Fighting for the freedom of others?

Can I start off (once again) by naming our ongoing and very much continuing and collective… heaviness right now?  

I’m not even sure if heaviness is the right wording here? But that energy zapping, demotivating, deliberating and ongoing fatigue of it all…

And perhaps one single word cannot truly encapsulate all that we continue to experience and really why should it?  

Seriously though this concept that we should be able to package everything up and place a label on it surely derives from the supremacy of whiteness and all of its sister systems?

I found this episode from Onbeing very thoughtful and tender.  It reminds us of what’s happening in our nervous systems as our internal world counteracts and very much reacts to our experiences of the external world.

Over the last twelve months I have really been looking at how we (and I include myself here), as a collective, continue to show up in this world.  

It has now officially been a year since the UK went into lockdown with at least 127,000 humans lost (& counting) and I am sitting here wondering why and when we got so desensitised to the loss of life? 

Real people with families and friends, jobs and homes, hobbies and wish lists, loves and hates but here we are talking about numbers…And I know it’s a lot and we must do what we need to, to remain conscious and present in our own lives but I think I am talking about the wider concept of grief, loss and pain.  

It’s not even that we don’t do it well it’s just that we have been conditioned to completely bypass it.  Something that the podcast touches on too.

But for me the constant questioning is around the absolute need to feel because it is ultimately what connects my humanity to yours?  To relish in your joys and to grieve in your losses is surely what sets us apart as a species?

If it feels like I am reiterating the same thing over and over again it’s probably because I am!  

I feel as though the issues are super complex but very much interconnected and overlapping.  It is the systems that continue to complicate and divide us.

Having the privilege to hold space for others on this journey and continuing on my own journey of curiosity and healing I realise that most of us are having similar levels of inner chatter going on.  Most, if not all, of us keep on getting pulled into this notion of more.  

More work, more production, more consumption, more creation, more knowledge, more things?  And I keep on wondering about this curious ‘more’.  The one that hounds me at night, wills me to turn on the laptop before I haven’t even had the chance to sit within myself…

I wonder why it is so fearful of me or you or any of us tapping into our inner wisdom?  I wonder who would hold the power then?   

I regularly invite ‘more’ in for a cuppa and a chat because ‘more’ really does like to butt in and disturb my peace and tranquillity.  Have you felt this too?

I deeply understand the urgency as much of the world and its people continue to suffer but I also must intentionally carve out and sustain a level of spaciousness.  This is the only way to make this sustainable and this means that it must be created from within.  For me or any of us to be capable to hold the multiple pains of not only our world but of our collective humanity it surely must start and end with us at its centre? 

I simply cannot talk about freedom, liberation and power if I do not feel that I am also worthy of these same truths.  

On turning 40

I know it sounds so cliché and I never really understood the concept of ‘life beginning at 40’ but here I am choosing to lean into the messy, painful but very gorgeous complexities of this thing we call life.  

The inner voice was totally like how super indulgent of you (with this pic!) but the truth is that I love the capture of this moment!  It’s all good to talk about the deconstruction & unlearning but the acceptance in real time of this truest version of myself that evolves with every walk I take, every smile I give, every word I write but every time I just gives myself permission to simply ‘be’…feels like home.

I am sharing some precious and personal words from the pages of my beloved journals on the weeks leading up to the big (normal) 4…0. They were originally in bullet points but really, I am the poet they told me that I could not be; unpolished, disjointed and very much a work in progress.

Take what lands for you oh precious one:

daily practice 

liberation for me is found in the deconstruction of the successes

it’s like my body understands the language required

like it’s been here before

but the mind…

the mind is the one that struggles

it acts as though it is travelling through to foreign shores

because perhaps it is?

Can you allow the lessons of this ongoing journey to infiltrate your being?

and if you are brave enough 

invite the next unknown in

because any concept of being behind in anything is wrapped up within the suffocation of such systems

Notice

and then notice again and again and again

how your body contorts to another’s pressure and dances freely when you are operating from the source

and in case you forgot you are in fact the source, my love.

So gift yourself your time

indulge in something new every day, the smaller the better, the more ordinary the better 

because this is it, right here, right now

This is your life.

And I beg of you please don’t compromise your softness.

Keep on loving fully

deeply, passionately & unapologetically…

and allow this same depth, this same energy so that you can also be fully loved

because all you ever needed was already within you.