Looking back I see that for most of my life I have oscillated between being fiercely independent and very needy of others.
This erratic pattern was founded on a bed of hurt, feeling unsafe and believing myself to be lesser because I am a woman. As a result, I detached and distanced myself, becoming ‘unavailable’ to the rest of the world and at times holding others to ransom for how they had ‘failed’ to rescue me.
If I had continued on this trajectory I would have reduced myself to one isolated speck on an island, out of reach to all the other specks that make up humanity and probably pretty furious about how people and the world had failed me.
Over the past ten years I have been working with Universal Medicine and have incrementally chipped away at this isolation and dysfunction of my own making – incremental being a crucial word here because step by step I have built a relationship with myself and a sense of self-worth that has stopped me being dependent upon, and tortured by, the real and perceived expectations of the outside world.
And two significant things have happened recently that have taken this initial foundation to a whole new level:
I started meeting online with a group of people to do Sacred Movement – a form of movement that re-awakens our connection to the purity, preciousness and power of being who we are. We meet fortnightly for an hour and a half and it would take an awful lot of energy to resist and deny the extraordinary transformations that have taken place in me and the other people in the group.
As I have developed respect and appreciation for the innate qualities I have, there has been an equal expansion in me seeing others in the glory that they are.
Alongside the people in this group, I have re-ignited my love and respect for women and men and the part we play in the balance of the world. What I mean by this is that whilst I was caught up in the struggle of trying to fit in to an ever changing set of ‘rules’ dictating how we should look, work, eat, be in relationships, child rear etc., I was not appreciating or sharing the innate qualities I have or seeing and honouring those in others.
The second significant thing that has happened recently is my mum dying at the end of last year, and just as her release is a blessing for her (following a long illness and life time struggle with alcohol) it has opened up in me a fresh and deeper willingness to access, appreciate and honour the innate qualities we all have. My mum was beautiful, sweet, clever, caring, funny, loving, talented, gentle, sensitive and precious and she struggled to accept all of the above about herself, fighting her own demons to the end.
When I got the call that she had died, I honoured her, smiled a goodbye and then let myself feel the depth of what she had held off from – the unfathomable well of wisdom, tenderness and stillness in every woman.
I feel that my acceptance of and love for her was a gateway to something so so much greater than we will ever humanly understand, but that we all know within, and actually very beautifully and remarkably I can sense that my relationship with Mum will go on developing as I develop as a woman and in so doing honour her true qualities.
We have so much to share; firstly with ourselves, then together and with our wider communities.
I understand now that to allow myself to fall in love with and commit to myself is a first and essential step to move beyond focusing on my shortcomings and hurts and allows me to afford the same grace and understanding to others… the foundations for true relationship.
By MB, UK
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Rediscovering the Delicateness Within … we have it all … all within us
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