I seduce myself

I fell for you truly, deeply, headlong despite my caution, despite all my reasoning. I didn't want to love. I had come to a place of despair & simply wanted to finish my death process begun from birth. Or so I thought. But, my inner me ambushed me, kidnapped me, stole my eyes & my heart, & would give me no peace at all until "dammitall!" I had to pay attention to the telltale sign of renewed Life, Love, Laughter, & that effervescent bubbling that gurgles all thru me, over me, & splashes out over everyone around. Why did everyone else know I loved but me? Oh yeah, because I was being grumpy about having to admit to being willing to do the hard work of healing & the even scarier work of loving & being loved. But even in this my inner me seduced me & revealed me for being such a liar. I really secretly wanted this deliciousness even if I could not bring my grumpy self to admit that. Oh but gawd! I wanted it more than a dehydrated person in the summer desert wanted water. Give me more! More! MORE! I want it ALL. I hate when I seduce myself, but here we go for one more round despite my being a terrible liar. I thrill when I seduce me. I'll never quit. ~ Daphne Yvonne Bradshaw

Once the Soul awakens... by John Donohue

Once the Soul awakens the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The Eternal makes you urgent. You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back from striving toward the summit of fulfillment. ~John O'Donohue

Highly Sensitive Person Is Different Wiring

"Whatever your perception of sensitivity may be, keep in mind that telling a highly sensitive person to “get over it” and “develop a thicker skin” is an exercise in futility; they cannot change the way their nervous system responds any more than you can change the natural color of your eyes or the size of your feet."

Understanding the Highly Sensitive Person

Research psychologist Dr. Elaine N. Aron, author of The Highly Sensitive Person (1996,) defines a highly sensitive person as "According to Dr. Aron's definition, the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) has a sensitive nervous system, is aware of subtleties in his/her surroundings, and is more easily overwhelmed when in a highly stimulating environment" She also mentions this includes 15-20% of the population. She has a Self-Test, too, but it is only helpful as a list of things to ponder, in my opinion.

"An HSP is not a person with Asperger’s Disorder (formerly Asperger’s Syndrome). Whereas there is a number of overlaps between the diagnostic criteria for Asperger’s (a form of high-functioning autism) and the description of High Sensitivity, the two are not the same. An HSP may have Asperger’s, but being an HSP doesn’t mean you have the disorder; having Asperger’s doesn’t automatically make someone an HSP. Although sometimes difficult to distinguish in the short term, Dr. Aron points out those even mild examples of Asperger’s have at their core some form of pervasive developmental disorder which is simply not present in the majority of HSPs. Similarly, sensitivity to sensory stimulation or sensitive sensory processing is never mentioned in the diagnostic criteria for any Autism Spectrum Disorders, including Aspergers."
Understanding the Highly Sensitive Person

I take umbrage on that paragraph as it labels Asperger's as a disorder rather than a difference in neurological wiring, which I am beginning to think is what the different parts of the full spectrum of what it means to be alive as a human are reflecting. I think we are all neurologically wired uniquely, individuals amidst the herd. The majority, even the vast majority are wired very similarly apparently. The neurological minorities would be differently wired, but this is called normal variation amongst a population, not a disorder or a disease.

Why is this important to me? It explains how to view the world differently, from different perspectives. It provides whole new realms to experience, to feel, to explore, and to enjoy. It gives me new tools to learn and to investigate, to experiment, and to discover more about me and about the world around me. It helps me know more of how to understand and to communicate truly with another person or group of people and even with myself on ever deeper levels. It also aids me in the rapture and ecstasy of being alive and being a woman.


more on various definitions of being highly sensitive -
Synesthete? That's Merely the Beginning of the Full Spectrum of Me

or on Shameless here:
Synesthete? That's Merely the Beginning of the Full Spectrum of Me

Flowers

Bring me not the cut or picked flower if you would show me love. Bring me instead a field of wildly growing flowers to enjoy season to season forever. ~ Daphne Yvonne Bradshaw

Fat Sex Is Controversial?

Even before I received my book I was warned that it was controversial. I was stunned by the warning actually. It came from a long veteran of size acceptance activism. I mean, being an activist is automatically being in a controversial issue or lifestyle. If it weren't, then the issue the activist represents is already accepted by the mainstream of society, right? So, to call any area of the issue controversial by an activist in that particular field of activism signals to me that maybe the topic at hand is going into the lunatic fringes of the issue. However, with this topic of fat sex, I just could not image at the time that this could be all that controversial because the majority of people in our country (USA) are considered fat. Plus, I know that sex is not only for the minority of people. Everyone seems to be in on the act, wanting in on the act, have been in on the act, have opted out of the act, have seen the act used to sell everything from apples to cars, and so on. Sex is everywhere. But putting fat and sex together are so controversial? Please! Give me a break already.

I reviewed this excellent book here:

Fat Sex: The Naked Truth by Rebecca Jane Weinstein

I will say again: "I would most definitely recommend this book. I wish I had had it when I was about age 9 onwards to help me understand more and get hurt less in a world determined to crush me."

But what is so controversial about it? The topic itself is what I am hearing. It seems taboo to talk of fat people actually being  human and enjoying human activities, especially sexual activities. Body shaming, body judging, body mocking, and all other forms of body bullying and abuse need to stop. But, until the body bigotries stop, somehow we must find a way to live in and love our bodies as the beautiful homes we live in for a lifetime and also learn to love with our bodies in ways appropriate to our own bodies' shapes, needs, designs, design "flaws," sizes, abilities, fitness levels, challenges, or whatever our bodies are during each season of our lives.

And, I am fat, aging, mostly immobile, and with various health issues. Guess what? My body is still a wonderful home for me and deserves love from me and from those I allow into my life. And also, yeah, I'm sexy and I know it. <wiggle wiggle>

 

Petition Request: Sweden, Transgender Women Can Be Raped, Too

Rape is rape regardless of who the victim is. Rape is a violent crime that destroys another being at the core of that being. Period.

Victims can be anyone and any living being, including women, men, hermaphrodites, children, rich, poor, young, old, dying, dead, non-human beings, etc.

Rape is caused by the rapist and supported by the rape culture. It is a felony and should have the strictest of penalties in prison time.

Please consider signing this petition.

Sweden, Transgender Women Can Be Raped, Too

The Crow Dance

It was a cloudy, chilly fall day, one perfect for a drive through the fall colored mountain forest in the area. Being in a melancholy, well, a downright depressed and weepy mood, a drive to see the wonderful trees as they prepared for their wintering seemed like a good idea, except for something nagging at my heart. Being so downhearted, I ignored this gloominess, or tried to anyway, thinking it must be from the deep sadness in me. My husband was busy working to clear the garden for a coming killing frost before we would go for the ride while the dog and I worked on the porch overlooking the mountain. Of course, the dog listened to my sniffling back tears in silence as we worked. She was a wise dog and very sympathetic.

After the garden was as ready as possible for the frost, my husband went inside to shower before the ride. The dog and I continued to work when I began to notice a crow, a forest friend of mine who often came right up to me demanding his share of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, acting a bit peculiar. I watched him as he seemed to be trying to talk to me through some crow version of the Vulcan mind meld. He made me smile. But somehow this time he also alarmed my heart. I had no idea why because everything seemed as it always had been, and my crow friend seemed very healthy.

Then he let out an eery but loud "caw!"

Hundreds of crows began cawing and swooping down onto the field beside the house and just above the garden. Hundreds. Never had I seen so many crow in one place before. Never thought there could be that many in our part of the forest either. But there they were. Cawing. Laughing in a crow way. But it was a serious kind of laughter it seemed. Very orderly too. What was going on?

Then the crow began what I can only describe as some kind of circle dance or maybe a stomp. All those crows dancing and cawing fairly quietly and in order could not be real, could it? It must be some dream time something or other. And as I watched, my crow friend came back to the porch banister beside me. The dog, the crow, and this woman just watched. And, tears began to flow down my cheeks. I felt as if my heart would break asunder forever. And, we three watched.

Then it was over. The many crows began a shuffling hop and jump then flying off in all directions, and it was again just the three of us - crow, dog, and woman. My crow friend watched me intently for many minutes in silence. Then he flew away too.

I gathered up what I had been working on and returned inside the house, washed up, and went to bed. My husband came to find me a few hours later to tell me I had a phone call.

What I heard was a woman that I had befriended when I first came to the area and who worked at my son's school had been killed in a car accident at the time and place we would have been also had we taken that ride instead of my watching the crows dance. My skin felt like goose flesh. I knew deep inside that the crows had somehow saved my life.

I wondered for years if that woman had died in my place. I would cry over this thought off and on until another friend years later suggested that it was not so much that the woman had died instead of me but that she had died instead of us both meeting our deaths at that time. With that, my heart finally was peaceful. This I now felt was the truth, if truth in such things can be had.

The crows still watch and guard our mountain. The dog member of our family has since passed away. And, my hair is a lot whiter and my heart more grateful and tender.

© 2012, Daphne Yvonne Bradshaw. All rights reserved.

Tree?

Tree, do you ever wonder things like why continuing living since you must live only here for 100s of years despite all done to you or around you? What have you seen, heard, thought in your tree life here? Can you teach me please, Tree? I need your wisdom. Tree? Thank you for continuing to live here & letting me live near you. ~ Daphne Yvonne Bradshaw

Burning, I dance by Daphne Yvonne Bradshaw

"I died, but somehow this shell of me trudged on for years, decades. Something fiercely defied my death, would burn my inward parts, never resting, singing sometimes raucously as I, shattering, was trampled, tamped down. Taunting me to dance ever more on puppet strings, the eyes, the mocking mirth of minions of my demise, defying them all. I did dance, a macabre dance of joy, of love, of kindness, of hope in darkest dark of no light but the longing knowing of the fierceness of my heart. My dance. My way. Even climbing the puppet strings to braid them to me. I dance. I dance. Burning, I dance."
~ Daphne Yvonne Bradshaw

Thirsting to Fly

Jeanette Winter's observation of lovers as quoted from her work The Passion is a sensual display of observation by a third party who happens to be a poetic prose type writer-thinker. She paints a vivid word picture of the nervous stage fright of a type of new lovers just meeting passion/lust. She does accurately report how many express the delighted terror of the new encounter with sexual opportunity just met - the "3 F phenomenon" of fight, flight or f*ck. Alas, too many never advance from this stage into an ever growing mature love & passion but rather become addicted or stuck in believing that this is all there is. Then when this fleeting, untamed, somewhat unpredictable spark is over, they go on to look for the next spark without even trying to build a long-lasting bonfire.

For me, the initial meeting with someone expressing sexual interest in me has felt like an attack. The delighted terror has had heavy emphasis on the terror part and little of the delight. I had been terrorized daily from the beginning of my life well into adulthood while also being "taught" to be a "good girl" at all costs or meet my destruction... as if I was not facing my destruction daily...  and so I married, have a son, faithfully dead ever since... except the inner me kept growing....

Something untamed, wild, almost fae within me thirsted to fly, knew there was more & that I was more than all I was going through. My search for my own wholeness, my own wisdom, my own "me" has been a costly way with a long way still to go. But, fly I most certainly do. Imagination is a powerful path. Dreams can be made realer flitter by impish flitter, hard work by hard work, one step at a time. Unimaginable pain can be endured if the inward vision sees the dream possible. Impossible things happen every day. Fly with me please.

“Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps, but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

Fat Sex: The Naked Truth by Rebecca Jane Weinstein

Fat Sex: The Naked Truth by Rebecca Jane Weinstein with forward by Margaret Cho

This book is written in a style reminiscent of the serious but casual discussions around the fire in the student center. It also reminds me of serious informative discussions with many a wiser person. However, this topic and the related issues surrounding being a fat person, especially a fat woman, and the facts of life about love and/or sexual relationships were never discussed in a helpful, encouraging, factual, or healthy way. This book shows by example as well as with an interweaving of a variety facts that all of what I (and we in this world) have been told and believe to be true about fat people and love relationships has not been the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The love life of fat people can be quite wonderful in fact.

I would most definitely recommend this book. I wish I had had it when I was about age 9 onwards to help me understand more and get hurt less in a world determined to crush me.

26 July 2012
Update from the author:

Rebecca Jane Weinstein:

Hello friends involved with body acceptance issue! Please share this with anyone and everyone. Although the book is getting a lot a press, don't be mislead, it is a hard sell! People see it as radical, even though it is just an honest portrayal for countless people. There may be some fear in taking the leap to buy and read. Support the goals of spreading the honest struggles and triumphs of pervasive body issues. Thanks!
http://www.FatSexTheNakedTruth.com/

Synesthete? That's Merely the Beginning of the Full Spectrum of Me

We eat light, drink it in through our skins. With a little more exposure to light, you feel part of things physically. I like feeling the power of light and space physically because then you can order it materially. Seeing is a very sensuous act--there's a sweet deliciousness to feeling yourself see something. ~ James Turrell

*I'm A Synesthete

This has nothing to do with synthesizers or athleticism.

Somer Sherwood Jul 3, 2012 at 9:00am
http://www.xojane.com/healthy/im-synesthete
*
There are many differences in my neurological make-up than the vast majority of the human population, and I am only really just beginning to understand the smallest bits now... at age 53 and ticking. It's better late than never on the understanding part? I just am who I am. I never could be someone else & never saw the point in trying. So, I am weird... eccentric if you prefer, but definitely someone different in the wiring department than most. It makes life both fuller and also more challenging... and very sensual in every sense of the word.Psychology Today has a sensuality test:
*Sensuality Test 
The lead paragraph states: "Sensuality is, in essence, how in tune you are with your senses. Do you notice smells, textures, sounds? How sensual you are plays a key role not only in your sex life but in your overall ability to derive pleasure from life as a whole."
*
Out of 100 possible score, mine is 92: "According to your score, you have a strong passion and attraction to the aesthetic qualities of life; you greatly appreciate the beauty around you, whether in the form of nature's masterpieces or man-made designs. We often forget that beauty can be found beyond what we see on the runway at a fashion show or on TV. By taking the time to explore the beauty in the world around you, you will develop a greater appreciation for the simple splendors in nature or the different facets of human creativity that we often take for granted!"

Absolutely no surprise to me. lol

*More than 5 Senses in Humans
*

Depending on which definitions of senses are used, we humans have more than 5 senses, maybe 20 or more potentially. Aristotle gets credited with the limiting us to just 5 as far as schoolwork goes - sight, smell, touch, hearing, & taste. I have always known there was more to this tale even if I did not always have words to explain it. Some of these include time, pain perception, temperature perception, spatial perception, & bodily function/position perception. Then there are the more intuitive perceptions as well. All are needed to live fully, safely, healthily, & happily. The absence of a sense is a diseased or dysfunction state and dangerous to the living being him/herself and also to those sharing the living space. The absence of pain perception, for example, often leads to loss of body parts.

Also -

Aesthetic and moral education are also closely connected with the training of the senses. By multiplying sense experiences and developing the ability to evaluate the smallest differences in various stimuli, ones sensibilities are refined and ones pleasures increased. Beauty is found in harmony, not in discord; and harmony implies affinities, but these require a refinement of the sense if they are to be perceived. The beautiful harmonies of nature and of art escape those whose senses are dull.~ Maria Montessori, Discovery of the Child

Summer Solstice Blessings

Summer Solstice Blessings

The rays of sun, the light of power,
Nature’s fecund and fruitful hour,
Longest day, shortest night…
Come, let’s celebrate the light.

Expectant harvests yet to come,
Let us taste the fruits of some
Of earth’s bountiful and lustful play
Of planted seeds come to stay…

At the summit of sun’s strength
Begins the lessening of sun’s length…
As days grow shorter, nights grow long;
Together we sing the solstice song…

Shine on, our sun, shine strong and true,
Let us totally delight in you,
And let us humbly accept your beams
As now you turn to darker dreams.

Let love and life, day and night,
Find the joyous union right
As the balanced circle turns…
And as our star, our sun still burns.
(C) Copyright, Daphne Yvonne Bradshaw, 21 June 1999. All rights reserved.

Sometimes Standing Up for Oneself Therapy Talk Is Not Healing Talk

Sometimes Standing Up for Oneself Therapy Talk Is Not Healing Talk

I woke this morning with a duh revelation. I finally could put into words something that had deeply offended, bothered, etc. me in therapy & therapy talk. It is the idea that standing up for ourselves is good even when it takes a sledge hammer to the other person because we think the other person is a boundary violator, bully, abuser or ____ (fill in the blank.) It is so hard for abuse victims to see the abusive behavior & to recognize the one doing it, that drastic measures are said to be called for to bring awareness. Maybe. But, because our culture is not trained to care about anyone or anything but instead  promotes hyper-selfishness, even healing modes are still steeped in selfishness. I never heard it said in therapy talk to stand up for oneself but have compassion for the person in front of you as you would like them to have or have had for you.  To say we have some things we want to say to the other person usually means we are about to sledge hammer that person in the name of standing up for ourselves. This is therapy talk keeping the system the same or making it worse. It is not really ultimately healing.
~ Daphne Yvonne Bradshaw, 19 April 2012