Words From My Truth On Love And Self-Love
I could have spent days, perhaps weeks overthinking what to write for this post, but I promised myself I would keep my words true and as I opened my laptop I instinctively knew what I needed to share from my heart to yours.
I had to begin by writing a story about love, practicing self-love and accepting the person we truly are.
“As I learn from my experiences my perspective shifts, today for me love means many things, but above all it represents acceptance and grace.”
Let me take you back to the Winter of 2020.
My hand searched for my telephone, I always leave it on the shelf next to my bed. We live in an old bourgeois building, in the daytime each room welcomes in the light and has a ceiling that reaches over three metres high, the dated furniture where my telephone rests each night wraps around and over our bed. Some nights I find it comforting, others it makes me feel claustrophobic, this morning I find the familiarity soothing because right now my world feels so foreign.
My phone reads 5.34am, I have by now lost count of the number of times I have been woken up at this time over the last few weeks.
This morning I feel a mixture of confusion, deep sadness and hope, a strange mix of emotions that doesn’t sit well on my empathic stomach.
My hand reaches to the pillow on my left, searching for solace from my husband, but he’s not there, for the first time in over 20 years, we are spending some time apart.
I get out of bed and fumble in dark through my drowsiness to switch on the lamp which sits on the dresser in the corner of the room. I make my way back to bed, trying not to wake myself up, as I want to stay as close to my intuition as possible, I take the notebook and pen which lay next to my telephone waiting patiently for my words.
It is still night outside and the streets are quiet, I can only hear the odd scooter and car passing by, and the blood rushing through my ears as my anxiety stirs and starts to flow through my body.
As another scooter passes by mind drifts to thinking of the people finishing a night shift, tired and eager to get home, to my husband and the years he used to return late from working at the restaurant. Sadness pangs in my deepness.
I’m about three weeks deep into a spiritual awakening.
I’ve recovered a lot during this dark period and I have questioned my sanity several times, this morning is no different.
I sit propped up by throw pillows and ask my spirit guides (prompted by my spiritual coach), why they keep waking me up, what it is they want me to awaken to, what do they want me to write about?
My hand starts to move across the page, ‘I’m here to talk about love’, after weeks of searching in my depths, I have another answer, I’m here to talk about love, so here I am.
The idiosyncrasy of this answer at this point in my journey of self recovery, finds me feeling somewhat amused, baffled and relieved.
A few weeks prior to this morning I had sat in a healing meditation with my spiritual coach Ula and was ‘diagnosed’ with a very deep heart wound.
In the moments I was invited to feel love, I felt… nothing. Not even numbness.
Shame and sadness clouded this recovery, but most of all there was a relief that I had reconnected with my truth, I had truly seen and heard myself for the first time in years.
I was no longer in denial about the root cause of my disease, and I now had some understanding of what I needed to do if I wanted to continue to recover.
This particular spiritual awakening didn’t just happen overnight, I didn’t just decide to go to my depths to recover another piece of myself, I didn’t wake up one morning and decide that my life as I knew it was going to be deconstructed so that it could be rebuilt.
My first spiritual awakening (the first one that I was receptive to), happened back in early 2009 and went on for many months. Triggered by the traumatic birth of my son and the passing of my Grandmother and the months of darkness that followed.
This time as I woke the world looked and felt so different, and in true honestly I cannot remember exactly how I arrived at that point, there was no ‘big event’, more a series of events that combined energetically and sent me searching not for something more, but for something significant, something true.
Little did I know that over the next year or so , I would come to understand that the truth is love.
I no longer wanted to be strong, no longer wanted to pretend that I was coping, fulfilled, not hurting, that I was not tired… I was longing for comfort in the form of ease.
We so often fall into a trap of thinking we desire freedom, but what we are really craving is comfort, the comfort that comes from being free of pain, doubt, difficulty, feeling unworthy, pressure, constraint, burden.
During those weeks of searching for comfort, remembering and reviving parts of myself that had been laying dormant in my depths, my perspective shifted.
I saw my strength in a new light, I rewrote my inner narrative about what it meant to be strong. Strength shifted from being how much I was able to tolerate, to me no longer tolerating. This was the major shift I needed to instigate my rising from this point.
“Strength is not about how much you can tolerate. Strength is no longer tolerating.”
During that dark Winter I craved quiet, space, clarity and someone that could understand me, at a time when I didn’t fully understand myself.
Not used to being in community, not having the support of one, I was never in the habit of reaching out. However this time was different and I was aligned with three kind souls who helped guide me through this very difficult period of my life.
I went inward and was repelled by anything and anybody who got in the way of me finding clarity during this time.
I instinctively knew that this closeness to spirit would dissipate with time and I wanted to stay in that space, connected.
Of course I went through cycles of blame, for why I had ended up here, why I had fallen into disease, why I was unhappy, but this was the awakening in which I was to learn responsibility of self.
If I did not listen to, nor see myself, how could I expect anyone else to? If I did not know what I needed, if I did not give myself what I needed, how could I expect anyone else to know what I need, let alone give me what I need.
“The hardest part about self recovery, is not the changes that we go through as we grow, it is taking responsibility for why we need to make those changes and Taking responsibility for how we have buried ourselves and not shame ourselves for not knowing any better.”
Self responsibility is one of the pillars of true self care.
As I learn from my experiences my perspective shifts, and as I am forever learning I know that my perspective will shift again, but today, as I work to recover from my deep heart wound, as I learn not only to love, but to receive love, for me love means many things, but above all it represents acceptance, and grace.
Acceptance of the truth, who I am in this moment, at what point I am in my life in this moment, acceptance of my loved ones, and at what point they are in their lives, and the grace to treat myself and them with compassion.
To love myself and allow myself to receive love.
