Sex and HeartHow I transformed devastation into love and loving lust

It’s possible to be a good person and not love yourself. Not loving yourself doesn’t make you evil, troubled maybe but not necessarily bad.

But doesn’t this sound limiting? Yet loving yourself for most of us is not an easy thing to achieve.

Since many of us were made to feel unworthy or undeserving at tender ages, as in we were maybe abused, physically, emotionally, or both, or we were neglected or ignored, the message received would have been the same whichever scenario you experienced.

“I must not be lovable.” or “I must be a bad person.” or “If I was (any number of things which I will leave to your imagination and the memories of your past) my parents would love me take care of, cherish me.”

You would surely have tried to gain their love, and certainly you would have thought that maybe if I try harder to be good or if I do more chores or if I do better at school or whatever it was, then they will love me. And your efforts mostly if not always proved fruitless, didn’t they? But you kept on trying, didn’t you?

And you carried this with you through your younger years and on into adulthood. You may have come to know intellectually that you are as deserving of love as anyone. Yet you don’t own this, not completely. You still carry levels of self-loathing. You still “beat yourself up” over small things, big things, anything. You still treat yourself badly sometimes, maybe by not taking care of your health through poor eating, exercise, or sleeping habits or telling yourself nasty things such as “you’re ugly or stupid”.

Changing these patterns is difficult, especially if you never knew love during the critical years of early childhood. Your caregivers’ love maybe was there somewhere, but it was too deeply hidden in the deep and wounded recesses of their own hearts, so it felt as if not there to you.

Learning to love yourself when you don’t really know love is a challenge, but it’s a doable one. IF you want it. It’s as important maybe more so if you want to then continue on to have a special someone with whom to share this love. Look at this in another way; if you don’t love yourself, how can another person love you?

First of all to cheat yourself of yourself sounds so sad. Even if you can love yourself a little bit, this makes all the difference. You can build on this. It may ebb and flow, but if some sort of spark of self-love is there smoldering, love CAN grow between two people, as it blooms for yourself.

And every time you love on yourself and/or have good thoughts about yourself, this registers in you, in your brain, in your body, and in your heart. And this is how you rewire neural connections. This is how to grow love for YOU. And loving yourself makes room for another to love you. The more you learn to love YOU, the more they can love you too.

This is a hard one though, as I said, especially in the early stages or for those who come from a dearth of love backgrounds. We have to train ourselves not to be expecting the other shoe to drop at any moment. We have to teach ourselves over and over again to revel instead of wallow.

And each time you feel the tentative feelings of joy disrupted, your beautiful feeling cocoon you have created burst, as in someone says something to throw you or is abrupt with you or slights you whether it’s misperceived or not, yes you will feel awful for awhile, but it’s not the end. You can overcome.

You will have to tell yourself each time and maybe for always that this person’s reaction or outburst has NOTHING to do with you. NOTHING. And you can still love yourself despite what goes on around you.

AND each time you are able to reconnect to your good or better feeling feelings in a positive way, the more solid and secure you will feel within. So every time something or someone attempts or succeeds in upsetting this, the easier it will be to NOT let them affect you at all or at least allow you to re-establish the good feelings more quickly. You won’t feel as if tossed into a pit.

Everything you do in your life is your choice, even if it doesn’t seem like it, even if it seems out of your control. You have the choice to change. It may not feel comfortable getting to where it is you want to go, but that again is your choice. Do you want to go through a phase where you are out of your comfort zone to feel good, or would you rather stay where you are within your self-created illusion of safety and not feel so good as an example.

You have the choice here to love yourself in each and every moment, and this may feel unbelievably scary to you, for the thought of changing these deep feeling thought patterns around this can be terrifying even if it’s something you desire. Yet the choice is there. What are you willing to live with? For now? For later?

At some point it will have to feel so bad for you that you will feel at the end of your rope, and you WILL refuse to tolerate it anymore. Then you will take your first steps.

Learning to love and adore myself is something I have danced with and around most of my life. It’s not been an easy lesson to learn to say the least. And quite honestly I still struggle with it at times.

Let’s say for example I feel bad. Maybe I’ve been feeling bad a lot of the time. I ask myself if this is habit. Yes it is, yet it’s also part of my original programming. Do I want to feel good or at least better? Of course, but still I feel bad. And I just can’t seem to pull out of it.

Yes it could be hormones at play, BUT bottom line it is MY choice to feel good, so when I feel stuck, I can swim about in my moaning how this isn’t the way I want it; that isn’t right; this feels bad; I feel inadequate, BUT I can also look around and see how much wonderfulness I do have, how hard I have worked to create much of this wonderfulness, and I can choose to take pleasure in that instead. If I made that choice, I would instantly feel better, if only a little.

Feelings come and go all day long, all life long. One thing you can count on is that they will move and shift. You CAN choose to have those feelings come from love.

You deserve to feel your own love. It’s good. It’s beautiful. Enjoy it as much as you are able in this moment, in every moment. You can learn to love you more and more, SO much even and all of you, even the parts you may not like so much. They’ll love you back soon enough.

So love on yourself tonight. Love on yourself all day, every day. Be it kind words. Or a smile to yourself as you pass a mirror. Or maybe blow yourself kisses. Or take a hot bubble bath or shower. Or self-pleasure. Or anything that makes you feel warm and safe and LOVED.

xxoo

This question has come up often enough that I feel it needs addressing. How long does it take to heal?

Clearly everyone is different. We all have different issues and degrees and depths of issues to heal, our hurts, traumas, fears. Within these areas of healing, each one of us has varying levels of tolerance to the pain that will arise and the courage and resilience to work through the pain which healing entails.

This question is not an easy one; in fact it’s an impossible one to answer, but what I can let you in on is what to expect while you work through your issues, as you walk your healing path though anything I posit may NEVER come to be for YOU, or you may experience each and every one I detail and then some, things I haven’t anticipated.

First of all whatever you feel and whenever you feel it is perfectly NORMAL. You will never be alone in your feelings. There will always be someone or many someones out there who feel just as you do. So you can at least put aside any notion that you are weird, different, or broken in any way.

As you walk, skip, jump, or run about on your journey, you may wonder at times if you are changing at all. Sometimes you will feel sure you’re not, as in you are stuck in the mud and muck that is your maybe your lot in life, as in you will feel like this, icky, low, depressed, forever.

But there will be other times you will be just as sure you are moving forward, as in everything looks a little brighter and smilier, so shiny and beautiful, rainbow colored, YES!!!

Yet there will be other  times you’re just not sure of anything at all. Any and all of this is NORMAL.

You may feel so lost at times.

You may feel like you don’t understand any of it, you, your partner, nothing at all. This too is NORMAL.

You may wonder if you are doing it the right way. There is no right way. Whichever way you do it, whichever road you choose or find yourself on is right for you, for YOU. Whatever works for you even if only a little is right for YOU.

You may at times wonder if it’s even possible for you to change at all. Are your issues maybe too deeply ingrained? Do you have what it takes, the perseverance, the fortitude, the ability? Is it too late for you? Are you a hopeless case? My answer to all of these questions and any others like them is this; if you have the desire, even if it’s just a hint, if you can imagine it, even if it’s just a wisp of an image, then you CAN do this.

The only way through the sometimes very dark tunnels is to go through them. Sooner or later there will be light. The farther down the path you walk, the shorter will be those tunnels and the sooner will there be rays of sunshine, for the most part.

However big or small your steps may feel, they are huge simply because you are doing this work on yourself at all. It will feel sometimes that you haven’t gone anywhere at all, backwards even, but that’s just not possible.

Once this journey has been embarked upon, the journey will continue, sometimes seemingly without your consent or approval. It can feel at times as if it has a life of its own.

AND you can’t fall into old patterns because you will know it, feel it immediately, and you WILL stop yourself before you continue into the once familiar pattern. You won’t be able to do it any other way anymore. And in time the old familiar will feel totally foreign, and the new familiar will feel like just that, familiar if not comfortable, at least once in awhile.

You may feel like you’ll never get there. Well this part is true. Where is there anyway? BUT you will eventually feel a nicer flow, a more relaxed feeling around most things. Things, life will just feel easier. Your heart will feel more open and loving and receiving of love. And really what else is there?

So how long your personal journey will take to where you feel as though you’ve come to that “somewhere”, a better feeling place, a more peaceful state? This is undetermined. It may take a short amount of time, or it may feel like forever. However it plays out for you, know this, this journey is a lifelong process/proposition.

So the short answer, really the only answer to the question, “how long?”, is that there is no definitive answer to this question.

It will be what it is for YOU. And please sink into it all, every icky feeling and every wonderful feeling and everything in between. The deeper you can sink, the sooner will you heal.

xxoo

Have you ever woken up one morning feeling as if the world is pressing down so hard on you that you feel as though you may very well crumble and break into pieces? Negative or “bad” thoughts swirl ceaselessly in your brain making you feel as if you are losing your mind?

Or maybe you feel as if you want to give up? You may yearn to crawl back into bed, pull the covers over you and sleep all day, all week, forever.

Has the sadness taken over, overwhelming you to the point that you feel as though you will sink so far down you may drown in the sorrow? You may feel as though you are falling into a bottomless pit.

And have these feelings seemed to come from nowhere in particular? As in nothing special or notable happened to cause them?

You feel so awful. You feel as though you are being crushed. Or you feel as though you are melting. The tears are at the ready, about to fall at any moment. Maybe they do. Maybe they flow like a river, streaming down your cheeks. Your hearts aches. Your body may hurt too. You just feel SO awful. And you don’t know why.

There seems to be no reason for this. Your life is mostly wonderful or at least good. Maybe you have a man who loves and adores you. Maybe you have a successful career or at least one that fulfills you if not compensates you nicely. Maybe your life is mostly filled with things you like to do and are passionate about even. Things aren’t perfect, but there’s no such thing anyway.

You “should” feel happy, ecstatic even, but you don’t. And to add to these tear filled feelings, you feel guilty for feeling like this. You have a lot. You have more than so many. You know there should be NO shoulds in your life. There is nothing you should do. Yet you feel you shouldn’t feel this way.

But still you have woken up on this day feeling so bad. And you wonder what this is. And you ask yourself what you can do abut this.

Why is trickier, yet it’s not really. This journey you are on is a process. Yes? So as you walk along your path, there will be shifts, changes, letting gos, releases. Each time this happens, something unlocks inside, and what was in there will come spewing forth. And sometimes, like this time, it’s especially icky.

Usually it’s old stuff. Past hurts, ancient pains, old traumas. You have in essence opened up a relief valve, and all that has been living beneath this stopper wants to come out. And it can feel REALLY awful. In a sense you are re-feeling what once was. This is far different than re-living an experience. You will likely have no specific memories.

For example I carry areas of tightness in certain places in my body. These are all areas into which I stored my pain. I have over time become acutely aware of these places to the point of at times extreme frustration and anxiety because I feel them, every one of them, and they don’t feel nice, and they don’t seem to want to let go, or maybe they’re not ready, and they are in my way, keep me from feeling love, and I feel SO frustrated.

They don’t seem to leave me alone, won’t seem to set me free. I work at them, and I work at them. I’m kind to them. I try to embrace them, love them, but they hang on to me like what feels to me the strongest crazy glue yet to be created.

Oh yes sometimes I get respite, but far too soon the holdings come back or shift to another place. Yet when I’m calm and being honest, I can recognize that over time, bit by bit, they have been releasing. If I look back with open eyes and my heart as wide as I can manage, I can see and feel this. I do know that the more persistent ones carry my deepest fears, and this is what remains. This is what I still feel.

Sometimes it seems as though when there is finally a tiny shimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, I become almost more anxious and impatient, for I want it NOW. Yet on the other hand there may also be a fear of being free of the familiar even though it feels bad. Still it’s a known factor which may be why some of the tightness comes back, albeit to a lesser degree. It can be a nasty tug of war in a way.

I really, really want to be love, live as love, feel only love, but then what will that be like? Will it hurt more? Such extreme vulnerability. The unknown can be VERY scary. Still I really, really want this. I do.

The desire for freedom and peace is FAR stronger than the fear of something new. And one day, as in this morning when I feel life suffocating me in despair, one of the last tenuous threads that’s been in the way teases itself away from its mooring. Some of the way? All of the way? It remains to be seen or felt. This latest one is in the muscles behind my heart. As it strains to relinquish its hold, it feels as though a dam is breaking, and I am flooded with an ache so deep, so profound. I feel as though it’s going to push me beneath this onslaught of feeling.

Old “bad” thoughts surface, familiar yet at this point of my journey no longer comfortable in its familiarity. Old insecurities, old fears rush to the fore. My heart is literally at stake.

I instinctively want to fight these bad feeling feelings, but I know better, so instead I do all I can to welcome all of this because I know what’s happening to me. I know that this is an amazing opportunity for further growth, deeper releasing. It’s hard to go against what comes naturally, but I sink into these feelings as much as I can anyway.

The only way through this is to feel every awful feeling feeling that’s coming up so it can then pass through me and become something else, something much better feeling.

I know that this spell will pass, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for weeks (oh please not weeks this time; it’s so hard when it takes a longer time). But when I do come through to the other side, my heart will be even more free and open to love and to receive love. I will feel good, awesome even.

And this is how the journey to your heart and your soul, your very essence works. It can test you to your very limits, yet it will bring you rewards, joy, bliss you can maybe imagine but not really “get” until you feel it. I can do this. I want to do this. You?

xxoo

Committed love What is it? What does it look like? How does it play out in the real world?

My definition of committed love looks like this.  It means I want to be with you and only you, body, mind, heart, and soul. I adore you and cherish you.

I am passionate about you, can’t imagine being with anyone but you.

I love being with you even if we’re doing nothing, just BEING together.

I am whole onto myself, yet you fill me up even more, take me to places I can only touch on alone. You don’t complete me, but you make me feel bigger, more expansive than I do alone. We feel great by ourselves and even better together.

I love you and want you more every day, nearby me, inside my body, inside my heart. I feel more at ease and comfortable, more ME the more we are together, separate yet as one. You bring out the best in me in all ways.

And this kind of commitment isn’t necessarily voiced aloud, yet the understanding of it is so profound. There is no question in either person’s mind, no words needed even though they may slip out now and then or more often. I have come to prefer the randomness and spontaneity of the occasional. The words never carry lost or diminished meaning this way.

Yes it does feel really good to hear, yet the actions say so much more, in the open, welcoming, glowing eyes, a safely comforting embrace, the warm, accepting, enveloping heart, through passionate lovemaking. Committed love is not calculated. It just is.

The deeply intimate bond I speak of rarely if ever happens without having been together for a while, years even, that place you can only get to with time, as your energies and spirits intertwine and feel almost as familiar as yourself.

This kind of love goes way beyond lust though lust definitely still factors in. It’s when you know each other so well, there are no more surprises, yet each moment together is a surprise, a happy one even in the midst of challenge or turmoil. Each minute a delight even if there’s pain. Each hour soul filling even if there’s a feeling of disconnect. For even when you feel a distance, there is an energetic cord between you, invisible yet tangible which cannot be broken.

It’s not a question of forsaking all others. The others don’t even figure into the picture. We may or may not recognize there are others, “appealing” others even, but they are passing images in the periphery. We don’t want them. We only want each other.

When two people are deeply connected in love and passion, it’s not that there’s no one else in the world. Yes we notice attractive people, BUT we are not attracted. Yes there may a little buzz of arousal, BUT there is no desire for that person.

And yes we have friends, dear ones, deeply loving ones, but it’s a different feeling, fulfilling in another way altogether.

It is often said that over time love becomes predictable, but I have to say my heart flutters more now when K walks in the door at night than it ever did in the beginning, and the joy emanating clearly from his eyes and through his smile, love radiating from him when he sees me tells me he feels the same.

Sex is never boring, people are. A little creativity and imagination go a long way. Relationships never grow stale, people do. None of this is hard work. It feels easy. The work on self is the challenging bit, difficult at times, painful, but the bond between us is our anchor, our source of respite, home. This is true love. This is committed true love.

xxoo

Uprooting old stuff, bad habits that no longer serve you, your protections, your walls which are no longer needed is like cutting out a questionably healthy or outright diseased body part. It HURTS.

You can experience physical aches. You can have painful memories. You can struggle with resistance. You can feel all kinds of uncomfortable things coming to the surface.

It’s kind of like releasing the cork on a bottle of brew that has been building up and building up, creating pressure, and then you let it go. It can all spew out. Or it can come out in spurts depending on how quickly you take off the lid. More slowly is best by the way, for it gives you time to integrate, minimizes messy clean up.

It can also feel like you’re tearing away and discarding a close friend, for those coping mechanisms have been good to you for a long time, kept you safe in a way. They did help you manage difficult situations.

But now they’re in your way. They are interfering with your movement forward. They are impeding you, keeping you from having what you really want.

You may very well suffer a sense of separation anxiety and fear as you work at letting this all go. Your old self is being replaced with an unknown, and unknowns can be exciting but also very scary.

And really you aren’t discarding the “old” you or rather the parts of you that you took on over the years and want to change. It’s more like you are absorbing them into your being but not so close by, kind of like leaving an imprint in your long term memory brain cells.

It will feel good to tell them thank you for taking care of you when you needed them, but then you must ask them to leave you be, be quiet, and go sit somewhere else. You are not banishing them entirely. You are just moving them to a farther away location in your body. When and if they do come to visit, you can give them a big smile, hug them even, and then you can remind them they don’t live here anymore. bye bye.

And now you have made room for and can allow the new parts of you or rather the deeply buried parts of you that wish to emerge and make you feel better and have the life you wish for. Does this make sense?

So the desire to grow is now stronger than the fear of releasing or of uncharted waters. You want to tug at that maybe stubbornly stuck bottle stopper. And so the journey begins.

You will feel like you’re being tested to your limits sometimes. You will feel really tired sometimes. You may feel like giving up sometimes. You may despair at your ability to do this, BUT if you have this desire and you can remain determined, you will be able to override thoughts such as these.

When anxiety sets in, do your best to let all of those busy, looping thoughts go. Know that as much as you worry, things NEVER turn out as badly as you might imagine. In fact most of the time they will never come to be at all.

It’s a change of mindset, and this alone will help the process quite a bit. What I mean is that when you are anticipating negative sorts of things, you will tend to get what you anticipate, or at least worry yourself needlessly. In other words when you prepare for the worst, the worst is more likely to happen. Though I could argue that there are no “bad” experiences, only opportunities for growth.

Imagining the best will tend to bring you the best, or at least take a huge edge off of anything that does happen that could be perceived as negative. When you have your mind set to more of the good thoughts and not so much expecting the best but just knowing it will be there, the best is what you will attract.

Try telling yourself this any time something that feels not so good comes about: “This is not such a big deal. This is great. This is exciting even. I am getting the opportunity to work with and release more things inside so that I can have a fuller, richer life. Not many people get this chance or even recognize it’s a possibility. I am SO lucky.”

Anticipate how good you will feel as you let go of things bit by bit. Feel how this might feel. Imagine it if you can’t really feel it. It will shift your feelings around many things.

For example, my body became distorted due to physical traumas and reinforced by emotional ones. I’ve been working very hard to restructure my entire skeletal construct even though I’ve been told this is impossible. But I knew I could change anything if I set my mind to it. It’s bone and muscle after all. Change the muscles, and the bones will shift. Shift the emotions, the body will change.

And I have proved “them” wrong. It has been difficult, physically painful, and as the trapped emotions are released, emotionally sometimes really awful feeling. It takes constant vigilance (this is where determination is helpful, but it can also feel like a curse at times, crazy making) to change how I sit, stand, lay down even, how I move. It takes perpetual attention to where and how I hold tension. It’s a constant push pull throughout the day.

For a long time, most of the time I felt physically uncomfortable, sometimes pain, not easy in my body which can greatly affect mood. I can still experience this though it’s greatly diminished. And it can be enormously frustrating, but I know what I want, and I just know some day this too will go away altogether.

And I can recognize the huge progress I have made. I have changed not only how I look but how I feel and it’s been SO MUCH over the years and all in good ways. My body has opened. My heart has opened right along with. Yes I still feel discomfort which tells me there’s just more to work on, on all levels.

My point is this. When I am struck with say more pain than has been or spasming in muscles I’ve been working to release, along with any accompanying bad feelings, anxiety, irritation, frustration, anger, sadness, I don’t tell myself, “Again? Oh no. I can’t take it.” Instead I smile as authentically as I can and welcome all of it, for I know that something big is releasing and bringing me ever closer to where I wish to go. And this comes naturally now. I don’t have to force it anymore.

Yes there are times when I feel overwhelmed. Or I feel there’s seemingly no light at the end of this tunnel this time. Or I just feel really cranky about it all, but it ALWAYS passes.

Once you’ve taken steps towards healing it’s just not possible to give up no matter how difficult it feels sometimes. Whenever I felt I couldn’t take anymore, that the spell of feeling icky I was in had gone on for just too long, suddenly the clouds would clear, and I would get respite. And it’s these periods of respite that will keep you going through the darker feeling times. And soon you will find these sunny spells lengthening, becoming bigger and brighter all the time.

xxoo