Dear Jane,

You have all of the evidence now. Collect it. You can do it. This is your perfect moment to prove everything. Just go and do it. Save your little girl (yourself!).

Angela

Finding Angela Shelton: Review

Finding Angela Shelton
Sarah Elise Stauffer, a mother, writer, and artist., 02/19/2008

Angela Shelton traveled across the US in search of women who shared her name. Her idea was to survey these women and get an idea of how each one was progressing in life. The unexpected began, and she discovered that 70 percent of them had been raped, beaten or molested. A survivor of childhood incest, physical abuse, and date rape herself, she knew in her soul that she was touching the surface of something huge. She made her documentary, Searching For Angela Shelton, and even confronted her father on Father's Day. This book chronicles her amazing and insightful journey into the belly of the beast. She breaks her own silence and helps others do the same. Sometimes harrowing, sometimes funny, and always poignant, Angela Shelton searches for and ultimately finds what she needs to find to heal and live a joyful life. Her book will help anyone who reads it do the same.

PAVE Rally on Feb 19th, 2008

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I went to the PAVE rally on Feb 19th on my Green Bike!  I met up with Bikers Against Child Abuse at the courthouse in Beverly Hills to participate in the one of the nationwide rallys for Victims' Rights.

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The 30 Day Finding Angela Shelton Journey!

Check out this amazing letter I received! It is from the 30 Day Finding Angela Shelton Journey. WOW!

Hi Angela Shelton.

What a ride! Today was my Day 30 on your Angela Shelton Journey. I can only begin to tell you how emotional the last 37 days have been for me. So many tears and emotions that some days I just couldn't click on the day's Journey email, and had to wait a day or two.

Thank you thank you thank you. Your program is truly inspired and a blessing from all that is good and loving and healing in the universe. Your messages are right-on, and your videos so intense, funny, and personal. I have learned SO much and still have work to do, but a shift in my healing has definitely taken place.

I thought I would share with you my Day 22 drawing of what joy would look like to me. This was done with markers on a file folder. I certainly wouldn't have felt this without your program, and the assignment gave me this light-hearted image of joy. I have kept it up where I see it many times each day, and it makes me smile every time, and lifts those old vibes up.

I will also share my Day 26 Mission Statement:

I am a beautiful entity, a divine spark of God who is on this planet to learn to love and to play and love and have fun. I pray to be a fountain of love to the world and to be a bright loving light to myself and therefore to others. I am joyous Jaye who exited the blame game.

Thank you for your work, from deep in my heart to you, and so much more than I can say right now.

Jaye

I am writing my autiobiography!

Angela told me I had to write about the process of writing my autobiography so here goes!
My physical therapist found out I have an interest in writing. He introduced me to a client who just finished her memoir at 71. After the three of us had lunch, she asked when I wanted to get together to read our writing to each other. This was the moment of commitment or synchronicity as Angela says.

This commitment meant I had to go home and write. The technique of learning a new habit in 21 days is a tool for me. I wrote on my calendar for each day 1 through day 21. Today is day 13 of my writing. I have written an hour sometimes two hours each day. The process of free style which is to write everything that comes to mind, just to keep writing, no thought of editing or spelling. The first day I looked to the left and imagined what it was like when I was a child on a tobacco farm before we moved when I was six.

Each day I continue adding to the script. I also print each days writing and file these 6 to 8 pages. My flat mate just happens to be a college professor, a writer and an editor. He told me about this technique which I am calling brain dumping. The intention is to get everything out of the head and onto paper. Once this is done, I will start to review each days writing and make notes in the margins about other ideas that come up. I am also rereading Write From the Heart, Unleashing the Power of Your Creativity by Hal Zina Bennett.

Yesterday, day 12, I fell in love with writing. I had no idea until yesterday that writing was like a spiritual exercise or a contemplation. For example, in contemplation when I am imagining feeling my completed book, like Anglea has the blog of experiencing her new book. She is feeling it, touching it and etc. This is what I did to see, touch and feel my book. It is a technique given in Write From the Heart. In doing this exercise, there was a point when the imagination stopped and something else took over. It was soul movement or the divine essence of who I am, the divine. This same type of creativity has taken over in the writing process. I had no idea there was a similarity until I experienced it. I am now in love with writing.

It has been a discipline to write each day, but I look forward to it. It has been different almost every day, the feeling that goes with it. The first day was almost surreal, then there were days of jumbled ideas, other days the words flowed out on the paper and an hour was up before I knew it, which has been almost every day. Some days I didn't want to stop and didn't, some days I had to stop and book and event for Angela. Can you tell I am excited? I have been inspired to know my sword is for inspiration, that's why I keep IT beside me!

Survivor Manual TV!

Now we have a place where the videos pertaining to Survivor Manual are collected!
Survivor Manual TV!

Watch the video called Healing the Human Spirit and the one about Sam MacArthur. Those are awesome!

Joyology, The Art Of Recovering Your Lost Joy

Excerpt Two:

We lie to make up for the truths we can not face yet. Dream of mine, 2004

We dare not devote ourselves to welcoming rivers of joy, (and many times without drugs inducing this pseudo joyous state.) We dare not choose joy. I wonder if we even know what the word JOY means. Joy is defined as :

a. Intense and especially ecstatic or exultant happiness.

b. The expression or manifestation of such feeling.
c. To take great pleasure; rejoice.

We are vessels, we can fill ourselves with the fresh waters of joy, or be apathetic and leave room for pain and suffering that will overstay it’s welcome if we let it.
What is the difference in Joy and happiness? We can feel joy and not be able to manifest it. We need to feel and manifest it in our daily lives. It is not reserved for some future event. What else do we have if not our days? This is our time. Now.

Joy is more than happiness. Joy exists on an astral plane above happiness. Joy is the ocean feeding the rivers. Joy is transcendent. Joy is not grandiose.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are in adequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous. Actually, who are you Not to be? You are a child of God.”
Marriane Williamson
I can hear the negative people now, discounting this because they have been brainwashed to believe it is egocentric to think this way.
When we feel trauma and sadness, we need to pay attention, get inside that pain and heal it as a path in our lives. Balance is the key.
“People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong…why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom.”
I have been afraid to stop focusing on my faults. I have been afraid to stop. If I stop, what if I let one thing go and I am suddenly swallowed up by my wickedness? Where does this come from? Abuse, religious brainwashing, perfectionism. It’s ok, we are not produce, taking a break and focusing on our strengths will not lead to us rotting.

We can work on ourselves without focusing too much on how much fixing we need. There is an undercurrent when a woman expresses true confidence and joy. She is arrogant, conceited, grandiose. It is no wonder we are starving for joy. We are searching like lost children, in relationships, in religion, in food, in drugs, not a coincidentally that many of the younger generations have tired to ECSTASY to experience this. Our searching can lead us to dangerous places, in the barren wasteland of drugs, empty dogma, denigrating un-reciprocal relationships. Mothers need to reciprocate in their relationships with their children. Children deserve this. It enrages me that I even have to say this, but I do because I know my own mother. It is not ok to make promises that you won’t keep, to not show up for a visit, even when she is an adult, to be an absent adult parent and an absent grandparent.

Create space for joy. There is room in you. Open your mind, and your heart to joy. Create a welcoming space for joy. Start in your home if it is hard to access internally. Make a vision board about joy, a collage. Find images that resonate and make something artful, hang it up. Joy is healing, it heals and it is healing. It is about freedom, the freedom to feel, to be yourself, you be anything, to BE. Just BE.
We deserve joy, we have suffered enough, our children have suffered for the sins of their parents, for abusers, for the pain of something that is not theirs to own. We need to look within and heal. Our relationships are suffering, we are projecting pain from the past onto our partners. The earth is suffering. Animals suffer. Enough.
But joy can not be fully felt when we can not and have not fully felt our suffering, our losses, our grief. Again, depression gets pathologized and many people end up repressing their pain even more because to be ‘depressed’ is considered weak and taboo. Sometimes we just need to give our love to depression. Depression is repression. Maybe we need to sit and feel it.

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” Henry Miller


Welcome joy, feel the fear and welcome her anyway. That tidal wave we fear may be exactly what we need.

“No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit. Helen Keller
I hope I am opening a new heaven to human beings who have suffered from sexual abuse. I want my relationship and mothering to do this for others. If we dare embrace our right to a joyous life, if we dare speak our truth in any form, we risk devaluation. My uncle called me an eccentric weirdo. He chose not to see my creativity growing up. When I was old enough, he became threatened by it. The fact that I ate organic really pissed him off, and he dismissed my newfound union with my soul as “back to nature stuff..” The underlying threat of violence in his tone threw me for a loop. I sensed what was coming. Martin [Luther King Jr.] attempted to define violence as the language of the unheard. I heard the unheard, I realized this incest stuff was infecting everyone unconsciously in that family, the perfect uncle was turning from me, and i could see in his silhouette colors of truth.
We have absorbed spiritual pessimism long enough, let’s attune to the beatific. Let’s own it.
“And the say came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom” Anais Nin
This is exactly why I spoke out. No matter how betrayed I have been by my “family”, and I have been, by every family member linked to me by original blood, I dared speak, fight, live. It hurt worse to be stifled, quite, complicit.
The truth of our abuse. The abuse that was dumped on us, it is not actually OURS.
Calling the rape what it was, rape, to my grandmother was an abomination! Oh she recoiled in horror that I would dare use the word! “Rape?! How can you say that??” I once wrote Pops a letter and said “I know we have had our differences(amazing how I am apologizing for his violence!!), but I love you. I am sorry your son raped me.” She lit up on me like the 4th of July. “How dare you say that to your grandfather, ‘I’m sorry your son raped me? What a horrible thing to say!!”
"Oh please, what a horrible thing to DO!!"
And so it went, just like always.
What enrages and flabbergasts me is that out of 6 adults, I was the ONLY one who was sorry that I was raped. The only one. The next person in my life who was truly profoundly enraged, sorrowful, and hell-bent on validating my very soul was my husband. He modeled this for me.
There are people who will support us, we have to know that.

Angela Shelton Michigan

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This is a song that Angela and her choir sang when we went with them to church.

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Touch it, Feel it, Love it - I did!

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Oh the anticipation!!  Just wait until you touch it, feel it, love it.  It's smooth!!

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Rape Anniversary Reaction Transformation

As I watered my lavender plant yesterday, it occured to me: I will be 30 years old next year. Holy you-know-what, Batman! Musings begin swirling away, I think of all the fantastic things I have seen and experienced in almost 30 years on this planet. Lucky for me, I grew up surrounded by horses and dogs. I met and married my soul mate at 20. We made two gorgeous babies together. We have traveled, uncovered one another’s passions and dreams, and discovered a depth of emotion and spirit together and as individuals I can hardly verbalize. I have created beautiful art; paintings, collages, cards. The ultimate for me, for us, is the artful creation of blessed togetherness: a healthy family. This family is a far cry from my early experience.

This February is the 19 year anniversary of the rape I survived. I was 10 years old when I was kidnapped, taken to a motel in New Orleans, and raped in every way one can be, for three days. I was already being abused by my father, my rapist, since age 3. This was the culmination of his sexual and emotional abuse of me, his only daughter. As I ponder, I think to myself, What drove me internally to not only survive, but want to thrive? What moved me toward that thriving after such trauma? I inhale the scent of my pretty lavender plant, I realize I am just beginning to answer that.

After a person is traumatized at a particular time, the fallout tends to rain heaviest on that day from then on, therefore it is known as an “anniversary reaction”. In other words, anniversary reactions are a re-triggering or re-experiencing of a traumatic event that occurs because of a time cue. We tend to be “triggered’ automatically on these days. A trigger can be anything from a smell, to the time cue being the date of the event, the texture of the carpet you happen to be walking on, or the weather. Thriving can seem impossible during these storms. I have had many issues to contend with, anxiety, post traumatic stress, panic, what I say to myself in my head.

What amazes me most as I write this is that the further away from this experience I get time wise, the more I am able to comprehend the horror of it, and the more magnified my thriving becomes. There is something about a bigger and bigger chunk of time in the space between me and the rape that enables me to look directly at it. To feel more fully than ever the horror at a safe distance of 19 years away is very healing. It is as if the distance propagates a more (w)holistic viewpoint. Wholeness is my journey, my destination, and my purpose. Something within me has always known wholeness. Something within me recognized wholeness early on, that is why I believe I was able to see it in and feel it to begin with. I recognized it because it was already in me. Continuing to create a whole, soulful, healthy marriage and family is essential to me.

My father told me he loved me all the time, I think he believes he does. For years I searched through the ashes of his actions for some sliver of love. I made excuses for him, I felt sorry for him, I longed for him. What I longed for was an illusion, for he would have to be a completely different individual to be what I longed for. I learned that based on truth, love can not exist within rape. My father and his “love” are myths, myths I chased for many years. Myths that helped me survive childhood without going insane from grief, myths that led me into abusive relationships and adolescent drug use. I thought love was possession, that I needed to be possessed, owned, that love was vehemently staking claim unto me. All things my father did. I clung to those myths all the while knowing my heart of hearts they were not real.

Deep in my consciousness I knew, I could not be fooled, the truth was rooted too deeply, this was not love! Aristotelian philosophy has a word for this vital force that was directing me toward self-fulfillment, self love, actualization of my divine potential; entelechy. Entelechy is a particular type of motivation, a need for self-determination, and an inner strength directing life and growth to become all one is capable of being. It is the need to actualize one's beliefs. It is having a personal vision and being able to actualize that vision from within.
Jean Houston wrote:
"Entelechy is all about the possibilities encoded in each of us. For example it is the entelechy of an acorn to be an oak tree, of a baby to be a grown-up, of a popcorn kernel to be a fully popped entity, and of you and me to be God only knows what…" [Jean Houston, THE HERO AND THE GODDESS: THE ODYSSEY AS MYSTERY AND INITIATION, Ballantine Books, 1992, p. 62.]


Incest and rape made me think I surely had no future in this world, in my body, in my self. Yet, there was a tiny seedling I held in my heart. A spark lived even as my father raped me, and it was one of wanting, a vision of a vibrant future, filled with laughing children, stars and color, hearts that loved, hearts that mended, safe hands. This propelled me along fiercely, I never let it go. I came close a few times, but I did not let go. No matter what he took from me, what my mind and spirit held he could never take.


I am still healing, unfolding, dilating, birthing myself into wholeness. It is a process. He did what he did for years, culminating in this act of ultimate violence and betrayal, yet all the while I held on to my visions; bluebirds atop picket fences, mother and father in love, children who knew in the depths of their being that Mommy and Daddy are in love not only with them, but with one another. Children nurtured profoundly, and ferociously protected as a natural extension of our bond.

In this month of love, I may have a rape anniversary reaction, or a few, but I know what I know. I see what happened to me, not as if it were happening to someone else, but me, a child. A little girl biting a red stuffed worm bent over a bed in a dirty motel. It is real. It happened. That was me. That IS me. I also know that a father can not rape his daughter and love her too. He could not steal my entelechy, my innate light.

The day I saw my future husband, that divine spark lit up in total recognition, it was as if we both saw into a mirror for the first time, “Oh my God, I look into you, and you reflect to me my beauty and you look into me and I show you your own.” It was magnetic, it was absolute. It was visionary. Mere potential becoming actuality. It was the first time my healthy self took over completely. Day by day, we actualize more love, the ever beautiful unfolding of human love. That is the path love, reflecting a person’s true divine potential and loving them into actualizing it. In spite of being raped, the prevailing theme at this time is this divine love. If that isn't worth celebrating, I don't know what is.

Dear Jane....

Jane!

You tried to communicate and it was erased so quickly. Can you try again? Send it to orders@ or filmmaker@ Can you become friends here too: http://www.myspace.com/angelasarmyofangels

I'm glad you're still alive. I spoke with another one of you on myspace awhile back. That was creepy. It is so hard to tell when they are watching and when they are not - so here we are right out in the open! Keep going girl. Save and hide your money. You should report it on or before the 29th of April too, even if you just do it online http://reportitnow.org/reportabuse.html The more you tell it, the less power they have over you.

Angela

Women Running!

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Are your running? What are you running for or from?  

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Feeling like you Failed?

To know me is to laugh.

This fail blog is for all of you who have said you feel like you failed. During the process of healing there is that dark point where the sword is still in you and you're pulling it out but you feel like you'll never get past the pain. You know what I'm talking about. Well, here is a blog that was just sent to me to perhaps lift your spirits and show you that again, you are not alone. Here is a fail blog.

Keep moving forward. As Angela Shelton Detroit said to me, "Sometimes life hits you upside the head but you have to keep going and keep trusting."

Ways to Communicate

Oh boy! Here is a new way to communicate - the http://www.bureauofcommunication.com/
Very fun and helpful! Communicate!

Moving on...

One thing that I've learned as a Survivor is that it is important to make sure that you are not falling back into that abuse cycle. I notice that I seem to find myself attracted to people who abuse and sometimes you convince yourself that somethings are not abuse if you aren't being hit. Well words can be abusive too! You need to start paying attention to how all people are treating you. Including people who you think are your "friends".

The reason I say this because I fell into something very much like this. One of my female friends was the perp in this case. She wasn't hitting me or anything thing like that. But it was her words that were abusive.

Really start to pay attention to things your friends are saying...everyone. Sometimes, you dismiss it, ....they are your friends, and are just trying to help...well no, if the words hurt its not a friend...its us being the victim again.

Be careful not to be comfortable in the victim chair because in the long run it will hurt you!

Remember you do not deserve to be abused even if its your "Friend!"

True friends are not abusive....