Residual Effects and Self-Sabotage

About 13 years ago, I took a trip to California specifically for an in-person Past Live Regression session. If you aren't sure what that is, it's a simple process, similar to hypnosis, where you're in a trance like state and describe what you see in lives before your current incarnation, which is recorded for you. Yes, I went there...

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It starts with birth and goes backwards. I saw a few different lives, one in which myself, my brother (currently) and both of my parents all lived in an orphanage somewhere in England. I was a young boy of about 10 and my brother currently, was my sister about 6 years old. The two of us fled the orphanage, on my lead (shocker.) I scavenged cleverly for food and resources, but turned most of it over to my little sister to keep her alive. In the memory, I ended up dying of starvation on the streets of England, she was hovered over me trying to wake me up from my deadened state.

Ever since that time, I've noticed many patterns emerge from myself, related or not, explained through this or my imagination, I'll never know. Regardless, there seems to be something in my unconscious that still has issues with food. I truly always feel like I will be starving. Funny enough, my brother and I lived together during college under my parents roof for a spell when they were cabin bound. I would always save part of my food if I went out (BUDGET...) for the next day. Jeff would ALWAYS eat my leftovers and I would ALWAYS get pissed. If only he knew I died of starvation because of him ;)

Hmm

What's my point? I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I'm trying to cut my body fat percentage down and build muscle, all at the same time, which is very hard. I pack myself a lunch and healthy, proportioned snacks every day, but I find that every day I start to panic. Once I log all of my food for the day into MyFitness Pal, I suddenly feel that I won't have enough fuel to get through my workouts. Am I going to be weak? I should maybe get a salad or soup or something to go with this? 

Logically, I know that it's enough. Unconsciously, I do not. On many occasions, I give into the demon and get some hard-boiled eggs, a small salad, soup, etc. (always healthy) but still calories I don't necessarily need. I feel it's sabotaging my fitness goals and makes me wonder how the past impacts the now.

It's something relatively harmless, but what about other things? Are illnesses and addictions a residual effect from the past? Reclusive behaviors? Inclusive behaviors? I guess we'll never really confirm knowledge. 

Anyways, this is not to excuse or explain undesirable behaviors, but rather to bring light onto the darkness of the unconscious and be better able to control the beast.

What do you think? Do you have any relentless complexes you think might be more readily understandable with Past Life knowledge?

That's all I have to say right now.

From what I recall

It's not a huge secret to those I'm close to that my Dad is an alcoholic. That said, I feel the need to write about it...

I remember when I was young, my Mom worked at First Bank. On Friday's, my brother and I were with Dad. He would pick us up from daycare and we'd go to the liquor store on Foley Blvd and McDonald's. I hate ketchup. He would always request a no ketchup/mustard burger for me and we'd pull forward and wait. Inevitably, it would arrive, with ketchup on it. Needless to say, the introduction of the Chicken McNugget was a godsend.

We'd go home, eat our dinner and Dad would sit in his rocking chair in the upstairs of our 4 level split home and I would play records for him. He always drank brandy, and was always jovial.

He was also a hunter, and a fisherman. When deer were had, they would hang them up in our garage and spend hours in the garage cleaning the meat. When they were done, they would cook the tenderloins in an electric fry pan with onions and mushrooms. I recall that they were delicious and Dad was always happy. The same with fishing. He was always happy.

Fast forward to the 2010's. Dad hasn't been so happy. Sometimes I feel that it's my fault, because I am divorced. Dad loved Andy, like a son and I can't help but feel that I destroyed a dynamic that could've been maintained. But still, even during those happy times when we were together, Dad was always drinking.

The 2010's brought a hip replacement surgery, which resulted in a forced sobriety. Which resulted in a rebellion from forced sobriety, which brought on him falling and breaking the leg his new hip was attached to. This brought on a secondary surgery, along with a stay in a retirement home to recover with another forced sobriety.

It starts to sound like a broken record from here. But to those involved, yes, it is a broken record. Yet, it's an important enough of a beat to keep trying to hear the rest of the song. And so you keep up with the hopeful days of sobriety that follow the remorse of drunken fall outs. And you 'encourage' (nag) with the earnest of an inner city school teacher in a crappy Lifetime movie. 

And then the things you remember. Somehow, they nearly all involve a drink in his hand, and yet he was almost always happy, and you look at your own life, and you wonder. And you look at his life, and you wonder ever more, was the happiness because of life or because alcohol made him happy? Did he reach the potential he'd hoped for?

There are so many stories in between that I don't know, and those that I do, yet they do not create a clear picture of this person. This person who was an enormous influence on my life, but was still mostly an absentee mystery.

I remember that Unchained Melody is one of his favorite songs and he wants me to play it on the piano at his funeral. I remember that he LOVED to dance (but he was always drinking when he loved it.) I remember that he was a great cook and he loved to feed people and entertain (but he was always drinking.) And I remember him going to work every day in shirts my Mom would iron while she watched taped episodes of All My Children and how he always sat in a rocking chair. Always. He's broken so many rocking chairs.

I recall my Grandparents, sitting in their rocking chairs too, drunk, smoking cigarettes and doing very little at all. I remember seeing my Grandma in the hospital with liver cancer. She insisted that someone ensure her pounds of makeup were on at all times, but the disgusting brown tubes flowing juices from her organs scared me, as did she, always. She was always late, always bought weird presents, let her dog poop on the floor in the house and had a naked statue garden and peacocks. She was not the cookie making Grandma from the other side of the family. She was the one who showed up unannounced with life-sized gummy rats for Jeff and I, driving a dented old limo and sporting Cruella Deville skunk hair. And she was my Father's Mom. In the objectivity of the recall, I can understand. I can fully get why he dove headlong into denial, all those years, while at the same time claiming he would never become them.

I can recall and understand, but his life doesn't look like theirs. It seems at some point he decided it had to, it must, I have to take that turn and become a puddle of a person who requires assistance to stay alive. The unconscious became a dragon that ate it's own tale to 're' find out what it already knew...

And it's terribly sad.

I hope that he finally wakes up in his 'nth' time in rehab and realizes that he could be truly happy, sober. With adorable Grandchildren who call him PAPA! And a family who admires his ability to be stable and calm. And just an all around great guy, who could help people, just by being him. I guess we'll see...

The best and worst

If you know me, you probably know that I am very 'dreamy.' I'm also someone fascinated by the unseen world(s) and I've done my share of out-of-body traveling throughout my mere 35 years. (See My First OBE for reference...) I've read a ton of books about the topic, some fabulous and some obviously fabricated. Some referencing visions in the bible, some talking about specific worlds and some talking about spirits that come across almost racist. (There's something for everyone, I suppose)

The thing that these books don't ever tell you is this:

"If you have an out-of-body experience, it will change you forever. It will be the absolute best and worst thing to ever happen to you." - Me

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There are many reasons for this. I remember being extremely overwhelmed and excited the first few occurrences, but from there things get even more complex. The sensations that threw me off my rocker feel tamer, more known. And because of that you also gain more control; you learn how to quickly decide not to leave your body, or how to induce it, you know when your state of mind is negative and you're headed to scary places and you learn to dive head-long into a lucid dream if you get 'stuck.'

Why is it the best thing that's ever happened to me, you may ask? For me, it was simply a comforting feeling that I am not my body, I (in the holistic sense) am separate from it, which also (for me) increases the probability that there is something post-mortem, and possibly something to look forward to! The most amazing things happen out of body, you can feel everything and communicate without speaking. Colors are vivid and space is fluid, but you can also sense space. Your perceptions are immediate and accurate and you don't question them. And in my experience, questioning your perceptions will send you straight back into your body (if that isn't telling...) You become completely genderless, because gender is more of just an energy out there, so there are way more 'genders' in that sense.

You can easily perceive strength, fear, warmth, empathy, care, sexuality, intensity and much more with absolutely no thought whatsoever. How could this be a bad thing?!

See Homer did it too.

The flip side of OBE's is this (for me,) coming back feels like a let down. Initially it's great to have that foggy feeling of remembering what just happened and how cool that was. But at the same time, it's depressing. For one, having sex outside of the body is unbelievable. It's not anything like it is here, the sensations are stronger and there is no body to be concerned with, it is all 100% pure energy that forges this insane intensity of orgasmic-ness. It's truly beyond compare and then you're back in the body and it's not as great. (Still good, but not tremendous.)

The other daunting lesson I've learned is that we are (or must be) responsible for our own energy. When you are feeling positive about things and leave the body, you will find positivity. On the flip side, if you are down in the dumpster, you may literally go down into the dumpster of your own psychic basement upon leaving the body. I can tell you that I've been scared out of my mind, having immediately dove straight into the recesses of the ground and been smothered by the weight of the world on my soul. I've felt myself being dragged by negative spirits into dark caves and terrifying areas that feel like you're being buried.

So, in knowing that 'as above, so below' may have some merit, just made me feel all the more responsible for my state of mental health. And depression, well, it doesn't lead you out of the body, it's as though the soul is too heavy to even gain the strength to exit, where typically the soul body is really light and flees!

In the interest of keeping this short, like most of my posts, I'm going to leave you with a few tips. If you are interested in 'astral travel' or OBE's, I would recommend reading something, anything about them. For me, it was almost as though my interest in it created the actual happening. And secondly, if you feel like you're about to leave the body, but you get stuck, you can try my method. I roll out of my body. The image above shows the lady just floating upwards, which might happen to you, but I find that if I imagine rolling off the edge of the bed/couch/etc. it happens right away. Because you can get stuck and it's a really weird tickling feeling.

And that's all I have to say right now. Have a loving and peaceful sleep.

If you would like to discuss the unseen with me off-line, feel free to email oddnumberedlife@gmail.com

B.A.M.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, for reasons I’ll get into later. But, I think it’d be just grand to start a movement called Body Acceptance Movement. Mostly because I think it’d be sweet to have the acronym BAM. I mean, BAM! I totally love and accept my imperfect perfect body. Right?! I know there’s already a BIM (Body Image Movement) but, there’s room for more, in my humblest of opinions.

So, here’s my story. About nine months ago, I set about to drop some poundage and gain more muscle. It turns out, I did. I’ve lost 28 pounds to date and countless inches and I’m smaller and more muscular and fit than I think I’ve ever been. You think that’d make me happy right? Wrong. Turns out, I’m more insecure and unhappier than I’ve ever been in my whole life. In fact, my mind has turned into a complete nightmare of sadness and agony.

Nearly every day, I go to the gym and see all these other women with gorgeous legs, butts and arms and while they are lightly plodding along on the elliptical machine, I’m over in the weight section doing deadlifts, squats, sumo squats, rows, pull ups, dips, jump squats, pendulum lunges, planks, tricep kickbacks, you name it. I follow this up by doing wind sprints on the treadmill and running mile after mile. And still, I can’t change the shape of this body I live in. I will never have legs like the girl on the elliptical barely breaking a sweat. Ever. No matter how hard I work.

We're being inundated,
daily, with being sexier,
not losing our man and
having a bikini body.
Think about it.

I don’t know what happened (that’s a lie, I really do) but, I know that I’ve become a prisoner to my own mind and I drank the poison of the media and I no longer feel that I have any value. Everything that never bothered me in the past now brings me to devastating nights of tears and misery. I wonder when my significant other is going to just up and leave me for one of the gorgeous girls he was eye-balling when we were out the other day. Or why he even bothers to have ‘do stuff’ with me when he can just go online and have everything that I’m not in the click of a button.

I spend an inordinate amount of time researching better weight lifting strategies, but I now avoid many of the websites out there because I don’t want to be inundated with images of gorgeous models that I will never look like, no matter how much effort I put in. I loathe Men’s Health and Body Building because inevitably, they’ll have the nice easy links for men to view the top 100 hottest women in the world and so and so bares it all. I mean come on, where does it end.

This relentless focus on my inadequacies is literally ruining my life. Every day has become mostly just a struggle to move past the nightmare in my head and just get things done. I distract myself for hours and hours at a time to avoid the demons threatening to take me under again.

In short, this past year has been the absolute worst year of my life. I used to write often and sing loudly and proudly in the car on my way to and from work. And now, I’m just stuck inside this white-walled elevator of my mind, going over and over why I’m never going to be good enough, or pretty enough or strong enough and basically just suffering in isolation. I don’t want to talk to anyone because I’m ashamed and embarrassed that I drank the Kool-Aid for one of the first times in my life.

All this to say, I feel as though it isn’t for naught. I always knew I wanted to do something to help women and younger girls realize their value and potential and to ignore the media. It’s something I’ve been all about my whole life and maybe I had to really drink the poison and know how it feels not to think “Bam, I’m hot stuff” even if I didn’t look like a Hollywood star. So, that’s how I’m choosing to look at it.

The time is now. There are a lot of things happening on this front in the world and I want to be involved. I’m not sure what my plan is yet, but hopefully, if I can connect with and help others heal, I might also get over this ‘illness’ that’s been plaguing me with the determination of a terminal cancer. And maybe, just maybe ‘we’ as a whole will start seeing how we’re being taught what to like and what to be attracted to. Have you ever noticed the way even certain words change a person’s mind for a moment. For example, just the mention of the word bikini to a man can take him away.

How is it that we’ve allowed the media to place so much emphasis on women as body parts, not people? And how do we aid our teenagers in focusing on their talents and changing the world, instead of how sexy they can look for a man, or to get a man. Their busy taking selfies of themselves in racy outfits, and making duck faces instead of drawing, playing sports, creating and loving life. It’s time to wake up and look at how huge this has become.

Okay, I’m off my soap box…

Do you have thoughts or suggestions? Does anyone know how to start a movement and would be willing to help me? Do you think this is a hopeless cause that should just be accepted? Or do you think it’s worthwhile to try to make a difference in someone’s life and prevent others from wasting their time, like I did, feeling absolutely wretched and isolated for no reason whatsoever?

PS: Am I afraid that the people I know, who read this, are going to look at me differently? Yes. Do I feel intensely stupid and vulnerable for revealing what I managed to keep under wraps all this time? Yes. But, I know from reading others stories of a similar nature, how it helped me to feel less alone and less ashamed. And, I also feel that true strength lies in the ability to be truly out there and vulnerable. So, maybe it'll be worth it.

that time I was a tripod

"You have to be really quiet when you're in the stand." He said, with authority. And so began the comedy of errors that was my first adventure of deer camp.

Creeping through the forest, just before dawn, I went. Silently. Out to my deer stand. I climbed up, with shards of terror in vein and cautiously sat down and worried my way through loading my father's borrowed rifle. And there I sat. Quietly.

We'll meet back at camp around 9, they said. To my drowsy eyes, the four hour sit revealed my imagination in the scenery of the woods. My mind was full of trickery and admittedly, I got sleepy. So sleepy that I felt the need to unload the rifle.

Around 8:45, I lowered my rifle on the rope and slid down the ladder, bag in hand. I crept back through the forest, onto the trail and up near Casey's stand. He looked down towards me, holding his hands up in a STOP position. He began pointing into some bushes about 10 feet in front of his stand and making the universal symbol for "Sleep" with his palms against his cheek. 

I think I get it, but I'm not sure! Something is sleeping in front of his stand. But I can't see it. I'm on the ground. I stood there, quietly... He's motioning something to me, so I start stealthily walking up the trail. Well, he starts silently ranting and waving his hands in the air and pointing at my rifle's open action. I sigh, and put one shell into the chamber, thinking how the hell do you expect me to shoot a deer I can't effing see?

When suddenly! Three larger deer come running right behind me and across the trail. The Doe that I'd been 'stalking' jumped up and was looking right into my eyes. I just stood there, stunned as Casey's yelling, SHOOT IT! 

Needless to say, all four deer got away. We laughed. And that was that.

A few more weeks into deer camp, I'd been scouting all kinds of deer. They were everywhere around my stand. Apparently, I had the best spot. That said, one I deemed to small to shoot at. Another was so close that I couldn't figure out what I was aiming at in my site. And I still wasn't sure I could kill a deer. I was a hunter all right!

Our last day of deer camp, I come back for round two at 3:30 or so and head to my stand. I get situated and along comes Casey. Standing at the foot of my tree, he says, "I'm coming up there for awhile." Well, his version of stealth mode is quite different than mine. He came STOMPING up the ladder with a vengeance. It was as though Big Foot and the Incredible Hulk were both on their way to get me and the seat under my butt was jostling and moving around with the wavering tree.

"YOU NEED TO GET DOWN AND YOU NEED TO GET DOWN RIGHT NOW!" I whisper yelled at him.

"What? It's fine, knock it off." He said, and continued up with only the slightest bit more caution.

He got up to the top and we managed to maneuver both of us into the small seat. And that's when I discovered that Casey's version of "being very quiet" was also radically different from mine. He sat there burping, farting, talking away. Farts so stinky, they got stuck in his warm gear and every time he stood up, or sat down the swamp gas was actually visible in the air. At one point, he even peed off the side.

There was one small moment in time that I thought, this isn't so bad. It's kind of nice having a buddy, it's warm and less boring. Alas, the swamp gas would prevail and I'd question the fleeting, fuzzy feeling.

Like I said, I'd been scouting and knew exactly when the deer would start to come out. About 10 minutes beforehand, I looked at him and said, "It's almost witching hour, you best be quiet!" He stood, facing the opposite direction, while I sat and covered the other ground. Not 15 minutes from those words, he motioned to me that he saw one. "I'm going to shoot it." He whispered.

The deer moved and he darted towards my side of the tree, hovering over me. I covered my ears, bent down and without words became a human tripod. BANG. We saw it fall, not more than 5 yards away from the stand.

"We have to wait at least 15 minutes, text the others and tell them we got one, but will hunt for another half hour or so." He said.

And I did.

5 minutes later?

"I can't wait any longer, I'm getting down." He said and dropped his bag off the side. We got down, and headed towards the deer. He stopped short in front of me and made violent motions for me to do the same. 

My heart started pounding and I imagined the deer getting up and charging both of us. But, it was just Casey being his dramatic self and scaring the shit out of me. We walked closer, clean shot. That deer was dead and HUGE!

And that's my first adventure at deer camp story.