Bailamos

I find it heartbreaking that no matter how accomplished women may be, we often continue to see ourselves in the diminished distortion of another's view of us.
I'm ready to stop seeing myself as everyone else sees me and start portraying the real me - make them see and appreciate the person I am, and feel that I am doing all I can do to be the best I can be. Remind me of this the day I say I'm not good enough for someone, or I change my plans to suit someone else because they make me feel my life plan is not as important as theirs.
I know it will happen again - it always does - but that day when someone finally swings my way; that's when I'll know I'm dancing to the right beat.

Tonight I danced. I felt it. I wanted to be there and I was there. I had quiet in my mind. I heard nothing, thought nothing, just felt. There is nothing more liberating than freeing your mind from the clutter and noise and just being, just doing, just experiencing.  

I felt my mind and body connect for the first time in a long time. I recommend it! Feel, sense, experience, live!

A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying it needs work.

Trying to follow your own advice is never easy. The warning to a friend not to make the same mistakes you have, only to make them again yourself; the promising you'll live every minute like there won't be another chance, and then you let that chance walk right by.

So here I sit asking myself how I manage to feel happy and confident and brave and at the first opportunity of being able to demonstrate that I crumble like a Jenga tower with no blocks on the inside. 

Not only do I feel a sense of letting myself down for missing an opportunity, I feel down because I've now made a first impression that is not consistent with who I am. Not sure I can recover from that one, but I guess now I gotta give it a damn good shot.

Some people say that depression feels like a black curtain of despair coming down over their lives. Many people feel like they have no energy and can't concentrate. Others feel irritable all the time for no apparent reason.  I feel weak and vulnerable.  I have no energy. I feel that black curtain. I opened myself up too much today to one person who I thought would have responded in a better way. The result is that I feel damaged and depressed. I vowed to experience everything, to try new things, to not say no. Not all of things are going to be favorable all of the time to everyone.  But to feel violated a second time is damaging.

I feel flat, drained, worthless. How do you come back from that? What little breath of fresh air is required, what experience, what moment in time to make me come back from those feelings of guilt and shame? Where do you look to find the positives, when you're not even sure whether its safe enough to open your eyes and look around?

My body is need of some work - mental, physical, emotional. Its on a roller-coaster of emotion and experience and joy and hurt and pain and elation. Its my "vessel" for carrying around my thought and feelings and for showing the world who I am. I need to be happy with it so I am working out the physical aspects, but how exactly do you tackle the mental elements when every time you feel so good you suffer a set back that makes you feel vulnerable and shattered again. 

I want to cry, I want to expel the negativity and wake up tomorrow and start again. I want that confidence back. That feeling that I can conquer the world or that I can just make someone smile. I want someone to make me smile, not just my mouth, my whole body. I want to laugh again. I want to laugh from the inside out and cleanse my body of this vulnerability and shame and feel safe and empowered.

I don't believe someone else can do that for me. I need to do that for myself. Anyone who waits for someone else to bring them back from that feeling can sink so much further while they are waiting. I'm not going to wait. I'm going to pull myself through the sludge and give my body the work it needs to get back on track.

Once I've filled that void for myself I want to do it for someone else. I want to empower others to get on track and bring them selves back from that feeling of helplessness. Thankfully a lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than the body needing a little work.

When life hands you a lemon, say "oh yeah, I like lemons, what else ya got?"

Life. Who could have picked it. We are born with no road map, no site map planning our journey. No rules, no general direction in which to head. Sure we go to school, we learn to read and write, we get a job, we get a boyfriend, we experience heartbreak, we have sex, we laugh, we cry. We makes excuses for all the things we should do but we don't. We go through phases where some things become more important than others. We make friends, we lose friends. 

But when do we really live? I mean REALLY live - those moments in you life where your heart skips a beat, you lose your breath for one second, you raise your heart rate til you think its going to burst right out of your chest.

I walked away from my text book life because I wasn't living. I was existing. But now I'm on my own. There are many sleepless nights, many lonely moments, many times where you ask yourself how much longer can I exist like this.

And then you have that moment - the one where your breath is taken away; only for a second. And you hold that memory, that thought, that feeling, and you cherish it. And you think of it when you're sad, when you're happy, when you're not thinking at all.

I don't believe we can make anything last a lifetime (except our existence) so I believe now in making the memory last a lifetime. Every moment - every conscious thought - should be lived with such intensity that it can carry you through the hard times, the lonely times, the times where you feel that existence just isn't worth it anymore.

Live every day with a little hope. Make your existence a life. Don't rely on fate or friends or astrological alignments to tell you whether you are going to have a good day, week, month. Take some control and find those moments, seek them out and enjoy the journey. 

Travel the world - we isolate our minds so much by experiencing so little. Don't go to another country and sit in a pool drinking all day (while that sounds like great fun, don't get me wrong) it is those lessons, that cultural experience that makes us so much richer in our lives, and makes our hearts and minds so much more enlightened. 

Meet new people - yeah, yeah I know - easier said than done, but consider what it means - they are not necessarily going to be a lifelong friend (but make that memory last a lifetime). Meet a new person every week. Take one lesson in life from them. Become a better person because of every individual you meet.

Don't settle. Never settle. Once you settle you will compromise every action, every decision, every moment that you could have experienced the best moments of your life. Settling is our western society's way of making sure you keep our economy thriving with gas bills, and mortgages, and cereal and nappies. Society tells you to get married, get a job, have kids, retire in a condo with lawn bowl competitions every week. That sounds like a lemon to me. Oh yeah, I like lemons, but what else ya got?

Tammara: Hebrew meaning "date palm"

The Date Palm (Phoenix dactylifera) is a palm in the genus Phoenix, extensively cultivated for its edible fruit. Due to its long history of cultivation for fruit, its exact native distribution is unknown, but probably originated somewhere in the desert oases of northern Africa, and perhaps also southwest Asia. It is a medium-sized tree, 15–25 m tall, often clumped with several trunks from a single root system, but often growing singly as well. The leaves are pinnate, 3–5 m long, with spines on the petiole and about 150 leaflets; the leaflets are 30 cm long and 2 cm broad. The full span of the crown ranges from 6–10 m.Dates have been a staple food of the Middle East for thousands of years. They are believed to have originated around the Persian Gulf, and have been cultivated since ancient times from Mesopotamia to prehistoric Egypt, possibly as early as 4000 BCE. There is archaeological evidence of date cultivation in eastern Arabia in 6000 BCE (Alvarez-Mon 2006). In later times, Arabs spread dates around South & South East Asia, northern Africa, and Spain. Dates were introduced into Mexico and California by the Spaniards by 1765, around Mission San Ignacio.