Here I am. No friends. No family. A job I don’t love. Alone in a country that is not my own, speaking a language that is not my native tongue.
Here, I tell myself, here is where I am meant to learn that if I can be ok, here, without all the things I am accustomed to, all the things that make me feel at ease, without a sense of belonging or place, without doing work that fills my soul, here, here is the place I am meant to begin my deep healing. Here is where I need to learn to cling to me. Here is where I need to learn that it is not anything outside of me that will create peace and wholeness within me. Everything is within me and here, here, I am seeing that for the truth that it is.
Yet that was just the beginning of the stripping away of my false self – the self I had created to accommodate friends, family, society’s customs, work – while those elements were no longer who I was while I was living in another country, there was more work that had to be done.
While there, my sole companion, my love, my best furry friend passed away. I was shattered. I thought I had already lost all of who I was. I was wrong. This was one of the most challenging losses of my life. Alone in a foreign country, no friends or family, with only my dog, and now he had been taken from me. I was devastated. I had made him my world to make up for all that was missing. Now all that remained was a huge hole in my heart. I was broken.
Yet, there was further down to go.
Upon my return to the US, I fell into a deep depression. I had been away for three years. I had changed. I wasn’t the same person I was three years ago. I once again felt like I didn’t belong. I did have my best friend, Emily, who had stayed in touch with me throughout my time abroad. She had been my rock through the trials and tribulations. Within eight months of returning to the US, Emily died six weeks after being diagnosed with acute leukemia. This must be some sort of sick joke, I thought. This time, however, I resisted the destruction that actually needed to happen. I threw myself into work, into dance class, into international travel. Little did I know that this neglect, this unwillingness to fully surrender to the tempest brewing in my soul would end up preventing me from fully healing.
I thought I was fine. I pulled myself together. I got support. But that isn’t what was needed. All of this had happened in order to rip apart the old me, the small me, the me that clung to some false sense of security. When I didn’t surrender to the destruction, I wasn’t able to be recreated. So I continued to play out old patterns and feed my limiting beliefs, all to prove my deep-seated sense of unworthiness.
So the death wish taunted me, beckoning me to come to the dark side. Instead of entering the darkness to learn from it, heed its gifts, and call it back into the light, I fed it and of course, it grew.
Now I can finally see that surrendering to the darkness is not the same as succumbing to it as I had been doing. It is laying down the sword in order to take up the reins so that I could reign as the true sovereign. The soul who is empowered by the dark not consumed by it. I am the darkness and the light. I am hell and heaven. I am the dragon and the warrior.
As I honor my path instead of criticize or disparage it, I am able to transform it and myself along with it. A true metamorphosis.
The gift in all of this is to come to know yourself, your true self, for the first time and to declare to yourself that, no matter what may befall you, you will never, ever, abandon yourself again. Because at the end of it all, you are truly all you have. And you must love, honor, and cherish you with all of your heart. That is the biggest transformation of all. And, that, that is precisely when everything changes. When you live as the truest, fullest expression of you, your life changes to reflect exactly that. As you ascend, you draw in circumstances, situations, people, and opportunities that match your elevated state. Everything around you aligns to match your heightened energetic vibration. You are free to be the you you were always called to be but had denied for so long. You are the divine expressing itself through you. No more dimming your light. No more playing small. No more hiding. You are here to rise, to reign, to alter your so-called ‘reality.’ You are here to shatter false perceptions. You are here to disrupt old systems. You are here to be a catalyst for change.
You are a sorcerer of light, a speaker of truth, a purveyor of freedom. You, my love, are a force to be reckoned with.