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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504354431 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2016 |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Can I Be Me
Without Losing You?
By Chental Wilson
Balboa Press
Copyright © 2016 Chental WilsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5043-5443-1
CHAPTER 1
Why Did I Say Yes, When I Wanted to Say No?
* * *
Song: "Change" by Tracey Chapman
Why did I say yes when I wanted to say no? Just to get my needs met? To create safety for my kids and myself? Is that what my mother did and taught me to do? Why didn't I just speak my truth? Have I learned to manipulate and lie? Or was I simply just too afraid?
I don't believe divorce happens because we drift apart and forget to do things together after the kids come along. It seems to me, as we become moms and wives, we adjust and take on roles based on what we learned from our mothers and what has been expected of women from centuries past. All those conditioned beliefs end up determining how our own life will unfold.
The truth is, I went underground and wore a mask to protect my children and myself. Right or wrong, I did what I did because that's what I watched my mother do. She kept the peace and made sure everyone was happy: Dad, the kids, that was her job and she forgot about herself. That's what I learned to do and on some level at some point: I agreed to it. Why wouldn't I? What else did I know?
I remember spending a weekend with my sisters in 2000. One evening we went around the room asking each other the question: When are you at your happiest? My youngest sister answered first. She hesitated for a moment and then said, "When I'm painting." I could tell a part of her almost felt ashamed to admit it, even if she didn't know why, but this was her truth. My sister next to me (in age) and I gave the same answer, "When our family is happy, we're happy." I remember thinking, this is so cheesy and it felt wrong. But I didn't say anything. It was like being aware of something you had always thought, but now after hearing it out loud you didn't agree with it anymore. My sister felt free to be happy doing something for herself and I hadn't ever thought about that possibility before. As we finished up hearing from the other sisters, I could tell my youngest sister felt as though she was being judged, and perhaps, she was. I just remember how brave she was to be so honest in spite of her eight sisters. Perhaps at the time some of us weren't even aware we weren't being as brave, or perhaps we really believed it was enough for our families to be happy. Is that what we were taught? As the youngest sister, she was always accused of being selfish and spoilt when we all lived at home. Now, when I look back, she was the only one who didn't take on our family's conditioning. If it was encouraged, she rebelled against it.
We were good girls who listened, watched, and saw how our mother was. For most of her life she sacrificed herself for the happiness of her family - and that was exactly what we were all doing. Granted, we were all happy to be that way, but we were clueless in knowing there was any other way to be. Every night my mother went off to the pub with my dad when I was little? She left my younger sister and me alone, even though it was the last thing she wanted to do. She said yes when she wanted to say no.
Why didn't she say no? She believed it would have upset our father. She believed he would have become angry and taken his anger out on her: or on us kids. So, what choice did she have? She went to the pub and left us kids to fend for ourselves. Can you imagine how hard that must have been for her? Knowing her little girls were terrified to be left alone? She had to make a choice and she believed this was the best one for us girls, so that's what she did. She did it for us. That's what I label prostituting ourselves to get what we need, be it for those we protect or ourselves. Perhaps her own mother did the same thing for the same reasons: and we did what we did because it's the only way we knew as well.
I believed I couldn't say no to my husband because I too believed he would get mad and take it out on the kids or me and then the whole house would be left in a mess. This was my job wasn't it? To keep the peace and protect the kids? I thought so. My husband isn't a violent man at all. He has never used physical force on me, our children, or anyone else for that matter. So you may ask, why was I afraid? When he raised his voice - that was enough for me. At times his energy filled the room with anger. This is what kept me from speaking my truth and it was enough to control me. This mirrored my father's behaviour and this is when I learned to be controlled by a fear of confrontation.
It goes even deeper for me. I believe in past lives. I discovered, through past life regression, that I was killed for speaking out in one of my former lifetimes. So for me, the fear was even more intense. What I believe is this: we come into this world with wounded egos that need to heal (sometimes from previous lifetimes and some accumulated from this lifetime) and it's our sole responsibility to be a detective in our own lives to find out what those wounds are in order to move forward.
I was fascinated to discover that I created my situations from my own behaviour and beliefs. Once I discovered this and grew conscious of my beliefs I could then change them, it seemed my husband would then have to make a conscious choice to accept my new way of being, as I had changed. I discovered that to become empowered was to simply embody the truth of who I am and I had to make the choice to step into all of me.
Ask yourself, how many times in your life have you said yes when you really wanted to say no? But because it would have upset your husband (or partner) and he/she may have taken that out on you or your kids - you just said yes to keep the peace. In the past, I would rather sacrifice myself than our children, so I would say yes when I wanted to say no.
Take sex for instance: brace yourselves ladies. You may not believe this, but I had sex twice a day with my husband for most of our married life. I can just hear the sighs, but here's the thing: Part of me believed this was my job as a wife and part of me was doing it to control the outer situations. I thought as long as I could keep my husband happy, within my own control, the whole household would be better off. To say no to sex created a negative situation and put him in a bad mood. I believed the negativity would play out into the next day and into our lives and neither the kids nor I wanted that to happen, so I said yes. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy sex, but that was over-the-top ridiculous. I was exhausted, it was just one way I controlled him. Others would say he controlled me - but I could of said no and had the courage to face the consequences of being true to myself, instead I was afraid. It was crazy.
From what I've witnessed, after the kids leave home ... boom - we return to our true nature of who we really were (pre-wives, pre-kids) and we get back to our hopes our desires. How confusing is that for men? How are they to know that our yes's sometimes mean no? But because we are trying to keep the peace we compromise ourselves for peace, love, and protection. At this chapter in our lives we're wondering, what happened to our dreams? It wasn't ever about whether we still love our men; it's just now that our kids are safely on their way we can concentrate on what we wanted to be all those years ago. We don't need to be the protectors any longer.
I distinctly remember the day "I" returned to my body with the clear understanding that we are all spiritual beings simply having a human experience and once we understand this, we are then free to create the life we really want: void of our fears. It took away the intenseness of life for me, I became relaxed now knowing that this was a journey, this human life I was living. As spiritual beings we are already perfect so no need to try to reach perfection. As a human being our job is to consciously go on the ride of our human lives watching and learning and ultimately getting back to knowing where we came from and who we are at our core. Its the game of remembering. Its time to remember the truths. It is said that we came into human form to experience separation, we have all come from a collective oneness. It is also said that this was our choice, we wanted to experience separation, so thats the journey we are on. I have experienced separation and Im happy to say that I am back to oneness and that I didn't have to die to achieve this. I get to now experience heaven on earth and you will to if you discipline yourself to follow your own truths. Separation does not feel nice, its lonely and dark and cold sometimes but its necessary, once we see that we have been conditioned to believe things that are simply not true about life and ourselves and disperse the illusion that we are separate, only then we can relax and settle into our time left here on earth and enjoy our life.
For me it happened about three months after our last child left home. It was a Sunday afternoon, much like any other Sunday and I was sitting in my home office watching the ten part series Oprah Winfrey had on with Eckhart Tolle. My husband came into the doorway and asked me a question. I don't remember the question, but I answered him with a voice that was not of my own. I remember having a sense of him standing there, astonished with my response and becoming very angry. I, on the other hand, was still wondering where that voice came from and whose it was. I pondered a moment more and realized, I had returned from the depths of my being, from the hold of my personality to start this new path of becoming me again. I'm back, but back from where? It was an incredible feeling of being shifted from one reality to another completely held in limbo, not caring about my current reality but much more interested in this new one I had been thrust into.
Then a voice went on to say; "We are not doing this anymore."
I asked, "Who is the 'we' and what are we not doing anymore?" and the voice continued,
"We are no longer saying 'yes' when we mean 'no',."
"Use your truth as your compass, but you must do this with the utmost compassion for your husband because he will surely not understand, it's time for a new way of communication."
The whole time I had a sense of my husband standing in the doorway not happy with my response to his question but at this time he had no effect on me, I was far too fascinated with myself and what was happening to me. I honestly believe that if my husband hadn't come into the doorway and asked me a question, which broke the vortex I was held in, then Im not sure I would have any conscious awareness that all this took place, so I am grateful to him for asking that question, whatever it was.
I believe the universe was guiding me in that moment and everything was in perfect alignment. Eckhart Tolle says that this happens by Grace, its not something we can force but what I have come to believe is that through this journey into your truth its creates a vibrational frequency that opens up the channel to which we can receive this grace.
Wow! I became fascinated by this internal dialogue and what seemed like god or universal truth speaking directly to me. I was told that now that my job was complete as a parent it was time for me to come out. Why was I hiding? What was I afraid of? What did I want? Who am I? Exciting as it was, this was also very scary, but from that day on, I was different.
I was no longer able to say "yes" when I meant "no."
I used my truth as my compass, it directed me to communicate only from my truth and allowed whatever came from that out into the open. I became courageous in speaking my truth: vulnerable and fearless. Oh don't get me wrong it wasn't easy, my physical body could still feel the resistance but I felt strong to go forward. My mantra was "no matter what." I was now the detective in my own life and determined to understand why I acted the way I did, what was I so afraid of? It was time to come out of hiding and attend to my next job in life: to fully understand myself and how I communicated.
I had not realized how I had become someone I was not and why? When the voice said, "You are no longer saying yes when you mean no," I wondered first if I had been and instantly I knew I had, then I asked myself, "but why?" The voice answered, "Because you have become as your mother as a wife and a mother." I have, how did I not know this before now? "You watched your mother do this but it is not who you are, you were never taught how to be in conflict with another. You were never taught about the duality of yourself, the wounded ego. I have come to show you truth so that you can go onto to teach it to others."
I was unconsciously unaware when I say, "I had known that I had made choices in my life but what I never knew till this moment was my unconsciousness within my choices." My choices up until now had often been made out of my conditioned self not my conscious self.
This statement requires some time to allow it to sink in!
(Just a side note to reitterate what is the difference between "my conditioned" and "my conscious self." Conditioning comes from those who you have interacted with as you grew up, your family, your teachers, your friends, this is where you have developed your beliefs from. They are not necessarily what you really believe. Your conscious self knows the truth, for you. When you are out of alignment with your own truth your body tries to communicate to you through the body via illness or emotional pain, its trying to tell you that your beliefs, your thinking is out of alignment with your own frequency and truth and its a message for you to inquire within and find out whats going on. In other words if your life is not flowing in harmony then this is your que to go within and be a detective in your own life to find out why.)
Its like I had been on autopilot and this voice that I now heard was showing me my past, present and future, it brought me back to myself, my true self. In that moment I became fearless to speak my truth 100%. I now knew that to be any other was not authentic and I could never make me feel truly free and happy unless I followed this path. I clearly got the message that day, "That you will learn this new way so that you can teach others how to be free of the conditions of their lives too. How to heal their wounds of their past. You will go on to teach this new way of communication."
Another fact that this moment shared with me was that not only am I stopping my evolution by not living in my truth, Im also preventing others from evolving too. By living a life true to yourself its like a win win for everyone because firstly you get to be you and secondly others in your presence also have permission to be themselves because you are no longer afraid of the truth.
There was a time in history when being a wife and mother was the woman's primary role. Women didn't work outside the home; however, now they do while still taking care of the husband, the kids, and the household. In the developing world, in a few countries, some women never leave the house without their husband's permission, but only because men in those countries don't want to lose control over women. They keep them in the dark, cutting them off from outside communication and making all the house rules. Women in some of these countries still believe they aren't equal to men, though, of course, it's not that they aren't, it's that they believe they aren't and history has shown them this.
That is the problem: It's about what we, as women, believe. I cant say enough about this sentence, the above statement is so important because its what I believed that was holding me back, not what was always true. We as women (the feminine) must now take our place in the world and the way to do this is by being true to ourselves and learning to unconditionally love ourselves no matter what. This is my life mission to teach. Its not about the masculine dominance any longer, its now about the feminine taking its place in the world to help heal our planet. I dont refer to the feminine as in the females only - its going to take both men and women empowering the feminine within themselves to make this change happen!
As I became an observer of myself, I realized, whenever I was confronted with a situation in which I wanted to say no but said yes, I usually did it, not just for safety, but a part of me truly believed this was what I was supposed to do. It was my conditioning talking, not my true self. It was very confusing.
In the Western world we think we have equality figured out, but in truth the belief many women still carry is that they aren't equal to men. I can just hear all my girlfriends saying, "That is so not true!" But in our minds we have convinced ourselves that this isn't true, but by our actions it shows it's still a belief working within us.
Just recently I bought a magazine and I was thrilled to see a whole advertising page dedicated to "Because I'm a Girl" a foundation helping girls in developing countries; however, I was also saddened to see that in 2012 girls are still fighting to be seen as an equal.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Can I Be Me by Chental Wilson. Copyright © 2016 Chental Wilson. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Testimonials, v,Dedication, vii,
Introduction, xi,
Chapter 1 Why Did I Say Yes, When I Wanted to Say No?, 1,
Chapter 2 Fear to Speak my Truth, 19,
Chapter 3 Sins of Our Fathers, 35,
Chapter 4 Did I Know Who My Mother Was?, 53,
Chapter 5 Family Conditionings, 66,
Chapter 6 Seeing Through New Eyes, 79,
Chapter 7 Discovering the Wounds, 93,
Chapter 8 Ego and Illness, 106,
Chapter 9 Shining Light into the Darkness, 129,
Chapter 10 Sins as a Mother, 147,
Chapter 11 Around The World on Two Wheels, 159,
Chapter 12 Unconditional Love, 175,
Epilogue, 183,
Acknowledgement, 191,
Resources, 195,
Author Biography, 199,