I am what I am...and I am grateful for all of it.
I am the mother and the lover, the giver and the receiver. I am both sustenance and the frivolous. I am sex, and I exude the essence of the feminine. I am dance and play and pleasure. I am the captive, surrendered.
I am highly self aware BECAUSE of my experiences with and the pain of anxiety. Anxiety helped me develop strong self reflection skills. It has helped me understand and empathize with others when they struggle. Anxiety has brought me closer to Sean spending hours/days/months (years) working through it together.
Managing anxiety taught me to be honest and open about however I truly felt, at first only with Sean, and over time with an ever expanding circle of people. I feel alive by helping fellow seekers grow and unfold, and by tending my core relationships. I now have deep friendships and true bonds with people from all over the world because I learned to stop hiding, and instead openly share my experiences and the essence of who I am. My level of openness is a thing of rare beauty. I am incredibly numinous. This draws people to me and inspires them to express more of their true selves. I am the pebble thrown in the pond...ripples.
I embrace my darkness and my light. I am both sin and salvation. I am whole by accepting all that I am, and I am grateful for every single tiny little life experience.
The above was inspired by many recent interactions and experiences, and this morning my reading of Louise Hay's book, "You Can Heal Your Own Life." It is basically a personal journal entry that started out as me trying to accept or embrace my experiences with anxiety. Like, to see ways that anxiety has actually benefitted me vs resisting and regretting it. I don't want to fight or begrudge it, but I also don't want to attach to anxiety being such a part of me that I can't move beyond it if somehow that opportunity comes someday. So parts above are written in the present tense and other times past tense trying to reflect my present acceptance without future attachment.
It felt like poetry as I wrote. It was allowing the core of my being to speak. "I" was just a vessel. The words poured out powerfully. They felt both heavy and light at the same time. It felt like I had no choice but to let this out, and I still feel this way now as I try to type and explain here...my hands feel both heavy and energized on the keyboard. Like they are possessed by some higher energy.
Every word above I know to be truth from the core of my belly. I am not always able to exude the full truth of my being because anxiety pops up and blocks my light, but my truth is still here and does not change. Only recently have I realized and accepted certain things about myself... like that underneath it all I am dance and play, or that I am both the darkness and the light. If you know me well in person you may laugh at that...hell, I wanted to laugh at some of that after at first after I wrote it! Historically I often presented not as dance and play, but as work and worry! But that was just the darkness of anxiety masking my truth. I am both and all...anxiety and joy, work and play, darkness and light. 🙏🏽 (and so are you)