Rebuilding a relationship with myself through devotion and radical honesty.

Healing was quite a humbling journey.

The first half of it, I felt like I’d arrived and didn’t need healing. The middle of it felt like I’d met the truth and could begin teaching others how to heal. I felt a deep obligation to return all that I’d learned and give it back as fast as I could to deserve the healing. To have, in a sense, earned it.

The third and final and infinitely ongoing path of healing…where I’ve arrived now…broke me down to where there was nothing left of “me.” Or who I believed myself to be. I have and had nothing to hold onto. Naked in every sense. No story to share. No meaning to make. No other to belong to.

just me.
being.
belonging.

I’m no stranger to a spiritual life. And in my journey in this, I discovered something that felt like a humiliating shock. I was a stranger to my own human-felt experience.

I could speak about healing. I could make meaning. I could sense what was happening in everyone around me. But what was happening in me? More on this soon.

You see, 8 years ago, I experienced a loss that I am still working to find words for. And, to be quite blunt, I don’t believe there will ever be words to adequately describe the journey of losing. There are, however, sensations of knowing that arrive.

This loss wasn’t the only thing I needed to heal from. But it was the catalyst that wouldn’t let me go back to the way I was or the way I was raised. It was my catalyst to feel. To be me. To discover who I was before the world told me who to be.

Hmmm. Feel?

How could a woman who had been identified as a highly sensitive person since she was a little girl not know how to feel?

I could sense everything in the room. I could feel so much to where it would debilitate me. I later learned that sensing everyone else wasn’t the same as knowing what was mine. And knowing what I felt wasn’t the same as letting myself feel it.

Oi.

This one took a long time to accept. That sensitivity and being at home in myself were not the same thing. That a spiritual life did not mean I was in the physical, my own human life. My beautiful and wonderful temple of a human body.

Throw up. Perfectionism. Avoidance.
Guilt. Tenderness. Forgiveness.

I’ve gone into many a ceremony and meditation practice in absolute devotion to turning my suffering into grace. I’ve set intentions to surrender to divine will. I’ve set intentions to be shown how to forgive. I’ve set intentions to be taught how to love myself.

The one that really got through to me was throw up in my lap…in a room full of people when I wanted to be held in tenderness.

I wanted to hide. FOREVER.

A disclaimer before I continue: every bit of inner work and discovery is between you and you. Yes, you may use tools that assist you in “hearing” your inner voice and higher self…but the whole point of this, and your right as a human, is to have agency and sovereignty. Nothing outside of you gets to define your experience for you.

The time I asked the Divine to hold me in tenderness was the same time I threw up in my lap and couldn’t clean it up right away. That would’ve require asking for help. And, for someone to know that it happened. And for me to accept that it happened. My internal thoughts were screaming, “GET ME OUT. MAKE ME INVISIBLE. I’m SOO GROSSSSS. NO ONE CAN SEE THIS!!!!”

I’d asked to be held, and here I was praying no one would come near me. I couldn’t unsee or unfeel that blunt realization. Dangit. I couldn’t think my way out of this one.

I had a hard time accepting that tenderness could meet me here. However, like the Divine does…her whisper tucked me into that moment of exhaustion. I gave up the fight to be neat and tidy. I gave up the fight to hide my sadness. I gave up the fight to hide my grief. I gave up the fight of needing to keep up with others. I gave up the war within myself. The work of holding my wall up so my heart couldn’t be hurt again. So I wouldn’t be left all alone in my sadness again.

I was completely exhausted. I didn’t give a rat’s ass that throw up was in my lap.

Or…I did. But I was too tired to do anything about it. Which was the medicine and integration of feeling through my body, not my head.

I did however, probably throw up a prayer of please don’t let anyone come near me. This throw up stinks. But let me stay here. I’m too tired to move. Annnnnd one of hoping magic could happen. That the throw up would disappear before anyone could see it or know that I did it. That I wouldn’t have to look at the aftermath and ask for help. Yep. I definitely had that thought.

Yeppppp.

Oooooooooh.

To look at the aftermath.
To sit in the aftermath.
To be in the aftermath.

To lose.

And there it was. The compassion. The realization. I wasn’t broken. I had been left alone in my sadness without community. I could feel. But I hadn’t understood how to let myself feel without turning what I felt into another story of why I didn’t belong. For me, the grief needed room to move. It needed to be felt. What I came to know as Grace was not the disappearance of pain. It was remembered love and life arriving within it. The grief birthed life and love in the same death and decay that had caused my life to shatter.

The grief was mine. And meeting it with tenderness began returning me to an inner sense of equanimity. A soothing lullaby of resonance from mama earth.

Feeling meant taking it all in.

My ugly. My messy. My rage.

My seasons of humiliation around self-harm in isolation with my grief.

My debt from attempting to raise three kids on my own while simultaneously trying to heal from two severe experiences of Big T trauma.

My days, and continued days, of not being able to pay for groceries for my kids.

My days of sending long text messages to intimate partners with a level of clinginess I was embarrassed by.

My terror of falling in love again and feeling worthy of it.

My terror of admitting I want intimacy and closeness again.

My terror of figuring out who I was without the “trauma.”

My terror of committing to my present life in full.

All of it was mine to sit with in my body. My body knew what to do. My body needed me to get out of the way so she could get to work. She was listening. She was acting. I was expecting answers in a language she wasn’t speaking. She didn’t care. She got to work anyway.

I didn’t need to define or intellectualize every bit of it before I could let myself feel it. Through all of this, I’ve arrived at the medicine of tenderness. Part of loving myself was allowing others into my heart. Including myself. To live in a perpetual state of intimacy. Open. Allowing life, others and self to love me when I didn’t feel worthy of it. Showing them the whole of me. Even the thoughts that I often feel too broken or damaged from trauma to be held in tenderness. To be cared for in my sorrow. To be supported with human decency as I recover fully. Rightful rest. And to be seen as doing enough by simply mothering, without proving simultaneous career badassery.

lived humility.

In conclusion of this momentary life contemplation, society and life helped create a belief that my sensitivity was fragile. That a word could define my vastness of who I am.

Hmmm.
Maybe it can.

But that feels like accepting fear’s definition of me.

This experience with my throw up taught me that fragility is an illusion. It wasn’t who I was. Love is and always will be. Sensitivity is a power to be sat with and listened to from the body. From the heart. From nature. Through nature.

Yes, I can be alone. Yes, I need to love myself. AND…loving me means loving you and others. Tenderness with myself means owning my radical truth of…yes…I do believe and desire closeness and a sense of belonging with another human and humans again.

This I am going to believe in wholeheartedly.