Category Archives: Uncategorized

Work is a verb…..

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man_hands via salonThe definition of WORK is activity in which one exerts strength or faculties to do or perform something:  the labor, task, or duty that is one’s accustomed means of livelihood.

From my high school physics class, I remember that work is an expenditure of energy and that energy achieves something.

In everyday terms, the sun works with leaves for photosynthesis and the worms work makes soil worthwhile for planting.

I work at my non-profit so that I can help to change the world view on Domestic Violence.

When we decide to work, we have decided to be active.

Being active means being intentional about outcomes and outcomes require certain steps.

If you want to WORK at changing your habits…..say smoking, you have to CHOOSE to NOT smoke and get help in doing so. Help can be a gum, a patch, hypnosis, therapy or some other intervention. Nicotine is addictive so your brain needs help to help itself.

The whole point of deciding to WORK at something in hopes of changing it means to be intentional, active and present.

What “thing” in your life have you decided to change?

What help have you sought?

How active are you being?

Are you finding that it’s really easy to “fall off the wagon?”

OK, so get back ON the wagon.

If it’s worth doing, then it’s worth the time, toil and trouble.

The next time you feel like giving up, give yourself a breather and get RIGHT BACK TO WORK.

Love and light,

Indrani

YOUR WORST MOMENTS DO NOT DEFINE YOU!!!

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perfectionistGive yourself a break and redefine yourself with the best of you!

If you find yourself stuck in a destructive thought pattern and are beating yourself up, you may be picking your own brain looking for evidence about what a screw up you are.

You may even be at the receiving end of someone telling you how screwed up you are and listing the evidence to support the “you are screwed up” theory.

Try to remove yourself from these people or this situation IMMEDIATELY!

Even if you can only get away by going to the toilet, go to the toilet.

Sit in there for as long as you need to break the onslaught of negativity.

If people begin to yell at you to come out, lie and say you have stomach problems and stay longer. The longer you stay in the toilet, the easier it is for them to lose their wrath and maybe calm down a bit.

Always remove yourself from the negative barrage of others.

People who are busy screaming and yelling at you about how bad you are do not have time to look at their own bad behaviors. They are turning their discomfort into anger directed at you so they don’t have to feel their own emotions.

The time to engage with people raging at you is NOT when they are raging.

The ONLY thing to do with a RAGER is to disengage.

So the next time you are being told how bad or stupid you are….disengage as soon as you can and refuse to be defined by others.

If you have made a mistake, forgive yourself and do not be defined by that mistake. Know too, that you are fully human and that you will make many more mistakes in the future. It is with our mistakes that we learn our greatest lessons.

Go forth and make mistakes, learn from them and refuse to be defined by them.

Love and light,

Indrani

 

A night at the movies…

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Woman watching movie with popcorn via travelssentials.comAnswer me oh my love, just what sin have I been guilty of?

Won’t you tell me where I’ve lost your love?

Please answer me sweetheart.

 

This was one of my father’s favorite songs by Nat King Cole. I know all the words.

The other day the song popped into my head and I had a whole new appreciation of the first two lines. If you can hear these words coming out of the mouth of an abused woman you will understand where I am going with this post.

Imagine you are looking at a movie, there is a couple that is wildly in love and after an amazing courtship they have a great marriage. A few years into the marriage, she is being picked apart…at first, just little stuff like the way she combs her hair or the way she laughs out loud. The things that were engaging and cute now become irritating.

She begins to see herself as “not good enough” for him anymore.

Isolation begins to set in. She feels isolated from him, from her friends and family and from herself.

She begins to feel inferior to him and others.

She may begin to self diagnose as “crazy” or “hysterical” and she accepts the pathologies and looks for confirmation that she is sick.

She gets diagnosed by a mental health professional as “depressed” and begins medication. Things at home never change for the better. In fact, things get worse because even though she may be feeling better inside the outside nit picking does not let up.

By now, the situation at home may have escalated to physical abuse and sexual abuse.

Now she feels really bad and even more depressed!

She begins to hate herself and the only way she can dispel the self hatred and pain is to turn on other women and judge and gossip. She begins to look for people worse off than her and she feels relief from the judgment.

As an observer of the movie, it is sad to see her life get so messed up so quickly. As an observer you want to shout to her tell her to get out!

It’s easy to see when others are being sidelined and abused. It is not so easy to see it in ourselves.

If any piece of this scenario applies to you, take a moment to look at the whole movie about how it got to this point and follow your own advice… Get OUT!

 

Love and light,

Indrani

A thunderstorm of shame….

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images via ebonyYou’re not really my friend … so you can’t share our hotel room!

These words were said to me about 24 years ago by two women who I thought were my friends.
Let me set up the scenario.
I was pregnant with my second child and really quite pregnant….about 7 months.
I was a member of a women’s club that was hosting a girl’s weekend and I was attending. One last hurrah before the baby came.
I had brought two women into the club and so I approached them and said, “Let’s share a room!” They said sure!
A few days later, one of them came to me and said, “Katherine and I spoke and we realized that we are not that good of
friends with you….so we don’t want to share a room with you.”

Holy Crap….did she really just say that?
Yep, she did!
I went home and wept!
I wept like a baby.
Listening to Brene Brown’s The Power of Vulnerability has allowed me to rewrite the script of that painful incident and to keep it now in my arsenal for great examples of when self-love could have helped me.

Listening to these CDs is like eating 12 scoops of ice cream too fast and getting brain freeze but you would never think of throwing the ice cream away.

If we can remember the hurtful moments in our lives, we can give ourselves the empathy that others could not show and we can use those hurtful memories to help others in pain.

We can call upon our hurtful past to become an empathetic listener to someone else.

Let us remember without falling prey to the pain.

Let us live BIG and BE vulnerable. It is the only way to whole-hearted living. Thanks Brene.

Love and light,

Indrani

Life Imitating Cinema…..

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this way via streetandstage.comI recently had a long flight and got a chance to watch some movies. The one that intrigued me most was Happiness Therapy.

Short version:

Guy seems to be bipolar, freaks out when he catches his wife having shower sex and has a big fight with the shower sex guy. Wife leaves him. He is released from a Psych hospital to live with his parents and he is hyper-focused on getting his wife back. His father is a bookie and has major OCD issues, expects the son to just sit and hold two remotes while the Eagles play whoever they are playing. Guy meets a girl who is also struggling with her issues and invites him to be her dance partner in a competition, in exchange for giving the ex wife a letter.

As I watched it, I was mesmerized by how simple the lesson was for the world.

Here is my take….

This guy is struggling to deal with his mental stuff and trying to think of ways to get back his wife. The girl gives him a chance to help her fulfill one of her dreams and with that promise, he begins to think of someone other than himself and to think of something other than the ex wife.

He practices the dance moves constantly and he is physically exhausted and seems to be getting more mental clarity.

The girl shows him how to tap into real emotion and how to sit with the feelings, also how to bring the emotions to the dance floor.

Meanwhile his father talks him into going to the stadium, where he gets into another fight and he gets arrested.

His father makes a bookie bet on what score he will get in the dance competition and puts additional pressure on his son.

Lessons for all of us

  1. Do something significant for someone else.
  2. The something must be out of our comfort zone, so we can rewire our brains.
  3. Stay away from people who try to put us back into their dramas, even if those people are family.
  4. Do our best in the new commitment and with feeling and purpose.
  5. When people make bets on whether we do well or not, ignore them, they are toxic.
  6. Give wholeheartedly to the people we are helping.

 

I know that this blog may seem a little “pie in the sky” but it is really a good formula for permanent change.

Watch this movie, Happiness Therapy…it may help to cement these lessons.

Love and light,

Indrani

The Power of the Positive Question…PPQ…

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positive-thinking via runnersami.wordpressThe power of the positive in the field of Psychology is reshaping the way we think about self improvement.

It postulates, in a nut shell, that we can change our brains and our behaviors by asking “What’s right with us and how can we get more of the things we want in life?”

This difference is in direct contrast to the traditional view of Psychology which focuses on “What’s wrong with us and how do I fix me and you and all that is bad in the world?”

To begin to understand the PPQ applied in any situation, do this deceptively simple exercise:

Bring to mind something that is troubling you. Pick something that is mildly troubling for now so you won’t get caught up in too much emotion.

Now ask and answer the following questions on a piece of paper:

1. What can I be proud of with this situation?

2. What can I be grateful for with this situation?

3. What are the positive and important elements within this situation?

4. What’s important to me about this situation?

5. How does this situation inform me about myself, the other and the issue at hand?

6. Using all of my values (take the survey at www.viasurvey.org) how can I positively affect this situation?

I hope you will take the time to do this exercise; it will give you great insight about yourself and give you a different view about whatever issue you are investigating.

Have fun!

 

Love and light,

Indrani

Faberge or Fauxberge?

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images via shutterpointA few weeks ago I attended the Faberge exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

Turns out the collection belonged to someone who started quite by accident.

The first piece that the collector bought turned out to be a fake (hence Fauxberge) and that mistake put her on a quest to educate herself about the authentic Faberge pieces.

She spent thousands of hours and as many dollars learning as much as she could about the art and hired many specialists to help her to identify real from fake.

 

How can this story possibly be connected to you?

Have you ever been called names or been told you were insensitive or mean. Have you ever been accused of turning your back on someone?

Have you ever accepted the accusations as real?

If you have, you have accepted the false or fake you that the other person is seeing.

You can say that they have FAUXED you! Yes, I just made up that word. It is pronounced “fawd”.

They have “sold” and you may have “bought” the false and unflattering description of you.

 

Who can you turn to for authentication?

The best source is, of course, YOU. However, sometimes you may be feeling so bad that you cannot be your own best friend. This is when you turn to others who are the “learned” in the field of life.

This could be a trusted friend, family member or a coach.

Each of these people can reflect to you a truer sense of who you are. Each of these individuals will release you from the choke-hold of the false beliefs.

It really is worth the investment of time and maybe dollars to investigate your true and sacred nature.

Don’t be fooled by people who try to paint you with unflattering strokes.

Be brave and stand up to these thieves of your divine self and stand in your authenticity.

If you would like a tried and true way to uncover your beautiful values go to www.viasurvey.org and take the free test.

 

Love and light,

Indrani

 

Are you an approval junkie?

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thumbs-up via successfulworkplaceApproval junkies MUST have people give them a constant supply of their drug of choice…APPROVAL.
“The most sensitive of approval junkies are reluctant to take any action that might be in their own best interest because they’d risk incurring anyone’s disdain.”

How do you handle disapproval?
Do you crater?
Do you feel like you cannot breathe?
Do you feel like your world is falling apart?

Can you ask a good, TRUSTED friend to tell you what you tend to do when people are likely to disapprove of you?

A good friend of mine finally had the nerve to stand up to her cheating husband. He accused her of being frigid and cold and not at all sexy, so that’s why he had to have affairs. After a few years of hearing these words and often believing them, one day she said, “So why would you even want to stay in this marriage if I am all of those things?” He was shocked. She asked for a divorce and told him to leave the apartment. He dragged his feet for almost 8 months and she KNEW that he was not even looking for a new place to stay.

One day when he was at work, she traded apartments with the neighbor across the hall and when he came home and used his key he found himself in someone else’s home and his clothes were in garbage bags at the bottom of the stairs. He was shocked.

That is how she managed to escape the tyranny of a lousy marriage.

He knew all of her hot buttons and he pushed them regularly. Further, he was a financial contributor and she needed his help. When she finally woke up, she had to get out.

She is happily married today and we both laugh at the experience.

What MUST you finally accept about yourself to avoid the hot buttons being activated?

One of the things that I had to accept about myself was that I have a loud voice and I speak my mind.

So now when people accuse me of speaking up or talking out of turn, it no longer hurts my feelings and I say… YEP, that’s who I am and I love myself!
What do you LOVE about yourself?

 

Love and light,

Indrani

Are you a fence post?

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santa-rosa-fence-post via themartinfencepost.blogspotA few months ago I was at a program at Kripalu and while on a walk one morning I observed some people building a fence.

That in of itself was not a big deal, except for the tool that was used to set the fence post.

It looked like a metal hat that fit over the top of the post and was used the push the post into the ground so it would be as sturdy as possible.

I immediately thought about women who were beaten down by others into being submissive and “put in their place” so the family system could be supported, whether the system was healthy or not.

I imagined that every time a woman or girl was told to be silent about rape or other abuse, that she was like that fence post, rammed on the head to be quiet and stay silent so that the status quo could be maintained.

I imagined that every time a woman decided that it was better to suffer in silence than shed light on the inhumane treatment she was receiving at home, that she was the one who banged herself into submission.

I imagined that she saw herself as the post and the tool. Maybe the thinking is that she better not rock the post or the whole system will come crashing down and everyone will blame her.

These musings are of course my own imaginings and I could be very wrong.

 

I have no answers about why women accept abuse and why they don’t speak up the very first time it happens.

Perhaps if one of you reading this has been silent in the past, the image of being bashed over the head as if you are a fence post might help you to speak up and take action.

If you don’t speak up now…then perhaps you will in the not so distant future.

My hope is that you eventually protect yourself and protect the children who may be witnessing the abuse.

 

Love and light,

Indrani

When people say NO to your passion… it’s ok!

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Learn-How-to-Say-No via blogs.psychcentralMany of you already know that my work is about serving abused women by providing free empowerment classes.

If you didn’t know just read a few more blogs and you’ll get the idea.

My dream is to blanket the world with trainers who will deliver my programs FOR FREE!

My dream is to train others FOR FREE and have them serve women who are ready to move out of their situations.

I always planned to cover expenses….but not pay for the trainer’s time.

I saw it as a way for others to be Philanthropists…not simply volunteers.

This was MY DREAM.

So, I started the training process. I invited my first group of amazing women and we began the journey of my dream.

Life, however, had other plans for some of these amazing women. One by one, they discovered that my dream was not their dream.

So far, I have less than ½ of the number with which we began.

The miracle here is this:

I AM NOT TAKING THIS PERSONALLY.

Actually, I am overjoyed for those who have found a different way to serve, as they are all doing.

They have found their own urgency and their own whisperings louder than those of my dream and for that I am grateful. I am happy to see them follow their own yellow brick road.

I honor and am grateful for the time they gave and hope that one day I can partake in their dream and support them, as they have done me.

What’s the lesson here?

The lesson is simple….if you are clear about your path then the HOW and the WHAT will show itself in good time. The feelings of anxiety and angst arrive when we try to make things fit the way we THINK they should fit.

So, the next time you feel discouraged about a dream falling apart, do these few things:

  1. Take time to breathe into the pain of loss.
  2. Allow yourself to feel the grief without anger to yourself or others.
  3. Respond with love…you LOVE this person, remember that!
  4. Ask them how you can be a cheerleader for them.
  5. Support their passions.

 

Disappointment is never easy to take and you can turn around the feelings of loss by focusing on your dream, not the other’s decision.

 

Love and light,

Indrani