Affirmations And Giving Thanks Each Day

November in the United States is a month of giving thanks that was started by the pilgrims at Jamestown, Virginia.  It is a tradition that continues today.  Thanks giving or giving gratitude shouldn't be related to just one day.  Some of the best years of my life were the years that I kept a gratitude journal in which I would write down at least 5-10 things each day that I was grateful for.  If you start the day by writing down what you are grateful for, your day seems to start out on a positive note.  If you like to write in your gratitude journal the last thing at night, then you go to bed with positive thoughts which can make sleeping better without taking the worries of the day to bed with you to create nightmares.

Over the years I have used affirmations to change my thoughts from being negative to being positive.  Just before starting this post, I went to the right hand column on my blog page and changed the affirmations from October to November Affirmations.  Each month I get these affirmations for the month from my copy of "Daily Word" magazine.  The "Daily Word" is a Unity Publication that you can find information about at the following website if you are interested.

http://www.unity.org/

I love the daily affirmations that are written for each day of the month in "Daily Word" magazine.  I started going to a small Unity church about 1996 or 1997 and learning their teachings.  Unity beliefs have an openness that many religions do not have for me on the spiritual level.  It was through this church that I first began to meditate.  Meditation gives me a deeper connection to myself and to God.  I do believe in the interconnectedness of everything and everybody.  I believe that we are One with God and One with each other.

In each copy of "Daily Word", here is what it says under Monthly Affirmations:
     "Affirmations are positive statements of Truth.  By affirming Truth, we are lifted out of false thinking into the consciousness of Spirit.  Each time we pray positively and faithfully, we are calling forth the divine activity that is always within us."

Now to my questions to you:  Do you ever take the time to come to my blog and read the monthly affirmations that I post here each month?  If you do, do these positive thoughts encourage you or lift your spirits?  Do you miss them by not coming to my blog and just reading what the emailed subscriptions send to you?

For those of you who have email subscriptions and receive my posts that way, you can click on the title of the article or you can go to the bottom of the page and click on the blog name Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworker and that will take you to my blog.  Then look at the right hand column and find the words "NOVEMBER  AFFIRMATIONS" and read the affirmations that are written below those words.

Here is what you are missing if you don't click and go to my blog for this month:

NOVEMBER  AFFIRMATIONS:

Inner Peace:
In the Silence, I find peace.

Guidance:
I rest in the awareness of God, and I am guided in right ways.

Healing:
With gratitude, I accept health and wholeness.

Prosperity:
I behold unlimited possibilities, and my prosperity grows.

World Peace:
I contribute to a world where peace prevails.

The affirmations will change again at the beginning of each month.  What else are you missing by not going to my blog's page on Blogger.com ?
Patricia

Related Articles:

The Secret---Affirmations Change Your Life
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/08/secret-affirmations-change-your-life.html

Meditations To Heal Your Life
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/08/meditations-to-heal-your-life.html

You Had It All The Time
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2008/08/you-had-it-all-time.html

The Secret---Manifesting---Creating What You Want With Your Thoughts And Words
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/07/secret-manifesting-create-what-you-want.html

How To Write A Book - Automatic Author Tutorial - Slade Roberson

A highlight of my day on Thursday, October 20 was an email that I received from my friend Slade Roberson.  Slade emailed me to let me know that I had been picked to receive a free copy of his Automatic Author program along with 2-Author Consultations.  If you are like me have an idea to write your own story for future generations to read, then you can find Slade's Automatic Author Tutorial at the following link:

http://sladeroberson.com/automatic-author

I have used one of Slade's tutorials in the past that took me step by step through the process of setting up this blog.  Without that tutorial, this blog would not exist.  I am still very limited in the technical skills that I have for using my computer.  That is one of the reasons that you won't find pictures at the head of each of my posts.  One of these days, I will have my daughter-in-law sit down with me and write out step by step how to download pictures on to my blog.  My daughter is the one who posted the picture of my husband and me for my profile picture.

Slade knows that I have recently made the committment to my family and friends telling them that I am going to write a memoir of my experiences with childhood incest and the healing journey that I have been going through for the past 20+ years.  I have already decided that my memory of being what I called a "3-year-old adulteress" is going to be the beginning of my story since it is one of my earliest memories.  I am not sure where my story will go after that.  My earliest memories of the incest happening didn't happen until I was 11 years old.  I still need to decide exactly what I want the focus of my book to be.  Do I just want to write one book like my friend Colleen Spiro has done in her book The Third Floor Window or divide my life up into more than one book as my friend Dan L. Hays has done.  Dan's first book is called Freedom's Just Another Word.  He is currently working on book number two which is due out sometime in 2012.  Reading both of those memoirs has given me much encouragement to write my own.

I have lots of encouragement from you, my readers, my friends and my family to write this book. With Slade's Automatic Author Tutorial, I have no reason to put off writing this book any longer. Now I am going to sit down and start reading the tutorial.

Before I do that, I need to apologize to my readers for not writing much on Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworker recently.  I am going through some minor health problems which I hope will be resolved soon.  As minor as they are, my energy levels have been low lately.  I feel just bad enough to not get much done throughout the day. 

With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up, that needs to change.  Family is coming to our house for Thanksgiving and I have major house cleaning and rearranging to do so that everyone will fit and have room to move around.  I love it when my family and Daniel's come to visit.  It takes a lot of preparation to get ready for them.  We will have about 11 or 12 people in the house for about 3-4 days.  My house is noisy and full of love, disagreements, and compromise as families do when they get together for any period of time. I am blessed with the wonderful mother-in-law and sister-in-law that I dearly love. It is the 3 brothers, of which my husband is the baby of the family, that usually provides the noise.  They are all in their 60's now and losing their hearing so they talk loud because none of them wants to spend the money to get a hearing aid. The youngest of the clan who will be gathering here are two sisters - twin 4-year-old who have me wishing that I had just a little of their energy.  They are sweethearts, who being four like a lot of attention.  They are easy to give it to.  Being around children can keep you young at heart. Being around them also gives me reason to miss my grandchildren who live in Idaho.  They are all growing up so fast. I hope that you are all having a glorious October and enjoying the Fall weather and colors.  Autumn is my favorite time of the year.
Patricia

Related Articles:

The Most Influencial Person---#4---Birth Of A Dream
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/07/most-influencial-person-4-birth-of.html

Out Of My Comfort Zone---The Third Floor Window
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2009/09/out-of-my-comfort-zone-third-floor.html

"Freedom's Just Another Word" Book Review
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2010/04/freedoms-just-another-word-book-review.html

Let's Talk About Spirit Guides Teleconference With Andrea Hess And Slade Roberson
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/11/lets-talk-about-spirit-guides.html

Name It, Claim It, Make It So---Intention To Hear Your Spirit Guides
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2008/09/name-it-claim-it-make-it-so-intention.html

Healing Is About Love And Compassion

Just because I disagree with someone does not make them my enemy or me theirs, at least not in my mind.  Compassion gives me the ability to look beyond the disagreement to see what issues may be bringing up stuff for the other person. 

Self-compassion also gives me the ability to look and see if I have any issues being brought up by the disagreement. Through compassion, I can see the possible hurts on both sides.  I can choose to forgive myself and the other person and let go of my own hurts and anger, if I have any.  If I hold on to my anger and resentments, they only hurt me.  They don't hurt the other person.  Only their own hurts and resentments can do that to them.  Compassion allows me to send prayers and love to the other person, as I pray for and love myself. 

Healing is about love, first of myself and then of others.  If I try to love others from a place of hurt and anger, it doesn't work.  For me to love others, I have to come from a place of self-love.  Where love exists, hurt and anger can't stay.

Part of self-love is not hurting myself for any reason. I don't own this self-love 100% of the time.  I still sometimes put the needs of others above my own and I still, when really hurting from an issue, overeat.  Right now I am overeating or grazing as my doctor called it because the idea of writing my memoir is scaring my inner children terribly.  The idea of being that vulnerable and putting the secret of incest into book form is terrifying to them.  Because of that fear, I still haven't written the first word even though I have told several people that I would.

Another equally important part of self-love is not allowing others to purposefully hurt me.  Sometimes that means removing myself from that person's presence. 

With today's access to Facebook, Twitter and emails, sometimes removing myself from that person's presence means blocking them from access to me on the internet.  Many more people have access to me on the internet than those that I know personally in my own town.  Some disagreements can be easily settled and friendships remain in tact.  Others turn abusive and those are the ones that I won't stay in.  That doesn't mean that I am judging the other person.  There is a difference between judgment and discernment.  That doesn't mean that I think the other person is mean or crazy.  I just don't have to allow their issues to be transferred on to me and be used to abuse me with. 

Until I forgive a person, that person is still controlling me.  Forgiveness means working my way through any hurt and anger that I hold towards that person. Forgiveness does not mean putting myself back in contact with that person until they have forgiven me and settled their own issues. It does not mean accepting that person back into my life when they are still raging at injustices, imagined and real, that they believe that I have done to them.  Something else I have learned is, if my heart skips a beat every time that I run into this person online, I still have a connection to this person. I still have a fear of being hurt by this person.  I need to pay attention to this fear and work through it for my own well being.

If you are still raging and still blaming, you haven't reached the forgiveness stage.  Forgiveness doesn't blame.  Responsibility and blaming are not the same thing.  Blaming carries shame.  Responsibility does not.  Responsibility is a two way street.  I am responsible for my behavior and you are responsible for yours. Blaming can keep you stuck in anger and hurt.  Responsibility gives you the tools to work through your feelings and gives you the ability to take back your personal power from the abusers. Personal power gives you choices you might not have known that you had when you were stuck being a victim.
Patricia 

Related Posts:

Judgments - Discernments or Prejudice?
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2008/04/judgments-discernment-or-prejudice.html

Tools Of The Ego
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2008/04/tools-of-ego.html

Dialogues With Dignity: Progress Over Perfection
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2011/08/dialogues-with-dignity-progress-over.html

You Deserve Your Own Love Guest Post
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2011/09/you-deserve-your-own-love-guest-post.html

September's Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse Is Out

The Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse - September 2011 Change Edition is out and posted on the From Tracie blog.  I have several of my recent articles posted in it.  This month had the topic of change. Here is the link for that Blog Carnival:

http://www.fromtracie.com/2011/09/blog-against-child-abuse-september-2011.html

Thank you Tracie for hosting this month's Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse. You will find 15 blog posts included in the Blog Carnival this month.  I hope you will join me in reading all of the posts and leaving comments to let the authors know what you think about their posts.
Patricia

Humanity Founded Upon Abuse Of Children

When I started using Twitter about two years ago, I met someone who is just as passionate as I am about protecting children from sexual preditors.  On Twitter, my friend calls herself BraveKidsVoices. Quite a few months ago, BraveKidsVoices shared an article with me which you will find at the following link:

http://bit.ly/9soLJK

Feel free to go and read the entire article for yourself. I warn you that if you are an incest survivor, this article may be triggering for you. That is part of the reason that I have taken so long to write my own blog post about this subject. The reading of this article is very difficult.  I still have not finished reading all of it myself. I will probably do a series of blog posts from this article. 

The title of the article is "The History of Child Abuse" written by Lloyd deMause is found in The Journal of Psychohistory 25 (3) Winter 1998.  BraveKidsVoices asked me to write this post, using this article, about incest as the most prevalent form of child sexual abuse. This post is my attempt to do that. I am not good with numbers - statistics, so much of this post will be direct quotes from Mr. deMause himself. I also think a part of me just does not want to acknowledge that incest is such a huge problem in our society and in the history of our world, it was much worse than today even. That is just so hard for me to take in. I hope that this series of posts will do away with my own denial in this area as well as any that you, as my reader, may be holding on to.  If you are an incest survivor like I am, we are not in a unique position of being just a small number of survivors, the figures from this article tell us that incest has been going on since the beginning of our history and that in many countries in the world, incest is an everyday occurrence for far too many children still today.

My title for this post comes from one of the first few paragraphs in Lloyd deMause's article.  ". . . the history of humanity is founded upon the abuse of children."  Mr. deMause goes on to say, "Just as family therapists today find that child abuse often functions to hold families together as a way of solving their emotional problems, so, too, the routine assault of children has been society's most effective way of maintaining its collective emotional homeostasis.  Most historical families once practiced infanticide, erotic beating and incest."

The conclusions that Lloyd deMause reaches from the many studies that he and his associates have done over the years says, ". . . the history of childhood has been a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken."  Over the centuries, children have been neglected and often treated cruelly by their parents.  Mr. deMause says,  ". . . children have been killed, rejected, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused by their caretakers."

Even though incest and other forms of child sexual abuse seems to be at epidemic numbers today, according to Mr. deMause - 30% of men and 40% of women have been sexually abused as children.  Mr. deMause's figures say that half of those were sexually abused by family members. 81% of those children were sexually abused before puberty, with 42% of that number being under the age of seven.  These figures came from adults who remembered their abuse in great detail and with great clarity.  These were adults with "conscious memories," not from someone who may have had fragmented, bits and pieces, of memories.  I have solid, detailed memories from the age of 11 - 17, what Mr. deMause's study would count as "conscious memories." Many more survivors would fall into the "fragmented" range of memories which means that they are not included in these statistics. 

Mr. deMause reached the conclusion that "the real sexual abuse rate for America is 60% for girls and 45% for boys, about half of these directly incestuous."

Outside of the United States, these figures are even higher.  Mr. deMause states that the further back into history one goes and the further away from the West that one goes, the worse the incidences of child sexual abuse become.  In many countries in the world, incest is routine among families. Fathers, brothers, uncles and grandfathers molest little girls.  Mothers, aunts, sisters, and grandmothers molest little boys.  India, China, Japan, the Near East and the Far East are just some of the countries that incest is prevalent in today.  Little girls are treated worse than little boys because in many countries, little girls are considered worthless with no value of any kind.  Often the little girls are killed or used as sexual objects by the men in their families.

This information comes from just the first few pages of this 24 page article.  Here is the link again for those of you who are brave enough to go and read more.

http://bit.ly/9soLJK

If you are like me, you had no idea that incest was so bad throughout history or even in our so-called modern world.  As more of us research and speak out about incest, more people will become aware.  Just becoming aware is a start but don't you dare stop with just awareness.  Do something to protect your children who can't protect themselves from sexual preditors. 

The internet is such a miracles for those of us who grew up before everyone had access to computers.  The internet is increasingly becoming more and more dangerous for our children.  Preditors have discovered the internet too and many use it to reach out to unprotected, unloved, inadequately supervised children.  These preditors reach out with attention to these shy children who are often left at home alone because both parents have to work or have activities that seem to be more important to them than time spent with their children.  Please, as a caring parent, monitor your child's time on the computer. Let your child know that you love them and will do whatever is necessary to protect them from sexual preditors, online and off.
Patricia     

You Deserve Your Own Love Guest Post

I was asked last week to submit a guest post for The Wounded Warrior blog which my friend from Twitter JanMetalMan is the owner.  Jan is a male survivor. He calls himself a wounded warrior.  I see myself as a warrior when it comes to reaching out to other survivors and giving others awareness about incest so that we can all give it our best efforts to protect our children from sexual abuse.

I had about a week to decide what I wanted to write the guest post on.  I kept coming back to the topic of self-love.  We are often taught as children that self-love is selfish.  The truth that I have discovered about self-love is that it is the most unselfish act that I can do. Me loving myself and you loving yourself benefits everyone around us.  I can better love you and my family if I love myself first. This has been the most valuable lesson that I have learned in my healing journey. When I love myself, I don't let myself become empty and useless to everyone. I take care of my needs so that I can be a better person and a better friend, partner and parent.

The title of the guest post is "You Deserve Your Own Love." Here is the link:

http://whatislove-2010.blogspot.com/2011/09/patricia-singleton-you-deserve-your-own.html

Thank you Jan for honoring me by asking me to write a guest post on your blog.
Patricia

Carnival Against Child Abuse, August 2011 Is Posted

Thank you Astrid of the blog A Multitude of Musings: Diary of a Person with Dissociative Identity Disorder for hosting the August issue of Carnival Against Child Abuse.  I have to admit that I got really busy this month and forgot to send in any submissions.  I am still going to go and read each of the blog articles that are entered in this month's Carnival.  Most of the submitters this month are new to me.  Welcome to those who are new. I look forward to getting to know you better by reading your blogs.

I hope that you will join me in reading this month's Carnival Against Child Abuse, August 2011 issue at the following link:

http://astridetal.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/carnival-against-child-abuse-august-2011/

I hope that everyone had a glorious Summer.

Patricia