Aintep, Turkey | Photo by Norair Chahinian December 9, 2015
The story goes that when I was 2 years old and my first sibling was born, I would stand vigil by her crib to alert my mother when she started crying. When I was 5, my first flashbulb memory is of begging my mother to allow me to hold my next new born sister in my arms on a porch swing; there is a photo of this moment. That same 5 year old me was climbing trees in small town Alabama, riding her strawberry shortcake bike with abandon to go down the street to her best friend Leah's house and jump on the trampoline for hours (past a vicious pack of dogs, but it was worth it), and getting lost in the Atlanta mall on her mother's shopping trips (having to be called over PA) because she always found it much more interesting to wander than to sit down and do what she was told ...
I'm starting to feel that in so many ways we go through elliptical journeys. That 2 year old, that 5 year old : she was not self aware ... and somehow she possessed the contradictory qualities of grounded nurturing/tenderness and also flying wildly towards inspiring things. And then life happens. We fall down, we experience loss, we survive pain and learn how to closet it. The world tells us to buck up, to maintain the peace for the larger tribe, to swallow the things that don't make sense to us instead of spitting them out to see what's inside and be better for the understanding and awareness. Our darkness gets shelved and in time we lose the keys to the source of our own growth.
Until, we decide to be disruptive: to this "peace" in our lives ... to what others think of who we are ... to the very lives we have constructed without the vital bits ...
In the last few years that dusty, buried key resurfaced for me -- and I had no choice but to open a rusty, unwilling door. Nothing stayed the same: the earth shook, the walls collapsed, I fell down further than I thought was possible to descend. But then, something magical happened ... not linearly, because we don't live in the linear, but through massive chaos: moments of clarity and light began to surface. I was deconstructing on the outside and somehow, slowly reconstructing on the inside ...
Every person I have met, every experience I have had on this alchemical journey has somehow sheparded me to my interior. To realizing I don't have to protect my false constructs; they only make me less open to the world around me, make me less compassionate to what surrounds me. If I maintain a fallacy on the outside, how can I be connected to my truth on the inside?
Little by little I continue to reach for that sacred place we all have within us. The place where we come from, where we truly exist, where we go back to ... where we really are. This is a continuous process ... It is daily practice ... hell, mostly it's hourly!
I am not extraordinary ... I'm just a very lucky woman who has had to learn over and over the most powerful thing I hold is my heart: when I open it, when I surrender to it - I am able to nurture. I am able to also receive ... I am able to be inspired and hopefully also somehow inspire ...
So, as I sit here in a cafe in Mysore, India, with my heart having a massive workout from the outpouring of love I received yesterday from all corners of this beautiful planet we all inhabit, I am grateful to be relating more to that 2 year old, that 5 year old me than I have in quite some time ...
It has taken me walking all over this world to realize, that all along, my destination has been here: the unprotected, raw chambers of what shines inside ...
The story goes that when I was 2 years old and my first sibling was born, I would stand vigil by her crib to alert my mother when she started crying. When I was 5, my first flashbulb memory is of begging my mother to allow me to hold my next new born sister in my arms on a porch swing; there is a photo of this moment. That same 5 year old me was climbing trees in small town Alabama, riding her strawberry shortcake bike with abandon to go down the street to her best friend Leah's house and jump on the trampoline for hours (past a vicious pack of dogs, but it was worth it), and getting lost in the Atlanta mall on her mother's shopping trips (having to be called over PA) because she always found it much more interesting to wander than to sit down and do what she was told ...
I'm starting to feel that in so many ways we go through elliptical journeys. That 2 year old, that 5 year old : she was not self aware ... and somehow she possessed the contradictory qualities of grounded nurturing/tenderness and also flying wildly towards inspiring things. And then life happens. We fall down, we experience loss, we survive pain and learn how to closet it. The world tells us to buck up, to maintain the peace for the larger tribe, to swallow the things that don't make sense to us instead of spitting them out to see what's inside and be better for the understanding and awareness. Our darkness gets shelved and in time we lose the keys to the source of our own growth.
Until, we decide to be disruptive: to this "peace" in our lives ... to what others think of who we are ... to the very lives we have constructed without the vital bits ...
In the last few years that dusty, buried key resurfaced for me -- and I had no choice but to open a rusty, unwilling door. Nothing stayed the same: the earth shook, the walls collapsed, I fell down further than I thought was possible to descend. But then, something magical happened ... not linearly, because we don't live in the linear, but through massive chaos: moments of clarity and light began to surface. I was deconstructing on the outside and somehow, slowly reconstructing on the inside ...
Every person I have met, every experience I have had on this alchemical journey has somehow sheparded me to my interior. To realizing I don't have to protect my false constructs; they only make me less open to the world around me, make me less compassionate to what surrounds me. If I maintain a fallacy on the outside, how can I be connected to my truth on the inside?
Little by little I continue to reach for that sacred place we all have within us. The place where we come from, where we truly exist, where we go back to ... where we really are. This is a continuous process ... It is daily practice ... hell, mostly it's hourly!
I am not extraordinary ... I'm just a very lucky woman who has had to learn over and over the most powerful thing I hold is my heart: when I open it, when I surrender to it - I am able to nurture. I am able to also receive ... I am able to be inspired and hopefully also somehow inspire ...
So, as I sit here in a cafe in Mysore, India, with my heart having a massive workout from the outpouring of love I received yesterday from all corners of this beautiful planet we all inhabit, I am grateful to be relating more to that 2 year old, that 5 year old me than I have in quite some time ...
It has taken me walking all over this world to realize, that all along, my destination has been here: the unprotected, raw chambers of what shines inside ...
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