I lie on my side on the bed, wearing my new moccasins that my boyfriend has forbidden me to wear indoors, hugging my journal close to me as I write. The words that are spilling forth are hardly my own, instead, they are wiser, guiding me to an insight that will help this dull tightness in my chest fade away.
I want to complain. I want to scream “It isn’t fair!” and most of all I want to feel like it’s not all my fault. That’s why I pulled my journal out in the first place. To stew in my own self-pity. I feel a lot of emotions. I don’t have words or a comprehension of them.
Instead, what comes out is a deep appreciation of everything that I have and everything that has happened so far, as if by design. It’s slightly maddening to me that my highest self is always present with me when I write. I don’t get away with anything.
I have this feeling of being caged in. That my body, the space, the city, the country, the earth that I occupy is too small and I am wanting to crawl my way out. There’s this craving for space, more and more space. There’s never enough and yet when I open my eyes I look around and I know this is not true.
What is this liberation that I am seeking?
I remember a dream and write about it — about a medicine woman who asks me four questions — and how I awoke, left with an empty, liquid feeling in my womb, in the primal ground of creation, where the secret key to all things lies hidden.
I close my writing with a line that I often end with: Universe? Answers, please.
☽
I go to a hot Hatha yoga class. The woman teaching is my favourite in the studio: she has short curly hair and her voice is smooth and deep and solemn. I would place my entire life in her gentle hands, though I’ve never spoken to her, except at the end of class to say thank you.
She takes us through a difficult transition from triangle to one-sided squat to wide-legged forward fold and the grace she translates to our bodies through her words is beautiful. It’s rare that I feel so held in such a safe container by a woman.
As I slowly drive home, still yoga-stoned, I have a striking realisation. This feeling I have been having, of wanting to burst out of my own chest, is a kind of sadness. The liberation I am seeking is freedom from that feeling. I often have this unquenchable desire for limitless expansion when I am growing. As if the skin I live in isn’t big enough to encompass me anymore.
That’s what growth looks like, It’s a shedding of one’s skin, over and over again. When I signed up for growth and freedom being the markers by which I measure my life, I hadn’t appreciated how deeply I would have to face my own underworld.
☽
I get home and place a stale croissant in the oven and treat myself to a rare homemade coffee with almond milk. While the croissant warms up I walk around the house tidying. I make the bed, put the coffee table back in its place after my boyfriend moved it to rest his legs on. I tidy my desk which is covered with the tools of my creative trade: camera battery and led lights from recent filming, pens and watercolours and paintbrush, my two ‘to-do’ lists: one for short-term aims, the other for longer-term, and several pages of hand-written notes for the next free online workshop I am running.
I bring the warm croissant and coffee into my office and flip open my journal. I want to catch the awareness of the realisations I have had in yoga before they disappear again. I write little love-hearts next to key points:
♡ My therapist and a psychic have both told me that I need to heal my ancestral female lineage, and after several years of working through those lines I have realised that — no — what is left now, this is my stuff.
♡ I have held this deep wedge of mistrust towards women in my life, the story of which has played itself out exceptionally, in my experience with the women in my family. This, of course, leads people to assume that the lineage needs to be cleared. But when I lean into it with my intuition, what it looks like is a past-life experience, that feels like a sword being pushed through my heart — an unforgivable moment of betrayal — from one woman to another, me, in this case.
♡ This has caused me to create life experiences for myself where I never have to deeply lean into trusting another woman. I have held myself apart, almost aloof, in a subconscious effort to protect myself.
I allow myself to feel the fullness of this, the impact these choices have had in my life and how now that I know this, things may be different. Then I take myself through the clearing process that I teach in my brand new online class: Sovereign.
The rest of the afternoon I move between a floating sensation, exquisite spaciousness and utter relief. I integrate my transition into this new level of being and growth by writing a long email to one of my closest friends: a woman whom I love and admire for her ferocious devotion to only speaking the truth. She replies and tells me I did good. And to keep going.
It’s a strange thing, how I am often guided to teach exactly what I need in that moment, the most. It’s as if in its own completion the lesson becomes integrated and taught and learned all at the same time. Sovereign run this Friday, December 1.