Chick Wisdom Will Never Fail Us...

For all the things that we each go through, there isn't anything as awesome as the Wisdom which comes from Being a Chick!

Making use of the feminine wiles is not for the faint of heart!

There are a lot of lessons that we learn each day. Some of them are good and make a positive impact. Some of them suck ass but still make a positive impact. All of them are needed. None the less,when it comes to having those conversations with the air, and when we feel like once again we have screwed things SO up that there is nothing that we can think of to make them be better or even different, into the brain comes something which I have termed as being "Chick Wisdom."

Chick Wisdom

You can call it a woman's intuition, or your can call it a Divinely Purposed "thing" that all women seem to possess (and hell, some of us even use it!), but I prefer to call it Chick Wisdom.

Yeah, this post is specifically for the girls and women of the world, namely for those of us who haven't yet been through enough to know how to effectively bounce back from things which may, at the time they are happening, piss us off and break our hearts, but really, all we were doing was learning.

None of us can have any sort of Wisdom without having to go through a few things in life. Things in life aren't always all bad. When we hear about the lessons that we learn most of the time we are prone to believe that what it is that we had to go through was somehow bad. If you learned from what you went through, and you know that you cannot do whatever it was that you did, you learned. If your heart ached but the ache dulled and then you woke up one day refreshed and feeling better than you have in a long while, you learned. If you went through shit, and experienced shit, but you are still in the mindset that all it was was shit, then you didn't learn shit. It is that simple. Really.

You can try to get your point across, but if it is that your words befall deaf ears, and you continue to push and try and do what you think you have to in order to feel better, then you ain't learned a thing.

When we are compelled more to think before we speak or act, think about how a certain thing will affect another person and we are more inclined to impose onto them not only our opinion but also the energy that tells them that no matter what, you are right and they are not, you are not utilizing your own method of the chick in you trying hard to scratch the surface of the issues which are yours and yours alone. While there are other people in your life who might make you miserable, the idea that they are who is responsible for how you feel is preposterous and it is so because you are choosing to let these things happen and choosing to let their shit be your shit, too. And that only makes you feel like a dumbshit, really.

Take it from a professional part-time dumbshit...utilize that Divine Chick Wisdom 

Every single one of us has moments where we lose our clarity and fall victim to our own dumbshit tendencies. I do it a lot. I am sure that I am not the only one who does, but I might be one of the few who will own up to it. Doesn't matter - we cannot go on through life being a dumbshit, and more, we cannot go on through life trying to not be a dumbshit all the time.

What we can do, however, is we can acknowledge that we have been a dumbshit, can bother ourselves with the idea that we are only human and then can use our Inner Chick to guide us through the maze of madness caused by life.

Survivors of domestic violence and emotional abuse sometimes suffer from a largess of dumbshit tendencies, and the truth is that we are only human, and that our own tendencies toward making bad judgment calls and even worse decisions will take over if we are not allowing ourselves to simply just accept that we are not going to always get things right, that we are prone to making choices that might not be the best ones we have made. The beauty of this is that if we know that we are going to screw things up, then we should know, too, that the bigger the dumbshit thing we do, and the more work it takes to come back from that thing, the wiser we will be for the effort and more, for the dumbshit thing that we did.

You are human. You are going to make all kinds of mistakes. Deal with it. Learn from it.

That way the next time you have the opportunity to be all the dumbshit you can be comes to you,  you will have had enough experience to know the difference between doing a dumbshit thing and using that Chick Wisdom you worked so hard to develop.

It isn't that hard to make bad decisions. It is only hard when we cannot accept that we did. You were born for a reason, and that reason was to learn throughout the course of your life, yes, even and especially as at one time the victim of someone else, and then eventually, your very own Survivor!!

...and no one who survives anything terrible can possibly be a dumbshit ALL the time, can they?

Nah...I didn't think so either...

I Love You All!!
ROX

The Path of Letting Go

We are never told that there will come a time in our lives when we can just simply let it all go and heal...
We cannot heal according to the whims of others, only from a place within our own selves will healing begin.


While I would love to sit here, pining away at all of the ugly things which have befallen my life these last two decades, and more, while the things that I didn't have control over as a child I now have control over, and tell a victim on their way to survivorhood that they just need to get over it, I know personally that it just is not that easy. There are things which happen to people that, for one reason or another, it seems, they have a very difficult time healing from. I am no different. It took me a very long time, not to get over what this person who I married half my lifetime ago has said and has done to me, but more, what it was that I blamed my mother for not having a clue about or worse - simply turning a blind eye to.

And let me set the record straight for you all right now - it is never going to be up to the people who were the adults in our lives at another time in our lives to make things right within us or for us. We are not ever guaranteed a thing in life, no, not even that the person who our parents choose to be our caretakers when we are children. I was a very angry child to a mother who, for what it is worth, knew what was happening to me, at least the part that she thought of as being "discipline," that is, but not the verbal or psychologically abusive stuff. And in her defense I must say right now that there are a lot of people on this planet who still believe that corporeal punishment is a very good thing. It isn't. I Know this, because I lived through it and was only alerted to the thing that happened to me so very long ago very recently.

I cannot tell another person when their time to let go of their hurts from the past will come to them, cannot tell another person when is the right time to just allow the healing to start - I mean the real healing - because that part is all of our own and on our own. No one can tell us how or when we will, but I want you all to know that eventually, with time, lots of tears, much rage, and a pounding anger which will either subside and we will learn from it, or, conversely, we will not accept it and will not allow it to just fade away from our lives and we will choose to carry on with it as though it was meant to be a part of our own Selves, and while it may seem odd that I might say so, for some people, that anger is what fuels their healing which means that their anger is the truth of them.

We cannot tell other people how they should deal with their own history, for that belongs to them and only to them, and most of the time I have been known to see the truth on the Scenic Route of Life, choosing to go through all the motions and whether I want to think about it or even believe it, savor each and every moment so as to garner what learning that I can from it all.

It is your Path, Walk it...


Just as any other Path we take, so, too, is the path to healing along the Path to Enlightenment. We do not ever realize that what we each go through is meant as a learning tool for us all, and along the way we do what we will to cope.

When we choose to walk the Path of Enlightenment, we are choosing to Know what we are made of, and through the tears and the surety of heartache, and over the course of time that it will take for us to Know our own Selves very well and well enough to realize when it is that what we needed to know, we know, we also walk the Path to healing.

No one said it would be easy.
But as all else that is meant to be had through pushing through it and dealing with it, so, too, is the Path to Healing a hard Path to walk...but, it is the Path which we all eventually will choose.

That is the time when we Know that we can finally let go of the monsters in the closet, the time that we can take the hand of the younger version of ourselves, the child who will Live within us all, the Soul of us, and Walk the Path we chose in this lifetime...

When that time comes, we Know that we chose the right Path and we can finally see the reason that we were so hurt, and more, we can see how it came to be that somehow, we made it through it all and now here we are, better, smarter, stronger and with a conviction of heart and soul, both which can only be had through the birthing of our newer Selves through the Pain that caused us to have to go back to a time where things seemed right because someone else told us things were, only to later be the very person who, through no fault of your own, would also be the one meant to Enlighten others of your own Path and where it took you and more, where it is leading you now.

It is your Path, so walk it, and do so in the Light of Peace and of Love.
When you are ready to, you can call it the time to Let it All Go and Breathe Again, or maybe, if you are like me, perhaps breathe for the very first time...

Let Go...it will only hurt for a little while!!

I Love You All !
ROX

Cry

Society sees crying and a show of emotions as a sign of weakness. Yet, in the world of the domestically abused, sometimes, tears are all we have.

The fact that my Sun sign is in Pisces makes it so that when I feel something, some sort of energetic or volatile pull on my emotions, if I am presented enough with all the facets and all the stuff that will take prior to said such emotional happening happens, if it is that the thing at hand is emotionally strong, I will likely end up in tears over it. This is not to say that I am not already an incredibly emotional person who feels every little nuance in a situation, but it is to say that personally I know that when we cry we are not only feeling what we have to feel at that given moment, but we are getting rid of toxicity that was not ours to begin with. This is the very reason that I tell anyone with whom I should have contact in regards to the issue of being physically assaulted for the very first time - that they NEED to cry.

Tears are a gift. Even though we end up with puffy eyes and our sinuses end up being very clogged from all the draining of our emotions, when we cry we very literally release the toxins which were built up within us throughout the time that we were only experiencing the emotional part of being abused. And of course the emotional part is way harder to get over than the physical bruises, but what only an actual formerly beaten person will tell you is that the emotions you feel after that initial attack will leave a person feeling an entirely new set of toxicity, and it is this level of toxicity that will compound the idea that you have already gone through all sorts of emotional stuff and now here is  yet one more thing to have to deal with that you know you never cared to deal with but are now very well in the middle of it.

I know this monster well because this monster is the one that lives in the back of the closet of my mind, taunting and haunting me with the mental images, not only of my bruised,  battered and broken self, but also and more importantly, the illuminated and bigger-than-it-really-is image of that angry face, the gritted teeth, the wild look in his eyes, and that illusory background of anger that he said was caused by me.

Let it be well known right at this moment that the first time you were abused, no matter what way it happened, that at that moment you were changed, forever. At that moment you were stripped of trust in others. At that moment your entire world became enmeshed and laced with a fear that is foreign to you, a fear that now lives in you because someone else placed it there and did so with force.

At that very moment in time, you became someone who you no longer knew, at least not the way that you did prior to that one very intense moment. You became the thing that you told yourself that you would never be - your spouse or partner's victim. The very word "victim" makes people think that you are somehow weak, that you should have had more back bone and above all, the thing that a lot of people will tell you but have no clue is NOT the truth is that they would never let it happen to them.

I am so sorry, folks, but abusers are not the type to tell you when they are going to toss you around physically, and abusers are not going to clue you in to when they have totally lost their mind and are now going to go ape shit on you and physically harm you. There is no abusive person on the planet who is also going to tell you what they are up to and there is no mental health expert who will make me believe that they are the very ones who will unwittingly tell you that they are going to physically harm you. It just won't happen that way. The way that physical abuse begins is at that point where the abuser cannot "break" you or your spirit, and if you are one of the luckier ones then you will know that a broken spirit is never up to those trying to break it and it is very much a case of if you will allow them that leeway - I allowed that leeway, but you don't have to.

You never have to let someone else tell you that they are going to physically harm you even though they will say it a whole lot. You never have to believe that you are not worth someone else's good effort at showing you that you are somehow the effort to be with someone who will not treat you like property. You never have to do a whole lot of things, and at the point where fist meets the eye or the jaw or the ribs, the notion that you do not have to do anything that you do not want to do flies out the window along with your sense of normalcy.
And it is your sense of normalcy that gets shaken and your sense of normalcy that becomes diluted with someone else's version of "normal."

Getting hit is not normal. Being told that you are all what someone else tells you that you are is also not normal and what is further not normal is the fact that in a whole lot of cases, many of us will allow this, out of fear or whatever the hell else it is that you can think of, to become the color of "normal" for an abuse victim because this is the "normal" that their own abusers grew up with. It is never normal for anyone to have to fear what another person  might do, because what they "might" do they ultimately and one day end up doing anyway. To tell an abuser that you are leaving them and that they need to deal with it is just inviting them to conjure ways of hurting you further.

In fact, it is evidenced that once a woman reports the abuse to authorities or when she chooses to leave him the abuse victim is neatly placed in a more dangerous position than she already was. Hence, the reason that I am all for provisions made to the abused through nonprofit agencies and government providers. When it comes to abuse and the leaving of our abusive partners it is the paper trail which matters and not only how the abuses made you feel. The reality is that the abuse is not done once you leave and the propensity and possibility of it still happening and more harshly once you are gone is real. More abused women are killed after they have left their abusers and not while they are stuck in the middle of the madness they have been forced to call their lives.

This, folks, is the reality that becomes that of an abused person, and the statistics you read and hear about are real. The textbook descriptions of what we go through are not real because these explanations do not give credence to the idea that bruises and bones take time to heal, that spirits crushed need time to become revitalized, and further, there is no textbook that adequately explains what it is that all abused people go through. And what we go through is quite a lot.

Hence, the reason that it is good to cry, the reason that when it all first starts it is good and needed to feel and explore those emotions and deal with them as best we can at the beginning of things without the benefit of therapy. In fact, to allow the tears to flow is therapy. It helps rid us of our sadness and our grief, helps to ease the bewilderment, and most of all, allows us to feel whatever emotions that we are feeling at the time it all comes to the head that, in most cases, ends up happening and it does not matter how long it took for your attacker to start in on you with the verbal and emotional abuse because at the onset of those things happening it is but a matter of time before the physical abuse begins.

So please, by all means, do yourself a favor and cry.

Sadly, you earned it...

I Love You All
...Roxanne...

You cannot make other people "get it"

Too often, the abused turn to people who cannot understand the depth of the issues

I won't bother to "out" the person who chose to run his mouth today about an issue that is really not a huge thing. I also will not go on to tell anyone who it was whose fracture of peace that was hard worked for almost wrecked, just because that person felt a little bit disgusted by the remnants of what someone else did. While I get it...really, I do...it - the 'it' that caused this havoc today, and surprisingly no, the "problem" has not seeped into my marriage to this person, was such a minor thing that it really is making me wonder if who in the lives of the abuse survivor and survivors-in-training are really listening to the people who are going through the mess called domestic abuse?

If you don't listen, you won't have a clue


This is not meant to insult anyone reading this, but if you are a loved one of someone who is being emotionally abused and you are not listening to what it is that they are telling you and if you are willing to compare your own childhood with your own abusive father to what it is that your loved one's children go through, please stop. Though the technical similarities are there, I know, for a fact, that no two situations are alike, so please stop behaving as though you know how to fix your loved one's problem because, no, you do not know.

You want to be there, and that is fine, and you want to help, and that, too, is fine. What is not fine is the idea that you think that what you yourself have been through in any way at all somehow validates that you know better than the victim does. Again - no, you don't, and there is no more bigger an insult that someone who goes through the abuse can receive. You cannot begin to know what is happening, are not qualified to give advice, can never fix things for them because the bottom line is that you do not know what to do and your attempts a trying to get your loved one through their time of heartache, though appreciated, may only serve them with more grief.

Believe me, I know this one personally. If I didn't, I would not have anything to write about today.

You cannot make things better by making your abused loved one feel like he or she is not doing enough to get out of the very volatile situation by making a phone call to the nearest shelter or even to the police.


From experience I can say that yes, calling the proper authorities when your loved one is being physically harmed is the best thing that you can do for them. Yet, when there is only an exchange of words, and this is not to tell anyone that verbal abuse is less damaging than physical abuse (because it is lots worse on the victim, and yes, I know this one, too), there really is nothing that calling any authority, any shrink, any person will do to help. And please, spare me the "they don't want help. If they really wanted out, they would get out." To those who would think and believe this, let me give you the biggest "go fuck yourself" that you have ever had.

You do not know what it is that abused people go through, even after their abuser is not in their lives. You do not know how to make it go away, and you can suggest all you want what you THINK you would do, but you are not in the situation and you cannot try to make an abused person get into your head when most assuredly it is YOU who needs to get into theirs.

To suggest that any abuse victim or survivor LIKES being told who they are, what they do, blah blah blah, is just adding huge insult to permanent emotional injury that the abused person has to heal from all on their own, and your adding your two fucking cents to a matter that you know nothing about, that you have not researched and that you are basically clueless about only pisses your loved on off. You are not helping the problem. You are adding to it, and you are quietly being placed on that list of people who abused them as well. Watch your mouth and your ass, because you do NOT get it and if you say horrible things to them about their life situation, you are just as creepy and clueless as is their attacker. You know nothing when it comes to what other people go through, and you will remain to know nothing as long as you continue to flap your fucking jaw muscles about an issue that you have some very real feelings about but not an ounce of real knowledge. Knowledge is key in these kinds of things, and without a scrap of even knowing at least your own part in their pain, again - you are no longer a part of the solution but have, without realizing it, become a part of the problem instead.

Way to go, hero!
Duh

...and arguing with an abused survivor or with someone in the middle of their crap over what YOU think they should do is like a sin against God and mankind


The term STFU completely applies here, because getting up in the proverbial ass of someone whose life is in utter turmoil is just like telling them what to do. Telling them what you would do if you were in their situation is a bad thing. You do not know what the hell we go through, so shut your sorry ass up and no, you WOULD NOT do all those things that you are telling your loved one to do. Stop turning them into your newest science project in societal bullshit. You do not know what you would do. You are telling your loved one this because you are not in the middle of the same pot of shit soup that they are in and you keep making it seem that they are somehow indebted to you for being the foremost expert on something that is foreign to you.

If you have not been hit by someone who outweighs you at least by 100 pounds, shut up. If you have not been bullied by someone who outweighs you by at least 100 pounds, shut up. If you have not been afraid of someone who outweighs you by at least 100 pounds because you have a memory of what happened to you and you cannot go through that shit again, please, shut the hell up, really. You cannot glean from television or the internet enough knowledge to get your ass out the door in terms of and in regards to having been abused in some way, shape or form.

Again, please, shut up. You do not know what the fuck you are talking about. Unbeknownst to you, and I am just telling you this as a favor to you - you, not so coincidentally, do not know it all, and no, your fucking big fat graduate degree does not make it so that you know more than a survivor or victim of domestic abuse and family violence. While you may know a lot more about whatever it is that you studied, unless you studied psychology and at least have a passing interest in the thinking of the abused...shut...the...fuck...up...today.

One more time...


You want to know how to help your loved one? That's easy - shut the fuck up and listen to them, because that is what all abuse victims and abuse survivors really do need, just someone to listen, to not judge them, to not put their own two cents in about how they feel about the abuser - talking about the abuser to the abused only places the attention and your attention on something that you do not need to further etch in the abused person's head.

Shut your foolish ass up and fucking listen. Listening will give you the opportunity to really know what it is, even in a very tiny way, what it is that they have gone through, what we have all gone through, and what a lot of us always go through, even after the abuser is no longer in our lives.

The very best thing that you can do for your loved one if you really want to help them is to simply just be there and to listen, because anything else you tell them will fall on deaf ears, as their entire lives are lived on the idea that they must always look over their shoulder, must always sleep with one eye open, must always have that sixth sense that tells us that we have to be careful...

Since we know that we have to be careful, perhaps, too, you might also want to be careful as well.

Wouldn't want to be the cause of yet another fight, or worse, another bruise caused to your loved one because you had shit to say, now, would you?

I Love You All...(yes, even you idiots with no idea of what you are advising to your loved ones)

Rox<3


(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. If you want to exact change and cause a Stir, you can contact Roxanne by clickinghere. Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)

What you Give...

In a time when having little to none at all, it seems a bit of a task to give, but in reality, it is the only way to get back to You


Biblically, it is said in the book of Matthew that "the meek shall inherit the earth." Depending upon how you interpret biblical meaning is what will make this a meaningful post to you, namely if, like I was feeling this time last year, you feel like you have nothing left to give. The best thing that someone who is learning to heal on their own can grasp and wrap their head around is not some weird fad diet, not cosmetic surgery, nothing tangible, but instead, is the very simple and inborn gift that we each have to give.

Because I was raised up in the church (in other words, was force fed the hellfire and brimstone yet Unconditional Love of God ... and found out later on in life that sometimes, being force fed something as great as Unconditional Love is what is best for us because it matters in regards to our larger Life Purpose) and because I am a Hawaiian person, my Life was meant as a testament to the healing properties of giving Love. However, for someone who has never willingly accepted being a statistic for data compiled for reasons of collecting information about spousal abuse, it is hard to give.

Hard to Give

Once it is that a person has been subjected to the whims and the madness of another, another who promised never to do the horrid things that no person should ever have to go through, you begin to learn very fast that what you have you have to keep, no matter what it is. You begin to think this way because the simple fact is that an abuser will do what they have to and basically whatever it is that they want to in order to keep their victim too afraid to be their true selves. In my case it was that my husband wanted a trophy wife, and he wanted a wife for other people to look at but not a wife that would be allowed to have her own thoughts and her own life and her own Self. Though he swears that he never took anything away from me (because what he took was intangible), the proof that he did is that here I am 20 years later, and I am about to re-embark on a journey into connecting with the world at large and have started my ascent back into the world of entertainment, of being with like minded musicians and artists, both well known and on their way to being well known, (or perhaps only worried about the music itself, as long as someone hears it and likes it) who are on a mission to rebuild the world, one person at a time, beginning with their very selves.

Sound familiar? It should.

Our Very Selves


All abuse survivors know that what they have been through is not and was not ever their own fault. It is not the fault of an abuse survivor to take responsibility for their bruises or their fractures, not their responsibility to have to deal alone with their own disbelief, their own heartache, the mess that has been made of their lives. We know without doubt that we are meant for a bigger purpose, that we are here to suffer, at least we know this to an extent if we are lucky enough to have people in our lives who know us well, so that we can go out into the world and help to heal it. This is not to say that we accept our lot in life, because no one with a brain in their head would ever agree to being treated like property, but rather is to say that each of us has a compelling story to tell and that our story was never meant to be a secret. What we go through is shameful, but of that shamefulness is borne the strength, and more, the willingness to go on in Life and to be a part of change and charity.

We are forced for long periods of time to be a very tiny, very closed off piece of the puzzle of Life that once it is that we release ourselves back into the fray we have no idea what we want to do in the grander scheme of things, even though we are aware that what we have gone through is a testament to survival, to the undying human spirit, to being whole again. We end up getting back into the world, not really aware that there are still people out there who want to hurt us, and we end up ending up with those people.

Then one day we get a clue and we figure out all on our own that being a person who will go out into the world and hurt others because we have been hurt is not the way to go. We go through the rebound thing, sometimes not with other people but with things. In my case, and because my old man always made sure to it that I knew that the reason that I ended up with anything "label" is because he bought it for me, I was the one who spared no expense on "pretty things." There was no brand new Victoria's Secret bra that I did not own, and there was not a pair of shades expensive enough that I did not want. I was a glutton for pretty things, a glutton for glory, if you will. Once all my things were gone, and about a year after I began seeking my own Spirit and its Cause, I realized the reason that John came into my life. He was brought to me to show me that though I loved the pretty things in life, I Loved more the things of an intangible nature. He showed me what and who I am not, and more, led me to the rediscovering of Who I have always Been.

I say a lot about our intangibles, and it is because our intangibles are permanent for us. Our intangibles are those things in our lives, those ways of being, which compel us to be there for one another, no matter how big or small a scale it is. To a certain and limited extent, it is actually a good thing that he came into my life and stayed, even though the way that I was brought back to me should never happen to anyone, it came the way it was supposed to and came with my having realized now that the pretty things in Life were always mine and that no one had to give anything to me as I'd already had what I needed, which in turn, to this point after realization, has brought me some very, very pretty things (thanks, April, for the very pretty shoes, girl!! I hope you like your gift as much!!).

Everything is with purpose, even the things that seem to make no sense to us, especially our suffering and learning through that suffering.

What You Give

Some folks are more prone to throw money at a thing, but there are others on the planet who LOVE to DO for cause. I am one of those people who very much like to raise money for causes, whose lives and day jobs are dependent on the giving nature of human beings and for the need we have to be of good service to one another. For more than twenty years I have fought the undying fire within me to do something big and grand and do it for the Love of being with other people. My husband told me, even though I never believed him, that people are horrible, that they will try to take what you have and then some, and that people in general cannot be trusted. And if there is anything that any abuse survivor knows well it is that sickening feeling of not being able to trust others. The ability to not trust others, by the way, is a natural reaction. It is the fight and the flight within us all. The difference between the human animal and the rest of mammalia is that we humans are able to reason.

With that ability to reason and to discern what others are up to we have also been blessed with an ability, namely when you have been forced into a situation which calls for our natural ability to sense a bad thing, to see in others that which can be called "good."

When we find that "good," we want to look at it and admire it and call it ours. What we are not realizing at that point, the point when we want to call it ours, is that it IS ours and it is also our right to claim it. We find at that point that it was never what we were given up to that point of realization, but instead has always and only been what it is that we have given to another, given to a situation, given, really, to ourselves. No one asks to get beaten up physically, but it happens to the best of us, and one way or another, we learn from what it is that we have been given. Some of us never learn, but most of the time, we figure it out, and once we do, we never unlearn.

One thing that we all eventually learn is that it is never what you have got, it is only ever what you give.

Find a cause to give your Love to. Find a reason to be happy, to be on fire, to have the will to never look back at what has happened and only look forward to what you can imagine.

Love is My Cause


Love is my Cause. I support a lot of causes, from AIDS and illness to, of course, making sure the world knows that violence among spouses is never a good thing, to the bringing out in the Goddesses in training the beauty which cannot be purchased at the make up counter, and yes, of course, to those whose lives are lived in the throes of danger so that our right to express ourselves stays intact.

When the beginning of 2009 came, and I sat with my head in my hands, in tears because my house and my pretty life were gone, with as much of a quickness that the tears came, so, too, did the thought in my head come to me that I needed to travel a Spiritual Path to wholeness, that I needed to find that piece of myself, all over again, that begged for the opportunity to give and to be who I am through the use of my gifts and the use of my communication skills and my penchant, simply, for desiring to make my own Prayer of Jabez kick some serious ass...and you know what?

It worked, like a charm, the idea that since it is that like all Pisceans, I, too, wanted to swim in the big ocean of Life instead of staying like the rest of the guppies and settling for a nice home life with a set schedule and the same old, same old, everyday of my life. I wanted to be a part of the changes happening, and I wanted to bring people together again, like I did when my hair and my attitude were both bigger than my heart even though my heart knew back then what it wanted me to do. Even then I knew I was meant to exact some sort of change in the way that people do things and who they do those things for, but until New Year's Eve 2011, I had no real idea of what it was that I was supposed to do. I just knew that it was big and that no matter what seemed to stand in my way, there was and will always be a way and that maybe that block in the road is meant to be there so that I can find another way to do things.

And yup, that is exactly what all the blocks in the Path were twenty years ago. Twenty years ago I was the rocker's fantasy chick...all hair, legs, and attitude (and of course it helped that I am one of those island chicks...something about an island chick and a rocker guy that just...well, you know...lol) but these days, I am the rocker and rocker in training's best friend in so far as causing a stir, putting asses in seats, making sure that the reason that any of us are here and breathing is to be of service to the rest of the species.

SO, with that said, it is time to get on out there and scream your own name, and to do it for your favorite Cause.

What are you waiting for, an engraved invitation? Yeesh! Get your asses out there and change the world already!!

I Love You All !!

Rox


(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. If you want to exact change and cause a Stir, you can contact Roxanne by clicking here. Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)

"The Greatest of These is Love..." (1 Corinthians 13:13)

The greatest gift another can receive from us is our Love

I just finished writing my other blog  and find that the one thing that survivors of domestic abuse are very unsure of is being able to Love fully again.

Let me tell you one thing, folks - no one is not ever capable of not Loving completely, no matter what or who. We were designed with the capacity to Love, with the capacity to give that Love, and it does not matter how many times we are beaten, literally or figuratively, the one fact that remains and will always remain is that no matter how much we want to believe that we are not lovable, no matter how many times we tell ourselves that we will not ever trust another person again for as long as we each live, there is not one person on the planet who is void of the ability to Love.

The Ability to Love


We, at one point, believe that we are not lovable, believe that we are somehow the only person on the planet who is not getting the Love we deserve and the one person on the planet who was meant as the poster child for who has been abused. NO ONE NEEDS to be abused, but it happens a whole lot, and in the time that it takes for someone to beat out of us the idea that we do not need Love from many sources we are at the point where we believe there is no return.

When speaking of Love, there is no such thing as a point of no return - Love is always returned, maybe not by the person who we try to Love and who we want to Love us, but from the rest of the planetary Tribe we are all an important part of. And when it comes to that point, it is the time that we find a way to involve ourselves with something outside of ourselves so as to give to the world the thing that lives within us.

Love.

There is no gift quite like it

This time of year we are bombarded with mail and emails and pop-ups and people at our door who are soliciting donations for various causes. And of course I would encourage anyone to give what they can, but when you can't give something tangible, give something that you can give all the time, without needing to stand in line to pay for it, and give something that is guaranteed to come back to you.

We are convinced by others that we are not worthy to receive what it is that we need, and if we believe this we end up with nothing, or what seems like nothing, but there is always our inborn capacity for Love.

Give of your Self - find a cause to support...


In all the years that I have been in this marriage with this now dying man, I never really understood why it was that I felt like I was not doing enough. The truth was that I was doing plenty for him and nothing for me. When the first AIDSWalk that he knew about my participation was about to start, he gave me so much grief for it and badmouthed me to the point of not being able to think straight. Then one morning I woke up and looked at him and saw that it is not because he is a homophobe, not because he is choosing ignorance over common sense, that we was like this, but because it was something that he was not willing to know more about, and what he was not willing to know more about was the idea of giving of one's self through time and effort.

To people who have no cause to support, theirs is a world which is black and white, cut and dry, and there is no such thing as being able to give without also expecting to receive something tangible in return. This man knows that though I love my tangible goodies, I am someone who Loves and Loves giving intangible gifts. It is no wonder that I do what I do for my job - I Love people, and I Love communicating with people, and I Love to give people things that they can feel but cannot touch.

In short, I Love to Love others, and my Life is about giving it freely to those most in need of it. It is my cause, to be here in this Life to Love others by teaching them and including them in how they heal from the brokenness of their own lives so that they can go on with Life with their heads and hearts vibrating in unison, lending to the greater Whole of Life itself.

If what you have been through in Life has taught you anything at all, I hope that it is the knowledge that you are Loved, are lovable, and that you have a lot of Love to give, not just to one person, but to the world at large. By joining a cause, you give yourself an avenue through which you can work out your imbalance of wanting to Love but not being able to or wanting to show it or give it to the person to whom you entrusted your Self to and then later found that you judged them incorrectly. Where you feel like there is nothing, there is something and that something is Love and the nothing that you feel is just there to remind you to get out there in the great big world and start giving it away...

You can do it. You can be your own cause until another one comes along that needs your brand of Love!!

I Love You All!!
...Rox...


(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine 'Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)  

Gratitude (Or "What Christmas is really all about")

Gratitude is hard when you think you have nothing to be grateful for

When it seems that you have had everything that matters to you stripped from your life, and when you believe that there is nothing left for yourself, Be Grateful.

Be Grateful, even for everything that someone else has put you through


As difficult as it may be for some of us to be grateful to the creeps who made us fear everything and everyone, namely them, it is good practice for healing to be able to forgive and to build an attitude of gratitude toward our oppressors, and it is because without them we know not the things that we are and have always been capable of. When I say be grateful, I really mean it, and I say it because it brings to you a feeling of peace, a feeling that you can get through everything and anything that comes your way.

Be grateful for the things that have been presented as challenges in your life, because without the challenges, we cannot ever know just how deep the well of strength is within us, how strong the person who we really are and who we really have been all along really is. Without oppressors in our lives we do not know what needs to be seen to and repaired, and we can never begin to heal without it. We can never begin to understand who we really are without something or someone there to tell us what they think we are, and what they think we are is so far removed from the reality of who we really are that once it is that we have been goaded, or hounded, or belittled, or even beaten, into knowing who we are, we never know and we can never return to it unless we are paying attention.

This is not my telling you that I am fine with the abuses that many have suffered, but it is to say that whatever happens to us is meant as a lesson, if not in trusting people we shouldn't, then in trusting ourselves to know that we can rise above everything that we have been witness to, everything that we have been told we are but are not, everything that we see as mean and horrible and things that cripple the soul. Without the tears we cannot know the depth or the joy that laughter brings and can never really experience it because there is nothing to measure it against. Without the pain we can never know what feels right, and without the daggers sent straight to the middle of the soul of our hearts we can never find out that every heart, no matter how broken, has the propensity to heal.

Without the ugly things that visit our lives we cannot know the depth and the worth of the beauty which resides within us all.

Take the good, the bad, and the ugly, and you come up with something beautiful


If there is one that I am very familiar with it is the depth of the soul of a person who lives their lives outwardly, lives their lives as though the only thing that counts, that has ever counted, was what they could accomplish in the material world, but there is nothing in the material world that has roots in the material and no matter what anyone thinks, it never will and it is because all of those material goodies came from a thought - a good thought, or perhaps even a very bad one, but none the less, the soul is where everything starts, because the soul is where our most precious treasures really are.

No matter what ugliness is part of your life right now, as Polly Anna as it might seem, you can turn it into something beautiful, something that somewhere along the Path that you are on right now will culminate into being something gorgeous and real and permanent and yours - you just have to believe that it is, and most of all, you must first have gratitude for it, even as it is still in your mind and in manifest and lives only as an intention.

And speaking of intention, never forget that it is the intention of a thought, of a desire that matters most, and not the thing itself. It is often said and widely believed that it is not the reward as much as the journey to the reward that we all pine for, and in the case of being grateful it is the one thing that matters the most. The journey to wholeness is not one for the weak of heart, the meek of soul, but it is the journey that all abuse survivors eventually must take, for without the drive to want to further your life, and without the desire to see things in a different light, there is nothing else that will lift a person out of the pit of hell called their life at present moment than knowing that one truth. No journey has ever been taken without also taking the very first step. In this case, the first step is simply believing, which, in an abuse survivor's world, is something that must be relearned as it, too, is stripped of us.

Yet, once we have it back ( I refer to it as my "Girl Mojo"), there is nothing and no one who can stop us. Nothing. Not one person. It is this way because we have used the Spiritual muscles built up by hurtful words and action taken against us, and it is this that carries us through to our highest learning. It is the experience as an abused person that prompts us to become survivors, and once we are survivors, we then become fighters, and in our case, the fighter never does not reign victorious. We go from being just a survivor to being a reigning and victorious Soul with a heart and mind to match, and by my count, that is a lot to be grateful for. We find that we can handle almost anything that comes our way, and if we cannot handle it at that very moment, we know that our moment will come. It is not a matter of if, anymore, not in the case of the survivor of domestic abuse and violence, but rather and only, when.

It is Beautiful to be Grateful...

A person living in the Light of Love and with Gratitude in their heart is a person who has begun the Journey to healing. If we can manage to rise above the anger, above the shame and above the remnants of what we thought our lives should have been, we can manage to see to it that everything in our lives brought us to this point, to this place where we can stand atop the proverbial mountain, look out onto the world that is our lives, and see that we have much to be grateful for, see that we are not so without that we cannot manage to also see to it that we are a better beacon of Light than we are a purveyor of the darkness. Abuse survivors live their lives shrouded in darkness that is not their own but becomes theirs once it is that someone whose darkness is not bigger, but whose darkness is backed by all the power that they have within them.

People who have survived such things have not used every bit of what they were granted at birth, and in so knowing this cannot use it if they do not realize that they have it. We all have it, and once we can take hold of and harness it, there is nothing that we cannot do - not one damned thing, and this is the most beautiful and most important thing about Gratitude.

Gratitude is a Light unto its own. It sheds light on the things that are of importance to us, and breaks us free of the belief that we want more than we deserve, and we do not realize that wanting is different than desiring. Want leaves us feeling empty, but desire fills us with hope and banishes the fear which has permeated the Light within us for too long. When we can be filled with Gratitude our lives begin to change.

So, be in the Light that is Gratitude - YOUR Light that is Gratitude, and find within the one Christmas gift that has been yours all along...

I Love You All...
...Rox...


(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine 'Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com) 

Learning to Trust again, to Love again takes a lot of Soul Work

"It's like the wind...I can't see it, but I can feel it..." (Victoria Kristine White)

It is a rare occasion when I will quote another person's words, but it was this young woman named Victoria,a woman with whom I am only familiar in a Facebook kind of way. Yet, her post this evening sent my being stuck for words a bit of a kick in the ass, and I know what it is that I wanted to tell you all, and yes, it relates to all that we have, as survivors, been through.

Regaining our sense of trust in others begins with our own ability in our sense of Trust, not only in ourselves, but also with the Soul, with the Spirit which guides us and with the idea that everything in the world, other than what you see materially, begins with a thought, and this does include those things which can be counted as 'intangible.' It would be cliche' for me to write something about Christmas, but in trying to keep with the whole  holiday spirit, I guess this would be an attempt at my reminding people that we cannot know how to give anything to anyone until we can first give ourselves a chance to grow. If we do not allow ourselves to grow, we will not be able to heal, and if we cannot heal, we cannot trust, and if we cannot trust, we can never really truly know how to Love again, no, not even ourselves. While this is a very ugly thought, it is the truth of the matter.

It took a lot for me to trust, as well it should have, because trust is the thing that is the hardest for people to rebuild within themselves. Mistrust is where doubt is created, and the first person we doubt is never someone else, but only ourselves, and we project it out onto other people, this feeling that we cannot let go of, at least not right away. It is too hard to let go sometimes, because we know that the risk is too great. Risk is what got us into the messes that we found ourselves in and it will be the trust that we will rebuild within that will help us to climb out of the despair that has enclosed us in a shell that might look like us, might act like us, might technically be us, but it is so not who we really are.

First, you must remember

The first thing that you must remember is that you learned how to mistrust people and that just as you learned how to do that, like much else, you will have to relearn trust. It is a sad truth that abuse survivors end up going through more than we bargained for when all is said and done, but the beautiful part in all of this is that you get to pick how you want to come back, and you get to practice talking to people, practice not talking about you so much that you give away more than you even have for yourself. It took me these last three  years to come back to me, to know and to reinvent me, and it has been a bitch of a time doing so, but it has also been a great time that offered me the opportunity to grow into this outrageous, fiery, passionate person who is full of Spirit and is deeper than the very recesses of the Soul within. This is who I am. This is who I have always been, and I Love Me, just as you should also be so inclined to Love You.

"...don't you even worry pretty darlin', 'cause you'll find Love again, I Know..." (Tesla, "Love Song")
The thing that I am asked all the time by other survivors of domestic violence is if I am scared to Love another person, and to that question I simply explain that I never lost Love for people and that Love is the thing that will carry you through everything and anything and will always be the thing that you will find will heal you faster and better than everything else.

When a person is abused by another person who has promised to Love them and that person chooses to fracture the trust that an abuse survivor has built up, it is hard to imagine that there is any Love there at all, but there is, and the Love that remains is the Love which has always been within ourselves. If we continue to believe that the Love we deserve is outside of us, we will always be chasing it, and we all know what happens when we chase something or someone - they run. They run like fire burns old newspaper - fast. The reason that we chase is because there within us is the person we were the last time we thought we had to go out into the world to find what already lived within us. We were made from Love, which means that we do not have to chase it because it exists within us and never will die.

Love does not die, even the shattered remnants of what it was that we were told and shown was Love from someone who themselves could not fathom Love because to them Love equals ownership. Love and trust are not borne out of a need for someone else to control who we are - yes, I said need. We seek the approval from someone outside ourselves to validate us, and all we get is the version of ourselves that someone else wanted or wants and is never really the person who we know we are, and the person who we know we are is the best person we can hope to even think to be because it is ourselves in our truest essence. There is nothing quite more beautiful than a person - a woman - who knows who she is and who is confident in herself, who Loves all of herself, even her quirks and the little things makes us who we each are.

It is not only the Romantic sort of Love that I am telling you about


Love is the highest form of respect that anyone can show another person. It was a long time before I could even think to tell anyone that I Loved them, but these days, after a whole lot of work on myself, it is a daily thing for me to tell someone that they are cared for, that even if it seems that they are unlovable, that I Love them, and when I say it, I mean it.

Yet, being able to tell another person you Love them takes a lot of trust. You must trust that you can give that piece of your Self away and you must trust your Self not to get hurt when they do not say it back - not everyone is comfortable or feels safe saying that they Love someone, anyone, and even if they don't say it, you know it because like Ms. White posted, Love is very much like the wind- you cannot see it, but you can surely feel it, and that is what matters the very most. It is important that we realize this about us, that we are able to Love, and that we are able to Love from the moment that we are brought into this life. Because someone else takes away the Love that we have for them, chips it away by being horrible to us, it does not mean that the Love within us dies. Love does not die. It is like Light - you can have all the darkness in the world and it can engulf you, but once the tiniest sliver of Light is shone, there is no more darkness. This is what Love does.

Illumination

Love illuminates our Selves, and with that illumination we are able to Light the world with the flame within which is our true selves. Once we have illuminated who we are and once it is that we have seen, through that illumination, our own flaws and imperfections is when we can know within that we have reached a point where we never thought we would ever be again. While there will still be much work to do, and while it will be that no one but us can reclaim that piece, it is a freedom like no other to no longer fear that we are not able to Love or to be Loved.

Being someone else's victim hurts in many ways, but being able to come back to who we are is like water for a thirsty person. Love drenches us in its healing nature and brings to the surface the ugliness that we have allowed to rule us and it sets the standard for who we want to be and who we want to grow into. Being abused makes us shrink into ourselves, makes us believe that this is all we will ever be - defeated, bruised, Spiritually maimed and scarred in the soul. Yet knowing that scars mean that healing has taken place is the salve that brings us back to Life, back to who we are, and makes us know that everything is going to be alright.

If we can believe that we can trust ourselves to do anything, then we should also believe that we will be able to Love again, in every way imaginable, and that what we asked for in the past has come and gone and now we can Love the person we have grown to become. We can take the ugliness, the hurt, the anger and the pain and turn it into the beautiful thing that we have become. We can turn someone else's trash and the rubble of what was and what became of us in to a beautiful piece of art, original and raw and primal and screaming from the inside, out.

We can choose to be who we are and we can choose to Love who we have become, and we can do all this all on our own. Yes, it will take time, and yes, you will cry like a woman in mourning, and yes, you will feel cleansed and brand new. One day you will wake up and just know....

One day, you will just know...it is like the wind...you know it is there, and you know it because you can see the evidence in the birds which fight it in flight, and even though you cannot see the wind, you can feel it.

So, too, is the nature of Love. You know it is there. You cannot see it.

You can feel it.

I Love You All ...
...Rox...

(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine 'Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)

Time Heals

Setting our sights only on the hurt we have suffered impedes our healing

Pisces people are fabulous martyrs. I know. I am one. On the other side of that martyrdom is someone who is strong and vibrant and full of both Spirit and Life and someone who is literally aching to experience the healing needed to survive all the things that they have been through, and I promise you that what they have been through is a whole lot.

If we are left only to ponder the reasons that anyone would want to hurt us we end up trying to find the corner in a circular room. There is no reason good enough to hurt anyone intentionally. No matter what kind of abuse it is - regardless if it is physical or emotional -  there is not a good enough reason to put hands on another person. The abuse begins subtly, can be a passing glance of disapproval or distaste, can be a remark made in regards to what a victim looks like (I always heard that I was a whore because I wore make up, did my hair, liked having my nails done, got waxed...you know...being a girl...I enjoyed it then as much as I do now), can be about their level of intellect, can be anything at all so long as it pertains to what must be done, according to the attacker, by the victim to make them more acceptable and lovable by the person who tries to change you.

There is no level that will be acceptable and there never will be. Once you stop doing all the things that you are told bothers your attacker, and once it is that you have changed everything outwardly they begin the cycle again and this time the damage is not something that can be see (yet) but can be felt and will be known by those who have known you longer than your attacker has. They begin to chip away at the self-existence that is built up, and they start an all out war on who you are, and this is where the real damage begins because the only and the very next thing that happens are the physical beatings. It all happens over time. First you are coerced into not being lovely to look at, then you are manipulated into a pattern of thinking that causes you to react to their words as though they were the words of God himself. Once you are changed both inside and outside, there is nothing left other than the physical beatings which are always the victims fault, at least and according to the person doling out the physical terror on their victim.

I tend to think of my  husband's fate as a Karmic debt being forcibly repaid by him through his losing his life at his very own hands. Only a moron would basically turn their back on their family, decide early on that since they feel that the system owes them something for all the time they put into it that they are now entitled to whatever it is that they feel they are owed, would choose, after having had a major heart attack and then having had open heart surgery, to continue to smoke, to eat like a pig, to be angry all the time, to live their lives with the bitterness that is them to be in charge of their lives.. This is the mantra of the abuser, that they are owed, that they live their lives at a deficit and that everyone within their own circle of social contact somehow is indebted to them for something. In my case it is because he simply did his job and, by his own demanding it, I stayed home with the children and raised them, doing what I had always done - I wrote - books, ghostwriting, marketing and ad materials, basically anything that I was tasked with and contracted for - and I danced, performed, choreographed, taught (and now use as a healing tool with other women with "beauty" issues that cannot be fixed with the help of make up or cosmetic surgeon) hula, and yes, he tried like hell to make me see hula as yet one more island girl's way of ensnaring another white man into her den of iniquity.

But he did not succeed at it. I would not let him. I still will not let him. He cannot take this from me again.
And now he is not long for this world , just as he said he would not be, and just as I have always known and believed.

Time Heals

Time heals. As time passes and memories fade we find that we are no longer the people we were so many years ago when there were blackened eyes and hairline fractures, when there were excuses made for behavior not befitting of a pig as it wallows in its own filth, when there were days filled with terror and nights filled with tears. Gone are the days where I would spend the entirety of a day trying to find a way to make this person see me the way that I knew I was - fine and capable of being my own person, no matter what he thought.

Here we are, the memories of a grimace before the blow, of 17 years long gone, and the voice which was silenced by a choice not made by me but forced upon me through being stalked, being belittled, being all the things in his eyes that I knew I was not. He'd never bothered one time to see me as I really am, and he still thinks that I am a little too weird for "acceptable" society, but if I bothered to let his words and his idiocy be what still ruled me, I might still be that timid little twit who was willing to please him to make him happy which eventually was a requirement needed to please him to keep myself safe. These days, it is the altruist in me, the Piscean nature, that damned Certificate of Ordination and the degrees in health sciences alongside the certificates in wellness that cause me to allow him his last days to be spent with his children. I am hurt, but I am not horrible. I am no longer as angry as I was,but it is all still there, the memories, as though I can watch them on my television screen. It is all like a long and drawn out miniseries that took too long to come to an end.

I have grown since that time and know well now that I have always been safe, always been nurtured by the Light of Love and the Infinite Universe, have always known that God has always had me. He must. If He didn't I might not be here. I might be a statistic that is a far grimmer shade of gray. I might be in traction permanently. I might be an addict. I might be ...anything that I am not truly.

But I am not. I am not any of those things that this man whose last name I share, with whom I share three marvelously Spiritual children, with whom I have shared history, an address, a car....with now whom I share only history, but not much else. I find now that after all these years, it was never me who was damaged and I was not damaged until after he damaged me.

Now I am scarred, but scarred means that to some degree, I am also healed, because the scar is the evidence that the wound that once was there has healed.

Scarred....scarred is good..

I Love You All!

Rox...

(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine 'Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)

There is nothing scarier - enlarging our territory the Jabez way

To survive you must enlarge your territory, so to speak

If there is anything that someone who has been through the travesty of both domestic abuse and domestic violence knows about it is being afraid of everything and everyone. This is the tragedy that is borne of the scourge of domestic violence. There are a million and one survivors out there in the great big world, who, because of someone else and what that someone else did to them, have limited their social circle.

We live life fearful until one day we realize that what happened in the past is done and over with and that the only thing we can do now is to learn from our fears and to learn to work with what has been done to us. I could sit here everyday and think and believe that I am everything that my own attacker told me I am, or I can bother to think about what all the other people in my life think of me and lemme tell you what - their version of me and his version of me are markedly different. Yet, not even their opinions matter in the grander scheme of things. Only mine does.

Only your own opinion of your Self matters, no matter what

My abusive spouse would, if he could, sit here and monitor everything that I write, but this does not mean that I would not come back and write what I really have to say, and what I really have to say is a whole lot. Yet that would solve nothing, not for him and not for me. He should not waste his time with trying to correct everything about me that he feels is wrong with me, because he would not bother to sit and listen to me as I go down the list of all the things that I think he could work on, not for me but for him. I say this because I know and have known for a really long time that what I have to say is really not a big deal to him because frankly he thinks that I am not as big of a deal as I know I am and yes, I happen to think all of us are a really big deal. If we were not and if we had nothing to do in this lifetime not one of us would be here.

There would be none of us to tell our story and there would be no one who would know that only our own opinion of us matter and that what other people think is irrelevant in the bigger picture because opinions, as it is known, are like assholes - everyone has one, and in my case, I have two.

We, even I, have to accept this truth about us. No one has the right nor the strength to occupy our thoughts about us - no one. If we could wrap our heads around this we would all be fine. It is the reason that for a lot of us it might seem that we need no one in our lives, that we do not need to be a blessed part of the lives of everyone else who occupy the planet, and that we need not be a blessing unto our own. This is what robs us, the idea that we must please everyone. That is impossible. We cannot please everyone. We need to please us first, even though your minister might have made it seem that you have to give up yet more of you for someone else. You don't.

I Promise.

The Jabez Way

Man, there was a time when referencing the Bible would give me the dry heaves, but anymore now I look to it so as to make sense of the things that for many years were used "against" me in that book. Yet, just like in life, period, we find our solace in places we never thought we might. In my case, it is the Bible. Maybe it is because of my upbringing and the fact that I practically had the Bible force-fed to me, or maybe it is because I feel like more than not, in it there are too many references to women being lesser than men.

There is much Wisdom to be gleaned from the Bible, and this morning, after I had been told that I don't need anyone else, (yes, by IdiotBoy) I began to see, both with my mind's eyes as well as all around me (nothing is coincidence, mind you) the word "Jabez" and "territory" and things that point to my enlarging my own readership.

We cannot be whole people if we are not willing to let people into our lives. I am a very private person in real life and choose to have but a select few friends, and yes, it does have a lot to do with the fact that after all I have been through I have become very selective with who it is I choose to spend my very valuable time with. Unlike money and tangible things time can never be replaced, and this is something that is lost on someone who is abusive, who is greedy, who worships their money and allows their things to speak for them. Once all the money is spent and once the things are no longer a part of their life they become helpless because now they have to learn to be right and upstanding with others. Now they have to be who they are in order to enlarge their territory and truth be known, it is not the person they abuse who they need to help change, but it is their very selves.

The same does not hold true for abuse survivors. We are a force and a power unto our own. We know well what it is like to have the power to enlarge our reach taken from us and we know the uncomfortable feeling that comes with not being able to reach out to others. This is a challenge for us, because what we knew to do in order to do such a thing has been called wrong, stupid, a waste of time, and everything that we know that is truth and true according to us has been washed away forcibly, and we feel like there is nothing that can or will bring that back for us.

Thing is, you have to bring it back. You have to enlarge your territory, and you have to be willing to see what is not there, and yes, I am talking about the mighty hand of God (or the Goddess...or whatever else it is that you choose to call your Higher Power). It comes at a time when you feel the most alone, at a time when you find yourself willing to let go of the assumption that your attacker knows better what is best for you, and it comes when we least expect it to, the need and the desire to call out to God like a child having a nightmare screams for his mother. Socially, abuse survivors are left without any tools to use that they have not tried, and we don't fancy using the ones that we did in the past because subconsciously that is how we believe we drew the person who abused us to our lives (this is not truth - you drew them to you because you thought that you were not good enough to have anyone who'd appreciate everything about you -yes, I said it, now deal with it. I have been there and I know that this is what happens...acceptance is key here, folks). We forget about what we knew back then because we feel like it only works to draw bad people to us.

What we know is our truth, and if you can bother to see to it that this is only a truth specific to you, you can then begin to enlarge your territory.

The Prayer of Jabez

The Jabez Prayer is known worldwide, even though not everyone in the world was raised up in the church (I am SO not the churchy reverend...not at all...). Basically what the prayer says is that Jabez wanted to "enlarge his territory" (his circle of people) so that he could go out into the world and bless people with what he was gifted with at his conception.

When I happened upon this prayer and this verse this morning it came at a time when really, I feel like there is nothing left for me to do other than enlarge my own readership. Had this been a mere six months ago I would likely raise an eyebrow, say that it was a good idea and forego the idea that there is an entire population, of women, mainly, who need to know that really, even with all of the offers of safety and all of the well meant offers of a new life, there is someone on the planet who understands and can relate to them, and really that is the first step in getting out into the world and remembering who we are. Who we are are not these wilted versions of our former selves. I took the opportunity to reinvent who I am to fit the mold of my life at present, and I am choosing to see it for what it really is - a transition that I was meant for, that no one else can get through like I can or in the manner which Spirit needs it done. It is only me, myself, who can do this.

I have been tasked with screaming at the top of the proverbial mountain that there is hope, that it is ok to want to be all the beautiful that you can be, that it is fine to want to be who you are and that it is ok to be afraid of what you do not know can or will happen at the hands of another. I am also tasked with screaming at the top of said same mountain that it is not ok to stay that way, that it is not ok to let anyone tell you who you are or control you or to just be downright shitty to you. Those things are not ok, but those are the things that we each have to get through. My purpose in this lifetime is to tell others that they can be who they are, that it took them some time to unlearn their Selves and that it will take them some time to relearn who they are.

This is my Jabez prayer, this blog...and these are my words and my gift to you all - to tell you that I am here, that I will always be, and that if no one else gets it, I do.

I "get it."

I Love You All!!
...Rox...

(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine 'Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)

"Physician, Heal Thyself..." (Luke 4:23)

When it comes to our healing from the things which we have gone through, we have to remember that how we feel is all our own.

It used to be common for me to blame everything on my abusive spouse. As years passed and I started becoming more and more clear in what it was that I have been through one thing that resonated with me a whole lot was that even though we get hurt by others, it is our responsibility to not hurt anymore. The thing that makes us hurt is the thing that sets off into motion the things that we can call our monsters, and the monsters and how we feel about what has been done to us is what makes us angry. It is not always and only the action taken against us, but the way that we feel about what has been done that matters more.

Placing blame on the person or the people for how we feel after the fact - immediately after the fact- is one thing, but to continue to allow them that much control over how we feel about anything is something that a lot of abuse survivors choose to do. I know this because I chose it, and now I have unchosen it, because it is not and never has been conducive to my healing. How can I expect to fully recover from the heartache if I am only willing to go back and revisit the past so that I can hand control over how I feel about myself to the person who made me feel crappy about me in the first place?

Physician, Heal Thyself

Rarely will I defer to biblical reference when it comes to something that is nowhere near being anything that any one belief system can "heal." Yes, it is very important that we have support systems in place, but to become and allow ourselves to become completely dependent upon others to make us feel better about what has happened to us is a habit that we need to learn to break. It is like depending on a cigarette to make us calm down when we are angry - we know that puffing away will help us ease the tension from having gotten angry, but in reality it is not the smoking but the act of smoking that makes us feel better. I mean, come on - we all know that smoking cigarettes is very bad for us, so let's not give credit to an inanimate object.

Instead, what we need to do, and what it is that I have made an art form, is the conscious act of learning how to heal one's own self. In order to do this, though, we have to be willing to live through the hurts and the anguish that we felt when we were going through what we went through. We have to revisit the pain to see it and where it lives and what caused it. We have to know and see for ourselves those places within where we hurt the most so that we can go within and see to it that we are able to heal from it all. Sometimes, the scar that stays still will bring back to us the pain that we went through, but forever it will remain a scar and not the wound that caused it.

We must be willing to see to it that our past pain is not as big as our desire now to no longer hurt, to no longer have the propensity to place blame on an old hurt and to be able to get past it all takes a lot of forgiveness, and a lot of patience. Yet, the bottom line is that in order to heal ourselves, we have to be willing to accept that we have to not look back, not place blame, and to no longer live in that hurt. It is Divine no longer allowing our abuser to have the control of how we feel.

If you want to heal, you have to take the first step in that healing. You have to be willing to let it go with them and keep it all for you...what, you ask?

Everything. That's what. Every damned thing. It is the only way that we heal, the only way that we get past it all. We can never heal from the past if we continue to live there. We cannot go forward if we hang on the anchor's weight of the past. It just will not happen for us. We have to let go of the need to keep our abuser at the end of our leash because them being there only enslaves us further to them, and again, that gives them all the control. We can stay mad, but if we stay mad forever then we will end up sick and dead at their hands, or at least, because of their influence. We already gave them pieces of ourselves that will forever remain theirs. That is the part that they took. The rest belongs to you, ok?

Physician, heal thyself...no one else can...

I Love You All !!
Rox

(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine 'Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)