Listening to Women Who Run With The Wolves today by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, she brought up the idea of a famine. When nothing’s bad but nothing’s good either. She called it the famine: when your spirit hasn’t been fed. It’s when your creativity is stifled, when nothing is pouring out from you. It’s when you are not nourished, or you’re blocked, or you’re holding yourself back in some way. I’ve felt that way many times. Many times it was within a relationship I thought was fulfilling, a relationship I thought was making me whole. In reality I was fractured. And yet my light couldn’t get through. I had disassociated from myself, from my soul. I turned my back on how I felt deeply because I couldn’t bear the pain of loss. I thought losing him would be the most devastating thing to happen to me. But to keep him meant I had to lose myself. So I did. I turned my back on myself. I chose to love him. I chose to act as the person I thought he wanted me to be, a person I thought he would love. But see, severing the thin tie I had with my soul cost me greatly. It was the greatest mistake I could have made. I severed the tie with the only person I could truly count on, the person who knew me to my core, the only person who could possibly know all of me inside and out and love me deeply. To outsource that was foolish. There is no greater love than the love we have for ourselves. And I don’t mean the selfish kind or the narcissistic kind. I mean the compassion kind. The kind who sees all of us and understands, who loves despite our faults and our failings. I had the power to love myself deeper than anyone could possibly love me but I gave that away. I laid myself in someone else’s hands thinking they could love me more, love me better. Foolish. No one can possibly love me more than I could love myself. No one knows every thought, every emotion, every memory across all my life. It’s simply impossible. And it’s unfair. For me to lay myself in another’s hands expecting them to love me as fully as I desire is unfair because they need to love themselves as well. And how are they going to do that when they are expected to love me just as deeply? Loving myself, caring for myself is what comes before all else. Even when in a relationship and someone does fall in love with me, they cannot be expected to fill in any gaps. I have to be completely in love with myself. My cup needs to be pouring over so that they can share the love I have overflowing and I can have theirs. This way we are both overflowing from the love and care we have for ourselves and we can share that with each other and the rest of the world. If we laid our souls into each other’s hands and gave each other the responsibility for our happiness then we would both be lost and lacking. We would be depleted in love. We would feel empty and lonely because the other would only be allowed to love us from a shallow depth. And we would be loving them from a shallow depth as well. Fighting our own demons, overcoming them, dusting out every corner of darkness in our souls must be done so that we can become whole. We have to pour love into those corners, every nook and cranny. We have to fill ourselves completely so that we can feel love, share love, attract love.
moodybreadcrumbs 