Whitney Houston - Greatest Love Of All

The Greatest Love of All

Don’t look for Love, look for the one looking for Love.    Rumi

One can never "fall" in love, you must rise to it's level of consciousness. Love is not a feeling, it's a state of MIND!  ~ T.C. Carrier~

So I have been feeling better lately, more energy, more hope, less discontent. It's funny how when I really become aware of the darkness I am slipping into and I make up my mind that I truly don't want to go there how quickly I can pull myself out of it. At least most of the time anyway, on the times that I can't I figure there's a reason and I relax and I sit in it quietly, waiting for someone or something to come throw me a branch to get me out of the quicksand. And God always does... Like my good friend Wendy always taught me "what you resist persists". She is so right...

Anyway one Friday night I was down the shore at a bar with a whole bunch of meetup people. Someone had posted for us to come celebrate her birthday so a good sized crowd turned out. I contemplated posting one for my own birthday as it was a few days after hers but decided not to. I don't know which stopped me more, my dislike of crowds and attention on myself or my fear that few would show up. I recalled it had been a few years since any friend had gone out of their way to do anything for me, it was my friend Victor for my 50th, a shame we don't talk anymore.....but at any rate I never did post a celebration, maybe I will for my 55th....

Speaking of Victor, we still don't talk anymore, not since that big falling out over our business and also him pushing me too darn hard with his plans of how I should change my life. Part of it was good plain old caring but also a part of it was him being more controlling than he realized, it got to the point that I had to break away in order to hold onto me. We do have mutual facebook friends though and on occasion we will cross paths, one day getting into a talk on healthy diet, or other such things. I think the ice breaker for that was a few days before the same mutual friend had posted the healing health benefits of hugging and I recanted the story of the time my little voice asked me to hug my friend each time I saw him in a manner that our hearts would touch.He knew I was referring to him I am sure of it. Anyway this night he showed up at the event and I didn't feel any negative vibrations between us and I also noted that he had a girlfriend now, she looked rather sweet and he seemed reasonably attentive to her (not at all like how I remembered him to be with other women he had dated) and most of all I noted how thin she is. This was always very important to him and I was glad to see he had found what he wanted and at the same time I did not feel bad that I was NOT that thin. What progress! I wished I could go over and introduce myself to her, even maybe give her a spiritstone, but I didn't know if he was ready to talk to me or not so I left it be. I may have forgiven and forgetten but I do not know his heart.

I spent the remainder of the evening chatting up all my friends especially the ones who had come from my singles chat nights. We made plans to come again and they told me how they wished we had bracelets to identify the Single and Looking in NJ peeps from the rest. I told them my spiritual adviser had been telling me to get some and I promised then and there to take the financial risk and order some. It was a very good night and driving home later the song on the radio was The Greatest Love of All. As I belted it out at full voice in the car (something I would never dare dream of doing at Karaoke) I realized that I had finally finally finally learned to Love myself! I was happy being me and I was happy being single still for now and I had a pretty darn good life and I loved me just the way I am no matter who else did or did not!

The following week I went out to Karaoke, a KJ I knew was now in a town near me every other Tuesday and I looked forward to being able to go regularly. I asked my friend Edie to come over from Staten Island to eat dinner with me and I knew she loved to sing and was really really good too. She chose her songs and put them in for the KJ, first one was "Where the Boys Are" second one was "The Greatest Love of All". I told her the story of that song last week and she said good for me. She sang the first one and I felt it was a message for me: A smilin' face, a warm embrace, two arms to hold me tenderly, where the boys are someone waits for me....... I felt it to be true! Later in the evening she got up to do her second song, The Greatest Love of All, and she got up grabbed my hand and pulled me off the chair, reaching for a second mic from the KJ with her other and told me to sing NOW darn it! I took the mic and I started off slowly and then got really into it, matching her note for note even on the hardest ones! It felt soooooooooooo good too, I always wanted to sing I LOVE to sing but there was always someone there telling me I wasn't good enough, the loudest voice of course my own. Truth be told sometimes I was not, when fear chocked my voice or anxiety strangled my vocal cords into bad notes. In the car, in the shower, sure I could sing but not if anyone could possibly be listening. But not this night, not with a loving friend by my side. And when the song ended EVERYone was coming over and patting me on the back telling me how amazed they were, even Edie said she never expected that out of me and trust me this bad ass Italian NY-er she don't give praise unless she means it! I plan to go back there often and I plan to sing more often too and who knows maybe someday I will sing one alone.....

I am feeling much happier these days, I posted a few events, I ordered the bracelets, I found things to keep me buys and my mind off my lack of a man. I am fine without one and trust and not curse my lords timing on this. And most of all I did find my greatest love just like the song says--- I found it inside of me! So can you! Don't give up on your path! Don't give up on your great love! Start with YOU, what ways can you love yourself more today?

With Love and in the Light, Cassie


The Greatest Love of All

"Greatest Love Of All"I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be
Everybody's searching for a hero
People need someone to look up to
I never found anyone who fulfilled my needs
A lonely place to be
And so I learned to depend on me
I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone's shadows
If I fail, if I succeed
At least I'll live as I believe
No matter what they take from me
They can't take away my dignity
Because the greatest love of all
Is happening to me
I found the greatest love of all
Inside of me
The greatest love of all
Is easy to achieve
Learning to love yourself
It is the greatest love of all
I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be
And if, by chance, that special place
That you've been dreaming of
Leads you to a lonely place
Find your strength in love

Facing My Demon's

As soon as the fear approaches near, attack and destroy it. ~Chanakya~

 Courage is knowing what not to fear. ~Plato~

 
So here it is labor day weekend, the UN-official end of summer, a summer that has seemed to wisk by me and I got so little fun out of it this year. I never once rode my bike, I never once went to the beach... granted it did rain a lot and then it was very hot and humid but still even on the nicer days I spent my free time napping or laying around watching shows on Netflix. There's no way to explain it other that to admit it, I am depressed. Not clinically, not suicidal, not can't even function depressed as I have been in past times in my life but still I am depressed. And you know what depression is? It is anger turned inward. What am I angry at? Or who? Could it be myself? My choices? I am not sure but I need to figure it out and fix it this much I do know.

I am lonely too, not that I don't have friends and family but still I yearn for the intimacy that only a mate can bring. Yet still, I keep them all at arm's length or they also keep me at arms length. I can't tell you how many men contact me on these dating sites and then show interest and when I get to the well ok here's my number call me and we can meet for coffee they go *poof*. Happens to all my friends too so I know its' not me! LOL Or if they don't go poof I find something wrong with them and send them away. But anyway I let my desire for physical intimacy sink me to the lowest of lows...........those of you who read my first blog, Cassie's Path, can you guess? Yeah I wrote to Randy.

I had written to Miyuki for a reading, hoping she could shed some light on my path and what I should do next. She said she'd do it but it would take a few days as she had no internet where she is at the moment. So I had to wait. And the long weekend loomed ahead 4 days since I had my last summer Friday off too.... There were things my friends were doing that I could do, and plenty of other things I could do myself like yard work, beach walks, seashell collecting....but nothing would satisfy the aching I had, the need for human touch..... So I did it, I wrote him and asked if he needed some pokey, that perhaps "she" wasn't giving it to him and maybe she'd go back to letting me take care of that "dirty job" for her... I didn't hear back from him for 2 days and I was just breathing a sigh of relief when Sunday morning I got one that he had written late sat night.   I am n0t all0wed was all it said. I should have let that go but I never have been one to say too few words. LOL So I just said bummer, I just can't find the chemistry we had and I mentioned that Jeremy got a job near him. I thought that was the end of it but he wrote back later in the afternoon, Why can't u find guys so many 0n day web.  She got mad at me cause u posted l0ts o stuff about us it makes u look untrusting. I knew he meant untrustworthy and I told him she must have snooped on the net and found my old blog and that I used to wish she'd find it get mad and leave him but I no longer wished that. Again I said that I just don't like the chemistry with other guys  that I only had asked because again I thought she'd be greatful to not have to do it because she told me she was not mad at me before for us being together. But if he is not allowed then he is not allowed and not to worry about me. Yup she still don't appreciate me but is still always worked wat I'm doin . I have needs its like a fish that can't swim. She strange and
don't get it. With that I realized I could probably talk him into it but it would be the same as always he don't want to loose the money or the kids or the freedom that comes with living with a woman who doesn't love you or want to spend time with you much. I had to make it good to get rid of him or he's start coming around and I'd give in to a repeat mistake. oh well i guess you we cant have everything, u got the home life you want but not enough pokey,  i can have the kind of man i want but i don't like the pokey         life is cruel but its for the best you dont want to do it with me myou must really love her to give up pokey for her     love is the most important thing there is, its worth giving everything else up for once ya find it. That shut him up.

It was shortly after that I got my reading from Miyuki. It was very accurate for what I knew to be true and very enlightening on what I need to work on, other than that though it wasn't good to me, a good reading but a hard to face message... but see for yourself the shortened version:

The first thing I'm getting from you is that you've been feeling really lonely and at a loss of what to do. Not just in love and company, but kind of in life in general. You don't feel like you've been feeling yourself lately and this may have been going on for a few months. There seems to be a sense of being really unhappy with yourself and the decisions that you have made that have brought you where you are. There almost is a sense of not wanting to even look at the past because you don't want to confront your feelings of resentment toward it, which leaves you with looking at the present which you're unhappy about and at the future which you're just plain unsure about. The thing about this is that you won't ever really be able to see where you're going without taking a good hard look at where you've come from. I know that sounds very cliche and stereotypical, and on one hand logically, doesn't make much sense. But the past gives us an idea of our emotional push, what makes us waver, and what trips our buttons.
On that note, it feels like a monster is in the closet...like there is one event or one series of events in particular that are being shoved away and have been possibly for years. Something that occurred to you when you were young, I feel a teenager of about 13-17. This is major....something that caused you to close off and view life differently. I'm getting a very strong impression that whatever this is, whether you feel you've moved past it or not, there is some lingering hurt there that needs to be acknowledged and if you dig deeply enough, you may find that it is the subconscious fuel for certain patterns that repeat and are currently affecting you emotionally. The way you've been feeling is caused by the simple fact that your subconscious is trying to get you to turn back and face the hard road you've come from and make peace with it. Sometimes we think of things and think they don't bother us, but they still manage to pop up in that nightmare or come out in our emotional interactions with others, affecting how we react to situations, and we can't see it unless we stop to ask ourselves why we do what we do. I'm not sure if you're familiar with The Shadow as in reference to the modern practice of "Core Shamanism" (it's like the Jungian shadow but slightly different in my opinion). That's what this seems to be, your shadow is ready to be confronted so that, passing from summer into the dark of the year, you can be like Persephone delving into the underworld, to reemerge into a beautiful new life once spring arrives. And it's all about reprogramming that view I talked about at the beginning of this paragraph. Some view you developed about yourself and others, changed. It's a feeling of something that you felt at the time was necessary, being ripped away, and you have been trying to replace it since. It's vital that you undo the view that developed due to whatever traumatic event this may have been.
I keep seeing the number 9...I feel like this refers to a metaphorical pregnancy...like it will be 9 months, beginning now, that you will be struggling with your subconscious before you emerge from it. So take fall and winter to really study and analyze yourself and figure out how your own behaviors developed. For everything we do as people, there are reasons behind our reasons. And the more you know, at any given moment, about why you are don't what you do, the more at peace you can be with yourself. I say this because I keep having a flash of you helping others...as though they are trying to show me that in helping, caring for, fussing over everyone else, you lost a vital relationship to yourself that is at the root of your loneliness. You know yourself, but your bond to yourself has worn away.
There are two things that are kind of vague to me. One is that I keep hearing "her father" and I don't know if this is because your father is deceased and has been trying to talk to you or if he is at the heart of what happened to you or what. So I'm not sure how to clarify that and that was the part of the reading that I wanted to try to get more answers on before I passed it along. I never did get more, so maybe you will understand why that would come up and it's not meant for me to know. The other is that I keep having an image of a park. It's surrounded by trees and there isn't really anybody there.  If that makes sense at all, I think you need to visit that park. It may be a symbolic image trying to say that you need to take some time for yourself, plan a daytrip and go alone or start taking time out at a park nearby and get in touch with nature, alone.
As far as love life, I'm really sorry. I'm not getting anything accept that I keep feeling you will meet someone that is already in your sphere of influence that you just managed to miss every time, but I think that sounds familiar like I've said that before, possibly during the last reading. The only difference is that I think you've already met this person, whereas I think previously I felt you hadn't. Other than that, I'm not really getting anything.

So there it was and for the most part I knew what she was talking about. Even though I had forgiven both my birth father and my step father the pain of them still hurt me, my distrust of men, my insecurities, my inherent belief that men would always fail to love me and let me down. No wonder I kept them at arms length, no wonder I always dated or yearned for men with a "trap door". You see my birth father never married my mother and instead went off to law school a few days before I was born, when I was 6 my mother married a man but I always felt like part of the package not what he really wanted. Then I went to college and my mom had promised me my whole life that my birth father would pay for it as promised and I even went to the town he lived in for school but he ignored us when we tried to contact him. The my step dad go religion and stopped drinking, my mother followed suit and so did I yet they judged my experiences and told me I was not a true christian. Anyway enough with all the whining, I just never had a strong loving my in my life. I need to heal all that if I am going to try to trust a man enough now to love him.

Miyuki recommended a book and some shamanic journeying.  I didn't like the idea of 9 months of inner work but hey time tables never did effect me I could do it quicker if I put my mind to it.... I went to locate the book online to order it and the cover looked familiar......I went to my book shelf and there it was! A book I had picked up a while ago but never got around to reading. We didn't even marvel at the synchronicity we just accepted it......time to face some demons and make them go *poof*!

What about you? Got any healing work that you need to do? So many of us are lonely and searching and not finding what we want out there, and while I realize the good ones are few and far between I got a wake up call for all of us. If you are single and lonely its YOUR fault! Not your mothers, not your fathers, not the jerk you were married to or all the out for sex only people on the dating sites its because you still need to heal something, you need to change something, you need to fix a button that hits a sore spot and makes you run and hide in the comfort of loneliness.What are you waiting for? I know I am getting to work on facing these demons!

With Love and in the Light, Cassie

I said what about my eyes

God said Keep them on the road.

I said what about my passion
God said Keep it burning.

I said what about my heart
God said Tell me what you hold inside it

I said pain and sorrow

He said… stay with it.
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.  

 ~Rumi~