eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504384094 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press |
| Publication date: | 07/21/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 124 |
| File size: | 183 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Writing Again
The last time before graduate school that I consciously wrote with deep intention occurred after befriending a very interesting mom named Mary who lived in San Francisco. We were both stranded in Atlanta, en route to San Francisco, in August 2003. Feeling lost and in need of some good company, I was on my way to visit my friend Rob in California. I felt it would be a fun trip but I went there with a deep sadness in my heart. I was single, and perhaps it was mostly my own choosing. I needed a break from being in a relationship. I needed to rediscover who I was and what I really wanted. I also needed to continue along my journey to happiness. Mary was meeting her husband in Atlanta; she seemed madly in love with him. They had two lovely daughters. She described one as an autodidact in the Tibetan language who was destined to meet the Dalai Lama. The other was enrolled in a prestigious high school in San Francisco and would most likely attend a prestigious university. She was in awe of her daughters and their experiences in this life. She was gentle and sweet, and although there was something beautifully naïve about her, she was a shrewd woman.
On this flight, Mary and I were drawn to each other. I may have reminded her of her daughter, and she, a well-traveled and knowledgeable woman, reminded me of my mother. We spoke deeply about our experiences. I learned much from her in a short time. She told me, "If you want it, write it down." She spoke about a book titled Write it Down, Make it Happen by Henriette Anne Klausner. I will never forget that plane trip or that book. On the plane the next day, when we were finally on our way to San Francisco, I took my journal and began to fill it with all my desires and wishes. I would not write, "I want" or "I wish," as that only attracted wanting and wishing. Rather, I wrote "I will" before every statement. This may seem like a minor adjustment, but the statement "I will" empowers you and shifts the experience from waiting for life to happen to making life happen.
The information Mary bestowed became invaluable, and it resonated with me for years. I remain deeply grateful that I was seated next to Mary that day. Words can significantly change and shift your life. In fact, Mary's words continue to impact me and continually prove to be significant to my achievements. Reading positive, happy, love- filled, genuine words can enlighten and inspire. After meeting Mary and listening to her wisdom, I felt a little less lonely and a little more positive. I was excited to see Rob, and I was left with a warm feeling that everything was going to be okay. I already felt happier!
I now felt the need to be more positive for MYSELF! I have always enjoyed encouraging others and watching the light go on and witnessing that Aha! Moment, but now I was empowered to will those moments for myself. Rob was already giving me amazing reads that he knew would be important to me on my spiritual journey. How blessed I was to have a friend like Rob in my life! All the experiences Rob and I had together in wine country became surreal, from the people we met to the carte blanche treatment we received. I was creating my reality. I was realizing that I was in charge of how my reality looked! Emitting a positive attitude began attracting positive people and therefore positive experiences. All the lovely surprises, from taking a drive to Auberge du Soleil to sharing a beautiful bottle of merlot with new friends and getting lost on the way back to Healdsburg, are engraved in our memories.
Universe, I am deeply grateful for the experiences and adventures that have created my tapestry, the one I call Alyce, in this lifetime. Thank you for sending me Mary, a wonderful and enlightened mom, for igniting the flame within me during that plane ride to San Francisco. Thank you for allowing me to meet friends like Rob, who have deeply affected the way I live my life and who have opened my heart to greater love, deeper compassion, and unbounded happiness.
CHAPTER 2
Getting Lost
So how did I get so lost to begin with? When did I stop listening to my intuition? When did this de-evolution occur? It, like anything else, took time. Years of a lack of discipline and misdirection finally took their toll on my person, my character, and my potential. I found myself making wrong decisions constantly and believing that these undeniably wrong decisions would work for me. Inevitably, they did not. Yet I remained on what I believed to be a path, a very dark and unrecognizable one that would eventually force me into a place of clarity. The path was plagued with insecurities and poor behavior, along with a misguided sense of who I really was.
One day I finally asked myself, "What happened? When did the potential for what I could have been, change into just tolerating my every day?" I wanted to accomplish greatness when I was a child; what happened to all that? I had fervor, I had passion, and I was driven! My eyes were lit by my own fire. I remember completely believing that I was going to accomplish everything I said I would. When reading The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, I relearned a key concept that I seemed to understand as a child that "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." What a beautiful concept. We could use this lifetime to emulate something greater than our present selves; we could continue to evolve if we chose.
That understanding was the next piece of my evolution. Each day well spent, in love with my life and in love with me, leads to a lifetime of happiness. This is one of the most poignant ideas that any of us can realize as we truly make this life our great contribution. Realizing that our perspective of our present reality dictates our happiness will inevitably lead to greater self-fulfillment. Perhaps I needed to feel disconnected from my potential, to make a complete change and become the woman you are reading about today.
Attending and then graduating from the prestigious Bronx High School of Science in New York City came with a lot of pressure and expectations. Along with 700 other freshmen, I entered high school with great excitement and passion. I recognized that not only would there be many other students who could match my intellect, many would exceed it. The issues in high school came when I was not grasping more advanced concepts easily. I have to study now? Why? I am bright and I have great intellectual capacity. I can easily study the night before and do quite well on my exams. That was true until my junior year in high school. It was difficult for me to admit that I needed many more hours of study and devotion to maintain high grades, but rather than put the time into my classes, I began a long period of criticizing and judging myself for my inadequacies. When my in-class performance and analysis were far superior to other students, they would fare much better on exams. Yet I remained stubborn and unwilling to study more hours. That was a sure sign that my ego rather than lack of intellect pushed me in a fruitless direction.
Although it took me years to admit to myself that I could have worked more diligently in high school to achieve Ivy League admission, I was unable to make the change necessary to achieve true success even when I entered my freshman year in college.
While my other very close friends seemed to be enjoying their first years at their respective universities, I was struggling to find myself at the University of Arizona in Tucson, a beautiful campus drenched in sun, filled with tan, beautiful people from the West Coast, palm trees lining the green mall down its center. A friend of mine from high school had made the campus sound like a dream; it was a dream, for her. I was desperately looking for a place to call home for the next four years. I felt I had no other choice but to adopt someone else's idea of that as I faced my rejection from Yale. I walked onto the campus at the University of Arizona, all 180 pounds of me, and decided there was nothing else I could do but enjoy my time in the Southwest.
Gaining admission to the university was not climactic in any way for me. I forced myself to remain positive about it because I was so confused and utterly disappointed in myself. Hey, what could I lose by attending a beautiful university in the southwest? I would experience a situation quite different from the one I was experiencing in New York City. But the gorgeous campus nestled in southern Arizona was not my dream, and its luster died quickly after my freshman year. I did not return the following August because I was lost — I mean really lost. My roommates in my first dorm were complete slobs, as well as judgmental, uptight, and controlling. They did everything they could to remove me from the on-campus apartment we shared, including calling the university police for some recreational drugs valued at sixteen dollars. It worked. I left the dorm. At the time, it was a nightmare situation. I was asked several questions by authorities as me and my friends in the complex shook our heads in disbelief. Most people in the dorm experimented with alcohol or drugs, including these girls. They were underage and drank constantly in the dorm. It seemed normal. This was college, four years of exploring who you are and what you really want. I surmised that the girls had other reasons to remove me from the dorm and had looked desperately for a reason to do so.
I began to reevaluate the relationships I had with women, including the one I had with myself. I found great friendship and support from my male friends at the time, who were equally disappointed in those girls. I felt like I was losing my connection to women. Why would those young women do that to me? Why would they make a big deal over something so insignificant that posed no threat to them or to anyone, especially when I said nothing about their drinking? I remember walking back into the apartment after I returned from being arrested and held by the police all day, saying, "Why did you do that to me?" I don't think any of those girls had a clear answer. Deep inside, they knew their motives were driven by jealousy and insecurity. I left for winter break, a sad and broken spirit, confused and doubtful about where the next moment would take me. I wish I were as insightful as I am now, because that moment in Arizona brought me back to New York City and changed the course of my life forever — and for the better! All I saw that moment was how disappointed I was in myself. I questioned how that could happen to me?
By the time January came around, I was living in another dorm, called Graham Greenlee, with much nicer girls, a great RA, and a lovely hall director. I have to thank those terribly insecure girls at Corleone apartments for helping me discover some of the nicest women I have ever met. Amber, Lisa, Penny, Robin, and Vanessa all lived with me on the first floor of Graham Greenlee Dorm at University of Arizona from January to May 1995. I thank them all so dearly for being such a great group of women and for teaching me about sisterhood. Part of why I am a great and inspired mom is because they all exemplified support, comfort and love, without fear or judgment.
Living on the first floor with all women, despite the dorm being co-ed, was one of my best placements. I will tell you why this is such an important turning point in my life. Although I was lost, my spirit drained for so much of that year, I began to have new respect for women around me — women are strong, women are friendly, women are a team, not to be divided by a love interest. And women can and do support one another in the face of adversity without finding fault in one another. I was so impressed with that group of women, and they shaped the remainder of the year for me, allowing me to find some joy in what otherwise could have been a very depressing time.
My birthday that year was a joyful time. It fell around the Easter season. The girls on my wing took me out for my birthday. I even went shopping so I could dress up for the evening! I felt so touched and so overwhelmed with happiness; I was finding so much beauty in these new friendships. I felt like I was healing from the traumatic experience I had been through with my roommates. My nightmares and anxiety began to subside somewhat. I wanted my new friends to know how deeply I appreciated their friendships and support. So during the week of April 16, 1995, I took them to Holy Week at St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in Tucson. I was sharing a very deep part of me with these young women. I needed to feel some sense of security and safety at that time when I was far from my family. Between the love from those women and the serenity of the church during Easter week, I found some light in a very dark time in my life.
Despite all this beauty, I left that May, never to return to the university or to the state again. I feel like it was the intention of the universe to keep me in New York for several reasons. I took the semester off after Arizona because I needed a break. When I returned to New York, my cousin Tony, who had been ill for a while from complications from AIDS, suddenly started getting worse. He was living with my aunt for her to care for him as he spent his final months there. I know that the time I spent with him was important because the anger that had nestled inside my soul became somewhat lighter when I was around Tony. He encouraged me to be a better person, to have faith in myself, and to finish university. He spoke about his travels and how he loved the island of Aruba because it was such a happy place. He even spoke about his youth and how difficult it was to come to the United States not knowing the language and how terribly he felt losing his father when he was sixteen. And he spoke deeply about the challenges he faced as a homosexual in NYC in the 1980s. And despite all those obstacles, he lived life as a happy person. He taught me so much through his kind and gentle nature. He smiled and laughed often. He was the cousin my brothers and I loved to see. When Tony came over, he paid attention to us and played with us and accepted that we were kids who could be a bit overwhelming at times. Despite his illness, one he handled with grace, he remained gentle in his mannerisms and positive in his approach to life. Tony passed away on January 29, 1997, from Kaposi's sarcoma. I refused to go to his memorial because I was angry and just not mature enough to handle his passing.
After Tony passed, I felt like a fog was beginning to lift. Initially I believed that a university life in New York would be the reason I had to return to the city. But I started realizing that NYC had a lot more to offer me in regards to my personal growth. I was living at home again and commuting to Manhattan to Baruch College while also working for a real estate office in Queens. Baruch is not where I had imagined myself attending college but it became a very happy and encouraging place for me. I was an English major in a business school yet the English department was graced with the most brilliant female professors. These women were Ivy league educated, well-spoken and very well read. At the real estate office, I was dealing with an entirely different situation. Initially, the office was a light and fun experience and one that distracted me from my disappointments, but it quickly became a toxic environment. I felt stagnant and bored. My bosses were both very nice to me for many years, and I, in turn, was very nice to them. But when my boss's daughter came to join the team, she found so much wrong with the office, including me, that she made it very uncomfortable for me to be there. I was chastised and degraded, so I quit. I knew I was done giving my best at the office; honestly, at the end of my time there, I was not being my best. I walked out of the office, drained but relieved. So while finding satisfaction in my university life, I became completely and utterly lost with work. Now, what was the universe trying to tell me?! It was a huge call to say "Hey Alyce, why are you settling with your work? Additionally, if I was to grow and evolve into a much better person it also meant leaving a relationship behind as well. And so, with the support of my dear friends Michael Angelo and Roman and my future sister-in-law Maria and her sister Patricia, I was able to leave a rebound relationship that had drained my soul for two years. The universe was giving me the opportunity to leave the average life I was living and start the amazing search to find myself, again.
Thank you, Universe! I am deeply grateful for these challenges that brought me to my better self. Thank you for showing me that situations that may seem negative are truly the challenges needed to move on to the next level, spiritually and emotionally. Universe, you are grand and wise, and I apologize that I did not acknowledge how grateful I was during those times.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Evolution Of Mom"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Alyce Manzo-Geanopulos.
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.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,
Introduction, xi,
1 Writing Again, 1,
2 Getting Lost, 4,
3 Happy with Me, 11,
4 Intuition, 16,
5 Birthing, 20,
6 Being Graceful, 26,
7 Health and Well-Being, 28,
8 Becoming More Me, 36,
9 Spiritual Influences, 41,
10 Evolving in Our Own Time, 50,
11 Balance and Flexibility, 53,
12 The Roadmap, 55,
13 Ladies of The Club, 58,
14 Ode to Dad, 62,
15 Ode to Mom, 65,
16 Physical Pain, 68,
17 Cooking, 71,
18 Nursing, 74,
19 How to Use Your Voice Effectively, 78,
20 Living a Blessed Life in Gratitude, 81,
21 Socializing as a Mom, 83,
22 Gatherings, 87,
23 Advanced Wifey, 89,
24 Women Helping Women, 92,
25 Romance, 95,
26 Emotional Intelligence, 97,
27 From New York City to Ithaca, 100,
28 Finale, 104,