When we live on the 14th and the 15th floor of our being, where words and the added emotional content govern our lives, we are utterly miserable. We have no control over our emotions: others have, words have.
We eat the menu, not the meal. We chase worthless and useless temporary “values”… and we hurt.
We try to rig the system and choose usernames, email handles, passwords to give us better words, but words are words, and the emotional content is added: to make you powerless and miserable… That is the nature of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil… that you always end up miserable.
It’s how it is, and you cannot change it on the same “tree”… you need to climb a different tree if you want a different life.
The Tree of Life…
Where what someone says about you is their business. It is their problem. None of yours… it doesn’t touch you.
Every article, every book, every video, every movie tries to make the 14th and the 15th floor petty, fix it, furnish it, decorate it… but it doesn’t help…
The ground of being on those floors is: being powerless.
The Tree of Life, we as humanity, have abandoned some seven thousand years ago, is where you have all the power over your own actions, over your own attitudes, over your own being… and being in power and in harmony with all, makes you happy.
That is the 13th floor of your being. The Tree of Life.
Here is an example of how fixing something on the same level of consciousness that created the trouble is just more misery…
How a DIY dress helped one woman reclaim the power words had on her body.
‘We should all be able to celebrate and love ourselves without fear of criticism from others, whatever shape or size we are.’
News flash: Words have power. This is something Jojo Oldham knows all too well.
Whether you’re a soap star hearing lewd comments made by a politician 10 years ago or the average woman getting catcalled on her way home from work, what other people have to say about your body leave a lasting impression.
Over Oldham’s 31 years of existence, she’s received countless comments about her body — both good and bad.
After years of letting these words affect how she sees herself, however, Oldham was finally ready to release them and embrace herself.
She took all the comments she’s heard about her body over the years and painted them on a dress. Posing for pictures, with a smile on her face, she took the power those words had over her and refused to let them dictate her self-worth any longer.
“The love I have for my body these days is something I’ve had to learn. And it requires constant maintenance,” Oldham wrote on her website.
Like so many of us, Oldham says she’s been in a love-hate relationship with her body for as long as she can remember. There are days when she’s thrilled with how she looks, and then there are days when she wants to delete every unflattering photo ever taken of her. The comments she would receive fanned the flame of her own insecurities.
“I had 31 years-worth of other people’s comments about my body swirling around my head and popping into it on a daily basis, and I wanted to do something positive with them,” Oldham explained over email.
The dress is a badge of honor, symbolic of the fact that, while Oldham may have been called these things, she is not defined by them.
“The comments that made the final cut have all stuck with me for different reasons,” Oldham wrote. “Some because they’re really weird, some because they’re really lovely, some because they’re funny, and some because they’re particularly nasty and they really crushed me at the time.”
“Once I learned how to be happy with myself as I am, the negative things that other people said about my body just stopped mattering to me,” Oldham explained.
Comments can do serious damage to even the strongest, most self-confident people. Oldham hopes her dress will help curtail some of that damage.
“We should all be able to celebrate and love ourselves without fear of criticism from others, whatever shape or size we are,” she wrote on her website.
She hopes the work will inspire women to remember they are not the sum of the comments made about their bodies; they are so much more.
I can feel that you are going to miss it unless I say more…
Many of you are caught up in how you look. What you weigh. What you wear.
Transient, temporary, and irrelevant.
You are bound to remain unhappy.
Same with money… transient, temporary and irrelevant.
Even health: without the right context it is transient, temporary and irrelevant.
I feel your hate radiating towards me.
Your hate is your problem. Deal with it.
