Posts Tagged: love

Sweat, Toast and Love in the Furnace

Posted May 4th, 2015 | Michelle Hollomon

“Why isn’t there a clock in here? Blazes! It’s so stinkin HOT! I’m seeing stars. The blood, the blood, the BLOOD! It’s rushing from my head to my feet. I’m going to black out! My heart is beating like a drum!  What will they do If I faint? Will they drag me out of here? Or will they leave me in this humid hell to drown in my own sweat pool?

Child’s pose. Do the child’s pose!! Child’s pose will make all the BAD go away!!”

Hot Yoga.  That’s a recap of my first Hot Yoga experience. Wow, I never knew a body could drip buckets that way. Now I know what death by sweat would feel like. It was like a slow 60 minute suffocation. Yeah, and did you know there are 90 minute classes? I know. Crazy.

And I’m TOTALLY going back.

Why?

Because the instructor was made of love. She was nurturing, and attentive, and warm (see what I did there? warm…?)

Seriously though, I pushed my mind and body further than I thought it could go, and she nurtured the class through the pain with encouragement and gentleness. She said things like “listen to your body,” and “feel your inner strength,” and “you got this” and “be proud of yourself for what you’ve accomplished,” and my personal favorite, “We’re almost done.”

Ahhhh. Doesn’t love feel good?

We regularly need the reminders to “take care,” “take time,” “take grace,” and “take five.” We need someone to tell us to listen to ourselves, and to tell us we are doing a good job. That’s loving.

My friend Jen said in small group yesterday, “God’s love is there for us all the time. We just need to receive it.”

Why is receiving it so hard? Why do I have to be in a friggin oven finding my wobbly warrior,  and seeing stars before I remember LOVE?  Child’s pose.

Regroup in Child’s Pose. Let love heal me in Child’s pose. Surrendered to the process in Child’s pose.

Life Hurts. It stresses us out, runs us ragged and lays us flat. The tasks of life seem too insurmountable to conquer, too lofty to reach, too humiliating to accept.

But THE Instructor (you know, not the one in yoga pants, but the Great Instructor in the sky and in your Heart) says, “I’m right here. You’re not alone. I’m your Champion. You can do ANYthing and ALL things when you stay connected to Me.”

And you curse under your breath, “Why am I here? And why won’t you let me out, God? Where is the clock? When is this going to be over? I’m dying here!”

And if we quiet our complaints and fears long enough to hear God speak, we’ll hear, “Because hard things produce endurance (which you’re a little short on), and endurance produces character, (which you… um… need… more of…,) and character produces hope, (which, Sister, you GOTTA have hope if you plan on surviving the rest of your life. Without hope, you are TOAST- warm, wet, sweaty TOAST!) 

“AND,” God goes on,

“You got this!!! Except when you don’t. Then I got you.”

 

Breath in, exhale, down dog, Child’s pose. Surrender. Love.

Class Over. Until next week.

HOW TO LOVE YOURSELF THE WAY GOD LOVES YOU:

  • Don’t judge or condemn yourself. Women are really good at critical self talk. The bible says, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.”Well, what if you applied “judging, condemning and forgiving” to yourself? What if you refused to judge or say condemning things to yourself? What if you forgave yourself for your short-falls?

  • It’s good enough. Remember, you don’t have to be the perfect student, wife, mother, person. You just have to be good enough. You are a beautiful, lovable, worthwhile and a smart enough person already. God already thinks those things about you. It’s time to make that Spiritual Reality a DAILY reality.
  • Stay Connected. It’s not about trying harder to become the person you want to be. Remember the apple on the tree. It does not strive, try or struggle to grow. No, it just stays connected to the Branch. The branch takes care of all the growing. The Branch is responsible for the growth, not the apple.
  • Child’s Pose in your Furnace Times. When you get overwhelmed with life’s demands, remember that the state of surrender is your friend. Don’t muscle through. Don’t grin and bare it. Don’t grit your teeth. Surrender to God’s love and let Him help you. Take a break and reconnect with God’s strength. You’ve find energy, patience, and wisdome in the times you are most spent because God enters the Child’s Pose.
  • The Goal is to Stay the Course: the Yoga lady who checked me in told me the goal was to stay in the room. No matter what, just stay the course. Believe me, if she hadn’t told me that, I would have left 3/4 of the way through. But I stayed in that furnace till the work was done. Don’t try to get out of what God is doing in your life before His work in you is done. It’s gonna hurt, but stay the course. If you give up before your work is through, you will just have to do it later in life.
  • Remember what God’s Love sounds like. Sometimes God’s love messages get drowned out by life’s static and back ground noise. God’s voice is nurturing, gentle, encouraging, instructional, accepting, forgiving. He is NEVER the one saying, “You’re not doing good enough.” He’s always the one saying, “I got you! Don’t worry!”

How about you? What things do you say to yourself that help get you through hard times? Have you seen endurance, character and hope be forged in your life as a result of furnace experiences?

 

 

 

 

 

You May Be Attracting Losers, Users and Abusers and You Don’t Even Know It.

Posted April 27th, 2015 | Michelle Hollomon

Whether you are single, dating or married, you probably have known someone in your past who wasn’t good for you. Whether it be friend, foe or ex-husband, this relationship turned out badly and you wonder why you ever got involved with them in the first place.

A lot of this attraction is unconscious. Sure, we see outward characteristics like clothes, hair, and personality traits that draw us toward another person. But there are things out of our conscious awareness that attract others to us, and we to them.

You may be attracting Losers, Users and Abusers and you don’t even know it.

These unconscious drives are often rooted in our Soul Holes- emotional wounds from traumatic childhood experiences. If our basic needs to be 

1) SEEN,

2) KNOWN, and

3) UNCONDITIONALLY ACCEPTED

were not met, then Soul Holes grow. Soul Holes attract Users, Losers and Abusers.

Losers, Users and Abusers make Soul Holes deeper, darker and harder to fill. They confirm everything in us that’s wrong, that’s troubled, that’s failing, bruised or weak. Losers, Users and Abusers expose the original wounds of the heart and make us acutely aware of our pain.

DONNA’S STORY

Donna grew up with her two older sisters and her mom.  Her parents divorced when she was five. Her mom worked full time and left the older sisters in charge of Donna after school and summers. Donna’s Dad quickly remarried and moved hours away. Dad’s visits diminished over the years and were eventually non-existent. Donna’s sisters and mother were loving, but stressed. Mom received no financial or parenting support from Dad, and all four felt a sense of abandonment.  Mom’s presence wasn’t often felt, and the girls were “on their own” a lot. When mom was home, she snapped, slapped, and slept a lot from being overwhelmed with her circumstances.

Donna grew up feeling forgotten. She didn’t fault her mother and sisters for her pain. She knew they were all just doing the best they could. But she couldn’t let go of the fact her father never tried to be a real father. She often wondered if he thought about her. If he wondered how she was. Or if he remembered what she looked like. Did he keep a picture of her? Did she mean anything at all to him?

Donna’s sense of abandonment was her deepest Soul Hole. It would be her undoing.

When she was 21, Donna met Craig. Craig was 10 years older than her, good looking, employed and went to church. They started dating, and the fact that he was attracted to her sent Donna over the moon. No one had shown any interest in her before Craig.  She fell head over heals. He always wanted to meet her at her house instead of her coming over to his, and he never gave her a straight answer about what he did for a living. But Donna overlooked these things when he would tell her how beautiful, sexy and smart she was. 

What Donna didn’t know, was that Craig was recently fired for suspicion of company theft, he was seeing another woman at the same time, had a child with a previous girlfriend that he didn’t support and never saw, and still lived with his mother.

Why was Donna attracted to a creep like Craig? Why did she turn a blind eye to some of his obvious red flags?  Why was she so willing to let down her guard just to feel loved?

Soul Holes beg for healing. They cry out to be seen, to be known and to be loved. The traumas of childhood can make us blind to the tactics of Users, Losers and Abusers. We are so desperate to be seen, known and loved, we will take the promise of love no matter the source. That can get us into a lot of trouble, just like Donna.

Craig was doing to Donna, what her father had done to her 16 years prior. Since the abandonment cycle was all Donna ever knew, she fueled it with Craig until the fumes made her sick.

After Donna’s 3 year on-again, off-again relationship with Craig, she left him for good. She was tired of the lies and secrets and feelings of betrayal. She felt that she was worse off in every way since getting together with Craig, and she was sick of it. It was hard for her to leave Craig- it was hard for her to be on her own and face the loneliness she knew would come. But she knew that being alone was better than being serially abandoned by a User.

What Donna did next:

  • Donna surrounded herself with safe people: She reconnected with her mother and sisters and told them the truth about Craig.
  • She asked for help from a counselor. There, she identified the original Soul Hole of abandonment and how it blinded her to Craig’s toxic intentions.
  • She routinely participated in a small group at church with supportive women. They did studies by Joyce Meyers and Beth Moore that strengthened her dependence on God and her self-esteem.

Soon, Donna found herself attracted to healthier people- people that took her seriously and followed through with their commitments. She deepened her friendships and established safe connections with trustworthy people.  She took time for herself, stood up for herself and basically refused to abandon herself in anyway. One day, her counselor asked her to write a letter to her dad- a letter she would never send, but one that desperately needed to be written.

Donna wrote that letter. She wrote about all the things her father missed out on, about what a sweet and smart little girl she was growing up. She wrote about how the pain of his rejection made her vulnerable and desperate for love. She wrote about how the Soul Hole of abandonment was real, and damaging, but that she would no longer be defined by it. Donna stated that she knew what true, committed love was now, because she found it in Jesus, and this time, it will never be taken away.

Soul Holes are like vacuums that suck the wrong kind of attention into themselves. These Soul Holes attract Losers, Users and Abusers that just make things worse. It’s important to take the kind of steps that Donna did to heal and grow so you don’t keep lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.

In the coming weeks, I will write a lot more posts about how to identify personal Soul Holes and how to avoid attracting the wrong sort of person.

How about you?

Have you ever attracted a User, Loser or Abuser before?  What Soul Holes blinded you to their red flags? What ways are you filling the Soul Holes with authentic love so that healthy relationships can follow?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yeah, but do you really know me?

Posted April 13th, 2015 | Michelle Hollomon

On your birthday, have you ever gone the whole day without someone wishing you a happy birthday? I mean the WHOLE day? You wake up, drink your coffee, go to school or work, go to lunch, and go home without a single person acknowledging it’s your special day? Terrible, right? No phone call, no cards, no Facebook shout outs. You would feel like the most un-special person on earth! You may be tempted to keep the information quiet, hoping, wishing, pining away for someone to remember. “Don’t they KNOW it’s my birthday?!!” you may ask.

If that ever happened to me, I would dissolve into a puddle of tears by 10 a.m.

But this will never happen to me. Ever. I unashamedly start celebrating my birthday the first day of my birth month- and since my birthday falls on the last day of the month, that is 30 full days of me-ness. If I’m not sure that my friends are planning something, I plan my own parties (yes, parties plural) months in advance. I narrow down my wish list starting the day after Christmas. On the day of, I casually mention my Personal Day of Celebration to the grocery clerk, the bank teller, any clients I’m seeing that day, and you better believe to the students I’m teaching. My children have been trained to offer hand written poems and home-made creations with Yours Truly in mind. That day was created for me, and everyone around me is invited to celebrate! (It’s April 30th, fyi.)

Letting people into your life is a good thing. Many of our relationships only go skin deep. We see eachother as valuable and worthy of love, but we don’t often take the time and energy to appreciate one another, to celebrate one another, to really know one another.

Love has to have three elements: 1)to be seen, 2)to be known, and 3)to be unconditionally accepted. In this post, we will explore what it is to be known.

To be known is to be understood. Knowing means perceiving, seeking, finding, and joining. Knowing involves being exposed, unguarded, and vulnerable leading to intimate knowledge.  Knowing is so deep and intimate, the ancient biblical scribes used the words, “to know” as a Hebrew idiom for sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. Knowing is not just understanding, it is also joining.

For example, a father of two boys has an easier time bonding with the oldest son because they have so much in common. They enjoy watching football, playing catch and all things traditionally “male.” But this isn’t true for him and the youngest son. The youngest son enjoys art, drama, and reading. He’s smaller, less physically coordinated, less athletic than his brother, and seems to get hurt easily. The youngest son feels inferior.

The father sees the differences between the two boys, and although has little natural interest in art, drama and reading, realizes that he must work harder to connect with his youngest son. The father could routinely ask questions to engage his youngest son, but won’t find meaningful connection until he joins with the son in his interests. The father decides to register the two of them for an eight week art class. The father begins to understand the boy’s unique talent for art, and even discovers his own genuine interest in the subject. The father enjoys their new connection and looks for other ways the two of them can connect. The father sought greater understanding of his youngest son, joined him in his interests and experiences, and communicated the message, “I love you and want to know you better.” The son in turn felt affirmed for his unique interests and abilities, more self-confident than before, and a deeper bond with his father. This is knowing.

Here is an example of what knowing looks like in marriage. My husband and I have been married for 18 years, and by this time, we’ve figured out the roles and domestic duties that work the best for us. One duty that has fallen to him is bill paying, budgeting and financial planning. Give me cooking, cleaning or picking up the dog bombs any day. Too many line items, numbers, or spread sheets and my brain feels like scrambled eggs. On occasion, however, my husband asks to look over the finances together. I’d rather stick a fork in my eye, but I do it with a smile, because I’ve learned the importance of this exercise. It’s not just important to our bottom line, it is important to our intimacy too. I get to share in something that Mr. Dashing cares about. I get to experience his concerns, share his burdens and ultimately know his heart. What are his frustrations? What are his hopes? What are his proud accomplishments? I get to know him and join him in the process. I could simply make regular deposits, spend the money allotted, and follow the budget like a robot, but I’d miss the opportunity to share the responsibilities and the successes. More importantly, I’d miss the opportunity to join in his journey.

“I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other’s wounds; they repair the broken skin.”

— Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

Without this kind of knowing, we end up feeling like a person who goes through thier entire birthday without any acknowledgement or happy wishes. Without being truly known, we end up feeling like the most un-special person on earth. We feel like, “Doesn’t any body want to know the real me? Doesn’t anybody care?” We drfit further and further apart from the people we love until we barely recognize the them.

Knowing and being known starts with you. It starts with taking a risk and putting yourself out there. It starts with leaning in and asking the uncomfortable questions. It takes sacrificing “the ideal” for “the real.”

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”

— Bernard M. Baruch

What activities in your life encourage the knowing that leads to loving?  Are you in supportive groups or circles of friends that meet routinely? Do you schedule time with important people so you can know deeply and be deeply known? If so, share your experience here! Let us know what you’ve done that has helped you!

Why Do I Feel Insignificant?

Posted April 5th, 2015 | Michelle Hollomon

Have you ever had the feeling that you just didn’t matter? Maybe a time you expressed your opinion and felt dismissed or un-important? How about volunteering your time for an event and not receiving a thank you for your time? Or how about when you were at that party and saw the guy you liked, and how he looked passed you at your taller, prettier best friend? Oh, that’s the worst!

All of us have had the feeling of being unseen before. It’s like, “I swear I’m here in living form, but no one seems to notice or care.”

I was once a part of a church group in which I was un-seen. Looking back, I’m rather embarrassed I stayed  as long as I did, but learning the hard way is my MO. Year after year, I volunteered my time, I hosted events, and started prayer meetings for the group’s members. Damn, I was a good Christian! But I always had this sinking feeling that I was just being tolerated- like a bizarre circus side show act that garnered curiosity and queer glances.

I never truly belonged to the group because I was not truly seen as valuable. True belonging is impossible without being truly seen.

To be seen is to be valued, recognized as a worthwhile individual; to be identified as uniquely separate with personal rights, needs and interests equal to others; to be noticed, counted, and taken interest in. Significance has less to do with performance and behavior, and more to do with inherent human value. It is being seen as human only- not more or less than.

Are you truly seen in your relationships? Do you feel valuable and equal? Do you respect yourself in your relationships by speaking up for your needs, following through with boundaries, and believing yourself to be equal? Let’s explore some examples. 

A young couple marry. The husband’s job takes them across country to start their life together. The wife is unable to find work in her field and becomes depressed. The husband sees the professional sacrifice she has made to be with him, and offers to quit his job and move to another area where she can find acceptable work. She, in turn feels that her needs are seen as important. She appreciates his gesture so much that she determines to stick it out where she is, so that he can continue his career path. Because she feels seen, valued and cared for, she has the strength to continue her sacrifice with contentment. She reinvents herself professionally, and they decide together to heavily invest in her new business start up. Her unique needs are seen, prioritized and resourced. She feels seen as a valuable person.

Way back when I was breaking my neck trying to be seen in the group who just didn’t see me, I didn’t know that I was guilty of not seeing myself. How could they see me as valuable when I didn’t see myself that way? How could I matter to them if I was acting as if I didn’t matter to myself?

Another example of being seen is when a mother sees her child as a valuable person, separate from herself, she is able to see and meet her child’s specific needs. If the child is struggling with her parents’ divorce, and acting out at school, the mother sees her child’s pain as separate from her own, and is able to address it by asking for help from the school counselor, meeting with the teacher, or talking it through with the child. The mother communicates to her child, “I see you. You are important to me, I care that you are hurting. I’m here for you.” Instead of drowning in her own pain, the mother sees her child as important enough to temporarily set her own needs aside, and meet the needs of her child. How many times have divorced mothers dried their eyes before the afternoon school bus arrives so they can give their happiest and healthiest selves to their children?

Sometimes this happens, and sometimes it doesn’t. You may remember growing up with such mental illness, dysfunction, or chemical abuse in your family, that you and your needs were largely ignored. 

Don’t ignore yourself anymore. Don’t treat yourself and your needs un-important anymore. If you start treating yourself as important, one of two things will happen: 1) the people around you will learn how too, or 2)the people around you will drop off and you will begin to attract new, healthier people. Either way, you win.

What ways have you learned to make yourself important? What advice could you give others?

 

My “Relationship Savvy” blog gives you tips, advice, and flippin’ fantastic feel-goods to help with your most difficult relationship challenges.

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