Tied up and twisted, my heart has spent too many years
longing for a foundation that can steer my boat to safer shores.
All of the rebellion and the resistance
landed me in too many self-imposed hells.
Prisons with unlocked doors where unrequited relationships
masked a painful confusion undistinguished from reality.
Thrashing about in misery, I lashed out in defenses whenever the house
of cards I had haphazardly assembled came crashing down.
Or, gone, like the wind, I would simply stop showing up.
Deeply intuitive, I wasn't thriving
yet I was too embroiled within my own ego to respond from anything
other than emotional reactions.
A myopic lens lent me an inability to see the larger perspective.
"Place your hand on your chest," she commanded.
"What does your heart say?"
Pressed beyond the rationale and the reasoning,
encouraged to tread past the concepts and to leave the monkey mind behind,
"You can't think your way into this," they chimed in unison.
"Listen - what does your heart say?"
Supported within a warm cocoon of sisterhood and friendship,
they spun their magic around and around my ailing spirit.
"True alchemy is turning all of this shit into gold," they confided.
I desperately sought to maintain my masks but their reflections could not be ignored. With trepidation, I began peeling away at the layers. My voice shaking, I spoke of the ugliness of some of my truths. The resentment - a tough exterior where anger and apathy mix and mingle - that erects walls of judgment and criticism, as well as the inability to let go of the pain of the past, were suffocating my strong, unique beat.
"Listen," she said. "What's does your heart say?"
Plump tears fell from my dark eyes as a lost little girl emerged from my psyche. She's sad and she's hurt. She's deeply wounded. All she wants is to experience safety - to know the strong arms of a protective father and the compassionate love of a nurturing mother - but she doesn't and she can't. So, she hides. She crawls up and into the music and the movement, the stars and the sky. She shields her deep sensitivity - falling victim to the notion that vulnerability is a weakness - as she moves through the world desiring to see but not be seen. Ironically, she hypocritically performs while literally and metaphorically screaming, "See me! See me! See me!"
And they sit there, unfazed by the brazen brat and unmoved by her rage.
"Listen, what does your heart say?" they sing.
And she is shaken by this stirring, by the wise wisdom welling up from the
deep pits of the Earth. An ancient demonstration that the only way to reclaim one's true authenticity is to honestly give voice to the pain and the sadness that resides within. "A whole Be-ing fully acknowledges the depths of their shadow while allowing this space to be fully carved out - into a container large enough to hold the suffering of others."
"The deeper the shadow, the brighter the light."
Indeed.
