Do you board up on a horse?

Sometimes I feel like I’m on a horse with no reins. Mentally that is…it really isn’t possible for me to board a horse, get on a horse, mount a horse? The last time I threw my leg over a horse on a carousel at the carousel museum in Leavenworth, KS, I had that moment of terror….while actively mounting the fake horse….what if I can’t get on….but much, much worse…what if I can’t get off.

I am not a riding a horse person….flying across the meadow on a horse with no name seems like it would be terrifying …… although…it might be exactly what I need to do if:

  1. I could give up control physically and in my mind not try to control the outcome….ie. not worry about who will clean up the blood and carry me over the mountains to a hospital.
  2. Breath into my feelings of fear and realize that the outcome is only a scenario I’m playing out in my head based on all of the fear based thinking that has gone before as I’ve tried to prepare myself for every eventuality rather than just relaxing and being!
  3. Allow someone to help me rather than faking strong and overly competent as I’ve always done in the past. Residue from childhood of not having confidence that there were “people” to take care of me rather than me having to take care of them. *cough mother.
  • My thoughts today as I realize mom has now been gone from this life for 10 years. There are just ashes left of the past I’ve left behind. It’s all happening right now. Everything else is an illusion…..just like the illusion of the future where I see myself riding a horse with no reins across the meadow. Just like control of the horse, I only have the illusion of control in my life.
  • Until next time….
  • The thing about Birthdays

    Welcome to my therapy session…With the exception of the boys-grand babies, every birthday that comes and goes, I feel a little lost….not because of everyone being a year older but birthday celebrations created by my mother are missing! I wish I could ask her why birthdays and holiday celebrations were so important to her and why she knocked herself out making everything special. Always a meal of favorite foods, a birthday cake and presents. When it came to him and the girls, I always felt she was stacking more work on me because I had to think and let her know, for each birthday, what I thought they would want the most! I, now, understand what that “burden” represented to me in our dysfunctional relationship! Was this the way she showed us love or was she playing out through us what she missed out on as a child because her mother died when she was still a child? As the matriarch of our family, have I dropped the ball? After my mother died and my girls moved around, I stopped feeling the need to make everyone’s birthday a national family holiday….does anyone else miss it? This is making me tear up and that’s how I know I must recognize the memories for what they are which is a destructive thought pattern of the past lubed up with feelings and emotions that are in the past. And the only reason they are bothering me today is because I’m not centered and I’m allowing these thoughts and emotions to appear as a reality now instead of living right here, right now…

    I’m so thankful to my mentors….and it takes a chorus of them….to teach me….or perhaps learn with me…how to live our best life today…. This post all happened because I wished the husband Happy Birthday this morning! No celebration today because our Des Moines kids drove down yesterday to surprise him and we all did dinner together at his restaurant choice. It was fun! There was love! In my heart I realize that’s all that is important!

    Until next time….