feeling of being trapped and overpowered by the male was well highlighted in this event too. That clearly has to do with my dad, as he was a controlling bully, but also it feels generational, in other words, bigger than just events in my childhood, where it could be that some of these painful emotions were passed down from a whole line of women in our family history, who each refused to feel their emotions around these kinds of events.

No matter where painful, fearful emotions come from, if I am going to develop a relationship with God, I will need to take responsibility for these errors being trapped within myself by building my desire to feel the truth and the pain.

Regardless of how much crying I did as a result of this event at the time (which is good), I am learning that emotions are usually far bigger and more entrenched that we believe, due to the very lack of desire to feel the truth and pain of the issues that brings events like this in the first place. And sure enough, a few weeks after the incident, I became aware that I was in a lot of denial of how much fear and terror I carry around inside me all the time that this event was also trying to mobilize. Underneath a lot of denial, I feel very unsafe. At this later time, I was able to tap into this all-pervasive-seeming terror that also felt intergenerational. Jesus has taught recently that this is a certain kind of terror. He calls it ‘global’ terror, in that it effects so many aspects of our lives. I cannot even imagine what I would feel like inside if I did not have this global terror inside. I look forward to that day.

So I will keep praying to God to help me open to more of the fearful emotions inside, and keep visiting this event as long as it brings up emotions for me. Writing this all down has been good for me too. It brings these issues back to my awareness.