After a while you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand
and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
And company doesn’t mean security,
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
And presents aren’t promises,
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open,
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
And learn to build all your roads on today
Because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans,
And futures have a way of falling down in mid flight.

After a while you learn
That even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul,
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure…
That you really are strong
And you really do have worth
And you learn and you learn…
With every goodbye, you learn.

~ Veronica Shoffstall

We all grow up with countless narratives on the pain, devastation, and overwhelm we can feel after a break up. Countless movies, songs, and books have colored our collective consciousness for centuries and millennia.

With the commitment to my spiritual journey, ongoing practices as well as psycho-spiritual integration work the nature of break ups has slowly begun to shift for me.

Prior to that a break up would ‘shred my heart’ and trigger a ceaseless storm of emotions in my being which ranged from abandonment, unlovability, and grief to anger, disappointment, and at times even disgust. Months of my lifetime would be absorbed by this inner turmoil and diminish my inner fire and life energy. All of which neatly follows our collective expectations and conditioning.

With the beginning of my journey I realized that the duration of this state pretty quickly dropped from several months to weeks. And with the focus on self love and my relationship with Source and Self the intensity of above mentioned emotions began to lessen tangibly. In the moment of a break up the thought of it happening in service of my growth and wellbeing was more and more present. While my inner tribe told the wounded parts that the one who was leaving my life was making place for someone who would be better aligned and more loving.

But I know your heart belongs to someone you’ve yet to meet
And someday you will be loved

You’ll be loved, you’ll be loved like you never have known
The memories of me will seem more like bad dreams
Just a series of blurs like I never occurred
But someday you will be loved

~ Death Cab for Cutie, Someday You Will Be Loved

In all of these years past I thought it would become easier to navigate break ups and the pain they caused me but not once did I imagine it to be possible to experience a break up and not feel pain. Why did the possibility never cross my mind? Because the belief that parting is painful is very deeply entrained, so deeply that I could not even conceptualize a reality where pain is not part of the picture. Looking back it saddens me how blinded my mind was to this whole new range of experiences which opened up for me a year ago.

On reflection I feel it is a deepening in surrender to Self-leadership and Soul guidance as well as trust in the benevolence of Source and life which allowed this shift to express through my being. And addressing codependency and enmeshment patterns in myself released a lot of the unhealthy attachments to past pains and misbegotten beliefs, which were at the root of the pain and turmoil I felt whenever I broke up with someone or a friendship ended.

I find myself strongly rooted in the knowing that what is mine to have will not miss me or be taken from me and that all that can be taken or end was not mine to keep. My hands which used to be sticky and grasping in their unconscious service to enmeshment and codependency, have been cleaned and opened up by knowing and devotion, only lightly hold what is given to me. Always ready to let everything go when their time has come. Trusting that they shall be replaced with more beautiful and enchanting things, people, feelings, places, or beliefs.

Now a parting is colored by the overflowing of gratitude for the times we had, the beauty and joy co-created, and trust in the wisdom of consciousness which is leading us in different directions. Even if my human dislikes certain behaviors of the other in parting, she doesn’t linger on those but follows the lead of the heart into gratitude and the lead of spirit into the field of infinite possibilities opening at this point of parting.

My latest experience of a breakup felt eerily equanimous verging on joyful.

There were no feelings of loss, anger, or disappointment but feelings of awe for the beauty of the experiences had, the lessons learned, and gratitude. Gratitude that there is more that life has in store for me as I integrate the insights and lessons and that I do not have to settle for less than the dream which is alive in me.

Of course I am cognizant of the shortcomings in him and myself, as well as the aspects that render us incompatible, nonetheless my focus lies intentionally on what was great, special, or exceptional. I can appreciate the poet, and the joy of being loved in my own love language, the delight to delve into the bliss of presence with another. And I can see the aspects of myself that need healing and discipline in order to prevent them from overriding my integrity. My internal self work focus lies on the aspects of my being which enabled, attracted, and were meant to be illuminated by this experience in their need for balance and/or growth.

I woke the next morning with sunshine in my heart and being to a day filled with synchronicities, serendipity, and abundance of love. And that is how it remained. This is what it feels like to part ways when I am more fully integrated and aligned than I ever was: Easeful, grateful, compassionate, appreciative, loving, and light.

Who knows maybe this was available all along?
And maybe it is time to write new narratives about breakups?
It sure is for me.
So why not for you?

I am sure there are many beautiful experiences of breakups out there…
Please feel free to share yours and make them more visible and accessible as a seed of hope and change for others!

Photography by Unknown

The post Changing the Narrative on Break Ups 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

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