Radical Self Love

I have not been loving myself well the last week and a half, hence my quiet here. I will write another post about what I've been experiencing, but I desire to share this.

A few weeks back I talked about writing a letter to myself for when I feel triggered, to remind me of everything I know when I am not in the fear-fog. This is different than the love letter I wrote to the Invisible Girl, although I think I will keep the letters together to turn to when I need them. I will be carrying this in my wallet so that I can be my own greatest friend when I feel triggered, lost and/or alone.

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April My Love,

I am proud of you and I have faith in you, even now. You are in the midst of a psychological and spiritual awakening. You are deepening into love and healing your fear. It feels like chaos. It feels uncertain. And that is exactly right because you are challenging the conditioning of a lifetime and revolutionizing relationship. You are choosing to be a trailblazer in Love.

If you are reading this letter, it is likely you are feeling very insecure, or you have been triggered and you need trigger care. If you are immersed in fear stories (and you know what is fear and what is love), then you need to give yourself time to come out of the darkness before making *any* decisions. Remember the wreckage you have caused by believing the fog is all there is. You may feel lost and out of control, but the loving insights *always* come.

Remember that you are a spiritual being having a human experience. Your longing is a Holy Longing for yourself and for God. Try to shift your perspective to Oneness and eternal connection.

Honor your wholeness.

"Being present--rather than being emotional--is what allows real intimacy to happen." John Welwood

Please don't become your emotions. Feelings are meant to move through you, please stop gripping them so hard.

Be present. Hold space for yourself. Be your own witness and sit with yourself no matter how uncomfortable or painful it is. Trust yourself. Do not resist what comes, let it move through you. Resistance creates suffering. Hell is the rejection of things as they are.

Be kind and forgiving with yourself. It is all right that you still have places to heal. It is all right that you get triggered and break down sometimes. It is all right that you have big emotions, they are as much your gift in relating to others as they are your challenge. You are doing your best. You are not crazy and you are not your mother. You are strong, resilient and functional and you are growing into healing and deeper love. This is just another opportunity to wake up.

Keep your heart open. Remember that safety and security are illusions. Being raw and genuine, even in your heartache, is what's real.

Ask for help and support if you need it. Trust that the people who love you desire to support you -- even if they can't make the space to do so right away.

Remember that you believe in the open-heartedness of poly. Whatever you are feeling, in your body, in your heart, is a fear response. Talk to your fear. Find out what it needs for you to feel safe and loved.

"I imagine God loves in multiplicity, and with no conditions. That God has figured out that there is more than enough of her to go around, that love is never in short supply. I can't imagine God saying, sorry, I'm taken." Lori Lothian

If this involves Knight, remember that you are responsible to this relationship. Remember that commitment isn't about what we call ourselves or how much time we spend together, it's about our willingness to love and hold space for everything in each other. Remember that he is committed to you and holding space for your process. Remember that our strength comes from growing consciously together. He loves you. Trust him and trust the relationship you are building.

Remember that you love Knight for his open-heartedness. Remember that in your love for him, you desire for him to shine his light as brightly as possible – please don’t try to diminish him with your fear. You desire him to be authentic and to experience the fullest possible awakening and joy - that will involve other relationships. Find compersion for those relationships, in the spiritual perspective if necessary. Find the love in Knight's other relationships. Use your empathy to feel the joy they bring one another (you know how blessed anyone is to have Knight's love). Honor that they are opportunities to wake each other up.

Remember it has never been another person or anything other than the fear between you that has caused the rifts in intimacy and trust between you and Knight (or anyone else).

Be grateful for the ways this relationship is smacking you awake.

"...if you love someone, go deep into your own unique experience of what that love is, and just let that be who you are. Surrender to it. Build your identity upon it. You are not a person who is jealous. Not someone who's trying to control. Not even someone who's fearing. You are love experiencing itself deeper and deeper within its own fullness."

You are Love. Love your self, April, all the best ways you know how.

Love Letter to the Invisible Girl

I feel lighter and happier today than I have since Knight started his new relationship nearly two weeks ago.

Those who know me well have heard me talk a lot about The Invisible Girl since my mother died nearly two years ago. The Girl is an archetype in me, the way that I have come to perceive my inner child. She is the part of me that never outgrew the pain of the invisibility that came from living in the shadow of a narcissistic mother. She is the part of me that doubts I can be seen and loved for who I am. She is the part of me that is terrified of abandonment, and becomes incredibly sad or throws temper tantrums when I feel unseen or I'm afraid I'm losing someone. The Invisible Girl is the part of me that gets triggered and overwhelms me with fear.

I have been trying to work with this part of myself, to really understand our relationship so that I can manage trigger experiences, and eventually learn to prevent them from happening at all. I have spent a lot of time observing her when she freaks out, especially since I have been in relationship to Knight. While I have had incredible insights into the source of my fears and the reactions they stir up in me, I haven't felt like I've made any real progress in managing the Girl or her triggers.

I've learned recently that the problem is when I observe her, I hold a lot of judgment about her, and even hatred for her existence. I have believed that her existence is evidence of my crazy brokenness. I've blamed her for making my emotional life so difficult. I have been incredibly unkind to her.

What I am learning in my studies into radical self-care is that my Girl needs to be mothered...by me. I need to hold and comfort her when she is terrified. I need to accept our feelings rather than resist them. I need to talk her to with kindness and compassion. I need to help her understand that I don't need her to protect me any longer. I need to find out what we truly need to feel safe and secure (as opposed to what she thinks we need).

Yesterday morning Knight had a date with his new lover. I started out the day all right but by early afternoon, when I hadn't received any texts from Knight, the Invisible Girl started throwing fits. Before and after his last date we had flirted by text and it had helped me feel connected to him. I told him how much it helped. So even though I didn't outright ask for it, I expected him to do the same yesterday (unexpressed expectations = inevitable disappointment).

As the Girl started telling me stories about how he's forgotten me, how I don't matter, how he likes his other lover better than me, etc., I realized I needed to do something to shift the momentum. I drove to the marsh to change the scenery and connect to nature, which always helps calm me. As I sat in the car, I was suddenly inspired to write a letter to my Girl.

While I have resisted the idea of communicating with parts of myself through dialogue or letters, as has been suggested by a variety of sources but always felt sort of hokey to me, I'm beginning to understand what a healing practice it is. For the first time I accepted everything that I was feeling and I felt significantly different afterward. I felt lighter. I felt hope that this may not last forever.

I woke up this morning feeling expansive again.

Here is my letter...

Precious Girl -

I know you are scared. You feel like we are in the dark and it reminds you of the closet we used to sit in when we had no one and truly doubted we existed at all. You wonder if we continue to exist if no one is present to witness us. Do we continue to exist to our Love if he is seeing, touching, loving someone else?

But we are real and we are loved. We are a Divine Spark - a child of the Universe. Not only do we exist, but we are amazing. We are so very strong and resilient. We have overcome so much together. And our story is witnessed by many. We are loved by many. We have never been so visible or loved before. We have touched so many lives with our poetry, our art, our writing, our service to community, our friendship, our vulnerability, and our willingness to share our story to be a light on the path to healing for others. There is so very much to love about us.

We are not alone - even when we are. People do not stop loving us just because we aren't interacting. We are loved every minute of every day by everyone that we love every minute of every day, whether we are consciously thinking of them or engaging with them or not. It is no different for those we love than it is for us.

I know you're scared by this new relationship, but the truth is that Knight made us first, to his own detriment, and we still felt invisible. It isn't about his new lover or him. It's about us. It's about me. It's about how I have been rejecting you when you most need to be held.

I am sorry. I am so sorry for making you more invisible by rejecting you and believing I am broken because you are inside of me. I am sorry for hating that you are a part of me. I am sorry I haven't given you the love we need when you are only trying to protect me.

It's not our fault that mom couldn't see past her own crazy to really see us. It's not our fault that the fathers in our life could not see past their own fear and addiction to see that we needed to be saved. It does not make us unlovable that our parents could not love us well. They really did the best they could.

Mom's illness is not our fault, and it's not hers either. I think she was an Invisible Girl, too, and she never figured out how to heal. Let's love her rather than blame her.

Precious Girl - it's time to heal. It is time to believe in ourselves. It's time to believe that we are our own super-hero and we can save our self.

Really look at our life, our story, and see how we have been our own super-hero all along. We saved our self from insanity. We saved our self from violence. We saved my children from a legacy of brokenness. Now it's time to save our self from this fear of something that is no longer real so that we can have the fullness of love we desire.

It's time to rewrite our story together.

Desire

"You will be called upon to account for all the permitted pleasures in life you did not enjoy while on earth." From the Koran (I interpret "permitted" only to mean it doesn't cause harm.)

If this were true, I would have quite an accounting to give.

In reading Love and Awakening by John Welwood at Harbin, I had a significant insight into my wounding. The idea is to look at what your partner triggers in you and then turn it back on yourself to look at how you are treating yourself the way that you are accusing your partner of treating you. It's not as convoluted as it sounds.

Here's my example: I have big triggers around feeling invisible and fear of abandonment. There are things that have happened with Knight that have made me feel invisible and/or terror that he will abandon me. These are the things that trigger my fear explosions. So I asked myself, how have I been invisible to myself? How have I abandoned myself?

The answer: I am almost completely unaware of my own needs and desires. Most of the time I live my life for meeting the needs of others, whether it's working an unhappy 9-5 job to keep my daughter out of poverty or working several volunteer hours a week to keep the Imps functioning. I live more often from a sense of obligation than genuine desire for what I am doing. Even when I make choices to serve, I look for where the need is (administrative leadership) rather than look at what I truly desire to give (creativity and emotional connection/support).

Then, when I am burned out from taking care of everyone else, I treat myself badly. Because I'm burned out, I choose to be lazy rather than take care of my self, my home, my creativity and my joy-full relationships.

Wow. I am astounded at how I have neglected and abandoned myself into invisibility. Of course I feel invisible around others; I am not seeing myself, so how can I expect anyone else to see me?

Today I started reading Mama Gena's School of Womanly Arts. It's a little over the top but the Universe brought it my way and I'm beginning to understand why. The book is about women getting in touch with their desires in order to create a vibrant life.

I am beginning to wonder how few minutes a day I spend actually doing what I desire to do, rather than doing what I believe I have to do to meet someone else's needs? And how many minutes a day do I spend wasting time on unfulfilling activities because I feel burnt out or in order to avoid doing what I believe needs to be done? (For instance, when my house is a mess and rather than clean it when I have nothing else to do, I veg out on wine and Facebook or movies.)

At the end of the second chapter she has an exercise in which you are to have a conversation with yourself. You ask, "What do you have on 'desire'?" And then you keep answering until you get to the truth of what you desire, small things to big.

When I asked myself the question I realized I have a complicated relationship to desire, because I have been taking baby steps towards acknowledging and manifesting a few of my desires, especially sexually. I am just beginning to trust that not only is it ok for me to express my desire, but the people I love want me to have my desires.

I realize that the one thing in my life I absolutely desire is Knight and the time I spend with him. As we have re-evaluated our relationship the last month and I have really examined my motivations for spending time with him, it is nearly always genuine desire to be with him. I enjoy our conversations, from the intimate sharings to the philosophical meanderings. I enjoy how much he makes me laugh. I enjoy our flirting and near-constant touch. I enjoy all the little observations he makes about the beauty in the world. I enjoy going out and experiencing the world with him. I enjoy what I feel and experience when I am with him -- joy, love, confidence, desire, connectedness, intimacy, curiosity, and wonder.

Considering this desire makes me aware of others...

I desire more intimate relationship in my life, not just with Knight, but with others as well. Relationship is one of my greatest joys. I desire more intimacy in my friendships. While I love my tribe, most of our time together is spent in fun gatherings of various sorts. I desire more cuddling, more holding hands, more touching in comfort and support. I desire more talk about our passions and how we are making our lives more vibrant. I desire more heart-inspired conversations about who we've been and who we are becoming. I desire to talk about the important things in life--the state of our world, what others are creating (art and culture), and what's really unfolding in our own personal journeys. Talking about what matters doesn't have to be heavy. It can be inspiring and joy-full.

I desire intimate relationship with a woman. It has been many years since I have had any kind of on-going romantic or sexual relationship with a woman. (I actually acted on this desire over the weekend. Even if it doesn't lead to where I hope, the asking was empowering and makes it easier to ask in the future.)

I desire spiritual community to share and learn with. I desire people to connect with regularly who are on the conscious path and who desire to support each other with intention. I desire community that desires to learn through study and practice, as well as transformational experiences and intimate sharings. I have been talking about this with various community members for a year and a half. It's time to take action.

I desire more art. I desire the time and energy to create beauty from my own hands or to write about my story. I desire other artists to collaborate with and be inspired by.

I desire fulfilling work. I desire to be making a living from doing things I love rather than earn a paycheck for pushing paper/bytes, answering phones and being bored.

I desire a healthier body that isn't uncomfortable all the time.

I desire a new home to live in. We've been looking for another house for a long time. The house we are in is full of dark energy from my years with my ex-husband. And the landlords don't care for the house so it's falling apart. I desire a nice house surrounded by beauty with a good landlord.

These are all big things. I can't really think of any little things I desire right now, but I'll keep my awareness open. As part of my new daily practice in self-care, I hope to start checking in with myself regularly about what I really desire, especially when I do get to make a full choice about how to spend my time and energy.