H. E. L. P.: that four letter word!

For months now I have been in a wallow kind of place and mood. There have been moments when I have been deeply inspired to write but am out and about in the car or not near my computer.  I made every effort to write a few notes of said inspiration into my little black book that I carry around with me but had not gone back to reflect or create from it until today.

"Help" was what I thought I needed to get this thing going.  To get my book written, to get the private practice off the ground and to write and create my marketing and webpage promotions.  I wanted "help" but was afraid to ask anyone for "help"! I had spent money on coaches and individuals to teach me many things but yet a year later the book hasn't budged! I had however done some deeply personal transformational work that has rerouted how I think and feel and see myself.  I am now more feminine and my heart and head are cracked wide open to every facet of my feminine powers and my divine purpose.  With a crystal clear understanding more than ever I know that I am supposed to write and write and write. There in lies the biggest problem!

I have known since I was a little girl that I was different than others, more sensitive, more intuitive and more knowing.  I known that for a very long time in my life I have hidden those gifts for the sheer idea of survival and avoidance of being shamed for them.  Looking back it feels as if I had to unearth them myself because no one could "help" me with that work.  There wasn't anybody that I knew that could really "help" me with the spiritual work.  There were folks that understood it and cheered me on and let me stretch my talents and skills on them to practice.  In the end it was just me, no "help" for this journey.  Part of me also knew that I had to go through this journey to be able to later write about it to "help" others in awakening to their powers and talents.  Just listening to myself read that line makes me shake my head in thinking that is wacko! Who would have thought I could have done that and then perceive myself as a leader in this field?  It was my intuitive talents that really gave me the help I longed for all along!  The help was within me waiting to come out. Waiting to be relied upon and flex its muscles.

For the past twenty-two years I have been a special education teacher, specializing in Deaf Education. All of this brought on by my first born daughter's diagnosis of deafness. As the catalyst that people are in our lives, she was a big one for me. It changed how I communicated, how I spoke up and advocated, how I perceived Divine intervention, and how it would shape my entire world and hers forever.  This was a career in which I could "help" others while helping myself learn about deafness.  That story in itself is a book.

Thus my journey on understanding "help"! I didn't know how to raise a deaf child, alone, I went and asked for advice. I had to do it myself and essentially there were only teachers and wonderful people who crossed our path that could advise us on what to do but, the doing was our own.  Counsel was the "help" I could gain. No one could do it for me.  Throughout my years I sought out the smartest and wisest people in the deaf education industry and sponged every morsel of technical knowledge I could off of them. I vowed to be the best deaf education early intervention teacher on the west coast, let alone in the United States when I finished my masters degree, All of the many endorsements I amassed to feel better and more equipped, each endorsement and each credential was a brilliant compliment to the one before it and the one before that. Yet I still felt I needed 'help"!

I grew up with the idea that "help" was okay to ask for if your were a kid but, not okay to ask for as an adult.  I also know that my previously Christian and Mormon lifestyle prided and valued the souls that could help others while still be resilient and resourceful for being able to help themselves.  This created a rock and a hard place. How can one "help" others if they themselves need "help"?  My parents raised me to fix things first, sew and cook and gain knowledge from books.  There wasn't YouTube videos back then so it was a lot of trial and error.  It is so much easier to offer "help" than to receive "help" for many of us!

Deep in this rock and a hard place, I would find myself stuck at times to know what to do and crying out for "help"!  Crying in my shower, crying in my church, crying out in my daily thoughts for the directional "help" I longed for but couldn't get!  Here I was the so called "expert" in doing such a journey, yet I secretly felt like I needed "help" and was a fraud because I didn't know what I was doing!  Then tragically the journey to the divorce happened. I cried out more and more for "help". I prayed harder, I researched more, I sought counsel from church members and people I thought were more knowledgeable than myself.  I felt lost and confused and so desperately in need of "help" that no one could give me on earth! I could glean nothing from friends or counselors or doctors or the people that I was raised to believe were experts and could "help" me. I needed to "fix" my life and I was at a deep loss for how to do it alone.  The person that I had married and had been my best friend for 14 years was now angry and trying to "fix" his own mess of a life.

There I was divorced, with three daughters and one foster to adopt son, trying to create a vision for what I wanted in my life and how to be happy again. I was afraid of men, afraid of the economy, afraid of rumors and what people thought about me and my family.  Here we were again, feeling different than those of my community!  I was a single mom with two deaf kids and two hearing kids, making it month to month with a teachers salary and fighting to keep my sanity. I felt the shun from the Mormon church and from my married friends.  Some of my married friends stuck by me but could not relate to my struggles or feelings of isolation and aloneness. My children and I struggled to find ourselves, them in their redefined life without their Dad and me in my redefined life of being all that and the buck stops her kind of gal.  There wasn't any "help", nor did I want any! There wasn't anyway I wanted to look weak to my children or to others so that I might be judged harshly and categorized as "weak" without a man!  That concept just makes my blood boil.

Somehow I found it so much easier to give than to receive as a so called "modern woman".  Perhaps the idea of giving is a way to avoid being in need or somehow associated with the helpless, needy female archetype that is so mythically carried on in our society!  I have never been a princess in my lifestyles or cultures, as that was intolerant in my mid-westerner middle class upbringing.  There was really never anytime to morn, grieve loss or be depressed in our family.  I remember during the years after my father's military retirement he struggled with finding his groove and we all believe he was severely depressed. Despite his depression he couldn't ask for help.  This was the original model for stoicism that started the lifetime of isolation and struggle.  Lucky us!  Please realize that my parents were children of the depression and that was the nature and culture of their parents and their generation, we have all absorbed into of our own fabric! So here it is, we are shamed and celebrated in our stoicism.  If you think back to when the American society started to publicly reinforce hard working women and selfless acts of independence and supporting others.  Remember "Rosie the riveter"? Yes this has been an orchestrated and guilted perception for us as a nation and especially as women. When and were does this soften up and allow us to realize that women are indeed human and need to be treated as such. Allowed to not be expected to do more than anyone just because we carry the role of parent or an icon to our civilization?  Don't we find it ironic that when the government or nation is in trouble they capitalize on the feminine power but can not afford us equality in peaceful more economically happier times?  It is as if the world only wants women of power to be powerful when they have a bully to take on!

So how can one balance the need to "help" and the need for "help"? Be ye man or be ye woman, finding the inner knowing is our only true help that we are all divinely outfitted with. Be kind to yourself first.  One of my favorite quotes about "help' came from a Mormon, "One can not help others to the top without getting there themselves!" -Gordon B. Hinckley  So imagine how hard it might be to push someone to the top if you don't know the way?  Imagine that we now, more than ever need the playing field leveled for women and we need to unshackle the shame that keeps us from achieving help  from the inside and from the outside! I can think of a bunch of other four letter words to bring on shame than "help"!