Success, Change, and A "Strong-willed" Child

My parents referred to me as a "strong-willed child." Once I decided to do something in my life there did not seem to be much that would stop me. My rheumatic fever gave me an intense amount of pain on a constant basis. Very early in my life I developed a competitive approach to my pain, and therefore I would work hard, run fast when I could, and I would stay active every moment that I was awake, and my approach to life gave me a competitive edge in living with my rheumatic fever and healing it and its afteraffects.

Of course in the beginning of living my own cure, my activity did increase my pain, but as I had lived with pain I had increased my tolerance of pain so that I could and did persevere with increasing my activity. During this time I was eating the best organic foods that were available on our own farm and lots of oranges each and every day. We raised our own chickens, pigs, beef, vegetables, fruits, and nuts on our farm, so the entire list of food groups were available to me. I ate at least two eggs a day and my favorite food was pork which I ate at least three times a day. My parents were very careful that I ate three oranges a day, which they ordered from Florida and which were delivered to us through the Rural Postal Delivery Service, or in simpler terms, our rural mailman.

I learned very early in my life not to dwell on my pain, but to always be planning in my mind what I wanted to do next in my life. I had announced to my parents at the age of two that I was going to be a nurse. Because I knew what I wanted to do, I was always interested in healing myself and getting on with my life. Every time that some friend would laugh at me when I said I wanted to become a Registered Nurse, which probably did seem impossible in many people’s minds, I would simply answer, "watch me"! I was learning some valuable lessons as I made up my mind to be normal and live a normal life. First of all, at my young age I knew that if we can find the perfect formula for living life, we can help ourselves to grow and change back to health. I was very young when I realized that we must eat fresh and uncontaminated foods, drink lots of fresh water, breathe fresh air, and exercise. I learned this lesson well from my parents, and as I lived this very important lesson I was growing and feeling healthier every day that I continued to live.

This feeling of success about living made me very excited about my plans for my own growth and change into my adult life. I knew that I was going to become a nurse from the age of two. When I was choosing the nursing school that I wanted to attend, I had to find one that would support my eating habits as easily as I could. I did not find one school that used only "organic" foods, but I knew that I was coming in on the cusp of change that I hoped would lead me in the right direction. There were not many cases of what we call "cancer" in our society at that time, but I found myself in the perfect situation to relate our societal change to the change in our disease potential.

I was very interested in societal diseases, such as tuberculosis, which was a devastating disease of the day that had no cure in sight. In my early life, sanatoriums were everywhere and they were used to house patients with tuberculosis and mental health problems. As I lived my nursing education I was making a clear determination within my mind to specialize in research in the hope that I could contribute to change through research that would help the masses of people who were suffering. That is still my goal today.

Smile

There is that something
That you lock behind your
Beautiful mind
That is as solid as any wall.

All of you is beautiful
The twinkle in your eyes
The smile that lights your face

As would the sun that gleamed from 

Perfect igloos

                       Where there could never be snow.

Our Journey to Love

Each and every human being is born to love, and they will unconsciously seek love from birth until death. Many individuals think that sex is love, which is absolutely inaccurate. Sex is a physical act and love is an emotion. When sex is good sex with someone you love, you can certainly feel the expansion of your physical love with sex into an emotional love. This can be a short journey or a long journey which is ultimately dependent upon the circumstances of the depth of loving emotions that has been cultivated within you and shared with other people. Love as our emotional self must always be strong enough to balance out our thinking mind. If our thinking mind is living in fear, we will usually not have discovered the love that is within us as part of our human design.

The love that we feel for another person is always teaching us some energy of a Dual Soul lesson, whether or not we understand our loving emotions. When we want to learn the truth of love, we must understand our loving emotions as an integrated energy of us as human beings and consciously use our loving emotions before we can become conscious of the internal love that we feel, which is essentially an energy of loving emotion. This helps us to understand that sex is not love. Sex is a physical act, and love is an emotion. We can feel the emotions of love without having physical sex, if our thinking mind has advanced far enough to engage with our loving emotions. Our thinking mind, loving emotions, and sensory response to life are all coming from the energy of our brain. Have we learned to think? When we have the ability to think, we also have the ability to know love, if we are not suffering from intense brain damage.

When people do not understand the truth of love, we can have abuse occur to a child, despite the fact that the adult may have interpreted their behavior as love. When we begin to compare the love that we feel for our family to the love that we feel for someone that is unrelated to us, we begin to feel the difference. Family love is a “soul connected” love. We may live in circumstances where we never see the person that we love, but in our heart and Soul we love them anyway on a deeper level, even if we cannot verbalize how we feel. Distant love is a love that teaches us more sometimes than the everyday closeness of love, because we will create a scenario in our mind that allows us to experience the beauty of the internal feeling of love. This can be a lesson of love for many people who experience death or divorce. We have friends, relatives, children, and family members that we may not see on a consistent basis, but distance does not interfere with the love that we feel for them.

Love is an energy. Thought is an energy. When our life creates a distance between us and the person or people that we love, our thoughts can help us contact their thoughts and we can feel the love and the closeness of the physical presence as we think about them. One vital aspect of love that we must all remember is, “love is as love does.” Love is not just a word and it has very little to do with our sexual conquests, because love is designed within us as an emotion, which we use as a way of expressing the energy of ourselves. We can always feel the emotions of love towards our family, friends, and other special friends if we have learned to use our emotions of love. Learning to use our emotions of love is our challenge because in our physical thought process, we can think that love is sex. There is no necessary relationship between sex and love. Sex is a physical act. Love is an emotion. If we feel the emotions of love during our sexual relationships, we will be helping ourselves to grow and change. When sex is used as a physical behavior to release tension but without the emotion of love, it is shared masturbation, which has nothing to do with our loving emotions.

Love is an emotion that is felt in our heart as well as our head or physical body. When we feel our “sexual need” only in our head or body, it is usually devoid of any and all loving emotions, therefore we can see that “physical need” is more accurate as a description than love is. As human beings we have ventured out of the “cave” to understand ourselves as loving human beings. After thousands of years, we think that we are truly ready to look at ourselves. But most of our sexual behaviors are still physical and usually have no true loving emotions. We may encounter people with plenty of sexual drive that is secondary to friction, but without any semblance of love as a loving emotion, which always shows us that we have not grown enough as human beings to want, give, and to share the emotions of love. The human species is an evolving species. Most humans have more class and thoughtfulness today than they did 100 lifetimes ago. Living our physical lives is our method of growth and change as a human species.

This is precisely why knowledge is vital to our thinking mind. Without knowledge, we will not and cannot grow and change at the same level. Once we learn a lesson, we must live that lesson countless times to work out the details and to set it in place in our Spirit Consciousness. This is the reason that Spiritual Philosophy has been the way of learning since the ancient days of man’s creation. If we repeat each day precisely like our last day, what have we learned??? As we live our journey to understand and to live our love, we give ourselves an opportunity to grow and change in new and better understood realities. The most important method of change is to learn the difference between right behavior and wrong behavior. As a human species, we can look at history and our own personal life and clearly see the path that we have been living as our own method of learning. If we are living any level of lying, cheating, and stealing, it becomes very easy to see that we have a long ways to go before we can say hello to change. The basic change that we make within ourselves through our growth is to change from fear to love.

The Ethical Values are our guideposts to change and growth. For instance, as we learn the value of Truth in our everyday lives, we can bring about a dramatic change in our Dual Soul growth. Truth is the most important lesson that we have to learn as a Dual Soul. What is the truth of us? What do we gain in our life by living our truth? Living any form of untruth allows us to “get stuck” in negative energy, which can take us years and years of multiple lives before we can overcome our lying, fear, and inequality.

Many times people ask me, “how can this happen?” Love can be felt within us from another person because love is an energy. We are energy as human beings. Unfortunately we have been taught that we are just physical beings, which is inaccurate because it is the love that gives our body life and allows us to be conscious of the energies of other people who may not be physically present in our life. Many times a “long-distance” love is all that we have. But long-distance love is a love that is being lived through the energy fields. When we understand that we are energy beings living in matter, we can understand how to connect with those we love, where ever they may be. Energy is the eternal pattern of us. Our human body is our physical image that is at all times dependent upon our Spiritual Energy for life. When we can accept that we are both energy and matter as human beings, we can fill those empty spots in our heart by connecting with the energy of the person that we are missing.

Sex is not love. Sex is a physical act. Love is an emotion. When we experience sex with both the emotions of love and a pleasurable physical response, we may have more of a conscious awareness of the love that we feel, but love as an emotion is a very strong energy field that can travel enormous distances to feel the love of another person. Poetry has been written about our “undying” love and it is helpful if you are feeling the loss of love to read some poetry and let it soak into your Soul and your heart. Love as an emotion is an energy and it travels with the speed of light, primarily through our internal thoughts to reach the person that we love. We should all be sending energy as love to those we know and love. Love is a powerful stimulant that increases our love of life and other people, but most of all love is an energy which can strengthen the internal forces of another person.. Love is the elixir that can heal the world and us if we are not afraid to live our love with other people.

Years ago there was a common saying, “make love, not war,” which I feel is appropriate today as long as it is two consenting or married adults. Love has a strong positive energy that builds the unity and purpose of our physical reality, war has only destructive energies at all levels of interaction. Energy is everything, which makes it essential that all humans develop their internal consciousness of Energy as the force that controls their life. We have a choice, we can live love or we can live fear. Love is not synonymous with sex. Love is an emotion. Sex is a physical act. Fear is a negative emotion that rapes our thinking mind. The energy that we live is our choice, but it helps to know the concept and design of energy so that we can use our free choice of love with the wisdom to strengthen our human physical lives.

Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time there was a prince and a princess. They were not born of the same family but in many ways they could have been. The princess loved the prince with all her heart and soul. So much so that she grieved for his absence.

The prince loved the princess very much too – but he was a man – and he couldn’t understand how he could love the princess as much as he loved himself. That wasn’t what he expected of love, so he began to think, to think of her as being too close to really love as a man should love his princess. So she became his sister and he spent time with her and cared for her but he was afraid to truly love as he knew a prince was meant to love a princess.

One day his princess was crying in her grief and the prince ran out of his castle to the top of a hill. He looked up at the sky and opened his arms to the heavens. Loneliness was in his voice as he shouted in frustration at the stars. At once his fairy godmother tapped him on the shoulder.

“Don’t despair my prince – life is as you want it to be. When you view the princess as part of you then you must love yourself before you can accept the love you have for her. But you are worthy of your own love too my fine prince. See how your kingdom loves you. You are perfect and beautiful in every way. When you can see it then the princess will never need to grieve again and neither will you.”

With that thought trailing in the air behind her the fairy godmother disappeared into the dark night and the prince found himself alone again on the dark hill. The loneliness suddenly wrapped him in its heavy arms and he shivered. Thoughts of the princess flashed into his mind and he felt warm again and safe. She really wasn’t part of him after all, he decided. She wouldn’t be lonely – not like he was lonely. She would only grieve for a lifetime, silently, but he would be the one to cry.

He stood there in the night and thought of how each of them would be less without the other and he began to feel warm and safe. He smiled, laughing because he had never seen it before. They were truly special people but more different then he had ever realized. They could never be the same because she was female and he was male. He wasn’t making love to himself but to her when he expressed that love. Then he could truly love himself for knowing the difference. And he could truly love her because now it was all right.

The prince turned and ran down the hill slipping and sliding in the wet grass. He couldn’t wait to find his princess and say for the very first time, with all his heart and soul –

I LOVE YOU.

Being Human

The story of love and life is how I look at my life, my self, my family, my friends, and the work that has made my life the beauty and simplicity of love and life.  When I was sixteen, my goal in life was to be a nurse.  After high school was over for me, I enrolled in a Daughters of Charity Nursing School in Indianapolis, IN.  I had only a couple of months between high school and leaving for my next challenge in life.  I was not Catholic, but I adjusted very quickly to the Daughters of Charity Nuns and the pace of Nursing School.  We studied, we worked, we slept a little, and we did it all over and over again.  Each and every day was a dramatic learning experience for me.  We not only went to school to study but we were being taught the beginning aspects of being a R.N. 

It was preferred that we not have boyfriends while we were in school.  Of course some of the local girls did have boyfriends and some that lived in small towns close to Indianapolis also had boyfriends.  Those of us who were from other states had a slightly different lifestyle.  The Nuns did have membership in a country club for us so that we could swim, play tennis, badminton, or golf  if we were interested.  I did go during the summer and winter to swim but my exercise plan did not include tennis and golf.  Nursing was providing me with all of the exercise that I needed to feel healthy.  

I loved studying to become a registered nurse.  I found the Nuns very supportive and basically friendly Souls.  Our classes were great and our teachers were superior to anything that I had imagined.  We worked hard and we studied hard.   In terms of the Instructors and Nuns, we appeared to be in an exchange program with Catholic University in Washington, D.C.  When we went to St. Louis, MO to study psychiatry, we became more aware of the Catholic University influence although this part was not stressed to us.

At the end of six months, some students disappeared.  At the end of one year some more students disappeared.  We had some very intense classes and if you couldn't keep up, the Daughters of Charity that ran the school simply sent you home by calling your parents to come get you.  At the end of the first year, I realized what the saying, "here today, gone tomorrow" really meant.  This was hard on many of us because in a small school, isolated from family and friends, you learn to depend upon your classmates for support and laughter.  But in this school, grades were primary, because you had to learn to take care of the sick and dying as well as yourself.

During our third year, we spent 4 months in St. Louis studying psychiatry under the Daughters of Charity.  This was a special time for me because we lived near St. Louis in Salem, Illinois so I knew a little about the town.  Knowing anything about the town did not do me much good because we worked hard and had very little time off.  When I did have a full weekend off, I went home, which was easier in St. Louis than it was in Indianapolis, IN.

I always enjoyed Nursing School, because I loved to learn and Nursing was all new to me.  I loved the patients and the nursing of the very ill.  I even liked the Psychiatric Hospital in St. Louis.  What a beautiful piece of land it was, which made me love it more since my roots were already in the land.  With the exception of one "little old civilian lady" whose husband had built most of the highways in St. Louis and had made a deal with the nuns to take care of his wife, all of the patients at the hospital were either Nuns, Brothers, or Priests.  This was a true eye-opener for me, because I had no idea that Nuns, Brothers, and Priests could become mentally ill too.  

I was not a religious person so I guess that I had never entertained the idea that Nuns, Brothers, and Priests could also become psychotic.  If you are living a happy life, why would anyone become psychotic.  If you were not living a happy life in a convent or Jesuit school, why were you there?  I learned a lot about psychosis in St. Vincent's and had a wonderful time in the town.  We went boating on the Mississippi River on one weekend while I was in St. Louis, which I had done before but none of my classmates had lived this experience, so it was one of our best weekends in St. Louis.

The Chief of Psychiatry had our class over to his home for a cookout, which was a wonderful experience but I always had a sneaking suspicion that the Director of Nurses twisted his arm because he did not appear to me to be a loving and open-minded physician or entertainer.  But even a grouchy Doctor did not spoil our fun time at his house with its beautiful pool and expansive yard because he cooked all of the food and literally was a nice host.  I never did figure out whether the Director of Nursing had him under her control or not, but the signs were significant.