Twenty-Eight Journeys

by Cheryl

Overview

Journey to the place where the subconscious mind and the spirit meet to heal you from abuse.

 

This book, intended for women, is a journey into the mind and then the spirit. It is a journey moving from a space of feeling worthless, shamed, guilty, forgotten, depressed, and tormented into a space of abundance, healing, self-worth, self-trust, and feeling safe in the world you live in.

 

Twenty-Eight Journeys shows you why positive thinking and affirmations don’t work for us—and then it shows you how to make them work!

 

This guide covers sexual, physical, mental, and verbal abuse. Honest, full of raw emotions and controversial topics, it lights the path to getting healed.

 

It’s not about managing your childhood and the damage it caused, but about freeing yourself from it for good. It starts with the mind and ends with the spirit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781452542652
Publisher:	Balboa Press
Publication date:	11/28/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	148
File size:	261 KB

Read an Excerpt

Twenty-Eight Journeys

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By CHERYL

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2011 Cheryl
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-4266-9

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Chapter One

Journey # 1

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Being Honest

I have read countless books, watched countless movies and have attended countless seminars on the power of positive thinking. I have written down and read out loud a million times a day positive affirmations such as, I am prosperous, I am happy, healthy and wise, all my dreams come true and I am a woman of worth. The list goes on and on and on, and still nothing changed. My conditions were the same, and the reason my conditions were the same, is because I didn't believe about myself what I was affirming, I was lying!

What most teachers fail to tell us, is how to believe these wonderful things about ourselves so the magic works. We are told to believe these wonderful things but nobody ever tells us HOW to believe these wonderful things. They say, "Act as If", or see things from the end, or repeat these sentences long enough and you will believe and then all your dreams will come true." I knew these things were true, but I didn't know how to get from this place to that place. It was like I could see the promise land, I knew, that I knew, it existed. I could see it and feel it and I wanted it, but I didn't know how to reach it. It was as if, I was standing on a river bank and could see the other side, but there was no bridge to carry me across to the other side. I was frustrated and I actually believed that God was being sadistic with me in allowing me to see this ever so close, yet non-reachable promise land. I really believed that if I affirmed enough, visualized enough, walked the walk enough and talked the talk enough, I would eventually reach my beloved promise land. Then when it didn't happen, I was sure it was because I was not good enough, that the laws of the universes worked for everyone but me, somehow I was exempt from such grace.

This work book is about seeing that bridge that leads you to the other side of the river bank, the promise land. The bridge is there, I promise you, but you have to adjust your eyes and look deep within yourself to see it and once you see it; your life will never be the same. I call this a working book verses a work-book because you will be working on you and you will be using this book as a tool to work on you. You will need a journal and will be writing down thoughts and feeling. You will be asking yourself point blank questions and answering them. Do not take the task ahead of you lightly, commit right now with your whole heart to invest in yourself. Be important enough to yourself to walk through your own soul, even if you don't feel important. There is no skipping steps, no rushing through the working book to get to the end, this isn't a race. It's about the healing of yourself, it's about saving yourself from the damage done by others and it's about coming into your own and discovering the wonderful person you really are. Right now you may not believe or be able to see your greatness, but during your journeys into the soul, I promise you, you will know your own greatness.

So what changed for me? How did I go from affirming until I was blue in the face, to being free? How did I see the bridged to the promise land that was always there? I got perfectly honest with myself. I came to the conclusion that being honest with me was the only thing I didn't try. Drawing this conclusion was also a bit frightening; after all, what was my honest truth about me? What did I, Cheryl really believe? I knew what other's taught me to believe, whether they did it consciously or unconsciously, but really, what did I believe? I had no idea and that is where I started. I've found that asking myself questions in the form of writing them in my journal and then writing out the answers, is an amazing tool that will lead you straight to your truth, whatever that truth may be.

What the teachers and the greats of positive thinking say are true, "As a man/woman thinks, so they are." However, you can't travel from America to France without getting on a plane and taking the journey. We don't just doink from one place to the next like we're Mr. Spock in "Beam me up Scotty." We must travel and that is what we'll be doing together, traveling. We will travel into truth, sometimes our truths aren't all that pretty, and that's okay. We will travel through what we were taught to believe, what we really believe and what we want to believe. How to go from where we are right now, to where we want to be. There is no sense is pretending any longer that we are at a place where we are not. Together, let's figure out where we are exactly and go from there. So let's get honest.

Right now, I want you to put this work book down and write your own "You come from here," like I did in the opening pages of this book. Write out your life, what events took place, whom did what, etc. Don't worry about figuring anything out, just tell your story. You don't need to write down feelings or thoughts at this point, just the story of your life. Take your time with this, you may write five pages in your journal or five hundred pages, just tell your story. It may take you one hour to write your story or ten days, it doesn't matter, take your time and write your story. Now write on the top page of your journal, I came from here and then begin. Come back to the work book when you are finished.

Chapter Two

Journey # 2

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What Were You Taught to Believe?

Now that you know where you came from, you can figure out where you're going and where you want to go, because you may not be going in the direction you want to be going in. That's okay, you can always turn yourself around and head the other way and take the knowledge from the path you were on, and apply it to the path you want to be on, and will be on once you turn yourself around.

What we learned in journey # 1 is to be honest with yourself, and in writing where you came from helps you to get a clear an honest picture about the events that took place in your life and the damage it caused you. Once you see the damage you can fix it, and once you fix it, then the power of positive thinking works.

Positive thinking only works when you feel positive about yourself and you don't feel positive about yourself until you are able to rid yourself of the bad feelings and beliefs and replace them with better ones. What I'm saying is, if you are a woman who was abused in her childhood you were subconsciously taught to not love yourself, to not know your worth and to not feel important.

When you feel unworthy, unlovable and less than, all the affirmations in the world will not help you, trust me when I say this, I've been through it. When I would affirm, "I am worthy," my subconscious mind would say, "No you're not," and the subconscious mind wins every time.

I realized that I could not jump from feeling unworthy to feeling worthy just because I said it X amount of times a day. I had to go down inside myself and dissect issues, find out why I felt unworthy and then question the thoughts and feelings I had about myself that were taught to me in my childhood.

We cannot just up and change our beliefs in a nano-second, it takes some work and the work is worth it. The very best way to undo a bad belief about anything is to questions it, to ask yourself questions that cause you to doubt the current belief.

A perfect example of this was my belief about God. I hated and feared that guy. Why wouldn't I, look what I was subconsciously taught as a child.

My grandfather was a deacon at the local Baptist church that we attended every Sunday. He would read the bible to me before bed time and then take me to my bedroom and molest me right after the bible reading. As a nine year old child, this is how I interpreted it and my childhood interpretation eventually became a belief I swore by in my adult years.

God is sadistic, He commands you to love him, but I'm afraid of him. The only thing that pleases him is faith and I have none of that. Therefore, God does not love me because I do not please Him, and if I cannot please Him, then I must be unworthy, and if I am unworthy, than I am unlovable, and if I am unlovable, then I am no good, and if I am no good, I am a worthless person. This is what I learned about me and my relationship with God and I struggled with it for so many years. Always trying to please Him and always falling short and always feeling worthless.

Then one day I began to wonder, what if I stopped paying attention to this God? I could not dismiss his deity, after all, I grew up believing in Him and so to come right out and believe he didn't exist was way too out there for me, I could not wrap my head around not believing in Him. But it was possible for me to ignore him, to stop trying to please him, to stop begging with prayer for his love and forgiveness. It was entirely possible for me to say, "Hey god of my youth, I don't want anything to do with you anymore. I believe that you are sadistic asshole that enjoys the sacrificing of animals, who hates gays and whores and every other sinner, yet you sent your only begotten son to die for the gays and the whores and you blamed his death of the Jews and then called it forgiveness, this is sadistic and I'm done trying to please you. I'm done praying and having my prayers fall on deaf ears and I'm done trying to have this impossible faith I was taught you so desire." Now I was getting somewhere. So I wrote a letter to the god of my youth and said all the above and more and I just began to ignore him.

At first, it was a little weird and I have to say, I was fearful. After all, I have just spoken disrespectfully to the king of the universe and I just walked away from him entirely. I found myself praying out of habit and I had to stop myself in mid-prayer A LOT.

If you want to change a belief, you can't do the same things and expect the belief to change. So for awhile, I went through life without a god. At times I was a little lonely, but I stuck to my guns and refused to speak to or attempt to please god of my youth and in a short time, other thoughts began to come to me, better thoughts that would serve me verses cause me to fear.

I realized that for me, the thought of having a higher power was something I needed in my spiritual life. I knew enough to know that I didn't want to go back to asshole god but a god like deity was important to me. I began reading books about other religions and their gods, and all were good, but none seem to fit me and when I say "fit me," I mean, I didn't get the feeling of, Oh I can totally believe that. I believed parts of this one and parts of that one, but never one thing totally.

I found my emotional relief from god, in the study of energy and how things work on a spiritual level and on the physical plane, and how both the spiritual and the physical worked together, and is what we know as life and self.

I was able to wrap my head around an energy force and thanks to Dr. Wayne Dyer; I was able to understand quantum physics. Dr. Wayne put it so simply for me, "change the way you look at things and the things you look at will change," I read this in one of his books. (We will look at this concept in more detail later on)

I began to see god not as a deity but as an energy field, a formless thing verses a white bearded man who sat on a throne in a place called heaven.

I was also subconsciously taught by my father, who took me on his extra marital affairs, that all men were not to be trusted.

Later that subconscious lesson was reinforced when we moved in with our grandparents and my grandfather began to molest me. The two most influential men during my tender years were the most damaging. Then to add another layer of reinforcement, my mother's six plus marriages showed me that men come and go like the wind. All men felt extremely insecure and unstable to me and so this was my interpretation of the entire male race.

Men were untrustworthy, unfaithful, unmoral and abusive and totally sadistic. After all, my dad took me on dates, grandpa molested me and marriage meant nothing to any of them and oh yeah, god is a man. These were my core beliefs about the male race.

I also believed, though men were scum of the earth, we women needed them. We had to have them for financial support.

My grandmother never worked a day in her life and solely depended upon grandpa for her survival like I did, and is why she never confronted him about molesting me, though she knew it was happening and my mother was always getting married so she would have someone to take care of her and meet her basic survival needs.

So basically, men were scum and women were needy and this is how life was for me for many many years.

Even as an adult, I had a great big fear of not being able to take care of myself. I was sold this fear when my grandfather would say to me, "you can never tell anyone of our affair." If you do, there will be nobody to take care of you, you will not eat, you will not have clothes to wear, you will not go to school, you will not have a place to live and heroin addicts will be your baby sitters, all the while your mother is bar hoping, looking for the next husband." The real driving force, hit home for me was, my grandfather's threats were valid. If I told of "our affair," I wouldn't eat, I wouldn't go to school, I wouldn't have a place to live and heroin addicts really would be my babysitters. These were facts and he manipulated me with these facts, and in turn, I kept quiet.

His statements and manipulations to keep me quite, along with my father's affairs, caused me to feel guilty, because I thought I was having an "affair" with my grandfather. This was my belief, after all, that's what he said and I knew from past experiences with my dad, you don't mention affairs because if you do, you really won't eat, loved ones will leave you and none of your basic survival needs will be met. This is a very scary thought for a nine year old child that carried over well into my adult years.

I had to get over this fear and guilt, which was just a belief I was subconsciously taught. I had to cause myself to doubt the belief that I could not take care of myself. I had to get honest by admitting I had this fear and then I had to wrap my head around some questions that would cause me to change my perception, (change the way you look at things and the things you look at will change).

I realized that my fear of not having my basic survival needs met, was a childhood fear carried over into my adult years and that my childhood fears do not apply to this time in my life, but are only past feelings from long ago. I needed to step from that life time into this life time.

We will get more into this later on in the work book. For now, I want you to re-read where you come from writings in your journal. As you re-read it, look for beliefs you were subconsciously taught. Don't worry about how these beliefs made you feel, we will get to that, so don't jump ahead. Just re-read and write down what you were subconsciously taught and how you have summed it up. Meaning, your perception of what you were taught. I'm saying, how did you interpret these subconscious lessons and who taught them to you?

EXAMPLES TO HELP YOU:

What I was taught- I saw subconsciously taught that all men are not to be trusted. I was taught this by my grandfather and father.

How I Interpreted what I was taught- All men are untrustworthy and since God is male deity, he too is not to be trusted. Women must fear men and god.

What I was taught- I was subconsciously taught, that god was also abusive. I was taught this by my grandfather who read God's word to me before he sexually abused me.

How I interpreted what I was taught- God loves everyone but me. God hates me because I am not good enough.

What I was taught- I was taught, that I was not worthy of respect. I was taught I was nothing and didn't matter. I was taught this every time my grandfather violated my little body and I was taught this by every angry word that was spit forth by my mother's mouth towards me, along with the beatings I took by her hand.

How I interpreted this- I am no good, I am unlovable and I am not meant for this world, for this life, for this time or this planet. I am unacceptable.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Twenty-Eight Journeys by CHERYL Copyright © 2011 by Cheryl. 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.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction....................vii
I came from here....................xi
Journey #1. Being Honest....................1
Journey #2. What Were You Taught to Believe?....................4
Journey #3. Doubting is a Good Thing....................11
Journey #4. Figuring Out What You Don't Want....................15
Journey #5. What Do You Want?....................21
Journey #6. It is Possible....................26
Journey #7. The Littlest Most Powerful Word in the World....................30
Journey #8. Be Willing to Say Yes to You....................33
Journey #9. All Your Boundaries Have Been Trampled....................35
Journey #10. Learning to Trust....................40
Journey #11. Fight or Flight....................46
Journey #12. Learning to receive....................51
Journey #13. Loving Yourself Starts Here....................57
Journey #14. Validating Your Inner Child....................64
Journey #15. What Threatens You?....................68
Journey #16. The Forgotten Child....................73
Journey #17. The Appreciation Vibration....................83
Journey #18. Resisting Means Persisting....................87
Journey #19. The Lower Vibrations....................93
Journey #20. Plugging into Your Own Good Vibrations....................96
Journey #21. Honor Your Own Rhythm....................101
Journey #22. Liking Yourself....................104
Journey #23. Trusting the She in YOU....................108
Journey #24. Being a Woman of Passion....................113
Journey #25. Flippin the Switch to On....................117
Journey #26. The Parts that were Hurt....................123
Journey #27. Call it Forth....................126
Journey #28. Releasing the Past....................128