First You Must Choose To Be Well

My mother was a very unhappy and unwell woman.

Looking back on her life, it is clear to me that her Wellness Wheel was totally off kilter. Not only that, it was broken, crushed and "all the kings horses or men" had not one darn chance of putting it back together.

By my 35th birthday I knew it was up to me to crack that unwellness code or not only would my life be damned but my daughter's as well.

Unhappiness is passed along while wellness is something you have to return to - on your own.

I gave it my best shot - returning my mother to her state of wellness. When nothing within my power worked (money, providing for as much of her needs as I could, giving her full reign over my home, etc), I turned to God. By 35, I had started my "lessons in Truth," and as my mind and heart expanded to the teachings of meta-physicians, psychologist with a spiritual leaning and New Thought ministers, I took home the message to my mother.

She heard me how long enough to lead me to believe something was getting through. The fallacy of my budding conviction would crack wide open within hours, sometimes minutes as she laid a table of "woe is me" for everything under the sun.

There was no way I could convince her to fake it until she made it. She was as real as they came where it concerned poverty consciousness, lack, 'the world is against me mentality', hypochondria, defeatism and handouts.

She made her transition rooted and grounded in these and other convictions. Her late-in-life Christian baptism did very little to mend her broken wheel.

Early in life, I made the conscious decision not to be like her. To ensure that, I fought and flailed against all of her brokenness. The irony was - my struggle only brought me experiences that matched exactly what I was fighting to avoid. Thankfully I caught the error of my ways quickly before my own wellness wheel was destroyed.

My childhood of sexual abuse; my early marital life of domestic violence and my experiences of rape were enough to break my spirit. Yet, an unknowing resilience led me through.

As I struggled with the aftermath of broken relationships, driven to suicide attempts, near homelessness and living on the edge of a first world brand of poverty (basically paying to have a job), something kept calling to me, telling me to look within.

Books, workshops, seminars even church had given me the same messages but it took falling to my rock bottom really hard on my backside to hear it.

As I sat in my room in a boarding house, shivering in a thin coat at a deserted bus stop, shivering on cold winter nights or getting up from the snowbank in which I had fallen on my home after a late night shift I rewrote my script.

• Wellness is mine in my life, world and affairs
• My relationship with money is healed. I have enough, I earn sufficient to pay my bills
• My current job is a window to one that will utilize all my skills
• I have friends who love me just as I am and support my growth
• My relationship with Abi (my daughter) is healing

These were just some of the affirmations I created and repeated, believing and knowing that my life was being recreated.

Yes, wellness is seen externally but must first be sensed and felt internally. No amount of money, medicine or material possession can instill wellness. Neither can prescriptive religious customs or gurus.

Wellness is a choice that only you can make, then activate and live. Start in one place in your life and it greatly permeates its entirety.

That is what I know for sure!

Namaste

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My Choices Made Me Who I Am

Choices.

Claudette Esterine

A smile lights up my face as I think about some of the choices that I have made.

As far back as I can recall, I was never one to not make a choice. Some people go through much of their lives without consciously “picking a side.”

My former partner of 16 years and I would argue over her propensity to always sit on the fence. It annoyed the heck out of me. She would never pick a side, finding some sort of nobility in remaining on the fence and watching the rest of the world fight over spoils. From my peace-loving perspective now, her raison d’etre makes some sense. Why join in the fracas? Let the minions or as she would more than likely say – the idiots – fight.

That was never my style.

I knew which political party my loyalty belonged to since my seventh year on Earth. By 11, I was ready to cast my vote.  When my neighbours went to St. Hugh’s High School, it became my choice for my secondary education. Being a planner from a young age, I was clear which girls’ school was my second choice – Alpha High.

Without knowing the educational requirements, again once I heard of my neighbours and childhood friends to date – Dr. Janice Chang and her sister Grace – choices for future career, medicine, I decided to become a paediatrician. When it became clear that my grades would not allow me to peek through the gates of medical school much less enter, I quickly decided on the hospitality industry.

Politics was my real love, however, so when the opportunity arose for me to earn a degree my immediate choices were to pursue studies in International Relations and Political Science. Later, upon migrating to Canada, a plethora of choices were before me as the doors to my former educational achievements closed due to lack of Canadian experience. That is the topic for another post.

Fortunately, my heart was already expanding and so was my spiritual quest, my choice was easy. Soon after putting down my bags in Edmonton, Alberta and realising that another choice had to be made – I entered Theological Studies at a Catholic University. That again was a deliberate choice. There were seminaries of other denominations but I chose to learn about systematic theology and Christianity from one of its main architects.

Not choosing is really a choice. I have written on this before. 

I made such "not-choosing choices" regarding intimate relationships and friendships for many years. My transition from comatose relating to conscious connections was gradual and over many years. However, once there, I never looked back. 

It would be a lie to tell you now that any relationship that I have entered, even encounters (and I have had a few) were unknowing. My eyes were always wide open.

A wanna-be partner was recently shocked at my choice not to be his “trophy girlfriend.” Within 15 minutes of dragging out of him his true intentions, to parade me as his prize – a strong, beauty-filled, educated, intelligent to boot, black/Jamaican woman; something his ex-finance could hardly come close to – I walked out of his life, kicking the door shut in his face.

Image: etsy.com

It has taken me too many tears and too many choices to be where I am today – free, independent, self-supporting and full of Spirit – to allow anyone be it man, woman, friend or even foe to treat me in any manner demeaning of my personal esteem of Claudette.

Women who bawl their eyes out, blaming Life over the choices or not-choosing choices that they have made will get little sympathy from me. I was one such and learned the hard way – that whatever comes to me is my choice. I love how Stephen Covey phrased it:

“But until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday," that person cannot say, "I choose otherwise.” ― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Can you say this? Let me hear you say that here or on our Facebook page.

Namaste.

Build Your Own Soap Box

"One channel is the Stress Channel and the other is the Peace Channel. We really do have a choice about what we listen to. The Peace Channel can only be heard when we are present in the moment, when we are in the now. To tune in to the Peace Channel, all we have to do is be, experience, notice, and naturally respond to what is arising in the moment. To tune into the Stress Channel, we just have to start believing our thoughts again. [...] Eliminating stress is just a matter of tuning out the negative and tuning in the positive and just being, experiencing, and dancing to that music instead of the mind's chatter." Gina Lake 

Group think sessions, as I mentioned in a previous post, are not something that I willing or even regularly attend.

My tendency is to be a rebel. 

Not without a cause but for the one and only cause that has ever really mattered to me. That is to be myself. This independent streak has been noticeable in me since I was eight or so years of age. Fully aware that I can think for myself, my mission was to do the things that my heart was propelling me to do.

Talk. I love to talk. Any subject that attracted my attention would get its deserved exploration then I would share my findings. Literally, I created my own 'soap box' in our backyard and would stand there and share my thoughts with the Julie Mango tree. Incidentally, those are my favourite type of mangoes!

Wikipedia provides this definition of groupthinking:

"Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an incorrect or deviant decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences." 

Simply stated, to groupthink is to "hold the party line."

That has its benefits but the risk of myopia and rigidity of opinion and approach is too great for my liking. As well, to hold the "line," it must be fed to everyone in the group and therein lies my challenge.

As a society, we are constantly fed a line. Invariably, that line is grounded in fear and "othering" of people, places and things different to our particular group. The diet, necessary to keep us in tow, is fed by the media and other entities of influence such as religious organizations, political parties and even educational institutions.

Silence and getting with the programme, drinking the kool aid, behaving and dressing as everyone else and, most important, speaking according to the script are some of the 'rules' to be observed.

Conspiracy theories are not my thing, however, there is enough evidence throughout history to show how countries, communities and small groups of people have been "brainwashed." One of the most horrific examples is Hitler's Germany.

Yet there is always a renegade, a rebel who refuses to drink the beverage. That individual, the Anne Franks of our world, choose to see things differently, focus on "what is possible," rather than on what is.

My suggestion is not necessarily to switch off all televisions, radios etc. While a total black out of the negativity and sensationalism of our media would greatly enhance the reclamation effort, we have a more power-filled tool.

Choice.

Choose for yourself how you will view your life and how you want it to unfold from this point onwards. Let that choice guide you if, when and how to withdraw from the group.

Then, build your own soap box and speak Your Truth from it - even if you are the only one listening. Really, how many more listeners do you need? There is power in one - it is called, I believe, the butterfly effect.

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Blessings!

Photo Source: sodahead.com