When looking for a safe place to go to the toilet is an invitation for rapists and murderers, our society is in bad shape.
Women in India, fight for your rights and especially the rights of poor women.
We are fighting along side you.
Much love & light,
Indrani
Welcome to Episode #3 of the Live A Brighter Life Podcast!
In this episode of the Live A Brighter Life Podcast Indrani and Andrea discuss letting go. Specifically you will:
Resources
I Thought It Was Just Me by Brené Brown
Podcast Recording
[powerpress]
I grew up a Catholic. I was one of the best Catholic girls you could ever want to meet. I was openly critical of ALL other faiths. I remember so clearly at a young age reciting the Lord’s Prayer in church and asking why we did not repeat a line that my Anglican friend used to say and I was told, “THEY don’t know the real prayer.”
Shamefully, I admit that I accepted that response as gospel and I told my friend, MY DEAR friend, that her prayer was wrong.
How hurt must she have been?
I persisted in my dogged dogmatic beliefs well into my twenties until I began to realize that ALL faiths taught the same thing and that I did not have to lambaste people about what they should believe.
The teachings from my childhood have made me a moral individual and for that I am grateful. I no longer practice anything and I consider myself a just and moral individual.
When I went to India in 1984 to get married, one of the first questions I was asked was this:
“Are you having your period?”
I was shocked and upset.
WHY was that anybody’s business?
I was told that the priest would not do the ceremony because I was unclean!!
WHAT?!!!
I remember thinking, “At least the Catholics never called me unclean!”
I refused to answer that question and I refused to play the game of being bound by yet another set of rules that made NO sense to me.
Fast forward to a few years ago, a friend asked me to speak at his Hindu temple during a women’s gathering.
I knew from past experience that this sect of Hindus DID NOT allow their women in the presence of their priests. I told my friend that I would speak but he should expect me to NOT agree with the segregation.
He withdrew his invitation, which was probably a prudent thing to do on both our parts.
There is definitely a place for religion, otherwise, the system would have died away already.
BUT why do women STILL follow religions that perpetuate a bias against females?
Why do men who love their wives and daughters still follow the dogmas that are prejudiced against women?
Would these same men and women be ok with words like:
“Women can’t be doctors.”
“Women must just be housewives and bear children.”
I have no answers to these questions.
I still have the questions and they get louder in my head.
Do you hear the same questions in your head?
Love & light,
Indrani
When Andrea Lee and I visited an amazing school for the children of sex workers in Delhi in Feb 2014, we were blown over by the level of JOY in the school and the level of commitment that the teachers showed.
We asked them what was on their wish list and the founder said a refrigerator.
We made that happen. Here are some great photos of that fridge and the smiles that it brought.
It made me extremely happy when I saw the blog by Melinda Gates saying that such appliances can significantly change lives.
Here, at ILF, we strive every day to positively change lives and end gender violence.
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Welcome to Episode #2 of the Live A Brighter Life Podcast!
In this episode of the Live A Brighter Life Podcast Indrani and Andrea discuss saying “No”. Specifically you will:
Resources
The Power of a Positive No by William Ury
Podcast Recording
[powerpress]
Welcome to Episode #1 of the Live A Brighter Life Podcast!
In this episode of the Live A Brighter Life Podcast Indrani and Andrea discuss boundaries. Specifically you will:
Resources
Better Boundaries: Owning and Treasuring your Life by Jan Black and Greg Emms
Podcast Recording
[powerpress]
There is a movement afoot where people want to uncover where their food is sourced.
Photo Credit: Flickr/chailey
We have seen an increase in artisan cheese makers, organic farms, grass fed beef and free range chicken. We are balking at farm raised fish and grabbing up the fresh Alaskan Salmon as soon as it drives into your stores.
We fuss about GMO foods and antibiotics injected into our meats and pesticides on our farm produce.
We try as much as we can to ingest the foods that are good for us. We know that messing with the food that nature produces may not be the best thing for our natural bodies.
We run internet campaigns against the large international corporations when they hide what they are doing with our food. We start neighborhood campaigns to help the local farmer, and we are proud when we make even a small dent in the way people think about the food they eat.
We have even seen a fast food chain like McDonalds put apple slices into a kids meal as they hope we forget that the meat in the burger may not be all meat.
I remember when they started advertising their chicken nuggets as 100% all chicken! I wondered what the heck was in the nuggets before.
Yet…we do not take one tenth of this investigative energy to put into the emotions that we take at face value and swallow as if we do not have a choice.
I was recently speaking to a dear friend who is an amazing foodie who prides himself on only cooking and ingesting the very best that he can source. He collects his own seaweed and mushrooms and can smell the difference in fresh seafood and insists on free range chicken and grass fed beef. He only buys the freshest produce and will go without before he ingests foods not good for his system.
He is the epitome of a healthy man!
He thinks about past childhood pain and imagines that somehow he had something to do with it. He thinks he may have been ” bad” so that his caretakers had good reason to ignore him, give him the silent treatment or just brow beat him back into the mold they made for him.
He thinks that he could have “made them” love and accept him as he longed to be loved and accepted.
He is wrong.
Children are given to us so that the adults in their lives can show them how to love. They learn how to love themselves by the way they are unconditionally loved by their caretakers.
If the caretakers withhold love and support until some action is extracted then the child gets a skewed view of how to be in the world. The disease of people pleasing begins to take root.
If, for instance, I choose to stay home and not attend a family function, and if I am told that I am selfish, instead of accepting that diagnosis I should be able to bring up the thousands of examples where I did what was asked and realize that the choice to say NO to a few things is MY right.
It does not make me selfish.
It makes me human.
As I take the time to reflect on life from this side of 60, I send so much compassion to my younger self who was ready to browbeat herself about transgressions that were freely lavished on her. I wish she knew that she was a good child, a good young girl, a good young woman and a good wife and mother. She wasted so much precious life energy berating herself for “crimes against the family” that she should not have accepted.
I send compassion to young and old everywhere and hope that they will find the self compassion to begin to question all the emotions that are imposed upon them by blaming voices and people who have no business judging others.
Inhale your goodness.
Exhale your divinity.
Love & light,
Indrani
**Psst.. Did you know you can highlight any sentence in this post to automatically share it via Twitter or Facebook? Go ahead, give it a try!**
According to The Sexual Victimization of College Women- National Institute of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics:
Please share this take on Sexual Violence by The Daily Show:
Photo Credit: Flickr/Shiv
Recently, on a learning journey to Trinidad, the Island of my birth, I was in a deep conversation with a dear family member and he said that he was not the “need to know” type.
I was not surprised. I had always known this person and had seen over the years a certain acceptance of many things and a certain trust that things would work themselves out.
I instantly had a flood of memories of all the times I had wished I was not the “I need to know ” type. I wished I could be the “let sleeping dogs lie” type. It seemed to me that type had a life that was stress free. They seemed to be more accepting of things as they were.
I remember this family member just “doing what he was told” without question.
He was always doing the bidding of others, doing the work for others and taking the blame for others.
He never seemed to be able to connect with the “why me” part of the question.
He was a man without boundaries.
It is very curious to me now, having grown up in this environment, that I dedicate myself to not just having boundaries and being able to say a positive No, but that I teach about boundaries and being able to deliver a perfectly placed NO.
Every time I return to Trinidad, I uncover another little piece of the “raisin d’être ” of Indrani.
I discover another deeper layer of what makes me tick and why I do what I do.
As I love this family member and am flooded with all the memories of all of his sacrifice, pain and torment that he had suffered, I give him thanks. From the time that he was a small boy who was tremendously abused, to being the 10-12 year old who was yanked out of school so that he could go to work washing busses to help feed the whole family to the menial jobs he had to accept because of his lack of education, I give him thanks and praise for NEVER giving up on me. For never giving up on all of his children.
I will forever be in his debt.
He is my FATHER.
With deep love and respect for my 86 year old father who now has Alzheimer’s, I remain your devoted eldest daughter.
Love and light,
Indrani
A few weeks ago I got some bad news. Something that I was looking forward to for more than ONE year got cancelled and just sort of fell apart. I did not receive any real reason.
I had to “phone a friend” and I gave myself permission to cry my eyes out.
She held space for me and I let it pour. I had not let myself fall apart like that for years.
After the wave of emotion crested and crashed, I felt better… except that ANGER began to swirl.
The previous pain was replaced by INTENSE rage and I wanted to call the offender all sorts of names and hurl insults … then I saved myself by going to sleep. The good news was that I was able to find sleep and peace whereas before I would have stewed all night and woke up even more angry.
I walked almost 6 miles and I felt great.
I also had some really great conversations with myself on the walk.
There were two wolves in my head, one was righteously mean and the other sweetly compassionate.
Every time the mean wolf would speak, it would list the “ways” I SHOULD act. If I did not act in those ways, the wolf told me that I was a wimp and a push over and so on and so forth!
The other wolf would wait for the first wolf to stop speaking and just whisper something like
“you know that this person is not nasty, you know the person is one of the kindest you know…”
Then the mean wolf would jump back in…
And so it went.
I began to get very confused. What to do? Who to believe?
Then I had a thought!
And just like that I knew what to do.
If you know me, dear reader, you KNOW I choose wolf number TWO, the wolf of Compassion. That is the wolf I choose to feed. I fed it with great thoughts about the person, great memories about the person and I said a silent prayer for the person to be well and safe and happy.
When I got home, I decided on the proper course of action for me. I decided to do the activities by myself. I decided that the decisions of another had to do with them, not me. If I wanted to go somewhere or do something, it was my business.
I have no time for regret.
So I offer this lesson to you.
When you are disappointed, as you sometimes will be, don’t allow your pain and your self righteous wolf lead down the path of nasty and revenge.
Try to feed the Wolf of Compassion and free your self from the “expectations” of what others should do for you.
Make YOUR decisions for your happiness.
Hope this helps…
Love and light,
Indrani