I Am So Hungry for My Self
there is nothing I could value more than my own process
My dear friend Blaire Lindsay just wrote a post about how the feminine soul needs her creations to feel like an exploration of who she truly is versus what the world dictates that she should be or create.
I feel this to be so deeply true.
In my own journey, I have, again and again, overlooked my own internal world, and tried to grasp outside of myself for direction on what I should do or who/how I should be.
From being obsessed with image and looks from a very young age, to my eating disorder, obsessive exercise, to simply holding myself to impossible externally oriented standards for most of life, I know what it feels like to want so desperately something I’ve deemed as the destination, the ultimate prize, only to find out, when I have it, how empty it feels because it was never the thing that I actually wanted.
I have thought to myself, more frequently than I like to admit, “if I only I had what she has! Then I would be happy.” I have had the inclination to take things from others and pass them off as my own. I feel a lot of shame in the admission of that actually, but I am so clear I have nothing to be ashamed of here and that this is quite a typical human response to wanting to be loved.
When we feel the level of love or admiration for someone we would like to receive ourselves, we can get confused that it’s the thing the person has that we want, when really it’s the admiration for other person that we want to feel for ourselves.
As little girls we were trained and programmed to please those around us. This isn’t necessarily sinister. It’s part of becoming a human in relationship with other humans. We have to be aware of other people and what they expect and want from us. It’s definitely something that is a gift of most women, to read people and their intentions beyond the tangible. Women are very good are reading someone’s energy.
This can take the form of being very connectable, intuitive and relationally skilled. It can also take the form of hyper vigilance and leaving oneself in the interest of others’ comfort. Which side we go here, largely depends on how steadfast we can be in our bodies, present to sensation, and how connected and free flowing the energy between our pelvic bowl center and our heart center is.
Abandoning ourselves is a survival mechanism. When we were an infant or a child we learned that to stay in our bodies and with ourselves and stay open was painful, so we stopped, we shut down, we closed, and we learned to leave our bodies and ultimately numb to the pain that way. This strategy works until the numbing or closing becomes more painful (separation, disconnection, lack of intimacy) than feeling our feelings.
Being embodied is not all pleasure, but if you’re willing to feel the deeper pain, you gain a deeper access to joy.
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being. The more joy you can contain.”
One of the sorrows I see a lot of people avoiding most, is the sorrow of how much we’ve abandoned ourselves, overrode ourselves, and denied ourselves our own process. How much we’ve put our own explorations on the back burner. How shallow we’ve actually ventured into our own worlds in the interest of understanding our external world.
I know that my impulse to figure out who I should be via comparison to other people has pushed me so much faster than it was ever true for me to go. It have tried to force so much in my lifetime. I have tried, and succeeded at times, to make it all happen in the way my ego decided that it should.
I am so hungry to uncover who I am via exploration into of my own depths.
I am so hungry to know what I think.
I am so hungry to know and pay attention to how I feel.
I am so hungry to go slow. At the pace of my own body and my own experience.
I am so hungry for the admiration and love that can only come from inside me.
I am so hungry for my Self.
I am no stranger to how little the external world values these hungers. There is no space for them in most our lives which is a big reason why we haven’t explored them and looked away from them and tried to repress them. And I am finally at a place, where I care less about that than honoring my own holy hungers here.
The Feminine may not be valued in the collective, but she is valued by me, and that is enough.
There is nothing I could value more than my own process at the moment. And what a wild journey it’s taken for me to get right back to the place I started: right inside myself.
Fertile is a new hybrid 1:1 and group program I am holding. It is an intimate and deep container for cultivating your own creative potential via mineral balancing, nourishment and self inquiry. I haven’t posted much about it publicly, but if you feel called to focus on the long game of nourishment with me as a guide, reach out and let me know. I’m taking connection calls now and we begin in mid January.
Join me in person for Heart Fire: A Solstice Embodiment Practice at Your Yoga in Bozeman. I’m so looking forward to holding space in person. If you’re local and want to come join us, you can sign up on the Your Yoga website.
