Illness, especially one that is connected with a potential for death, has a way of triggering existential fears. Fears as old as our ancestral lineages, fears embedded in every cell of the body, fears arising from a lack of knowing and trust in true nature. One of these fears is fear of death, the fear that still holds the majority of humanity in its stranglehold. Another fear is the fear of mutilation and/or disability. Both fears are worthy challenges to the mind as it faces its extinction or diminishment in them. 

To a mystic or conscious person who has walked a spiritual path to some depth death no longer has a paralyzing or irrationalizing effect as my perception of it has transformed. In my experience death has been illumined by the light of consciousness to reveal its true nature of a liberator and gracious energetic gateway that transports us to the next dimension of this journey. Due to that I do not fear but actually welcome death, whenever it may come. I love life and the experiences I have in this current embodied form but have no desire to resist my Soul’s call to move on. I deeply trust and know that whatever happens is for my benefit, even if that benefit cannot be fathomed initially it has always revealed itself in time.

The challenge I faced was to dance with the fear of disability and mutilation. To observe compassionately how deeply ingrained it is in the body, to listen to the body and discern its voice of wisdom from its voice of fear. To hold the fearful part with love while using knowledge and conscious knowing to entrain trust and surrender to life. And do all that while navigating everyday life, decisions about next steps that are true to my being, and other people’s opinions, mindsets, and energies externally.

A rewarding challenge, which once again left me in awe as to the strength that is available to me when I meet life head on and anchored in present awareness. Something of a milestone as I observed myself interweaving seriousness and clarity with playful awareness of a larger picture to life, which made it all feel lighter and at times even magical.

Towards the end of my journey, along the standardized path doctors prefer, I heard the call arising from my body and knowing to veer back onto a purely Self directed path. Which meant making choices that the doctors would not like or understand. And I felt genuine compassion for them, trying to make it easy on them to accept my choices by underlining that I take full responsibility for my life and choices and free them from any responsibility of their consequences. On the other hand I offered to keep them in the loop with a view to upcoming test results and developments.

And this is where I realized that the path of the Self I am called to walk is a high stake gamble to those who live from a cosmology of separation consciousness and total identification with the body. My choices induce fear in them while they feel empowering and aligned to me. In my cosmology of oneness and centering true nature beyond the body, what I am called to do feels like sidestepping the pull of distortion and inner dissonance to step back into the slip-stream of consciousness and the ease of its harmonious flow.

It is an invitation to understand health as consisting of two seemingly contradictory realities, who are one nonetheless. Like the seeming contraction of Quantum Physics and Newtonian Physics, there are different rules and systems at work in our body and *all* have to be honored where they apply.

My body and intuition have been in alignment with the first recommended treatments, which surprised and intrigued me. And which is why I wholeheartedly embraced these treatments and immersed myself in receptivity to the goodness that came with it. 

Then my body and intuition signaled that we are done walking this path and another is needed to integrate and heal fully. 

The inner guidance system has been leading me to delve into more research on current medical knowledge, insights, and research and concurrently synchronistically lead me towards the path that is mine to walk. I have opened myself to feel as fully as I can, to allow all voices within me to speak and know they will be heard, to take a lot of alone time to contemplate and digest it all, and lastly keep asking my intuition for guidance and clarity.

In hindsight the contours of a subtle lesson begin to take a fascinating form. What I have been guided to do was moving between two dimensions of consciousness on all dimensions of experience (mental, emotional, physical, spiritual) and to know their oneness in the process. Knowing them as one heals any rifts, or resistances, that arise from separation consciousness which lies at the core of dis-ease of the body and loss of wellbeing.

Now I am focused on Self healing, which to me means letting the Self heal all that disrupts the health of the body and bring it back into balance wherever it has been out of balance. Addressing all layers ( trauma, metabolic, genetic) with an energetic, nutritional, lifestyle, and consciousness approach beyond words. 

I know that fasting, be it in the form of intermittent fasting or 3 day water fasts will be part of the next step as is the focus on creating a state of hyper nutrition for the body. Though usually meant in a nutritional sense, I got the nudge that it applies to all layers of experience, which need to be intentionally curated to be extra nurturing and abundant in goodness. This is how my body wants to be supported in healing itself and that is what I shall do to the best of my abilities. 

And of course I will be making sure to be seen and tested by my doctors. Thankfully I have doctors who support this journey and will keep an eye on my health and provide helpful nudges and recommendations where necessary. It is a privilege, and the result of a lot of self work, that I get to be supported on all dimensions of health and healing.

Not many will understand, nor concur with, what I am pointing to in my reflections. As what I am pointing to is hard to verbalize and be understood purely rationally but easy to be known, sensed, and felt. I trust those who are ready or need to will resonate with it and be led inwards towards new insights and clarity on their experiences and perceptions of health.

Life is more complex than our current human knowledge, as expansive as it is, can quite grasp nor explain. We do our best with what we have, and sometimes our knowledge holders forget to be mindful of the not-knowing that parallels each knowledge they have gained. And from that forgetfulness of the gatekeepers of knowledge many of us derive misperceptions of reality, or assume limits to our possibilities that are born of fear and a lack of knowledge and understanding. It is human and understandable, but we no longer need to be beholden to such ignorance. 

When we shine the light of consciousness on current knowledge we allow consciousness to gift us knowing, knowing beyond human horizons and in service of life. There are more ways of knowing existence than our reductionist western conditioning acknowledges or values, nonetheless they are as valuable and trustworthy when used discerningly and applied where they are most useful. Just like a hammer cannot do a screw-drivers work ,nor vice versa, forms of knowledge and knowing have their time and space where they shine or fail.

Keep inquiring into your guidance systems, keep feeding your mind knowledge from all sources, dare to hold contradicting theories and ideas, and let that wise inner voice direct you to what is true to your path.

Let us never cease praising the treasures we are gifted by the great Beloved as we surrender to life.

Blessed be fellow journeyers of the mystical path.

Photography by Unknown

The post Health Lessons appeared first on Venuskind.

Safety has for the longest time been on the forefront of my mind, though it referred to physical safety from potential harm through violence. But that attachment and focus born out of a protective hyper-vigilance ended years ago. Thankfully. 

Emotional safety was something I did not actively and consciously look for, as I had rarely experienced it consistently nor (un)consciously believed it could be a ‘normal’ to strive for. Predominantly experiencing emotionally volatile and often unsafe relating  had impressed on me the importance to get better at protecting myself, at taking hits, and fighting more effectively. Habituating me in time to facing high level of distorted and combative energies without even giving myself the opportunity of exiting or becoming skillful at averting them. Awareness of the cost of such energies to my mental and physical health and growing self compassion have motivated me to focus more on listening to my body’s feedback, and being gentle with myself and others while moving away from such dynamics. Yet having gone through countless experiences of unsafe emotional relating has had an interesting side-effect: the knowing that I can and will not only survive but also use it for my growth. 

My focus is not on emotional safety because I know from experience that disruptions are sometimes necessary to break me out of entrenched patterns and therefore gifts of healing and growth, when received appropriately. And I am aware what a privilege it is to be able to say that emotional safety is no longer the focal point of awareness to me. It also means that I have reclaimed enough internal balance, integration, and harmony to focus on more subtle and creative aspects of relating. 

These days my measure and focus for the kind of relating I desire to co-create, experience more, and which is my current growth edge, is sweetness. Sweetness, not in the sense of the saccharine artifice many mistake for it or try to present but as a quality arising within me in certain relational moments or in connections. 

Sweetness is a softness of spirit, fragrant and sweet to the heart and being, it symbolizes to me a drinking of ambrosia from my own cup. Sweetness can have incredibly healing, nourishing, grounding as well as liberating and inspiring effects on mind and body. There is a shimmering warmth and timeless quality to her. An experience of being without or few overlays of persona and conditioning, where spaciousness is equally present as is a sense of being held in (a welcome) containment. 

Sweetness is a state where oneness and being an individual co-exist in awareness. And from this awareness and fascinating embodied experience the self expression, energy, and needs of an ‘other’ are perceived with awe, embraced, and met in a spirit of loving generosity.

Being met with sweetness in another when I feel distress or dysregulated is still an incredibly magical and tangibly transformative experience to my system. Some aspects of me still need time and a slower pace to allow it in as the specters of facsimiles of sweetness and their poisonous sting are still very present to them. It is lovely to observe them allow it in with more and more trust, as they remember the delight they feel at being met by sweetness from the Self. It is one of the most precious gifts of love the Self offers aspects/parts/exiles/shadow. 

There is no judgement, hierarchy, or harshly contrasting duality in sweetness’ golden shimmering luminosity. Sweetness is a healing salve to wounds of separation (abandonment, rejection, neglect) and disablingly stuck emotions (shame, guilt, fear), a healing frequency emitting ceaselessly towards the inner tribe, an invitation to attune and thrive in the harmonious and joyful resonance it co-creates with them. 

Sweetness does not need the other to be a certain way, she might offer other perspective vantage points as a gift of her spaciousness and to support an easing of contractions and tensions held in the other. Sweetness is effortlessly giving with his warm conscious gaze and welcoming embrace to all that arises and is present. 

Sweetness embraces all things, knows them to to be the One in the many, and honors everything and its role in the unfolding of reality.

Sweetness is the gateway to novel relational co-creative explorations I am open and drawn towards in all relationships. A gateway to walking and exploring unknown lands as the trusting and playful golden children we truly are at heart. 

Safety is a given, when sweetness is present.

Photography: ‘Father and Son’  by Steve McCurry (1980)

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As memories birth ever new feelings, thoughts, and sensations my present awareness observes it all, while engaging with the beloved friend. Observing the layering of memory born sensations, watching feelings and thoughts scoring initial moments of reconnection, like music enhances and colors a movie. 

First there are excitement and the apprehensive question: how much they will open to engaging and how deep they will choose to go in sharing and bearing their hearts and souls to me. There is a fear and tinge of sadness at the thought of them maybe choosing to be defended or evasive. 

Then there is the warmth of joy at meeting their openness and affection for me. As threads of affection and soul bonds, are enlivened, and light up joy, expands into ecstatic elation. The intensity of elation coinciding with the opening of boxes of forgotten and unintegrated feelings of the past…

And past pain reminds how we fell into unhealthy relating patterns and wounded each other in the past, admonishing me to be especially mindful and compassionate now that I know better. 

Open questions of a past self present themselves to awareness. 

Conscience speaks of how I expressed in an unhelpful, or even harmful, way towards them and initiates expressions of acknowledgment and heartful apologies. 

Old desires, attachments, and longings return to be remembered, known, honored and given a new place or form in this new adventure in relating. 

There is grief for all that could not have been, the unattainable dreams for this connection, and the time and life not shared or journeyed together. 

And making peace with uncomfortable truths and reality as it was and is. 

And as we share where we are in life, what we have learned and unlearned, all is in a gentle flux, seeking to attune to the relating that wants to unfold for us. There are no definitives or set points beyond our reciprocal love, affection, and choice to relate… All else has to grow into a new form, as time shared waters all that had gone underground in months or years of silence or no contact. A fertile void embraces and ambiguity suffuses this renewed relational meeting of souls. New intentions, agreements, and commitments slowly begin to define the bandwidth and intensity of the flow of relating and energy.

Meeting in reciprocal appreciation, playfulness, and engaging in deep soulful exchanges is more than nourishment on all levels of my being, gently washing away distortions and pain from hurtful relating and misperceptions in past relationships, ours and others. 

The gift of reconnecting with special souls goes beyond returning their unique frequency to my experience, it also induces an integration of relational disruptions and hurts. And feeds the knowing that repair is not just possible but also an opportunity for rebirth and renewal in magical and unexpected forms.

Photography by Unknown

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Years back, I have been guided to step away from generosity and taught to painstakingly observe, witness, and analyze the dynamics of giving and receiving in my relationships.
Learning to differentiate between healthy flow of generosity and the ‘faux generosity’ of over-giving, and to notice when and why the first is turned into the latter. Realized how draining and withering lack of reciprocity, and giving to the wrong people, are for my heart and being, and to become aware of the high cost incurred to my body-mind by experiencing and healing this. Reflected on the heartrending devastation experienced in the emotional realm when giving from an open heart to an imbalance in giving, attention, awareness, care, or love.
Learned to hold myself accountable for that pain I caused myself while being compassionate with the parts that replay this pattern. Practiced releasing the ‘other’ from the blame my protectors and wounded parts would put on them by expanding their perceptions and leading them to embrace accountability.

After all that work, energy, and love flowed into this ongoing process of understanding and integration I still find myself slipping back into this distorted pattern of hurting myself by inviting misaligned people into my experience and replaying old scripts with their ‘generous’ help.
I cannot express how much it tires me to find myself in these repetitions, how much energy is spent on going through the whole process with gentleness and care for subtleties. And yet, what else is there to do but to work towards integration and liberation?

Thus, I find myself contemplating, once again, how to teach the parts of me, who give generously without keeping an eye on reciprocity and equality, to be more discerning and moderate their giving. How do I ensure that powerful feelings and the overflow of love and affection do not manage to disrupt awareness and alertness to the replay of old patterns?
Maybe it is also about accepting the humanness of forgetting and awakening in-midst of a replay, and embracing it as a humbling experience and reminder to stay aware and alert?

It is still challenging to engage with above mentioned helpers in this pattern in the aftermath of awakening to the pattern, to protect them from the immensity of anger and rejection triggered, from expressions of the deep-rooted dislike for the stingy and miserly in perfectly honed daggers in word form, and any other impulse to make them feel the pain their actions translate into for me.
The parts in me that hate them are powerful and sly and I still haven’t mastered our dance, finding myself taken in by their rationalizations and emotions more often than I like. I have a lot of growing to do in this…

Which is why I choose to step back from engaging in any deep or intimate way with those, with whom I find myself in patterns of giving and withholding, emotional openness and unavailability – if they cannot or will not step up and work with me in diffusing the activation and emotional charge.

Here is an interesting thing my reflections have made me become aware of: Those who have the skills and emotional intelligence to move between states, self reflect, and retain access to meta perceptions and exchanges on relating, are only rarely in this dynamic with me. And if they are it plays out in a different and more mellow way (regardless of the intensity of emotions or heated exchanges), as we can talk about it from different dimensional perceptive points (identified/detached, mine/theirs, human/consciousness) and open to unknown possibilities, negotiate compassionately to have our needs met, and navigate the challenge with humor and playfulness.
These are my people with whom I can fail better, grow, and thrive.

Now how to teach my parts to direct their healthy generosity and affections towards my kin, decline invitations to over-give, and be more discerning and reserved towards those who cannot meet me on an even playing field of consciousness that is on the level that serves our wellbeing.

Work in messy but gratitude-inspiring process…

Photography by Caroline Tran

The post Generosity appeared first on Venuskind.

I am fascinated how hard it is for the tender and longing aspect in me to let go of the hope that existing connections can change and take a form that is mutually nurturing and expansive. The naive rationale that where there is sympathy or love there has to be a way of connecting deeper and finding the flow that nourishes and makes our hearts come alive. I have sat in contemplation of what it is that keeps our repetition compulsion going when our behavioral patterns never bring about the desired or needed outcome. How young and vulnerable these aspects within are that engage with life from the limited and magical thinking of a young child.

Teaching this aspect that the connection, flow and love it seeks is already available in my life, even if not in the connection it is focused on. Learning to redirect her focus on where love and affection are always available and flowing, making her realize that she no longer lives in scarcity and can let go of the grasping pattern. Showing her that focusing and fully opening to and engaging in the connections that naturally and effortlessly take to depths and heights more than fills all our cups of love, wellbeing, and joy. No need to make other connections be anything else than what they naturally are.

One of the most challenging lessons is teaching these young and tender aspects within to let go of their grasping, their asking for reality to change, for others to be different to who they really are instead of accepting reality as it presents and finding creative ways to fulfill needs and find joy in circumstances as they are. On a mental and cognitive dimension this is a simple thing to understand but the emotional and physical are slow to embrace changes in perception. Maybe this is the reason why it takes long and repeat periods in the ‘hanged man’ position, to speak once again in tarot, for us to shift out of old survival or adaptive patterns. There is something to these periods of suspension in the in-between that works on the subconscious and emotional body in healing and integrative ways.

Nothing compares to the massive feeling of relief and peace that take hold when said aspects embrace reality as it is and find they not only survive in doing so but begin to live and thrive for it. Even though it is accompanied with a depth of grief that may surprise and challenge us to be present and gentle with ourselves as it makes itself felt and known. Yes, there is a deep sadness, a feeling of loss and deprivation that wants to be felt as a message from years long gone and a self not allowing and capable of feeling these truths of experience.

When my adult eyes and mind surveyed my connections from this new inner state of healing I was able to let go of connections, which used to trigger this aspect in me as they ‘starved’ me emotionally for various and individual reasons. I let them go in love and gratitude for showing up in my experience as teachers and healing lessons and with wishes of goodness and blessings to them. 

Similar to the hopeful self-torture of keeping clothes that no longer fit our bodies in our closets as ‘motivation’, my subconscious patterns kept connections in my experience which were not aligned with my being. Now I could see the connections in their emptiness, their anachronism, and incompatibility with effortless clarity and no longer felt a need to stay connected.

Disconnecting and moving on brought on a feeling of ‘rightness’ or better alignment and flow into my experience of my relational field. Though not all connections that remained are connections at the depth of bonding and flow I prefer, they all feel good and aligned with me as they are. 

I celebrate depth where it is available and everywhere else I show up in a mirror of the depth, presence, affection, and care or from whatever level my authenticity wants to engage with them.

Instead of unconsciously trying to futilely deepen connections beyond their natural capacity and form, I consciously accept them for what they are from wholeness and emotional abundance within. Given my acceptance of the reality that what my heart seeks may be rare and not available in relating with the majority of people, I am even more appreciative, grateful, protective and nurturing of the connections which show up in said form.

I remain open to more beings meeting me in the depths and heights of heart and consciousness and the possibility of shared magical and transcendent explorations and experiences. Committed to compassion and acceptance with all the other relations which lack the glitter of stardust and droplets of the water of life.

And I bow to life as it unfolds in it multidimensional form, to the breadth of experiences available to us on our planet, and to the ability of consciousness to direct our path through this wild, magical and messy playground.

I bow in gratitude to the lessons that taught me the sweetness of yielding to life.

Art: Blanc Arctique by Sophie Wilkins 

The post The Unmet Yielding into Wholeness appeared first on Venuskind.

For most people the word healing describes a goal-focused process akin to the healing of a cut in our skin: a localized process of hurt, inflammation, scabbing over, creation of new skin and retaining a faint or obvious scar.

Healing to me has a more layered meaning and is absolutely process-oriented not just goal-oriented.

In an interconnected web of existence, a world made up of on quantum particles and their potential for entanglement, as an organism within a complex interdependent ecosystem – healing is not limited to the individual being or organism nor solely dependent upon them. In other words, everything I do to heal myself feeds into the web of our shared existence, our collective consciousness, and affects my relational systems and engagements with All That Is. Equally all that is done by other aspects of the All affects and influences me via the field of consciousness.

Healing in my understanding is a life-long practice – it is not something that can be done in a few months or years (unless you look through a purely reductionist lens at localized physical ailments).

To me it entails being aware of our woundings, early childhood traumas, and what is often overlooked what was missing to support our healthy development. The trauma and developmental impairments afflicted on us through neglect are the hardest to notice and become aware of and yet their are often the most important aspects of our woundings in need of healing.

We need a certain level of psychological knowledge and developmental understanding to attain to our tender and wounded aspects skillfully, while also practicing being gentle, compassionate, and loving with all aspects of self. Gently ending internal wars, divisions, and other self sabotaging or self harming patterns we have learned.

It means questioning all we have learned and belief, researching and learning more about the things we hold strong beliefs on, contemplating and critically reflecting on our life experience and trying to find other ways of perceiving or framing our memories and stories.

In the process of healing we will find aspects, traits, skills, parts of us that we lost along the pathways of trauma, adaptation, and conditioning. We need to recognize, reclaim, nurture, and cultivate these to integrate them into a more whole and integrated version of ourselves.

Our perceptions are changed by this healing process as distortions from trauma lose their hold over our mind, and with new perceptions new layers of reality become visible and call for our awareness in engaging with them. More discernment makes itself available to us. And what once seemed black and white to our conditioned minds and hearts suddenly has multitudes of nuances of grey and colors.

Healing reclaims feeling. We feel more, we learn to engage with our emotions wisely, never suppressing them, nor fueling those which may burn or harm us. Learning about the pitfalls of being identified or lost in our emotions, to respect their power and bring in consciousness and intuition to help us channel and utilize their energy in service of our path and life as a whole.

We become appreciative observers of life within as without as life now reveals more and more of its subtle magic, humor and playfulness to us. Fear loses its grip over our thinking and feeling to regain its function as a navigational signal.

Learning to feel and think without identifying ourselves with emotions and thoughts, becoming more detached and yet more engaged. No longer being hijacked by tsunamis of emotions, blinded by limiting beliefs, we can be fully and sustainably present.

Healing is deeply relational. I concur with the notion that many of our woundings have been created in relationships and necessitate corrective or healing relationships to fully heal, as there is only little that can be done in the absence of relating in terms of healing. Being a mystic I would count all kinds of relationships as potential sources of healing, not just relationships with humans. One of my most powerful healing and corrective relationships is the one I have cultivates with Self (or higher self) and which is my most nurturing, loving, and joyful relationship.

Allowing energy to flow through us with less obstructions, having more spaciousness in choosing what to engage with and what to let pass us by in order to protect our wellbeing and expansive trajectory.

Healing is an ongoing process and journey for multidimensional beings, whose every change to one aspect of inner being affects all other parts and thereby calls for recalibration, adaptation of skills and practices, or cultivation of new skills. It is a premise for true growth, expansion, greatness, and change.

Once we have attended to ourselves enough, an inner knowing lets us know that moment, we will not only desire to share our tools, experiences, and knowledge but also be able to do so with the necessary awareness, discernment, and knowing to minimize potential obstruction or harm to others, while remaining open to keep learning and showing up better.

I feel myself transitioning from primary focus on personal healing to making collective healing my focus. Whatever form that may take or which adventures beckon along that new pathway are still unknown to me. But I hear the call clearly and delight in following it as intuition guides me.

Photography by Unknown

The post Healing appeared first on Venuskind.

How do I explain that my mind is reeling while trying to differentiate and keep apart timelines, feelings and persons?

How do I own and express to him that I know it’s unfair that he is affected by my childhood trauma and that I choose to protect and love my inner child even if it means hurting his feelings in the process?

How do I hold space for his hurt without collapsing into abandoning myself  while gently advocating for my wounded child?

How do I express my gratitude for our meeting because it revealed an unconscious effect of my past and helped me avoid hurting myself and others in this way again now that I gained an understanding of this trigger?

~ June 2016

Art by Unknown

The post Questions from the Void of a Flashback appeared first on Venuskind.

Spirit is raining down insights in waking and dreams on me like candy from a carnival procession. Insights which triggered all kinds of emotions, responses and reactivities thereby illuminating and revealing layers of conditioning whose time for release has come.

There are several facets to the nature of emotional fulfillment that are being revealed not merely to my mental perception but a whole being knowing, a process of becoming one-with, or said differently: integration of emotional fulfillment with emotional lack.

The first piece I received was that emotional fulfillment on the human or whole being dimension doesn’t necessitate a romantic relationship or a specific other. For my human it suffices to have an open-hearted and loving connection with nature in her various manifestation, regardless if its plant, animal, human, elemental or energetic kin. I lived for decades under the codependently colored misperception that I NEEDED enmeshed human relationships to be well and emotionally fulfilled.

My spiritual path has led me to deepen and strengthen my connection with Source and Self which created a new embodied reality for me. The unhealthy fear-driven fixation on human relationships, romantic and otherwise, has been fading away with the degree of inner integration and growing sense of wholeness. Now I welcome connections and relationships but no longer feel compelled to overlook or sacrifice my needs for them, nor center them unduly in my everyday life.

A new voice is ringing in my inner tribe which has called the codependent and romantic conditioned aspects out and illumined more blind spots in my relational system. She ruthlessly laid bare the aspects of relating I used to hide from my awareness. Making me face how costly romantic partnerships truly had been to my wellbeing, energy levels, and how little they gave for what they costed. Don’t get me wrong, they all had their meaning, function and treasures but of that I have been aware of  all along what I avoided facing were their shadow aspects and that is why that was highlighted to me.

And with that reviewing and highlighting another layer of the romantic dream and conditioning died away.

I find myself in a new self perception which dissolves all previous ideas of needing a (or several) intimate partnerships at the center of my life. I no longer seek or subtly long to establish them as the foundation of my life vision. My focus has shifted to envisioning my being as the sole foundation of my life and to keep cultivating, nurturing, and weaving a network of loving, caring and deeply spiritual connections and relationships around me (community).

I cannot stress enough what a huge shift this is to my system and perception of life and vision for my future.

Another guidance received was the need to integrate those parts of me who long for scripted external relationships to be the source of my emotional fulfillment. Understanding their plights and needs and integrating them into my inner tribe in a loving way to help them release these conditioned dreams and attachments in their own time. Showing and teaching them the difference in embodied and felt sense of fulfillment between the relationships they attracted and the quality of relationships which are present, free, precious, blissful, growth-inducing, and available without their overlay of conditions.

I am learning to release the sticky hands of codependent parts from my life and relating, and in equal measures to set boundaries to the sticky hands of other’s codependent aspects when they grab at me or my energy in unhealthy and unwelcome ways. The second part being the more challenging at times.

My higher Self called me to retreat into internal oneness to rebalance and recalibrate more of my being to this new sense of self and to engage from it with my network of beloveds for attunement, shared joy, and to experience what this new state co-creates with them and life in general.

Art by Daniel Taylor

The post Emotional Fulfillment appeared first on Venuskind.

This is how I deepened my love relationship with my body, feeling more attuned, healthy, stronger, energized, balanced and peaceful.

This year Spirit has stopped me in my tracks and made me contemplate where my preference for diversity and desire to connect with a variety of people, energies, mindsets and lifestyles was serving my wellbeing and where it was detrimental to it. In the process I had to release some unconsciously held beliefs and fears, change what I expose my mind and being to, become more discerning and reflective of the energies I experience and the feedback my body gives me about them. I had to discard another layer of good girl programming that used to override my own needs in service of useless ideas or principles. Within the same lesson Spirit guided me to choose the reality, timeline, story I want to live in and release my attachment to being connected to all other realities, timelines and narratives in unhealthy and ego-driven ways.

This is how Spirit healed my mind and spirit and revitalized my being.

This year I am wrapping up a long karmic cycle of unbalanced, unfulfilling, unloving and disheartening relating and relationships. I was lead into extensive self-observations, deep introspections, reflections and knowing of what in me attracts, co-creates, enables, nurtures and holds on to these painful experiences. Another layer of how the ego abuses and tortures me was revealed to me with the gracious help of an external catalyst who artfully combined all the tones of my ‘core woundings’ to trigger the unraveling of what still remained hidden to my awareness.

Parallel to it I have been exploring new dimensions of relating and communing with my innermost circles of friends and family, tasting new states of oneness in diversity, joyful embracements of similarities and differences alike, new frequencies and tones of blissful co-being. My heart is opening to more love and experiencing a delicious multitude of subtleties and nuances to love, friendship, affection, tenderness, support, nurturing and care. I have been learning to show up in my relationships with more vulnerability, playfulness, discernment and self love than I would have been capable of or even dreamt it possible just a year or two ago. I am being met in kind, with effortless reciprocity, appreciation, compassion, joy, playfulness and love that exceeds my most daring dreams. And yet I know it to be just a beginning…

This is how my heart and emotional body have been purified from the dark tendrils of karma, ancestral patterns and trauma and infused with luminous rainbow colored threads of love’s potentiality and soothing.

It has been a year of refocusing on my dreams, of manifesting my heart’s desire for a life filled with a multitude of loves, for a community of like-hearted dreamers, magicians, alchemists and creators, for creating spaces of potentiality, transformation, the magic of being and the effervescence of life. A year that allowed me to witness these dreams begin to take form in the physical dimension and nurture their unfolding with eyes of awe, glittering with the light of age old galaxies. This year has shown me the change of the tides-the time for my visions to take form has finally come. It has been a year of answered prayers of old, a year of my consciousness visioning in the realm of the unknown, touching the impossible wanting to be manifest through me and us.

This is how my trust has been nourished and expanded, this is how my dreams have been resurrected into a higher vibrancy, free, fluid, playfully and creatively shapeshifting with the flow of conscious harmonic resonance.

I release what cannot be part of my becoming and unfolding with heartfelt gratitude and blessings and welcome whatever awaits to teach me, enrich my life and expand my consciousness and love with open arms and heart.

And I bow in gratitude to Source, life, 2020, catalysts, teachers, students, friends, beloveds, family and Self for a subtly yet profoundly transformational year. 

Art by Marcel van Luit

The post 2020 Hindsight appeared first on Venuskind.

To survive I emulated these attitudes consciously and subconsciously in parts of my internal tribe. Inadvertently and sadly taking up the role of abuser towards myself and others in its wake. Rarely allowing myself to feel or own moments of sensitivity or tenderness, my subconscious numbing and repression being instant and almost total in all but a few situations. Recoiling from, feeling uncomfortable with and irrespectful of those who expressed their sensitivity and tenderness, all the more harshly if they were male. And yet I felt attracted to the more artistic, poetic and creative types who tended to be more on the sensitive side – nothing about trauma and wounding is ever logical in my experience.

Concurrently I incarnated with a strong warrior spirit willing to protect whoever was marginalized or attacked, most often than not the weak, the powerless, and the sensitive and tender. And so this specific internal war was seeded and took a great part of my energy, attention, and capacity to live life in inner peace and full creative expression away. Decades of moving from one perception to the other, feeling good about myself in one and painful shame when the harshness overtook.

I began my work on this in my late teenage years with whatever tools I could find in a world that was still pre-internet and little psychological and neuroscientific research being accessible to ‘normal’ people. I learned to manage the external expressions of the abuser, by sheer willpower, and had to endure many defeats and failures without the soothing balm of self compassion, which heaped more shame to the mountain I already held in the subconscious. In my thirties things thankfully began to take a turn as better tools and practices became available to me and I opened more to ‘esoteric’ tools. This is where my true and most effective work commenced. Everything before could only be compared to putting bandaids on a deep and infected wound. A temporary solution at best but mere useless actionism in the long run.

Fragility

Reclaiming my tenderness and sensitivity only happened once I had learned to differentiate it from the fragility of my wounded parts. In my mind fragility is an expression of the egoic nature, its existence serves to protect the status quo and is counterproductive to true healing and integration. Fragility is what makes us reactive, defensive and stubbornly avoidant to all that would heal its underlying pool of emotions, sensations, memories distorting and festering in the depth of the subconscious expertly hidden from our waking awareness. 

Fragility being a function of the ego is cunning, a shapeshifter and spinner of illusion which manage to enchant us into believing them to be reality. Fragility’s rationalizations and emotive reactivities have an intensity of pull that effortlessly highjacks our awareness into its states of hyper-activation and limited higher brain functioning.

To calm fragility I have to face, feel and integrate trauma and shadows – it is, of course, an ongoing process as we keep experiencing new traumas which express in novel ways and necessitate new and better adapted tools of knowing and healing. 

Trauma and Shadow work

A lot of people speak about trauma and shadow work these days but when I look at them and their words I can often sense with clarity that they only ventured to do the most superficial work on these themselves. Rare is the voice of wisdom and the glint in the eyes of those who went deep into the abyss of trauma and shadow.

I have written and shared some insights into my ongoing trauma and shadow work here, but admittedly only in the lightest way, as to write about it as I experience it is nigh impossible as our language lacks words to aptly describe the depth of despair, excruciating pain and abject sense of disorientation and lostness and all the other hues of sensations and emotions that I have to sit with as I contain my impulse to flee and deny whatever arises. This work is not for the faint at heart, it is definitely not for those lacking in discipline, honesty or the lazy.

Shadow and trauma work necessitate much courage, resilience and willingness to begin them and stick through the challenging moments, but the most precious qualities needed are cultivated in the process when handled right: self compassion, self love, self trust.

Without self compassion and love we cannot gauge in a helpful way how much work is needed, when to take breaks, when to resource ourselves by doing things we love and by taking loving care of our body, mind and spirit like the amazing parents and lovers we never had. Without self trust we will crumble whenever our fragility speaks in the language of fear and catastrophizing instead of trudging on the seemingly endless path of self work. And in my case I will add that I needed my inner light and spirit, the aspect at the core of my being, which has always led and gently pushed me towards healing and integration and picked me up whenever I was down on my knees.

In shadow and trauma work I learned to feel and engage with my sensitivity and tenderness in wholly new ways.

Sensitivity and Tenderness

When sensitivity and tenderness are released from the repression of our wounded patterns we might easily feel overwhelmed by them and with the old judgements still echoing in our minds we might feel like stepping back or distracting ourselves in order not to feel them. And we might even feel shame-anxiety or the shame that was induced into us when we showed ourselves in tenderness. 

It is key how we respond in these mystical moments of new beginnings. We are learning emotional intelligence and competence here. It takes time, effort, compassion and a playful attitude to navigate this with grace. This is where our trust in ourselves deepens: In daring to experience how much we can stretch, how much more than our mind believes we can actually take and what happens when we mindfully move past the boundaries of our thinking. 

It is uncomfortable to be sensitive or tender, things get under our skin much more than they ever did in our previous armored iterations of self, therefore we will have to learn ways of dealing with sensations and emotions as they arise and keep tinkering away until we find our stride. It helps to train the mind to look out for the gifts of these states: What are we experiencing, learning and accessing through being sensitive and tender? Where do we need to set new boundaries now that we are becoming softer and more receptive to energies and life? 

I have found, with an infinite sense of awe and wonder, how much strength and resilience I derive from reconnecting with and making ample spaces for sensitivity and tenderness. Once I had my critical selves come around and welcome them, external comments or dis-ease could not get to me as much anymore. I am more sensitive, I feel more of the violence and harshness that has been normalized and embedded in human relating and communicating. And yet it is by far easier to balance and integrate any harm encountered in a state of tenderness and sensitivity than it ever was to do so from states of fragility. 

In other words it is SAFER to be in open, sensitive and receptive states than it ever could be to be armored, protected and therefore in fragility. Read that again and ponder it!

Yes, it may seem that people can hurt me more easily than they could hurt previous iterations of myself. But to an awakened and self-knowing observer, who has done quite a bit of deeper trauma and shadow work, it is clear that the cost of armoring and hyper-activations are much higher and self-destructive than open-hearted living could ever incur. 

Living in our trauma and without integration of shadow has deeply destructive costs to our mental and physical health down to changes of our DNA and limits our capacity of making a good life for us in all other aspects of life. That is why I often silently shake my head at those who are health fanatics, experts on nutrition, body work, health hacks, etc. but deeply avoidant of anything that would take them deeper into trauma and shadow work. And though working on your psyche and subconscious unlocks positive effects for your physical health, merely focusing on the body only has a lightening but not a consistently healing effect on our psyche and subconscious. 

The only adjuvants or partial alternatives to doing self work I have observed are conscious and shamanic plant medicine treatments and highly charged and focused energy healing work, which both take a level of mastery most energy healers unfortunately cannot access due to their own states of fragmentation and lacking spiritual mastery.

From my current vantage point I am observing on the global plane humanity experimenting with fragility and clashes of fragilities.

My hope is that we are becoming aware of the immense costs of egoic games of protection, victimhood, abuse and dominance and that we heal and transcend them in our race consciousness. Ending the need for endless replays of hurtful and destructive patterns and opening the pathway to higher and new ways of engaging with each other, with animals, plants, and our beloved mother planet.

I see the opportunity for us as a collective to learn and evolve past fragility and learn to live with sensitivity and tenderness instead. Deeply empowered by the gifts of tenderness and enriched by the dimensions of life, joy and fulfillment it unlocks for us.

This is the dream, hope, and vision I hold at my core.

Art “Neuroses in Blossom” by Shikeith Cathey 

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Art by Unknown

The post History to HERSTORY appeared first on Venuskind.

In the past 5 years I have shared a little on the disruptions, betrayals and ending of friendships that were very dear and precious to me. Yet I did so only haltingly and while keeping the depth of pain, disappointment and devastation I have felt mostly contained to myself. Not out of fear of burdening you or making myself ‘too’ vulnerable but out of a sense of sacredness of those feelings. They were mine to feel and hold in their entirety and to share them with another necessitated, in my healing phase, a deep degree of intimacy and trust with another as well as the knowing they can and know how to hold this space with me as I was feeling and processing.

Now I feel I have come to the end of said cycle of learning and can more holistically and openly share my experience and process as I stand in a space of enough integration and transformation that I can communicate it in a way that makes this a sharing of medicine and not of distortion or affirmation of imbalance. As I progress on my path I am learning the importance not only of the intention behind my words but also their form and accompanying energy and to hold myself more accountable in being mindful of all three.

Looking back from where I stand now I understand how these 3 friendships ended in a way that opened a gateway to my three core woundings and original trauma triggers:

The first outright abandoned me in a rare and precarious moment I turned to him for help. 

The second crossed boundaries, triggered inadvertently my childhood sexual abuse and manipulations and denied me an opportunity to talk about it and ground myself through reconnecting, co-regulation and save our friendship which was very precious to me. 

The third neglected our relationship, took my being there for her for granted, without any willingness and capacity for reciprocity and distanced herself from intimacy and sharing in a time of extraordinary challenges and hardships in my life.

It is hard to convey in words the depth of abject pain I felt at the betrayal and abandonment, the disorientation, the distrust in my relational system and capacity to choose and cultivate friendships… the regression into the wounded child I was, feeling the vastness of despair, disconnection and loneliness and the need to hold my raging protectors in all their anger, resentment and vengeful feelings. All of which lasted for years.

It is fascinating how I was guided to respond to all three in a unique way and how that staid the same or shifted in unexpected ways. 

The first one I dismissed out of my life without any further communication or attempts at repairing because I sensed the impossibility of it and my total unwillingness to accept that in any of my relationships. If he crossed my path now I would be polite but I would not be open to a reconciliation. Maybe if he led with an embodied apology which expressed in all of his words and actions. And even then, he would have to re-earn my respect and trust which I willfully would not make easy for him.

The second one I unfriended after a period of trying to see them in person and process together what happened and repair the sudden disruption. It was his unwillingness to show up that made me choose to unfriend him although I still loved him deeply and ending the friendship hurt me like little in my life ever managed to hurt me.

The third I didn’t unfriend, I chose to divest my energy and engagement to equal hers and reframe our connection as an acquaintanceship, which is its own kind of ending a friendship in my universe. Though she wanted to repair and work on the friendship, after having gone dark for a long time, I was no longer interested and willing to invest more of my energy. In the grieving process of observing the changes in our connection in the period of her silence I realized a fundamental imbalance in our connection and its inherent limitations. I understood we could not travel into new lands of friendship and connection that were calling me and emerging in my other friendships and connections. And here a rather ruthless aspect of me emerged to insist my energy kept being invested in what was blossoming and not in what has become a part of the past. 

In the past years of tending to my core woundings, confronting my trauma and its distortions to my perceptions and most of all to my relational system I had to get very clear, honest and intentional with how I define relationships, how I am willing to show up and invest in them, where I am unavailable or outright unwilling to engage and where I am willing to extend myself even if it is challenging and painful. These have been years of reclusion and hermiting, pulling back from almost all real life social engagements apart from a select few that made me come out of my shell with their love and persistence. Years of deep contemplative inquiry, shadow work, self love and internal consolidation, while holding my remaining inner circle with as much love and care I could muster.

Now I look back with gratitude and see the immense gift these endings have been, each in its own way was a portal into healing the most armored and tender woundings of my past, initiations into a major part of the integration and healing I needed to bring to my being. The anger and resentment I felt have been transmuted into a changed inner landscape and wonderfully forged, nurtured and cultivated close friendships on whom I know I can rely and lean  and who have been my light in the darkest passages of this journey. The disappointment has been balanced with compassion for their humanity and storylines of trauma and wounding. All that is left in my wounded child and protectors is compassion, love, gratitude for them and a clarity on my needs, wants, desires and boundaries for friendships.

And with that a fundamental shift in my relational system has come about that fills me with amazement and awe as I observe its unfolding and blossoming. 

For most of my life my system could only conceptualize, feel and allow people to be in my life if the connection aligned with my wishes and expectations and if we had a huge falling out it was impossible to repair or reconnect. Now there is a spaciousness in me which can accept and adapt to the shifts of relationships and allow for others to weave in and out of my life within my internal framework of sovereignty and self love. Which means that I need not create strict boundaries and walls to keep people out or in, I trust myself to respond adequately or repair where I stumbled and allow others to do the same as long. I no longer lose sight of my sovereignty, wellbeing and self love in my friendships.

Another gift of this painful cycle is my ability to fully surrender to the leadership of my higher self or soul. A surrender and total trust which allowed me to fully be present and open-hearted with the second friend when he crossed my path a couple of weeks ago. This synchronistic event allowed me to experience the healing of residuals of the above mentioned themes of this cycle with full consciousness in the slow and measured pace of my soul, body and heart. To witness the grace of liberation of past pain and limitations is beyond words. All I verbalize is that I feel a depth of humility and awe for the becoming I am gifting myself, for the blessings I now can fully appreciate in unison of all parts of my being, for the excitement of the possibilities that are opening up and a warm welcome and receptivity for what wants to be born from this.

I have no idea if the reconnection is a process of closure before parting, or if it is the beginning of a new friendship, which may be based on a more conscious and heartful foundation, or whatever else it could be. All I know is that I have grown and get to taste the beauty of freedom and wholeness in sweeter ways than I have ever tasted them in this incarnation. For this I give thanks with all of my being!

So my loves if your friendships break, if people fall away, love yourself into wholeness and sidestep best you can any temptations to frame them as toxic, unworthy or similar. 

See it is our dearest soul kin who will volunteer to teach us our most painful and lessons, not out of negativity but their souls generosity and love toward ours. They avail themselves to enter the field of trauma and take the karma upon themselves of hurting us for our consciousness and soul expansion. I bow to these souls in gratitude and in the knowing of the costly gift they have given me, even if their human expression is unconscious and not capable to show up in the love of their soul essence or if my human decides they no longer have a place in my life.

May our human family evolve into a state where we can co-create our lessons without utilizing pain as the messenger and pathway of learning. And may we be gentle with each other and hone our skills of healing self and our relationships until we get there.

And may we hold the ones who stand by us in loyalty and love with the gentlest and most nurturing embrace and keep showing up for them in all the ways they need. I bow to my beloveds who carried me through this time of pain and healing with their love, presence, compassion, humor, being and radiance. 

The post Friendships, Betrayal, Abandonment, Neglect & Healing into Wholeness appeared first on Venuskind.

At my core I hold a hypersensitive, loving, gentle and guileless little girl believing firmly in the goodness of humanity. These very qualities singled me out and attracted many forms of subtle, overt and pathologically cruel abuse and heaped shame on all of these traits beyond anything I could bear. To the hurt and confused younger versions of my self it felt at as if life was teaching me to drop these aspects of self and so I developed a seemingly powerful outer persona that numbed the sensitive in me to a degree my mind could handle, learning and expressing the ways of unlove like a new language I had to gain fluency in, practicing delighting in harshness and derision of others, cultivating a cold unfeeling capacity for ruthlessness and hyper-vigilant distrust.

In my healing journey of reclaiming said little girl a new layer of shame began to be heaped on all the traits and behaviors I adopted in my survival and moving on from the fear-inducing past. As I reclaimed what lay at my beginning, external voices, once again, shamed the parts of me who helped me survive. Another layer of burden and drama to work through thanks to the ‘good girl’ and ‘love and light’ bias I surrounded myself with in this phase of my life. A growing unease and restlessness kept me looking for the next step of my journey because this felt equally unhealthy and unbalanced as the phase of survival did before.

Enter shadow work and mystical studies to blow dualities and more importantly preferences to smithereens in my mind, then in my emotions and now successively in my body. Nothing about this chapter of healing was and is exactly easy or painless, and yet the pain was ‘just’ the pain of having to let go of lies and misperceptions that had endeared themselves to me and to welcome the unknown in their place. 

And the deeper and more visceral pain of facing the accumulated shame, the pain of titrating in and out of it until I could hold more of it and for longer periods without giving in to the habit of fleeing it, read compensatory avoidant behavior. It took some time to make my peace with a reality in which I can feel shame, around certain things, and can be lovable and beloved to myself and others. To not judge shame or only perceive its corrosive effects and to see equally its natural and helpful manifestations and functions. To end dualities held in the depth of my subconscious, non-verbal conditionings and belief systems.

The Unknown – the ultimate fear fed by the orthodoxy of beliefs, the illusion of knowing what I haven’t experienced, researched, explored or deeply contemplated myself and the fear of ego death. Who would have thought that the unknown has always been my best friend, a space of blissfulness veiled by the nonsensical lies of my conditioning?

I like to think of the Unknown as another word for the Field – the Dark Mother of all that is in form, sound, geometry and light. The first step of the One becoming the many and the last in going from the illusion of separation back into oneness. I like to gender the Unknown as a HER: mystical, nurturing, creative, playful, surprising and loving from a non-dual perception and manifesting vantage point. 

When I allowed my mind to explore many a rabbit hole or alternative narrative about reality (which some like to label as conspiracy theory in their varying levels of cognitive dissonance), she sat by my side and watched me get drawn into dark and light narratives, snagging here getting entangled there, struggling to grasp the reality of multidimensional concurrent realities feeling my human captivated by some and their strange effects on my biology. When it got intense she would tap on my shoulder and let me gaze deep into her luminous darkness as she smiled at my slow disentanglement and transformation. 

I owe her my freedom from energy sucking entanglements and the clarity that arose with blinding light from the depth of her darkness and I delight in the laughter we shared about my slowness and blindness to fact that fear of the unknown was what allowed for entanglement and entrapment in limiting narratives about life. 

She taught me to dance through and across narratives, to dip my feet, to swim and dive deep into them without losing my perspective or anchored vantage point of not knowing. To entertain ideas which align or contradict with no attachment but with all the more joy and creative playfulness. To be free from the egoic need for certainty, absolute truisms and setting myself apart from others by virtue of illusions of absolute knowing. 

She reminded me to enjoy this ‘soul playground’ and helped me develop new skills of engaging and interacting with it from spaciousness and with bliss.

I bow to the plentiful gifts of embracing the unknown, of letting the dark mother hold me and inspire me through changes and evolutions, to her gifts of expansion to my consciousness and to her mysteries that shall remain untouched by me in this timeline. 

In gratitude to all that is unfolding as I dance with my fellow travelers across timelines, dimensions, incarnations, narratives, system and cultures with lightness, ease and grace!

Art: “Ms. Universe” by Jessi Jumanji

The post Hello from the Other Side appeared first on Venuskind.

My (small) self has come a long way in my healing journey utilizing therapy as much as self work in order to achieve inner peace and wellbeing. I am grateful for what I did eventually achieve and learn along the way. Yet I also had to concede that psychology had its limits, that deeper set distortions as well as the unconscious patterns necessitated the tools of spirituality. And as the years progressed intuition guided me to more and more powerful modalities, tools and perception changes. Making me often wonder where I could be today if said tools would have been available to me in my mid or late twenties and leaving me feeling grateful that younger generations will be able to heal faster and better for it.

For the past year I have been in a sublime internal dance of love, care and surrender which deepened my primary relationship with my own being. I observe the way my Self is teaching and healing my self whenever she surrenders and makes space for her to take the lead. Life has slowed down to a crawl internally as the Self illuminates and helps the self figure out the patterns and futilities of patterns to inspire the self to experiment with novel responses and derive joy from this newfound playfulness and ease. There are moments that trigger thoughts and feelings of “I can’t do this!” or “This is too much!” and my Self simply smiles and asks “Are you sure this is not your fear or trauma speaking? Do you know who I am? Do you know what I am?” And my whole being relaxes, leans into the knowing of the Self as the illusions of smallness and fragility fade into historic memories.

Coached by the Self into more balance and inner peace more consciousness and wisdom keeps coming into my knowing. The inner Guru is making every breath and every moment a teaching opportunity which leaves me feeling contemplative and appreciative of the vastness and complexity of life. An inner radiance arises from this dance of love and wisdom, a light that renders my being unshakable yet deeply compassionate.

As I was in deep meditative writing today I realized how things that once would have triggered all sorts of trauma and shadow responses simply make me laugh within. And I think to myself well met old friend, thank you for alerting me to the quality of my frequency which invited you into my experience. Then I recalibrate, rebalance internally while not paying the external event or trigger no mind. I have finally understood what the eastern masters mean when they say “There is nothing to do” when my Self showed me the ineffectivity and waste of energy of the constant toiling and activism of the self. I no longer feel the need to respond or sort things out externally unless intuition clearly nudges me to. Otherwise I am practicing my default of sorting things out in the subtle and energetic realms by sorting out my vibrational state. At first I felt like all kinds of drama and pain might ensue if I did not follow the desires of the self to engage, respond, act upon what had happened. But I chose to trust my Self and practice self composure and containment even if my emotions were in a turmoil and it was rewarded with less and less turmoil and a calming down of the hyper-reactive triggers I used to have. 

I have been living in the experience and knowing of my wholeness for years now but this experience is adding a whole new layer of feeling safe, content and powerful to my inner state of being. Where once co-dependency made me feel existential fears of abandonment and losing another, I feel spacious and complete enough to speak my truth, be myself and dare to lose another. Not from a rebellious or avoidant energy, as part of my trauma let me respond in certain circumstances but from a deep feeling of being whole, loved, cared for, abundant and part of a magnificent universe of love. 

Another realization that made me laugh and shake my head is this:

I used to think that self-realization was about experiencing and knowing one’s Self. Now I see that it can only be the beginning, as self-realization, if it is not a sudden and sustained state of enlightenment, necessitates the self to surrender and hand over the rains to the Self while aligning itself with her and serving her. 

This is where I find true freedom, a freedom which is based on universal truths and truths of Self leadership. And this is also part of the vast magic of love, which I have only begun to explore.

I bow in gratitude and awe to Life, my greatest and most benevolent Guru!

Photography by Venuskind

The post The sweetness of being loved by Self appeared first on Venuskind.

I cried over the perpetuations of pain across generations, the relational mutilation of the men I know intimately and love, the pain their pain brought to our relationships and me, I cried over all the wasted energy in attempting to understand, help and support when the men were too blind or afraid to truly face their truth and do their work, I cried for the friends I see flee from healing and the masked unhappiness they hold themselves in. I cried for the painful and long journey a man has to undertake to get to a state of being capable of relating in any healthy or meaningful way.

I cried over all the ways I misunderstood and couldn’t relate to my father and him to me, for the pains of his childhood that caused his covert depression and fear-inducing presence and cold absence in my life, I can see now why he teeters on wanting to reach out and then deciding not to. I cried for the shame and self-rejection I carried for him and my grandfather too. I cried over the patterns of trauma, active and passive abuse that run in my family clans and the way they keep an unhealthy hold on self esteem, self love and interpersonal relationships.

And I looked deeper into the abyss of relational dysfunctionality seeded with the pathology of patriarchy suffusing our culture and subconscious minds. 

Realizing more why relating has grown ever more difficult as I proceeded in my healing journey. Understanding with more clarity why my system rebels when a man unconsciously expects or demands me to mother him, tests me incessantly to affirm the belief of his unworthiness, lashes out and keeps hurting me whenever my love became unbearable in the hell of (un)conscious self hate and rejection. 

I understand why my intuition tells me to retreat from men whose relating and “love” is self referential (I love you for what you do for ME, for how you make ME feel. No value is given to the other beyond the fulfillment of a role to serve their needs). I can see how much of a journey of healing and integration lies ahead of them and how incompatible we are due to the work I have already invested into my integrational self work.

This has been an unexpected and deeply cathartic journey into aspects of my past and subconscious I rarely got to illuminate. Simply by being open, empathetic and reading a much needed and valuable work on male psychology.

I shall never fully understand people who denigrate book knowledge and think it useless and dead. Books have been some of the most potent catalysts in my life. Authors can become wise ancestors to our lives and journeys when they distill the treasures of their journey and make them accessible to us.

If you are curious about the book I read, its title is “I Don’t Want To Know” by Terrence Real and I cannot recommend it enough. Regardless of your gender or feelings towards men, this work of heart will bring unexpected healing insights and expansive perspectives to your life and experience. Especially if you are striving to relate consciously with the people in your life this will be a valuable and insightful resource.

Photography: Rachida Brakni & Eric Contona by Gianluca Fontana

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