Journey to Empowerment Read Online Free PDF Page B

knock on society’s doors of plenty one too many times, sit down to rest from the pain of rejection, then say, “What the hell, I’m giving up.”
    My own consciousness is the key for me not to become one of them.
    I am told that they are there for many reasons that could lead to homelessness. For new arrivals here, there was only the YWCA available for women who had limited resources for a residence.
    What did we do wrong along the way to get to this? Hotels and motels cater to wealth, which I do not manifest now.
    But why are women and mothers, the image, the creatress—why is there no room in the inn for us? Has our labor of love, our toiling on the earth, our unselfish love been in vain?
    From a home with multiple rooms to one room that is rented for months could be seen as a prison to some, a vacation for others—it depends on the circumstance.
    A simple matter of a late check from whatever source could put you or me on the streets if you had no family or friends to rely upon.
    Moreover, if you have not doctored on your self-worth and self-esteem—too many nos and negative outcomes may lead to your breaking point.
    It seems to me we need to raise consciousness about this situation, because too many of us women are becoming a nameless, faceless “them” etching out a survival on the street.
    ----
    I’m a Divine work of art and I’m proud of these qualities that I possess…
----

The Dark Night of My Soul Journey
    B Y R EV . V ICTORIA L EE -O WENS
    I first encountered my conscious destiny more than twenty-five years ago, when I stood at what was a crossroad in my life, unaware that I had entered a place of dark journeying. I would either recover spiritually and physically from self-inflicted degradation or lose my life, not necessarily dying a human death, or remain in a zombie-ish state, wandering bewildered through life. It would be an additional five years of drifting along as an unlearned parent to five children, after three failed marriages, the last one being of an abusive course, before I realized that I was emotionally still a child.
    Looking back down that long, winding road, I am grateful for the lessons learned and even the discovery that I was an alcoholic. This sojourn actually saved me from sinking into a whirlpool of ignorance by giving me false courage to do that which I would not have been able to do under my own power. I went back to college and got my master’s degree, yet something was still missing. I had no real concept of God except as the meanest of retaliators, because I was raised in a home where fire and brimstone were the rudiments of punishment for those things deemed not of God. Today, it’s so wonderful to know that punishment comes by my own hands, based upon the choices I make. In other words, I am punished by my “mistakes” and less-than-best judgments, and not by my “testing the waters” to see how much I can get away with. However, in the fundamentalist belief system I grew up under, it seemed that everything was “wrong” in my youth. There was no fun, no makeup, no boyfriends, no movies, no sock hops or dances, no hanging out at the drive-in—the very lifelines of my peer group’s world.
    Eventually I found my first “Eskimo” in the person of a secret boyfriend, who guided me toward a way out of my depressed, repressed and oppressed situation through the glow aroused by my first alcoholic drink. In that moment, I experienced my first “I don’t care what’s going on” feeling. In time, I found myself depending on liquid and powdery courage to satisfy that short-lived taste of euphoria. As it became less and less available to me, I sank deeper into the hold of addiction. Soon I would need a little “suppum suppum” just to make it through another day.
    I recognize today that I carried many of the characteristics of my mother (I still do, but I’m aware of them