A young lady in her mid-twenties is being beaten black and blue by a strong, well-built man as 50+ people stand by and watch.
What would you do?
How would you react?
Visit the following link to read the entire story and let us know what you would do in the comments below if you found yourself in this awful situation.
https://www.facebook.com/indrani.goradia.5/posts/792430934181717?notif_t=mention
Love & light,
Team ILF
I went to an AA meeting many years ago with a friend. AA stands for Alcoholics Anonymous.
There are meetings all over the world many times a day where people who are struggling with addiction have a safe place to speak about their struggles.
The meetings do require people who wish to speak to say their name and to say, “I am an Alcoholic.”
The simple power of this introduction leaves no room in the mind of the speaker or the listener about the challenges being faced.
I would like to borrow this concept but I want to call it A2A.
What would Awareness to Action look like?
It would begin with the uneasy feeling that something might be wrong.
How do I know that something may be wrong?
That’s the easy part.
We would be on edge, scared and not able to identify the fear, sick to our stomach, etc.
These would be signs that our body is giving us that STUFF is awry!
The easy thing to do here is to ignore the feelings of dis-ease and discomfort. That is what most people do. They push down all the whisperings that the body sends our way. The headache? A whisper! The nausea? A whisper? The inability to speak? A whisper.
Whispers are manifesting in our bodies everyday.
My idea of A2A, Awareness 2 Action, is to listen to the whispers. To allow the self to feel the discomfort.
If you allow the feeling to continue to whisper and to give up the wisdom you will be able to find a path through the challenge.
So the next time you find yourself feeling uncomfortable, ask yourself these simple questions:
What’s happening in my body?
What are my thoughts about what I am feeling?
If you can take your blood pressure to see if it’s elevated that will be a sign that something internal is off.
Use all the whispers of the body to inform how you will navigate the challenges.
The challenges will always come and its up to you to be aware of them and to take informed action.
Love and light,
Indrani
Can worrying about something actually help to prevent it?
One of my very favorite books is The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.
Simply put, it is brilliant and instructive and intuitive.
The book starts with a horrendous story….PLEASE don’t stop reading there. Keep on reading, I promise it will be worth it.
de Becker talks about why real FEAR is good for us and explains that most people mistake worry for fear.
Worry is, in his words, “A way to avoid change, when we worry we feel justified to NOT take action, a way to avoid feeling powerless over something, when we worry we feel like we are doing something, a cloying way to have connection with others, it is a poor substitute for love or taking loving action, a protection against future action.”
He goes on to say that Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence says that “worrying is a sort of magical amulet that some people feel wards off danger. People believe that worrying about something will cause it to not happen.”
Further, de Becker says, “The relationship between fear and worry is analogous to the relationship between pain and suffering. Pain and fear are necessary components of life. Suffering and worry are destructive and unnecessary components of life.”
What do these words mean to you?
Is there a thing or a person that you worry about a lot?
I hear people voicing worry that their child is divorced or not married or with the wrong partner or not having a partner at all.
How does this worry help the child?
Is it not more stressful for the child to have to hear the parents worry?
I urge you to buy the book, The Gift of Fear and give yourself the gift of never choosing worry again.
Choose instead to take a certain action that will help the challenging situation.
Choosing to constantly worry makes your life miserable and dumps all kinds of stress hormones in your blood stream. You are in effect simply poisoning yourself.
If you are being abused, what positive action can you take today instead of worrying when the next time is that the abuser will strike?
My wish for you is that you throw out worry with the garbage and begin to implement a system of positive actions in response to your life challenges.
Don’t worry, take action.
Love and light,
Indrani
A 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
What is your conviction?
I was recently at a gathering of open-minded folk that was organized by Chris Guilabeau called the World Domination Summit. If you have not heard about this gathering of people who want to change the world for the better…you are missing out. At some point during the weekend I heard someone from the stage say, “What’s your conviction?”
What an intriguing question!
What is CONVICTION?
To be convicted of something is to have EVIDENCE that the something is TRUE.
In the case of a convict, they have been convicted of something that is against the law of the land. Sometimes the law of the land does not make sense, like having separate entrances for coloreds and whites. We saw how ridiculous this looked in the movie The Help, when one of the white women instituted residential “colored only” bathrooms. This piece, however, is not about those kinds of convictions.
I am referring to convictions of belief, convictions of spirit and moral convictions.
At this stage of my life, what is my conviction?
Well, I have many. I have strong convictions that children should NOT be beaten!
I have strong convictions that any form of domestic violence is unacceptable.
I think that men and women deserve equal pay for the same work.
Like I said…I have many convictions.
Why are convictions necessary?
Why should you have strong convictions about the issues that are dear to you?
Have you ever seen the TV show with John Quinones called What Would You Do? That is a show about convictions. Some people speak right up when they see an injustice, like someone stealing from the blind or a child being mistreated. Others just observe. The observers are not bad people, not at all. Their conviction about staying out of other people’s business is just stronger than their conviction to get involved.
What do you feel strongly about?
What would you go out of your way to fix?
Who would you stand up to?
What causes get you heated enough to say something out loud?
These are not unnecessary questions.
These questions determine HOW we show up in the world.
It is not enough to do lip service to something that you hold dear…you must back your words with strong convictions to take necessary actions.
Martin Luther King, Jr. took action.
Mahatma Gandhi took action.
Every time someone stands up to a bully, they take action.
Every time an abused woman leaves her abuser, she takes action.
We do not have to have celebrity status to take a stand or to follow through with our convictions. We just have to believe!
What do you believe?
How will you show the world what your convictions are?
One of my strongest convictions is that women should NOT be abused. That is why I do this work.
What work will you do to take a stand for your beliefs?
Love and light,
Indrani