As twenty, thirty extra pounds?

Wrinkles around your  eyes from fretting?

Lines around your mouth from frowning?

Do your shoulders slump?

Is your neck stiff?

Do you experience aches and pains?

Have you isolated yourself?

How can you possibly feel and look your best when inside you’re being eaten up with judgment, resentment and lack?

What if you could change your physical appearance by changing your emotional state?

Change the outside by changing the inside?

I’d go as far as saying that if you are someone struggling with weight (and it’s not purely physiological/ hormonal) that you have to do the inner work if you want to lose weight and look better.

I lost twenty pounds within a month-without dieting when I forgave my father. Oh, but you see-I gained twenty pounds within like two weeks just before that (when my father came back into my life after years of estrangement) The thing is…I didn’t realize I was gaining the weight until after the fact. I didn’t realize my seething internalized anger was having me over eat and not exercise. When I got conscious (I was taking a Master’s degree program in Spiritual Psychology at the time and had lots of homework) I immediately committed myself to a practice of identifying inner judgments about my father and myself and then I practiced forgiveness.

What if there was a ‘forgiveness fashionista‘ who could come to the rescue with a remedy- a stylish remedy?

Inner and outer healing to reveal the beautiful you!

I’m super excited to explore forgiveness in this new way.

Cleaning the inside and then dressing the outside to match the new, lighter, brighter, sexier you!

I noticed something in my own life having to do with being seen in my world.

As I got less depressed from doing the inner emotional work I started getting rid of the black baggy clothing I lived in and I began wearing colors again—and not colors too bright-that I could hide behind…but colors to enhance the real me.

I’m exploring giving one style tip and one related fashion tip per week on this blog (using my experience working in some of the finest stores  in NYC and then having a career as a personal stylist)

It’s not only a natural fit-but fun!

Would that be helpful?

I’ll keep you posted on the classes I’m teaching and the new products I’m using to beautify my life..the books I’m reading,,,,the trends I’m following…and what I’m wearing.

It’s time to shine…

With forgiveness and love,

Brenda

Referred to by one radio interviewer as..

The Queen of Forgiveness and now… looking forward to embracing the

Forgiveness Fashionista inside me.

I graduated from The University of Santa Monica in 2001 and use the skills taught there everyday for my own personal growth and for those of my coaching clients.

This video is a gift of healing from them to you….

Out of Fear. Into Forgiveness. Onward to Freedom.

Brenda Adelman

Enjoy: www.joy2meu.com/Personal_Boundaries.htm

If this is one of your issues-you owe it to yourself to read this.

The author talks about your personal space, how to stop someone from invading it and how to set it clearly in the first place.

He also refers to emotional honesty and how to be real and honor yourself.

I’m passionate about these subjects and this is really incredible.

Forgive and Be Free,

Brenda

I was recently interviewed about the power of releasing judgments in order to experience more freedom.

Check out this 60 minute interview to learn more.

Forgive and Be Free,

Brenda

What a wonderfully artistic trip and I got to reach a whole new audience with the message of the power of forgiveness.

One more opportunity this Friday night at The North Hollywood Church of Religious Science on Whitsett. What a lovely church. I’m looking forward to performing there.

It’s this Friday July 16th at 8 PM at the North Hollywood Church of Religious Science on Whitsett.

There will be cookies and tea served before the show and the talented singer/ songwriter Caroline Waters will be doing a pre-performance show with songs she wrote for My Brooklyn Hamlet’s original soundtrack. The show will be filmed for John Zak’s upcoming documentary about the healing powers of forgiveness.

Stay for the short Q and A and then join me and friends for a “Welcome Back from London and Dessert party” nearby.

Get your advanced tickets for the show directly from the church at http://www.nhcrs.org for $5 off.

Check out a recent review from my run in London:

My Brooklyn Hamlet – Brenda Adelman’s story has shocking parallels with Shakespeare’s play

By Judi Herman

http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=3435

A man shoots his wife dead and marries her sister…

Extraordinarily his daughter finds it in her heart to forgive him. And she is the winner in this unfolding tragedy for it takes his death to set her on the path to the forgiveness that will heal her.

Ultimately the audience at Brenda Adelman’s searing one-woman show are winners too as she shares her extraordinary true story…

Her father’s gun is a motif in young Brenda’s life for her father teaches her to use it when she is just ten years old. By this time her mother has taught her to recite her favourite excerpts from Shakespeare, a legacy she uses in the show to spellbinding effect..

Brenda does not just live to tell her tale, she is brave enough to share her journey to ‘truth and reconciliation’ and the way it has shaped her life, leading her for example to take a masters in spiritual psychology – and of course to write and perform My Brooklyn Hamlet. She morphs effortlessly into both parents and does not spare her audience the gory details of their relationship, or the depths of her own pain… thanks to her winning open personality and the simplicity and candour of her storytelling, nicely leavened with a disarming humour and her great personal charm, the parts add up to a gripping whole.

And I’ll be leading a live 90 minute workshop on the Power of Forgiveness in Relationships (current, new to dating and your relationship with yourself) the next day-Saturday, July 17th from 1-2:30 in Westwood. More info on that coming.

Forgive and Be Free,

Brenda

http://www.jewishtelegraph.com/leeds_3.html

Brenda always thought of herself as a daddy’s girl – until he murdered her mum

THE scenario of a man killing his wife and some time later marrying the woman’s older sister is the sort of storyline one would expect to see on Eastenders.

But this bizarre state of affairs really happened to Brenda Adelman, whose show My Brooklyn Hamlet made such an impact at this year’s festival.

Brenda insists that she came from a happy family background in spite of her father killing her mother and then marrying her aunt.

And throughout the nightmare and trauma that followed the killing, which took place during the high holy days, Brenda claims the act of forgiveness was the catharsis that sustained and helped her own wounds to heal.

Actress Brenda had already left the Brooklyn family home eight months previously and made a life for herself in Los Angeles.

When she was 30, Brenda received news that changed her life. Her father had shot her mother, a photographer, in the head at point-blank range.

“I really loved both my parents and I adored my father so much, I was always ‘daddy’s little girl’ – so I was in total shock.

“My father’s lawyer was with him after the shooting, but didn’t inform the police till some eight hours after the killing, by which time my mother had been cleaned up and there were no clues.”

Brenda went into denial. Her father argued he and his wife were fighting and struggling with the gun and it went off. Brenda claims there was a cover up because the gun, the one that her father always carried around with him, simply vanished.

“The police said it wasn’t suicide because there was no gun-powder on my mother’s hands and my father claimed he did not remember who pulled the trigger,” she said.

“Nothing made sense. But I held on to that little thing of who pulled the trigger.

“My father pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was given a sentence of just two and a half years.

“He was a wealthy man so he had good lawyers who also represented the Mafia. I just wanted closure, but every time I broached the subject of what happened he would brush it aside saying the past is the past and he didn’t want to talk about it.”

Brenda said her parents always had a love-hate relationship and there was a lot of domestic violence at home.

She recalled her father holding the gun to her mother’s head on a couple of occasions when she was a teenager.

But her mother told her later it was a regular occurrence. Brenda was in her early 20s when her mother decided to leave her father but the quirky bohemian photographer was soon to return.

Brenda said: “When my mother eventually took him back I just thought she must have been lying about continually being threatened with the gun because why would she return if he did that to her?”

After the tragedy it crossed Brenda’s mind that her mother might have been killed somewhere else, not necessarily in her bedroom, because there was no sign of blood anywhere.

“When the killing occurred I kept thinking that it was my fault and that I was damaged, because if these were my parents and I loved them so much how could this have happened. I came to the conclusion that there must be something wrong with me. So I was the one who felt guilty.”

The defining moment for Brenda came when her father got out of prison and said he was going to take his daughter to court. He was going to claim one third of the money that his wife had left Brenda in her will, because he felt the money was rightfully his.

“It was then I recognised that my father was not the man I thought he was; the dad I really wanted to have back in my life.

“And I realised I needed to move out of being a victim into acceptance and start taking my life back.”

This resulted in My Brooklyn Hamlet, Brenda’s one-woman play which she describes as “very entertaining, very tragic and very New York”.

She said: “I found acting the roles of my parents and aunt on stage became cathartic and from my point of view a sort of therapy to see what they were really like.”

Her introduction to the William Shakespeare went back to childhood when her mother read the great plays to her daughter as bedtime stories.

“After the tragedy I turned to Hamlet because there I found a soul mate; someone who had experienced the same things that I had,” she said. “It was really a salvation for me and I owe that to my mother.

“As a child there was always a part of me that knew it wasn’t right that my parents were treating each other this way. I knew the difference from right and wrong and in some way that kept me sane.”

Brenda firmly believes there was a bigger picture that she couldn’t see. She knew that in witnessing her parent’s relationship there was this tumultuous love-hate issue between them and, instead of taking responsibility for their own actions, they chose to blame each other for what went wrong.

“I also realised that my parents were flawed and I tried to find out why they were such unhealthy people,” she added.

Brenda also felt the time was right for her to forgive the unforgivable, which is what her show is all about. Performing her play with the Shakespearian connection in England is, she notes, like a dream come true.

“It is gratifying to know that my show opens the hearts of those who see it and causes many people to look within at their own hurt and anger,” said the 45-year-old New Yorker.

JOHN FISHER’S VIEW: For some children having wacky parents can be a whole heap of fun.

For Brenda, it was just the norm; she claims to have had an idyllic childhood loving deeply both her mother Barbara and her father Jerry.

But it was evident from the unfolding events in Brenda’s one woman show My Brooklyn Hamlet that her family was to some extent out of the ordinary.

Not every three-year old has a daddy willing to teach his little girl to drive a Cadillac, for instance.

All credit due to him then for waiting till she was six to show her how to shoot a 38-calibre Smith and Wesson.

‘A family that shoots together stays together’ was his family motto.

And instead of Cinderella or Rapunzel, Brenda’s smoke-piping bohemian photographer mother used to read the works of Shakespeare as bedtime stories when Brenda was a toddler.

Brenda’s way of dealing with her demons was through the capacity to forgive and this is the key element in this powerful story, because only through forgiveness could Brenda find her true self.

She shares with us the privacy of her pain with disarming honesty and takes us on an incredible journey as she compares her own story to that of the Bard’s Hamlet.

Both strands contain shadowy parallels that give this quirky saga a dynamic resonance.

Already the recipient of a Hero of Forgiveness award Brenda’s decision to forgive the unforgivable makes irresistible theatre.

There is much to admire in her performance, she has undeniable charisma and the play is both engaging and deeply moving.

But beyond this there lies a sense of mystery and a mystery that will never be solved.

And because of this it is the audience that is left with a longing for closure.

© 2010 Jewish Telegraph

www.JewishTelegraph.com

Here’s the first article about my upcoming performances of my one-woman show, My Brooklyn Hamlet, at The Leeds International Jewish Performing Arts Festival.

Thank you so much to the journalist who captured the heart of my show and the work I do related to finding the forgiveness in even the unforgivable.

Come see the shows June 6th and 8th in Leeds and June 11th-June 27th at the New End Theatre in London.

http://www.thejc.com/arts/theatre-features/31732/the-actress-whos-a-real-life-hamlet

Forgive, Create, Be Free,

Brenda

When Vrinda Pendred (nee Barker) was diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome at age 7, the doctor failed to notice she had Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) as well, despite OCD symptoms being a huge part of why her parents had brought her to the doctor in the first place. Even when she was finally diagnosed with OCD at almost 14, Vrinda had no comprehension of how complex and wide-ranging the disorder was, even within herself. Only as an adult did she finally start to understand just how deeply OCD affected her life, mentally, physically, emotionally and socially.

Vrinda’s story is not at all unique. In fact, if there is anything rare about it, it’s that she was diagnosed as young as age 13. Some people don’t discover there’s a name for their intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviour until mid-life. Others are never diagnosed throughout their entire lives, their ‘quirkiness’ remaining a mystery both to themselves and to the people in their lives. We can only imagine the suffering they’ve experienced, struggling through homelife, school and work, feeling misunderstood by teachers, parents, friends and colleagues.

And it’s not just the people who have OCD who are suffering. Think of the frustration and heartache felt by millions of teachers and parents around the world, who watch their students or children struggling with OCD (often undiagnosed), but cannot understand what is happening because these children are too young to express what is going on inside their heads. The sense of helplessness, and even guilt, can be enormous, as they simply do not know what to do to help an OCD child, and are at a total loss as to how to manage or respond to the unusual behaviour and destructive anxieties.

And what is most poignant is the thought that all of this could be avoided – and even treated – if there were more education about the many facets that make up OCD.

And that is what Vrinda Pendred has set out to do. Now 27 years old, and a mother herself, she has merged her two most passionate callings in life: 1) writing and 2) educating the world about neurological conditions, such as OCD. Vrinda has created a unique publishing company called Conditional Publications, whose primary aim is to help push forward this education, by devoting its catalogue to publishing the works of writers with neurological conditions, thus giving a voice to the real experts on these mysterious disorders.

Their first book, Check Mates: A Collection of Fiction, Poetry and Artwork about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, by People with OCD, is coming to Amazon  TOMORROW, Tuesday, May 11^th

Put together by 20 writers and artists from around the world, all who have OCD, Check Mates showcases a range of emotions, from love to hate, joy to rage, fear and sorrow to hope and optimism. There’s even a little bit of humour. What it doesn’t do is shy away from the truth. Every angle is covered, no matter how painful, which makes for a startling and moving read.

Whether you’re a parent or teacher of a child dealing with OCD, a therapist or coach of OCD clients, or you have OCD yourself, everyone will find something in this book that speaks to them.

And if you don’t think you know anyone with OCD, have a look around. I think you’ll be surprised (if not shocked) at how many people have it, but are hiding in silence and isolation. This book will open up your eyes, your mind and your heart, and will bring a long overdue healing for many.

And, true to her principles, Vrinda will be donating a portion of the proceeds from the sale of every copy of Check Mates to OCD charities, to encourage research and treatment for the condition.

Check Mates: A Collection of Fiction, Poetry and Artwork about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, by People with OCD is coming to Amazon  TOMORROW,  Tuesday May 11^th. To show my support of this inspirational new book, I am giving away  a 4 part video tips series about How and Why to Forgive to everyone who buys Check Mates on the day of the launch.

AND… In addition to my gift, there are over 30 other wonderful gifts being offered by mind-body-spirit teachers, authors, coaches and healers from around the planet when you purchase the book on May 11^th.

To find out how you can buy this book on May 11^th
and receive over 30 other gifts, just click HERE

Or copy and paste this link in your browser: http://conditionalpublications.com/pages/check-mates-launch.html

I hope you will join me in celebrating the launch of this unique book, Check Mates, the first ever collection of fiction, poetry and artwork about OCD.

In case you have a strained relationship with your mom I wanted to offer you an exercise that will help bring you relief.

You can do this even after your mom has passed away-if that’s the case.

Watch this short video that shows you why it’s important to forgive your mom’s betrayal and how to start the forgiveness process.

Have a beautiful Mother’s Day.

Forgive and Be Free,

Brenda

Illustration from the book
Check Mates

Checker – counter – washer – neat freak – superstitious – perfectionist – over-thinker – worrier

Any of these sound like you? Perhaps a friend or family member? To tell the truth, I think we’re all a little obsessive-compulsive. But just imagine if our quirky little habits and rituals started taking over our lives without us even realising it.

OCD has become a hot topic these days, with celebrities like Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz and David Beckham going public with their diagnoses. But a quick Twitter search for ‘OCD’ shows that the disorder is still largely misunderstood and joked about.

For some, OCD can be fought and restrained; for others, it’s an overpowering destructive force. No two sufferers are the same. Each has his/her own unique story to tell.

The book Check Mates, edited by Vrinda Pendred, is a collection of such stories. It is the first ever collection of fiction, poetry and artwork about OCD, by people with OCD – the real experts on the subject. It also marks the launch of Conditional Publications, the only dedicated publishing house for writers with any kind of neurological condition.

What makes Check Mates such compulsive reading (if you’ll excuse the pun!) is that it’s divided into two halves: in ‘Realism’ you get glimpse of what it’s like to live with OCD in day-to-day situations, and in ‘Beyond’ you enter fantasy worlds that drive the absurdity and horror of OCD straight home. Put together by writers and artists from around the world, there’s so much diversity in this book, showcasing a range of emotions, from love to hate, joy to rage, fear and sorrow to hope and optimism. There’s even a little bit of humour! I think everyone will find something to relate to.

What it doesn’t do is shy away from the truth. Every angle is covered, no matter how painful, which makes for a startling and moving read.

If you have OCD, you’re going to find yourself in this book and realise you’re definitely not alone. If you don’t have OCD…you’re probably going to find a little of yourself anyway, because that’s what this book does: it forces us to look at our own neuroses. I think this book is set to crack wide open a few stereotypes that have been flying around for far too long.

And as if that’s not enough, part of the proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to OCD charities.

Check Mates: A Collection of Fiction, Poetry and Artwork about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by People with OCD is coming to Amazon on 11 May 2010. To show my support of this inspirational new book, I am giving away a 4 Part Video series on How to Use Practical Forgiveness to everyone who buys Check Mates on the day of the launch.

AND… In addition to my gift, there are over 30 other wonderful gifts being offered by mind-body-spirit teachers, authors, coaches and healers from around the planet when you purchase Check Mates on May 11th.

AND… Vrinda Pendred, the editor of Check Mates, is giving away an EXTRA special gift of her own: ‘The Passenger’, an unpublished short story about Tourette Syndrome.

To find out how you can buy this book on May 11th, claim your free copy of ‘The Passenger’,
and receive over 30 other gifts, just click HERE

Or copy and paste this link in your browser:
http://conditionalpublications.com/pages/check-mates-launch.html“>http://conditionalpublications.com/pages/check-mates-launch.html

I hope you will join me in celebrating the launch of this unique book, Check Mates, the first ever collection of fiction, poetry and artwork about OCD.

Be sure to sign up for a “launch reminder” HERE, and then mark your diary for May 11th!