Sunday

Since I try to post some words every Sunday (and it happens to be Sunday today), I am now sitting at the kitchen table, thinking of something to write. 

Often, when I search inside myself for inspiration, something bubbles up, like a little pocket filled with something that wants to be expressed. A thread, a line, a feeling charged with a promise.

But now, after having worked in the garden all day, there is nothing there. 

No theme, no intention, no deep thought.

My mind is filled with images of the weeds I pulled out, of the sun through the leaves, the cobwebs I removed from the windows. I can still hear the sound of a distant lawn-mower, the panting of my dog who followed me everywhere, birds, bumble bees, far-away planes high in the sky. 

So this is it.

A story of dirt, weeds, sun, spiders and air.

Nothing the mind can cling to. 

What a lovely, peaceful day!

Fear

Fear is a silent intruder.

It comes in through the backdoor without making a sound and suddenly seizes you in its icy grip.

Crumbling your foundation

bringing down your walls of safety

leaving your body in a state of panic.

An unwelcome guest, fear is!

Such a relentless force.

But then again,

a powerful teacher as well.

Fear forces you to go beyond your old ways, your set ideas about yourself.

It exposes your hiding places, your mind constructions.

It will find them all.

You won’t be able to wear your mask to the world any longer.

You won’t be able to pretend, or keep your true feelings hidden.

Your body is no longer able to cover up for you.

Fear forces you to surrender to your inability to control life.

Your inability to be someone you are not.

Your inability to hide yourself or believe in your own lies.

Fear, in the end, crushes your house of cards,

but when you are willing to lose it all,

it will leave you naked,

empty-handed

in the deep safety of your true self.

Power

When you look in the mirror

and stop apologizing,

stop being the good girl

the nice guy

the trusted one

what do you see?

It is the face

your gut knows,

the unwavering one

your strength hidden

behind  your doubts

and confusion

It is your power

lulled to sleep

stripped of its claws

the dangerous one

the one you forgot

that’s calling you home

River

Ever noticed how life carries you like a meandering river?

How nothing ever stays the same?

How you can’t hold on to your fear

your agony,

your worried thoughts?

They will have to make place 

for the next thing to happen;

the postman delivering a package

someone telling you a story

the phone ringing

After that, you try to remember again

what was on your mind

before life distracted you

Ah… yes,

Agony.

Or perhaps you dare

to let the sparkling river take you

leaving your thoughts unfinished,

your fear unguarded,

your grudge unattended

just like that

Just to sit for a while

So nice sometimes to just sit for a while.

In the garden. 

Or somewhere quiet.

In your own company.

Letting go of all these small burdens that somehow settled on your shoulders.

Letting go of roles you play, taking them a wee bit too serious.

Letting go of it all.

Perhaps it’s a women’s thing.

To focus on the needs of others and lose your center in doing so.

Which isn’t helpful for anybody.

And certainly not solving anything.

So this morning I sat down with my coffee on a bench in the garden.

Feeling like the possum with the babies on her back.

Bit like an overpopulated planet.

What a relief to let go.

Let go of my imagined responsibilities.

Of worries about things that are already in the past.

To simply be weightless and here.

And how amazingly life reacts when you are available again!

Available to the fresh morning air.

To the cat.

To the moment.

To myself.

Moving beyond the family bond

‘You need to diminish yourself in order not to lose the love of others’. 

This is a well accepted, toxic belief, passed down through generations, from mothers to daughters, fathers to sons.
It is the belief that you betray your kin by stepping out of the family bond that keeps you small and on hold. 

The bond I am talking about is not the free, loving connection between family members, but the hidden bonding that is forged by guilt and the need to cover up old, unprocessed wounding from the past. 

The loyalty towards your parent’s woundedness is a powerful one, urging you to not move beyond their unhappiness by stepping into your own, authentic power and freedom. It is like a silent contract binding you to the responsibility of healing your mother or father, of meeting their inner needs and easing their pain, feeling selfish and cold if you don’t. 

This bond is a strong one, and is still keeping you on hold nowadays because deep down you believe that the source of love is found in it. This belief, having its roots in early childhood, includes the idea that if you are able to heal your parents, you heal the source of love. When you heal the source of love, you will be loved and seen again.

Stepping out of the family bond, even when it keeps you trapped in feelings of guilt and powerlessness, feels like stepping into a void, evoking feelings of deep fear and not belonging, of doing something fundamentally wrong. Not only the family bond tries to pull you back into place, also cultural you are deeply encoded to never leave the clan, especially not the parents.
This is because we do not know that the source of love was never out there, but hidden in ourselves, hidden in the heart of our being. 

The source of love you are looking for is inside. You’ve heard it before, but it is meaningless until you are ready to move beyond old safety. 

Finding this source means letting go of the guilt you took up as a child and shift your focus, shift your center of gravity from outside to inside. It means listening to your inner needs and becoming an inner parent for your wounded inner child. This is not selfish, but an act of love that will set you and your loved ones free.

You cannot heal the inner wounding of your mother.
You cannot heal the inner wounding of your father.
Let it go.

You can only heal yourself by seeing through beliefs causing self loathing and feelings of unworthiness. Only you can come home in who you are, fully and totally. It is your natural state; you are meant to be home. You are meant to answer your inner calls, meant to meet your needs and enjoy your own, free voice. 

And once you do, you open the door wide to that inner source of love that was actually never yours to own. From this source love flows without a price tag, without limits or sacrifice, love that is not given or received by you but just flowing freely, as it always has and always will.

The denial of love

Could it be that loving yourself is the portal to that abundant, unconditional source of love we all have inside us? That source that you came to look for outside of yourself but that was always waiting to be discovered right here, as the essence of your own being?

Somehow you seem to have learned the opposite; that you need to turn away from your own self in order to be a loving person. 

You learned to make yourself unimportant, silencing your truths and aspirations, making yourself invisible in service of needs that were not your own. It is still a widespread, deep embedded belief in our culture that it is a good thing not to pay too much attention to your feelings, your longings, especially not to your inner woundedness, but to simply carry on instead, be strong and not a bother to others. 

This kind of loving is in fact a deep denial of the nature of love itself. It has a price, it urges you to sacrifice something precious, installing a feeling of shortage instead of abundance, of shame and guilt whenever you pay attention to your inner needs and dreams.

How can something that is loving for you be unloving for someone else?

How can being happy and powerful stand in the way of someone else’s happiness and strength?