Heartbreak.
Um, wow.
Has there been anything else so volatile, so chaotic, so disruptively whole within your being? Alive.. intense.. dead. We can experience it all through heartbreak.
Something I've noticed though, is that our culture tends to associate heartbreak only with romantic relationships.
Rarely do we associate our past life memories, what our ancestry has gone through, our relationship to environmental degradation, or even a childhood variable with the root source of our internal pain. We tend to place it on something very external outside of us. When really, that external thing may have just been a trigger for detoxing deeper pain.
... Let's keep going.
Recently, I've consciously tapped into a part of my being that can only be described as intense loneliness.
Looking back though, I can see that in ways I've had this feeling for my whole life.
Not all of me, no ... a part of me is this bright sunny disposition that is just natural and flowing. Bubbly. It feels fun.
But then, there's this other part of me that feels a hole, an emptiness that aches for something outside of itself that will never come.
And beautifully enough, through the path of the priestess, I've come to foggily realize what this is. The memories are coming back.
Recently, I've recalled a past life trauma...
... Foggily detailed,
... Yet oddly accessible.
I kept seeing, for years in my minds eye, this little Irish, beautiful fishing settlement and Village, maybe what would be considered 2 or even 3 thousand years ago. And I just know it got burnt. Ravaged. All of it. And my family died. And the attack was blunt, and traumatic, and I was left without a family, and without a home, and without a village, all at once. I've seen this for years and years, but lately these obscure details and feelings from it have come into light.
Understandably, like everyone else whose grown up in this culture, every once in a while I have those 'Am I totally just making this up?' kind of moments. But more often than not, I just feel this knowingness inside of me, that yes, this is to be trusted. It is truth.
These visuals and the memory of this feeling (loneliness, gnawing) are the same I experienced after I first watched Tristan & Isolde when I was 14 or 15, (Starring babe of the century James Franco, might I add ;D ) when I watched an ancient Irish settlement being burned, and a boys whole family be killed. I walked out of the theatre absolutely numb to the tragedy I had just experienced in my soul, but completely besotted with it at the same time. It was intense. It took days to get over it, and yet, at the time, I thought it was just a really sad movie that I was oddly affected by. But now I know it actually mirrored a long buried past.
All of this inside of me, I found, as I explored this feeling, and the idea of heartbreak.
And since then, I've realized, I shouldn't beat this feeling up. This loneliness. This ache. Or ignore it for that matter. Whereas before I might say 'Why am I sad, I should stop being sad?'', I can now know that...
It has a cause.
A very real one.
And you realize that all this inside of you, is pretty cosmic.
Pretty powerful.
And to be treated with the utmost of respect.
So. Give yourself permission to love your shadows, because they are worthy of your love... And so are you.
Lots of love and Happy Solstice everyone,
Don't be afraid to feel it, whatever it is,
xo Beth