For as long as I can remember i’ve been in love with love. I’ve searched and questioned and yearned and wanted to understand it since I was a tiny girl. When I was four I came to the understanding that as you grew, if you let it, love would turn you into a big warm hug. And if you didn’t let it in, you became a sharp corner no one wanted to bump into. Three decades on this insight still serves me well. The difference now is that i have had plenty of opportunities to make friends with my own sharp corners.
For countless years I searched for love, wanted to be loved, wanted to be cherished and all at the same time didn’t understand what vulnerability was required to actually become saturated with that juicy goodness.
The world in addition to the countless Disney movies I consumed taught me love was meant to feel good, if it didn’t feel good it wasn’t love. And love most definitely was an outside job. For love to be real it must come from someone or something outside my own shadow filled self. It must be profound, convenient and clearly labelled, these were the kinds of things that I believed made love real.
(For the record let me be clear here when i speak about love not always feeling good, I am in no way referring to any kind of violence. Violence, emotional, physical or any other kind is NEVER ok and absolutely NOT any part of love. It must not be tolerated, accepted or hidden. Ever. Ever.)
When I speak of the parts of love that don’t feel good what I am referring to is the willingness inside myself to move towards those aspects of myself I found and sometimes still find undesirable. You see it would have been highly convenient if the world or someone else could love those undesirable bits of me so i could feel good, accepted, valued, beautiful, enough. I wanted my worthiness to come from an external source. An external person. An external thing. (Addiction lives here). And although sometimes love can be reflected back to us by something outside of ourselves, it is only ever a signpost back to the truth of what is already in existence inside of us. Love is an inside job, any other version rarely lasts long.
Some of my demands were for someone to love and cherish me the way I deserved. And the shit storm started there. Because when someone does love and support you so entirely and you still feel unworthy, you have the opportunity to turn and face the truth, to run or to suffer. There is no where else to hide. If every external demand you have made has been met and you are still not happy, its time to face the music. The internal music. The song that never ends.
That’s what i call the hot seat. This hot seat is the invitation you have been waiting for your whole life. It’s your deepest yearning to get real and honest and messy so you can make friends with your own internal chaos. But more about that in my upcoming book.
What I can share with you now is this.
By turning towards all that petrified me about myself, by finding the courage to sit and make friends with my yucky icky undesirable shame filled bits, this divine man appeared in my life. And when he appeared I turned towards myself, and him.
He showed up and I let him in. In doing so I stood far beyond any confines of comfort I had ever known in my life. It hasn’t changed.
I vulnerably love with all my being and at the same time i know it is 100 percent guaranteed one of us will leave the other. That happens to everyone we know and love. We leave each other. We all eventually have to farewell this life. Our time is finite.
So when he pulls over in the car and wanders off into a paddock I wait. I sit, I weave and reflect. And when he appears back at the side of the car with these in his hands love leaks out my eyes. I see him. I love. I let that love in. It breaks me. And in my sacred brokenness my light floods out and touches the world.
My heart is willing to make friends with my sharp corners and from there I can be that big warm hug the world is desperate for.
I show up,
In love and service,
K xoxo
