25/04/2024
Being with my deepest feelings requires courage.
When I am brave enough to face the emotions I hold inside, especially the hard, ugly ones, the ones I don’t want to look at, I reclaim myself and my right to be here now.
The more I unearth the parts of the full range of my experience and connect those inner dots, the more I validate and honor every particle of myself.
The more of me I feel, the more of me I heal. The more I open to bliss and pleasure.
To hold myself authentically is the purest form of intimacy - the highest reclamation of worth and a radical act of love.
As my eyes clear from the tears and my shoulders unwind tension, my hips deactivate their contractions until I shake out my anger, until the cruelty blasts out of me.
Eventually things come back into balance, percolating trust once again.
It is a choice to follow a cycle through to completion. There are many, the process unending. And often it is not easy.
It is not always possible and I am not always willing.
To face the fiery dragons, is to lean into distrust and despair, to understand why they are there. It is also to re-discover self honor and sincerity, kindness and courage.
To swim within the cold waves of fear, is to discover hidden desperation and self-hatred, pounding the gut, struggling to be seen, contracting, and crumbling ideas until they start releasing.
Yet on the other side of intensity, there is nothing like it to feel the calm knowing within and to have the ability to generate boundaries.
To deepen with your beloved self, requires effort and patience and the utmost of courage and resilience. Only then can a true ‘other’ be revealed.
For how can one possibly hope to be fully held and understood by another, to deepen in any form of intimacy, without first doing so with themselves?
Reclaiming my self deceptions, results in feeling, in feeling entrenched experience and the emotions that come with it until finally I am ready to move forward into fresh portals of new understanding.
It is not easy to reclaim myself and my right to be fully here, especially since my pattern has been to accept the blame and all the shame that comes with it. It is not easy, with my many years, many injuries and many failures, to turn things around. But walk forward I do, for this is my decision to keep moving through into my truth, as long and as much as I have left in me.
Being with the inside. The truth, however long it takes to find me, is what I request of myself and offer those who choose this path alongside me. It is also what I ask for in return.
Imagine what a world we could have if we each strive with such intention.
Words by Avoline Braley
Picture Avoline Braley
