@Karinne – hug. Good for feeling safer and more confident in you. I also go through that meeting/remembering emotional abuse and cycling through falling apart and then noticing and interacting and falling apart and and and. It’s rough. I’m glad you’re feeling lighter.

@everyone – good thoughts for this new week. xoxo

So, making this a habit, as it’s a good practice:

The hard. It was a big, difficult week:
-Calling my partner on his alcohol dependency which he’d acquired during a horrible, stressful period and acknowledging the stress and hurt that it inflicted on me.
-downloading and reconnecting with a lot of buried emotions, including some quite surprising and tearful-panicky ones from emotional abuse I suffered in my early 20s.
-almost giving up on the whole relationship and mentally preparing to move back to Australia, 7 months after moving to the UK

The good. Thankfully it more than balanced out the hard, and has left the end of the week feeling the most unstuck it’s been in months:
-my partner accepting that he does have a problem and deciding to go teetotal for 2 months. He’s stuck to it so far.
-me, gently, not accepting responsibility for him doing this. He needs to do it for his own reasons, not because I tell him to. Bonus unstuck points for him!
-taking a half day off work when all the emotions came crashing home to nap/process them, rather than stocily slodiering through.
-observing the emotions from the old abuse and realising that I’m actually getting better, facing it rather than dampening it and hiding. Really tough, but it also means I’m feeling safer and more confident in me.
-seeing my partner be a lot lighter and more present with only a week of not drinking. Feeling lighter and more present myself as a result.
-we found a house! Our house! Yay housey-house. Rather than 3 people living in a 2 bedroom flat, with my step-daughter on alternate weekends sleeping at the foot of the bed, we shall now be two people, in a 2 bedroom flat. With space! And connectedness! And things that make my home MY home. Finally, some roots after 7 months of tossing about at the whim of others.
Karinne´s last post … Last week was: a long breath out (the Yay! edition)

Stu has some great ones this week! I think my favorites are:
1) “It’s really sleazy for us to start tilting ourselves” instead of It’s really easy for us to start guilting ourselves
2) “hardware will exit breakfast” instead of hard boiled eggs at breakfast
3) “it’s always advocated in a cave to be healing” instead of it’s always an okay thing to be feeling

And my chicken is painfully (heh) short.

The good:
+ ribcage healing, slowly but surely.
+ The hippie husband surprised me with a Globe Bar! It’s pure awesome.
+ confirmed new project starting Thursday so income will be assured and I can get out of this boring house. Forced rest is never fun.
+ Silly hairs pretty much guarantee that I’ll never have to work a “normal” job again.

The hard:
– Avoiding the pity party that tries to take up residence in me.
– Still dwelling on being fired from the volunteer gig. Fired for trying to help just really sucks.
– Too injured to Shiva or yoga. Starting to feel like Jabba the Hut.

Herewith my week:

The Hard
*packing up on site – ugh, goodbyes and stuff and discombobulation on a massive scale, wondering what is happening, where my desk shall be next week. All sorts of not knowing.
*wondering what happened to my time – because… where’s it gone? KAPOOF – my week was over and I was sitting there thinking ??? What?
*Walking like a penguin and having to go down the stairs sideways and up them on all fours. So dignified. Because OW my legs – they complained at running 13.1 miles in 2:22
*Snot – still! Ugh gross. Cold be gone.

The Good:
*Packing up on site – forward movement after all this dithering. Hurrah. An end and a beginning. A shift. Done. The road is built and open and we did it.
*I ran a half marathon. After being diagnosed with M.E. just a few months ago. Bloody fantastic me! And my legs and my lungs are just so clever and only took two days to recover from that very big challenge.
*An interview for a potentially WOW opportunity. Scary, scary just thinking of the change. But a change and a job and an opportunity to make what I will of. Yippee!
*Epiphanies about patterns. I mean they happen with me on a daily basis anyhow, but these are patterns that are long standing and have a big effect on how I deal and relate to people, so it’s about chaning relationships so that they become a gazillion times better and that is good. Ja.
*India! I go to India in just a few days. Wheeeeeeeeeee! I am so excited. Just one big adventure. With a gorgeous sun hat.

Hoorah. I love autumn and November is nearly here. Novemeber! My favourite month. And I have a really cool hat to wear this winter.
Wormy´s last post … Clothes! Hats! Men Dressing Up! Oh, Handbags and Hairstyles – it’s all happening here.

So it’s a Saturday Chicken for me…

The Hard

- missing the Gemini’s. It was a really important night for my girlfriend who was nominated for her role as “Mamma Yamma” on kids TV. I really wanted to be there.

-my aunt died of a heart attack. It’s extra hard to deal with this while I’m a million miles away on tour.

-getting a cold on tour

-not getting enough time alone. Spending every minute of the day with 6 lovely people. It’s still fun, but I’m a hermit by nature.

-trying to stay connected with Ali while we’re in different worlds and time-zones. That’s really hard.

The Good

-laughing a lot every day

-playing great music every day

- listening to Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking on audiobook. So awesome.

-an amazing fancy meal with the band in Edmonton

-riding my bike around Chicago

-running every morning

I only read Havi’s Chicken and the next few comments, so I’ll have to copy this and read it on my next looong drive.

Have good week every body!

xo
Christine Bougie´s last post … 9 shows, 56 hours in a van

@Amy Crook – haunted pirates! Best. Ever.

@claire – sovereignty FTW! Yay.

@Jenia – hi! Appreciating how hard the hard is (it really is) and happy you’re here at the cocktail hour — which I’m completely borrowing from you now. Brilliant.

Yay for the Dance of Jenia and yay for your unexpected moments of bing. I love it!

@spiralsongkat *blows kiss*

@everyone — Hugs all around for the hard. So much of it. And celebrating with you for all the good bits.

Every single one of you is in my heart. I love that through this thing that has totally turned into a witnessing ritual, we get to be part of each other’s week.

p.s. where’s casey?

The good:

- having an extra hour for sleep this weekend because daylight saving is turned off
- having dinner with colleagues/friends and meeting their partners

The hard:

- friend unexpectedly lost one of her highschool friends
- work, haven’t yet found any routine or ritual to make it go smoothly, nor have I found out what’s the stuck

I used to have a hard time waking and especially getting up in the dark, but now that I’ve developed my own morning ritual I must say that doing it while it is still dark outside gives me a pleasant feeling of being in a nice cocoon of my own making and comfortably getting ready to face the day. The cold in the morning, however, is not so pleasant. Yay for comfy blankets!

Another hard part was finishing a 15-week volunteer assignment, saying goodbyes, going out to farewell drinks and accepting that I accomplished less than I wanted to. And feeling OK about saying it to myself and to others. And trying to understand what it means, for right now and for later, to say openly that I did not do my best and that the whole assignment was a difficult experience for me.

Good stuff. And the grand prix goes to… Shiva Nata! The DVD is still in the mail, so it’s probably more accurate to say that I am doing “Dance of Jenia” rather than “Dance of Shiva” (based on pictures and articles entirely – no video download luck in this country). Practiced three times this week, going into it saying to myself “I really cannot be bothered, and I am not sure it works for me, and no breakthroughs are going to happen anyway, but it’s only ten minutes, so I am going to do it to just check it off the list and say that I was right about this arm-waving stuff being yet another yoga nonsense”. And yes, all three times I got some amazing, very visual, very neat “bing!” moments. Immense gratitude and appreciation to everyone (Andrey! Havi! Selma!) and everything that directed me towards Shiva Nata.

Another good stuff is letting go of this above-mentioned assignment and accepting that the past is the past. The door opens either way – I can come back to visit and draw more lessons from this experience whenever I feel like, but for now I’ve chosen to walk out of the door and move on to the next thing.

My Good:
-my kids are both home and things are going well
-i’m taking barbara’s writespeak program on november 1st
and very exciting
-started blogging daily (not my biz blog but barbara’s blog that i created for the program)
-made a paradigm shift about why i’ve felt so disappoitned in others and realized that i need to turn more towards the Divine for my needs than for people for the issues that have come up
-realized that some mood issues are the result of weaning off medication which should level out in the next 4 weeks or so. a great piece to have in place.
-solving sleeplessness with meditating when i’m wakeful at night which seems to be working
-coming to peace with some relationships that have ended

Whatever hard there was this week has been eclipsed by all the good!

Love that. Have a great weekend.
Char´s last post … Happy New Year!!!