PAIN, POST TRAUMA, EXPANSION, AND LOVING MY PARTS AS THEY MAKE ME WHOLE

Inevitably escaping from the direct horrors of my life, I’ve recognized how I’ve perpetuated those intense experiences in my mind even with time passing by. These wounds have been the shadows that invited circumstances in my life to eventually face them with a power and conviction from my soul in the today.

Back then, I use to have this secret desire that someone would come save me. Similarly, with the lovers in my life, I held this fantasy of a knight saving me from my pain and despair, also fulfilling my yearning to be loved profoundly.

Today, I have been the one to save me. Today, I have been the knight to love me and sweep me off my own feet. What I had been seeking I remembered was already within me.

The pain that kept me away from love, kept me from myself, was within me. I realized I was giving away my power and have reclaimed it.

Years ago, when I was attending this 12 step group called Survivors of Incest Anonymous, I had this epiphany. I was sitting there listening to the many who would say “Hi, I am so and so and I am a survivor of incest.” It was after many times of saying it myself aloud that I realized that I no longer wanted to identify as a survivor but chose to live from that moment on.

It’s a daily reminder to be present in my power and as I affirm this for myself I affirm that I no longer allow the past to weigh me down, nor do I empower the ghosts of the past to be present today.

The love of my life, my Luis, my soulmate, died 13 years ago. I recently revisited the pain his passing had caused me and saw where I made this subtle choice to shut down and affirm the idea that love is unsafe, scary, and not for me. I revisited this place within myself with the help of a dear friend and where I noticed my contraction I chose a different path for myself rewriting the program and story I told myself. Now, I am open to the pain. I lean into it. I hold space for it. Instead of contracting, I widen even more so to embrace this and the other parts of me that were scary and that are scary. I say yes to love, to life, to living. In reality, I’ve kept myself from myself and limited my potential. Now I say yes to embracing all of it, and all the sides of me me. The seen and unseen. The shadows, the fragments, the pieces that I thought were broken but now see them as parts of me to continue to embrace. It’s not easy but what’s easier, shutting down because of them or widening and embracing my bigness that can hold it all and continue to expand?

I know as part of my humanness and the experience of my journey in this life is to continue to unravel and unwind and embrace my wholeness.

The program I believed in no longer serves me and the me that I’d like to be that is bigger than I can imagine.