Tag Archives: gender violence

Robin Williams….

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It is amazing how profoundly touched I have been by the death of Robin Williams.

Yes, he was brilliant, funny and an amazing man who touched many….but he was a person just like you and me.

Beyond the sadness of his loss is a pain in my heart because I KNOW the desperation he felt as he stood in his depression on the precipice of life and death.

For those who have never stood on that ledge, the tragic concept to end ones life is horrible yet it seems so rational to those of us who have teetered on that cliff.

There is an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and the option of death appears to be a choice of true freedom.

It’s a decision of surrendering. We have put up a good fight, but now have no more fight in us to keep going.

It is a black or white option, torment or peace.

Unfortunately, millions of people in the world who suffer from depression understand too well what he may have felt in the final hours and moments of his life.

My heart aches today for those who loved him but also for the millions of souls who stand alone on the precipice each and every day.

Please, if you suffer from depression, know that there are options.

It sometimes can be hard to take even the smallest step towards help but even the small step can bring you closer to a better way of life.

#depressionawareness

PS: If someone you know or love struggles with depression, do not dismiss them. Listen, love and help.

 

When the going got tough… I had to find a way to keep going

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cheerful-happy-woman-enjoying-nature-beautiful-sky-balloonsI have been having some significant issues the past few weeks.

Most of the time I am able to stay in the moment and to stay out of negative thinking and self judgment. However, a few days ago, all my resolve fell apart and I had nothing left.

I could not crawl into a hole and hide. I could not run away from home. I could not stop caring for the people around me.

I had to find a way through a difficult 24-72 hour period.

So I chose to live by the positive psychology of PERMA.

P is for Positive Emotion
E is for Engagement
R is for Relationship
M is for Meaning and Purpose
A is for Achievement

These five elements are what make life sweet.

If the details of each day put a little deposit into each of the buckets and you can look at the day and feel good and positive about what you accomplished then you are living with PERMA.

Here is an example:

Let’s say you are facing some significant personal issues and you have no energy to  do anything for anyone but you want to do a little something for a few key people and you want to feel great about what you do.

Pick a person who needs a little help and do just a small thing, like maybe giving them some tea or a meal or just a call on the tele.

When you do this small thing you will get Positive Emotion from the deed.

You will be Engaged with the person you love.

You will be building the Relationship with that person.

You will have done something that gives Meaning and Purpose to your life.

You will have Achieved something with and for them.

Stacking up these bits of PERMA during a tough day will make you feel a lot better AND will flood your brain with Positive emotion.

It’s not always easy to find something that fills all the buckets, so just being able to fill 3 or 4 is a great start.


Love and light,


Indrani

Not seeing what has ALWAYS been there can be a true gift…

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School-boy-and-blackboard-300x300My lesson from identical twins, 25 years in the making.

I have known a set of identical twins from the moment of their birth. We have shared hours and days and weeks together over the course of their 25 glorious years on earth. They are as close as my own children and I love and respect them as much as I do my own.

I have never been able to tell them apart. My daughter has ALWAYS been able to tell them apart. She, my daughter, would get so frustrated with me when I would keep asking her which was which.

She tried to point out all the small details of their faces, the shape of the eyes, the difference in the smiles, the profile differences and still, as hard as I tried to look to see, all the details evaded me.

I remained blind.

Then, a few weeks ago, I had the lovely chance to spend five glorious days with them.

The first day I was still blind….I could not see the differences. (I had actually given up many years ago, because I was sure I would never get it.)

Then, as clear as day, I woke up the second day and I saw it.

I cannot tell you what I saw. I just had a shift in perspective and RIGHT there, I said, “Are you Jackie?” (Name changed to protect the twins.)

She said YES!

I could not believe it.

I asked again a few hours after and again I nailed it.

The next day, I nailed it again.

I do not understand what shifted in my head, but something very significant  did and  I know that I will always be able to tell them apart.

I think that this paradigm shift is what needs to happen with women who accept abuse.

They must keep looking for ways to recognize that which they have been blinded. They may have been blinded by childhood abuse, or by acts of war, or some other horrible history.

They must be able to see through what they have accepted as fact.

Each woman is the ONLY one who can shift her perspectives.

Thousands of experts can point out the problems such as:

  1. No one has the right to hit you
  2. No one has the right to rape you
  3. No one has the right to control you
  4. No one has the right to blame you for their anger

I could go on and on…

It would not matter, because unless something shifts inside of each individual person, they would not be able to escape the abuse.

I will keep doing the work I do.

Indranis Light will keep putting up blogs, sending out recordings and teaching in shelters IN THE HOPE that some people somewhere will be able to make the shift and begin to see the SIGNIFICANCE of their individuality. 

When the shift happens, when people see that THEY are worthy, NO ONE will be able to take it away and they will be able to change the relationship.

They will, like I did, say “Is that you?”

They will say, “Yes, it is me and I am worth MORE than putting up with abuse. I refuse to accept it another day longer.”

I will never give up on all the women out there who are looking for the little hints about their worth and I hope they tell me when they figure it out.

Please like our Facebook page.

 

 

Love & light,


Indrani

When the nasty “Know It All” person rears their ugly head, be very targeted in your response….

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Finger waggingAllow me to set the stage.

A couple weeks ago I buried my father.

I had the highest honor at the funeral to have delivered his eulogy.

It was, BY FAR, the most important speech I had ever and will ever make in my whole life.

I wrote and rewrote and edited and practiced and was generally very anxious about the whole day, but especially that I would do the greatest job I had ever done as a public speaker.

I wanted to rely on my memory but I choose to bring up the iPad and I stuck to the script because I was afraid I would lose my composure.

A dear friend had advised me that the eulogy should educate the congregation about the greatness of my father.

I spoke to my siblings and I spoke to his friends and to many young people that he had mentored and I composed my poetry on my Dad.

During the delivery, I spoke clearly, pausing to breathe and to allow the words to flutter like and angel’s wings over my family and dear friends who were in attendance.

I managed to get through almost 97% of it before my voice cracked and the tears began to flow.

Almost everyone came up or called up to tell me what a beautiful honoring I had done for my father.

Ok Dear Reader,

The stage has been set.

Fast forward to the actual night of the funeral. My siblings and children and nephews and mother are gathered in the humble living room in Trinidad and a friend of my mother comes to visit.

She walks in, loudly announcing that she has spent the whole day in church and has just offered up prayers for my mother.

THEN, she looks at me…

“Indrani,” she says loud and clear, “the eulogy was lovely BUT you should have said how devoted and loving your father was to your mother.”

The WHOLE room of people fell silent.

Everyone is now looking at ME, for my reaction.

Let me remind you Dear Reader, that the funeral would have been less than 8 hours prior and we were all still raw and in pain.

My sister, God bless her, sits upright from a slouched and relaxed position and says, “I MUST DISAGREE WITH YOU. You clearly did not hear the beginning when MY sister talked about their marriage of 62 years!”

The “nasty know it all” woman began to defend her position…she REALLY DID begin to defend her position!

If I wouldn’t have been so pissed I would have been laughing.

I then spoke up in a LOUD and VERY CLEAR VOICE.

And this is what I said….

“I have had many comments on the eulogy and everyone has said how lovely and honoring it was. I must tell YOU, you are the ONLY critic. I MUST give YOU a prize for the honor of being the sole critic.”

I then arose from the sofa, I walked to the dining room table and I picked up a piece of crumpled paper and I PRESENTED it to her.

I said, “THIS is your prize. Congratulations for criticizing the eulogy I spoke at my Dad’s funeral.”

Dear reader of this blog post, YOU should have seen the look on her face.

She could NOT believe that I was indeed defending myself against her attack.

She scampered out of my childhood home as fast as she could.

The lesson of this blog is this…

DO NOT allow nasty people to hijack your beautiful brain. Bring out the big response, stand on your sacred honor and let your brilliance fly.

Love and light,

Indrani

Asking the right questions may get you better answers….

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question-yourselfI have just started to read The 7 Powers of Questions by Dorothy Leeds.

When I reached for this book in the store, I rolled my eyes at my own self!

Part of me KNEW that I needed help with finding better questions to address Gender Violence, and the other part of me wanted someone else to read the book and think up the better questions.

Can you guess which part won?

Yep, the Inquirer won….she almost always does!

The questioner in me has gotten me into more trouble than I can recall.

So, as I devour this amazing book I came across this…

“Self – questioning is essential to our growth, because it helps us examine ourselves. Self-questioning cannot only help us determine our successes and our failures, but it can help us understand the reasons behind those outcomes.”

Every time a child does something that they are not supposed to do we ask, “Why did you do that?”

As parents and caretakers, we hope that we can help the child to discover the reasons for their actions.

When politicians do crazy things like tweet their private parts to random strangers and do it over and over and THEN still try to run for office, we ask, “Why? Why on earth did you do that?”

Often times we have the best questions but the perp has pitiful answers.

We cannot, however, allow our own self questions to be met with pitiful self answers.

WE (if we want to keep growing) must keep searching for better answers to the WHY questions that we ask ourselves.

Why did we allow that person to yell at us and why do we keep going back for more abuse?

Why do we persist in hitting our innocent children when WE hated that we were hit as children?

Why do we accept less than what we deserve either at work, at home or at school?

No one can give us the answers but ourselves.

We must be relentless in figuring out the answers.

I invite you to read this book, and then begin to form better questions so you can create better answers.

 

Love & light,

Indrani

Plagued by thoughts….

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Woman-with-question-marks-15742269Often times, when I least expect it, I get flooded with those questions that I have an inability to answer and they haunt me.

More often than not, those questions have to do with my mission…to end gender violence.

Some of the niggling questions have to do with the relationships between men and women and why women continue to accept abuse and why men continue to think they have the right to abuse.

In my work, my passion for ending Gender Violence, Intimate Partner Violence and Violence against Children, I have more questions than answers.

All the questions begin with WHY?

WHY would a grown man rape a child?
WHY would educated women stay in abusive relationships?
WHY would a mother-in-law abuse her daughter-in-law?
WHY is society still pretending that this is a problem for “others”?

The WHEN question is …

WHEN is enough enough?
WHEN will CEO’s investigate their managers for domestic violence before hiring them?

WHAT can YOU do?

You can begin by eradicating violence in YOUR home and community.

Here are some classes to help get you started, pass this link around to EVERYONE you know.

www.liveabrighterlife.eventbrite.com

NO ONE is immune to be on the receiving end of violence.

Share this blog with all the people you love, ask them to share it with people they love.


Thanks for taking up this cause.


Love and light,
Indrani

How BRAVE must they be?

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A few weeks ago, there was a disturbing news report from a city called Lucknow in India.

Seems that a mother who had reported the rape of her young daughter was brutally attacked and in critical care.

The attackers were demanding that she withdraw the rape charge against their family member.

She did not.

SHE IS BRAVE!

What do you think she taught her daughter?

She is one of the bravest women I have never met.

I wish I could meet her and help her.

But chances are, I will never even know her name.

I can still help by continuing  to do the work of ending violence against women.

I am sure that my efforts will not help THIS woman BUT we will help others.

We will help as many as we can reach.

Will YOU help us to help other women?

How, you ask?

You can:

  1. Sign up for the Live a Brighter Life FREE classes and begin to stand up for yourself and for others. www.liveabrighterlife.eventbrite.com
  2. You can train to become a trainer of this work. Just send an email to Stacie@indranislight.org and she can answer any questions you may have and help you get started.
  3. You can make a donation to this foundation so that we can continue to do the great work we have started. http://indranislight.org/donate/

Any amount helps.

The choices are yours.

 

Speak up about abuse or stay silent and allow it to continue.

 

Love and light,

Indrani

When religion disrespects women it’s bad for all of humanity.

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10277278_715031178560095_2112063105973454337_nI 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.

The quote that appears in this blog by President Jimmy Carter seems to chronicle ALL the distaste I had seen, felt and understood throughout my life from people steeped in their religious beliefs.

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

Spreading joy any way we can…..

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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.

 

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21603031-how-chilled-food-changing-lives-cool-developments

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What’s the source?

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There is a movement afoot where people want to uncover where their food is sourced.  

Photo Credit: Flickr/chailey

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!

Except that he accepts the thoughts he often thinks about being not “good enough “or “being selfish” as gospel truth.

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.

I would love to see the day when we feel an emotion that causes us pain and immediately begin to hunt for the source of the pain. I would love to see more people “sourcing the beginning” of their pain.

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.

I ask you to hold yourself with loving compassion today. Even if only for a few moments.

Inhale your goodness.

Exhale your divinity.

 

Love & light,

Indrani