Being Needed

Neediness is a red flag because it speaks to a mind state of self disempowerment and delegation of responsibility for one’s life. That is something I have been training myself to release and no longer accept, enable or am willing to engage with in myself or others.
Being needed is different as it arises from a temporary state of exhaustion or overwhelm. I have learned to check in with my being to ascertain if I have the energy and capability of being supportive before answering another’s need. Equally I check myself when in need of support to honor the other’s agency in saying no to my request. And I make sure to observe the dynamic of being needed and helping to ensure it doesn’t become chronic or lastingly shift the relational dynamic or perception of each other. I am aware that both tempt me to step into old patterns of becoming a ‘helper’ and ‘over-giving’ before feelings of resentment start poisoning the waters.

Being Wanted

Being wanted generally feels good to the abandoned and neglected child I once was. It felt like something good and healing when I was younger and knew less about my inner workings. And for the most part it anesthetized or silenced the old wounds, which I then mistook for healing and goodness. But looking back I can see that it never had a healing effect and was just another tool of avoidance and perpetuation of the status quo. I see how easily being wanted becomes a dependence, a drug, I can hunger for and through which others can manipulate my feelings and wellbeing. And it rarely serves to feed the ego with what it hankers for if one is on a path of liberation, healing, and wholeness.

Being Valued

Being valued would have been hard to detect, understand and know for my younger self. I was too superficial, too conditioned to discern it and its unique qualia (quality of experience). When someone values me, everything they do and say differs from the actions and words of someone who wants or needs me. There is a balanced equality in the relational dynamic, a calm unhurriedness, a warmth of affection, and general openness and willingness to attune to me. Even if power differentials happen, they rarely move to the extremes and are part of a constant shifting and changing flow which doesn’t allow for fixed roles. When someone values me their engagement with me will more often than not take a form that nourishes the soul, there is a greater willingness and ease in giving, and much less of a grasping for my energy and being. I feel more spaciousness in these connections, more ease and grace.

There is an innocent joy in being helpful to someone in need, and I delight in giving of myself. And I no longer do it in a form that is depleting or harmful to myself or the relationship. That is in almost all of my relating, except with my primary care givers where I am still learning to calm my nervous system and uphold my boundaries.

It is nice enough to be wanted and I now look into the unvoiced or unknown motivations hidden in the wanting, the stickiness that would create distortions in the relational flow if left unexamined and unaddressed.

Not much compares to connections of reciprocal value and love, though.
The fabric of these connections feels light and luminous like gossamer and yet when put under strain it is stronger than Tungsten. The fabric of connections built on want or need are more fragile, volatile, and lacking in resilience in comparison. Which is why I prefer being valued and valuing those I connect with. Less may do for a while, at a distance, or until lessons are learned and contracts are fulfilled.

With gratitude for the eternal Guru and her infinite wisdom and guidance in this complex dimension of consciousness evolution.

Photography by Venuskind

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For letting me repose in and relish desireless EMPTINESS and delight in embodying the void.

For making me ask myself how I can bring more of the qualities of the VOID to my experiences and encounters.

For teaching me to face REALITY as it is and stop fighting, denying, or projecting upon it from fear and a lack of acceptance.

For helping me get crystal clear who ‘my kind of people’ are by correcting my perceptions of embodied and lived SPIRITUALITY and alignment with my being.

For making me read Alexandra Stein’s “Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems” and plunging me into revisiting my past to purge more of the damages incurred by MANIPULATION, BETRAYAL, COERCION and OPPRESSION. A harrowing and dark experience which liberated me and created space for more possibilities in my perceptions and life.

For ongoing and potent DREAMWORK to release past woundings and misperception, inspire new lines of inquiry, and to introduce new emotional and energetic set points.

For deepening my lessons on FULLY SURRENDERING to SELF, teaching me to let go of willing and instead to intend and show up, while trusting deeply in the fulfillment of my Soul’s desires. Releasing more of my identifications with my tribe of selves as well as becoming more compassionate and considerate of them.

Teaching me that the BLISS the mystics speak of is not just to be found in ‘peak experiences’ or ‘peak phenomena’ but also in the elation derived from surrender to Self, heart-centered being (not emotion-centered being there is a crucial difference), the integration of shadow, and the transmutation of the conditioned self through the luminous power of consciousness. This kind of bliss is not reliant on external circumstances or the absence of pain or suffering, its subtle and pervasive nature shines through all of experience and brings levity and joy to the attuned being, which in turn allows for even more expansion into being and blissfulness.

For healing more of my MISPERCEPTIONS and ATTACHMENTS to one of my parents, moving me from the toxicity of neediness and resentment towards compassionate detachment.

For DEARMORING me and teaching me to feel more and cultivate useful skills in navigating life from a more open and vulnerable state by deepening my trust and Self-leadership.

For guiding me to expand into PLAYFULNESS and release limiting thinking and self censorship.

For teaching me to RELATE and LOVE in a new way by gifting me with deeply meaningful and expansive explorative experiences with evolutionary minded Souls. Allowing me to get intimate with all aspects of myself and become clear on what I truly need, want, and desire in relationships and how to manifest it, whilst reminding me to beware of settling for ‘less than’ my being desires.

For giving me the realization that I no longer turn to LOVE RELATIONSHIPS as a panacea for a deficit of love, as that has been taken care of by self and tribe love, but to co-create evolutionary containers for shared magical and extraordinary adventures.

For making me conscious of the unconscious AMBIVALENCE towards men that steeped relating with them into a dualistic dynamic of desire/delight on the one hand and fear/repulsion on the other.

For teaching me about the importance of an internal felt sense of EQUALITY, POWER, and ADMIRATION in love relationships.

For giving me opportunities to practice OPENING FULLY to a man and surrendering to the experience of relating with trust. And also reminding me that having an attraction, great connection, or feelings of love for someone doesn’t imply a need for turning it into a committed relationship.

For helping me remember, reclaim, and update old DREAMS and aspects of my being.

For inspiring me to create a new VISION BOARD from a knowing of wholeness and understanding of what fulfills and grows me instead of the distortions of desires and unconscious scarcity beliefs.

For giving me an opportunity to actively and PHYSICALLY CHANGE what doesn’t align with or serve me, which was unbelievable rewarding and important at this point of my journey. After years of having been taught to be patient and trust the unfolding without physically intervening this felt especially liberating and delightful.

For reminding me what great delight and pride I take in the WORK OF MY OWN HANDS and that it is way sweeter than enjoying the luxury of having someone else take care of stuff for me. And that no matter how tired, sore or exhausted I felt my little bull’s heart was aglow with glee.

For giving me ample opportunities to be sensing, experiencing and seeing the vastness of my STRENGTH, DISCIPLINE, and PERSISTENCE in expression and enjoy how amazing it feels.

For allowing me to discard things, which my mother had held onto without my consent or knowing, and which kept unwanted energetic cords alive with past aspects of my life. And for the delight that followed said DISCARDING as rushes of energy returned to my body and being.

For granting me the knowing that every part of me and the ego mind which operates on adversarial perceptions and narratives becomes a SLAVE to duality.

For teaching me that mastering DUALITY does not mean directing or dominating it but rather knowing its true nature and engaging it from consciousness without submitting to identifications, attachments, and dogma.

MASTERY in the mystical sense is not about domination, as that is beholden to fear not love, it is about being ONE WITH duality and playing with its seeming contrasts in creative, joyful, aligned and expansive ways. Seeing through its appearance of duality and contrast to perceive the underlying oneness.

For teaching me about the need and joy of living from ALERT PRESENCE. Not an alertness in the sense of vigilance (which is mostly rooted in fear) but alertness arising from being fully present, open and in harmonic resonance with the rhythm and flow of life.

For giving me the realization that these times call me to be with WHAT IS without getting entangled or invited into shadow play by narratives and stories wanting to wrap themselves around it. They call for my ability to stand strong in my discerning sovereignty and Self while engaging with the moment from curiosity, playfulness, compassion and love. To be CONCURRENTLY SEPARATE and ONE WITH ALL.

Teaching me to no longer allow my mind/body to be pulled in false dichotomies, meet dualities with a knowing and intent of ‘both/and’ to break the spells of limitations and distortion, and to allow Consciousness to offer new perspectives and pathways to INFINITE POSSIBILITIES from the vastness of its wisdom. New perspectives and solutions which not only help me navigate the challenges set before me but also to thrive and delight in engaging with them.

For sensitizing me to the fact that due to my experience of spiritual trauma and entrainment of a narcissistic God, I have to be mindful that the deep-set distrust and ambivalence towards said deity does not CROSS CONTAMINATE subconsciously my relationship with inner Presence (higher Self) or Source.

For teaching me to reclaim and step into my INNOCENCE and access the immense power and spaciousness it comes with as I consistently love on my inner child.

For challenging me to get past linguistic obstacles and learn to express VULNERABILITY as easily in German as I have learned to do in English. Helping me drop some of the unhelpful cultural conditionings and reigniting my love for the poetry and richness of the German language.

For bringing back old and new MALE FRIENDS into my life and teaching us to relate on higher levels of awareness, authenticity, vulnerability, compassion and love. I appreciate and welcome the replacement of friendships lost in years back and the upping of masculine energy in my circles. Acknowledging the fulfillment of longheld wish.

For ending on a gift and high note, which give me a knowing and positive outlook on 2022’s oncoming magic and gifts.

Photography: Chelsea Jackson Roberts by Francesco Mastalia

The post Thank You 2021 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.

Maybe the strange experiences of the past months served to show me that I had kept loving you way more than any of my other ex partners? Whatever the reasons might be, something about us had remained unfinished until you closed it out now.

But with you I am deeply passionately,         unrequitedly in love.                                                       ~ Virginia Woolf

And as I read this quote today I realized I am finally OK to still be feeling this way as I walk away.

I wonder why it was so hard to simply acknowledge this and move on for the past weeks?

What part of me wanted me immersed in confusion and despair every time someone rejected my offer of love, be it in friendship or more?

Thanks to you I have learned to make peace with the transience of relationships and connections and release more of the expectation of continuity and permanence.

Thanks to you I have had the opportunity to release more of the pain of my original experience of abandonment and rejection. The way you have been triggering this repeatedly makes me believe this to be one of the main functions of our connection: helping me heal my core wounds.

Thanks to you I have observed my reactivities and have clarity on where my self work needs to focus to free myself from this old script.

Thanks to you I had an opportunity to practice loving another in sovereignty, freedom and with compassion even if it challenges and pains my egoic aspects.

Thanks to you I have been able to balance my Karma by paying some of my debts.

Thanks to you I have experienced again the intensity and vastness of my love as I gave what you rejected to myself. And I realized, again, that it is more than enough to be loved by myself. The love that abundantly surrounds us in life is an overflowing surplus assuring the absence of lack.

Thank you for redirecting me towards my dreams, goals and teaching me to stay mindful of my needs and wants when relating.

As I reflect upon the experience of the past months I cannot help but laugh at the silly games we play with ourselves and others. What a strangely hilarious note to end my year on.

And, though I initially felt confused and pained by your silence and coldness, I bid you farewell with nothing but feelings of gratitude and joy, my darling catalyst. Every encounter and exchange with you has made me stronger and helped me become a better version of myself. In our early days the lessons came in light while in the end they came in darkness. A perfect dark yin void to our golden yang beginnings.

Thank you for the blessings and gifts you brought to my life. I hope you are rewarded generously with bliss and contentment.

With my best wishes, love and blessings!

Photography: Unknown

The post Beloved Catalyst appeared first on Venuskind.

“Forgiveness does not create a relationship. Unless people speak the truth about what they have done and change their mind and behavior, a relationship of trust is not possible. When you forgive someone you certainly release them from judgment, but without true change, no real relationship can be established.”                           ~ William P. Young

I am grateful for stumbling on the above quote because it opened the floodgates of what has been wordlessly percolating within me for weeks and finally allowed me to form words where there were mainly sensations and feelings.

Someone I loved fell short of love and acted in way that was hurtful and unacceptable to my being. Though I forgave them I chose to distance myself and later to embrace their choice of a cessation of our contact. 

Knowing that emotionally triggering situations can cloud my discernment as the ego is quite versed in using all sorts of wiles to make its unloving nonsense appear like a loving choice… I wondered if I had truly forgiven them or was unconsciously acting from old woundings.

On deeper inquiry I felt that I wasn’t acting from feeling hurt or ego but couldn’t make sense of the seemingly abrupt decision to end the connection with such finality.

Reading the words “When you forgive someone you certainly release them from judgment, but without true change, no real relationship can be established” ripped the veils of confusion: I had forgiven them yet I knew there was no true change and no hope of such change in a near future.

When another neither feels, senses, knows or is capable of reflecting what their wrongdoing was there is no realistic hope for change. And the last incident was merely the last straw that broke the camels back, I had experienced several confusing expressions of their limitations… the moment they made their issues not only into a passive aggressive jibe on social media but an elaborated exhibition of lachrymosity across several public posts I was thoroughly disabused of my predominantly positive perceptions of them.

There was no relationship of trust left. 

I do not choose to trust people who assign responsibility for their own feelings to others, I do not choose to  trust people who disrespect the privacy of our relating by posting about it publicly. 

Attempting to shame me by tagging me on said posts isn’t loving in my book either. That kind of emotional blackmail hasn’t worked on me for the past two decades. More malicious and expert players at this game have taught me too early and well to make me fall for this trap any longer.

“Forgiving you is my gift to you.                                                                    Moving on is my gift to myself.”                                                                    ~ Unknown

I harbor no resentment towards them, there is compassion and understanding in my heart for them as well as a crystal clear knowing they are not my kind of person after all. Which was disappointing and disillusioning but also insightful and eventually freeing. 

There are things I would do differently now thanks to the experiences I had. This shall inform future connections and other relationships and further gentle my responses with compassion even when they trigger core wounds.

I am grateful for the experiences I shared with them, the magic and beauty of connection, the catalytic effects I had on them and the lessons they taught me. In my mind our karmic contract has been fulfilled and paid in full. I wish them well wherever their path leads them. And I hope we are granted the grace of not crossing paths anymore unless our vibrations are truly aligned.

Integrity is one of my core values, therefore I am glad that I have been gentle and loving with myself while also vigilant that I do not entrap myself in darkness. 

As in all of life’s twists and turns, I remain a grateful, messy, learning, loving and playful work in progress.

Photography: Unknown

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