Taurus Full Moon

I have spent much of my life in a trance, sleepwalking through the days. The world holds so much pain that it has to hide the magic, make it go away, make it wrong, make it evil. We are shaped and molded to disbelieve, even though the evidence lies right in front of us. It almost seems as though we are encouraging people to participate in fake fairy tales. It makes the real ones seem less believable. They try to cover up the truth. It keeps them feeling powerful, and the rest feeling weak. They don’t want us to know that we are enough. That’s why it’s so hard for us (me) to internalize our own basic goodness.

I ran through life checking all the boxes of what I ‘should’ be doing in order to be a ‘good’ person. I never thought about whether or not I wanted to do all of those things. Truthfully I hated school. All of it. Even college. I didn’t want to be there. I was bullied and harassed by my so-called friends. I was sexually assaulted more times than I care to count. In those moments of my childhood, I froze developmentally speaking. That is what trauma does to the body. The brain will protect you initially, but the body will hold onto it. It remembers, even when you don’t.

A girl exclaimed to her mother one day
She no longer wanted to wear a dress.
Why would she do that you ask?
It made her harder to access.

It must be a phase.

Sometimes things happen when you are little that your child brain can’t handle. You can’t quite understand what happened, much less explain it to someone else. So you stay quiet, and it becomes a rock in your heart. Eventually that rock gets kicked over, and begins to break you from the inside out. You can either choose to deal with those emotions, or let them engulf you completely.

Shame can be a brutal master, if you allow that emotion to take control of the wheel of your life. I did for a very long time, some due to societal conditioning and some due to generational trauma, the mother wound it is sometimes called. Women are taught to be like maidens, whose job it is to protect the masculine, when actually we need to be more like crones and embrace the feminine intuition. We need to get untamed, as Glennon Doyle says. The only way to do that is with information. And this was about the time I exclaimed to my religious therapist that I bought my first Bible, The Vagina Bible by Dr. Jen Gunter. Knowledge is power, as they say.

Mantra: I embrace change in all its forms.

We are all tasked with coming to terms with our light and shadow sides, maturing through experience as we do so. They must first be given conscious consideration. And that in and of itself can be a true heartbreaker. Balance that out with understanding that you are not a problem to be solved. I know how that sounds, but two things can be true at the same time. It’s understanding the fact that there was nothing wrong with you to begin with, and it’s your responsibility to fix yourself. And by ‘fix yourself,’ I mean find yourself, the person you were born being. As much as they try to make us forget, we are human beings in fact.

We all have the same basic needs, to be seen and to be loved. Without these two things, especially in our developmental years, we get a sort of severed belonging. We conform and perform to meet the standard, to keep up with the Jones. I did this, and then I really started not to like myself. When we don’t like ourselves we react out of an insecurity in our nervous system, which leads to chronic worry (anxiety). We put up walls and weapons because we mistrust ourselves. We feel separate, like we have no sense of belonging.

We resist our sense of goodness more than we hide our sense of badness. It’s easier to live in a familiar flawed sense of self, than it is to consider our profound capacity to love.

Tara Brach

You can’t always think through your problems; intuition happens in your body. I had a hard time learning how to sit with myself and my emotions. Therapy gave me a safe place to practice and the tools I needed in order to keep it all going, although I still fall down quite a bit. Most days I ask myself once simple question: What are the words that I need to hear today? And then I tell them to myself. That was a huge lesson for me, learning how to stop breaking my own heart, to stop looking outward for something that is already inside myself.

Mad love, Jenna

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