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California Dreamin’

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Los Angeles

I’ve just returned from a wonderful week in LA. I was lucky. The winter disappeared while I was there. Instead of cold and rain I had brilliant blue skies and temperatures in the sixties and seventies. Wherever I went I ran into people I knew and loved. That always seems to happen to me whenever I’m in LA.

I made progress in getting producers interested in my novel THE SILENT STEPS OF GRACE. One day it will be a powerful and uplifting and inspiring movie that will help people in their lives. One very successful producer of several big movie hits called the book “tremendous”.  He also said that he found one of the story lines disturbing. That most certainly was the hidden history of the United States. The real history of this country is certainly not what we were all force fed in school.

He also asked me why I wanted to get involved in the movie business. “If you have a happy life and are o.k. financially why would you want to make your book into a movie?” he asked me.

“To see it come alive on the screen,” I replied. “Money and notoriety are a distant second.”

“You’ll pay a price for that,” he sighed. “You’ll be dealing with the worst people in the world. My advice is don’t do it.”

He may well be right. Only time will tell what the price of success is.

L.A. is an acquired taste. At first, it’s overwhelming. Huge, too many people and far too many cars. It takes time to get grounded and get your bearings. A friend of mine, who is a Ph. D. and runs a multi-discipline program at USC, calls LA a cesspool. It certainly is that. But if you take your time and separate the wheat from the chaff, you will find wonderful and extraordinary people. I know tons of them and am honored to call them my friends.

Getting around the city is a nightmare. It’s rush hour traffic all day long. One friend said if he has an appointment in Beverly Hills he’ll leave three hours early so he won’t be caught in heavy traffic. He’ll work in a coffee shop in Beverly Hills until it’s time for his meeting. That’s how bad the traffic is. Another friend of mine said it took him 90 minutes to go less than 2 miles. Several people said the traffic made LA almost unlivable.

LA has several advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages are:

  1. great climate
  2. very open and creative culture
  3. great food choices, particularly in Santa Monica and Venice
  4. Santa Monica and Venice are ground zero for healthy conscious eating
  5. Lots of organic restaurants
  6. Great health food stores, particularly Co-Opportunity in Santa Monica which may be the best health food store in the country
  7. Great beaches
  8. Great people
  9. Home of the movie and TV industries
  10. Lots of people striving to grow and become more conscious

The disadvantages are:

  1. High cost of living. Real estate is incredibly expensive. Rents are high.
  2. High taxes.
  3. Traffic and gridlock
  4. Lots of toxic people
  5. LA and Southern California are in the direct path of radioactive winds coming from the crippled reactors in Fukushima
  6. A monster quake that will level virtually every structure in SoCal could happen at any time.

For me, the cost and risk of living in LA outweigh the benefits of returning there to live. That’s why I left after living there for 16 years and will not return. My solution is to travel there frequently, see my friends and work to make my novel into a movie.

If you haven’t yet read THE SILENT STEPS OF GRACE you should. It’s a great story. It will move you, inspire you and educate you. In short, it’s a game changer. You will find more information about it on my website www.alanmesher.com or on amazon.com. It is available in both print and digital formats.

 

 

 

 

Boundaries and Abusive Behavior

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/tatulund/1453235137/sizes/s/in/photostream/

Psychological boundaries serve two primary functions. They protect us from harm and help define who we are. A boundary may be a conscious principle such as “abuse me and you lose me” or a deep emotional knowing that we are not consciously aware of until it is activated by a real time event. In either case the violation of our well-being incites us to act in our self-interest. Enforcing our boundaries has a two fold effect. It makes us stronger and it makes our boundary system stronger as well. Strength leads to self-confidence and greater clarity about who we really are. Strong boundaries enhance our sense of self.

Never Tolerate Abuse

There is never a valid reason for tolerating abuse. If you allow yourself to be abused you are strengthening the bad tendencies of the abuser while weakening your own sense of self. When you allow the abuser to take your power you inflate his sense of control over you. This creates a very real psychic dynamic in which the abusive person has all the power and you have none. When someone steals your power you will be full of fear, rage, and resentment. These emotions are a dangerous trap. As you long as you harbor them the abusive person has the upper hand and you are stuck in harm’s way. Then, if you should choose to stand and fight it is too late. When you have internalized what your abuser wants you to feel engaging him is like giving him a gift: the opportunity to abuse and wound you further and steal what energy you have left. This uplifts the abusive person and destroys you.

Strategies for Dealing With Abuse

The best strategy to deal with an abusive person is not to internalize the abuse, take it personally, and let the abuser steal your energy but to walk away at the first sign of abusive behavior. Restraint and self discipline keep the abusive energy your attacker wants to dump on you inside him. It is better that it eats him up than it weakens you. After all, it’s his energy not yours. Don’t allow his problem to become your nightmare. You are not responsible for the way he feels or the circumstances of his life even though he may try to make you responsible for the weight of his situation. Don’t let the abusive person use guilt to
manipulate you.

However, if you have been involved in a painful transaction with an abusive person and experienced the fear, rage, and resentment that accompany a negative encounter it is important to clear those emotions from your system. Internalized emotion does not go away on its own. The sting may lessen; the memory may fade; but that energy has been stored in your subconscious as part of a permanent culture of weakness. Future events will trigger those emotions and they will create havoc in your psyche and weaken you further.

Changing Yourself

An important part of building a strong boundary system is clearing the toxic emotions from the past that will weaken you when activated. You can’t change an abusive person but you can change yourself. When you rid yourself of stored toxic emotion from the past you will be far less vulnerable to taking the abusive person’s attacks personally and internalizing their shaming emotions.

Do not forget that internalizing shame gives the abuser the upper hand. If there is no hidden shame inside you the abuser’s attacks will bounce off you and be deflected back at him. Then, instead of successfully passing his shame on to you his toxicity will weaken him.

Never feel that you are big enough to take on the abuse; or that you deserve it; or that you are being helpful and spiritual by doing so. The truth is you are neither being helpful nor spiritual. You are being foolish and untrue to yourself. The whole point of having boundaries is to be true to yourself.

Spiritual Light

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Flickr by IpUrBeLtzhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/ipurbeltz/4810073442/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Why the World is So Unhappy

Spiritual Light saves, heals, does not discriminate or take sides, is equally available to everyone, and is free. If this is true why isn’t the world more peaceful,and why are so many people so unhappy? One part of the answer lies in the high degree of polarization that infects each national issue and every global concern. Both the national stage and the international arena are overwhelmed by the constant clash of religious, economic, social, political, environmental, and nationalistic forces. These conflicts wax and wane in their intensity but never completely disappear. They are now trending toward their zenith in all areas simultaneously.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/remix-man/3972348757/sizes/s/in/photostream/

Changing the World

Given the difficult conditions in the world what we can do as individuals to change the direction of events has never been more important. We can’t sit by and wait for the world to change or hope someone else will do it for us. The world will only change when enough of us have changed, not before. Spiritual growth is no longer a matter of personal preference but a world wide imperative that will impact the future of the planet. The other reason for the lack of world peace and personal unhappiness is that we are all challenged by a form of polarization that is at once eternal and personal.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/katerha/4894450261/sizes/s/in/photostream/

Transforming the Shadow

We each have light and dark elements in our soul. Our job is to transform the shadow side of our nature so we can let more spiritual light into our systems and stand in our real power. That is why we are here. It is no easy task. We won’t succeed in this mission unless we uproot the unconscious toxicity buried in our bodies. Much of this material comes from past life trauma that was never resolved. While we are no longer aware of these events they are the hidden cause of much of our present problems. They separate us from our soul and prevent us from expanding in the Light. Until we clear our darkness we can not stand in our power, be channels of unconditional love or vehicles through which spiritual light enters the world.

Where Peace Begins

With the world in chaos it is  a perfect time to remember that peace in this world begins with us. We are all accountable. The Light cannot be present on earth until it is present in
each of us. We are so much more powerful than we have been led by the PTB and the media to believe we are. Believe in yourself, not in what others say to control you and steal your power.