I’ve been home sick for a few days now.
Not the kind of sick where you think you’re dying, mind you, but the kind where you can’t go out in public, but you’re still healthy enough to read, listen to podcasts, and journal between naps, tea, and soup.
So I went down a rabbit hole, listening to a few of my friends and people inspire me share their magic of the work they do in the world. I dove even deeper into my passion for leaning and tarot by deep diving into the Celtic Cross spread which I almost never use (I almost always draw spreads intuitively and almost never use a traditional format).
Something about this post full moon, reflective, forced retreat time, juicing my intuitive muscles, deepening my learning, and this open contemplative pre solar return time is particularly potent. So I’m taking some time – being with my body, my emotions, my dreams, visions, deepest wounding, intuition, guides, my writing – to prepare for all that was and all of the possibilities.
Yesterday I was offered several juicy prompts and reflections to reflect upon, and one in particular stands out to me to share here on my personal blog, journal entry style.
The prompt: what’s the deeper thing?
The context: the prompt was originally offered by my friend Shameca, who is a powerful business coach, and posed as “what’s the deeper problem you solve?”
For me as I sat with this question, and I sat with some of the unique gifts I bring through my own work in the world (read a little more about that post here) I decided to go a little deeper into myself and my experience.
I love to go deep. I always have.
Perhaps it’s my Venus in Scorpio or a whole other host of planets there (plus in Sidereal my ascendant is actually Scorpio, but I digress), but I’ve always wanted to go 10 legues deeper into the sea – whether that be the sea of courage, conciousness, or human potential.
Perhaps that’s the thread that underlies all of it – my deep curiosity for human potential on a biological, biomorphic, biocosmic level.
My journey has led me to deep sea dive into understanding the murky waters of my own emotional realm and emotional intelligence, unveiling the hidden gifts inside of my anger, my denial of difficult emotions, and the shadowy work of trauma and ancestral healing.
It has also led me into the deep sea journey of learning about fibre arts, knitting, spinning wool into yarn by had using spindles and wheels and ancient technologies and arts long forgotten and so intrinsically woven with our lived everyday experience – what we wear, living art and expression.
I’ve spent over 20 years climbing mountains, began surfing in my 30’s, and opened up my whole field of perceptual awareness of my sensuality and sexuality in learning how to be here inside of my body and my senses.
I’ve developed my intuition over the years and have offered my intuitive skills in helping others love themselves into being, make aligned decisions, move through messy and painful divorces, deaths, job changes.
I have held women when their whole lives have fallen apart and guided them deeper into the depths of surrender that eventually brought them through to the other side, more whole, more self than before.
My friend Sanaz calls me her “Guru of Self Love”. I too have been my own Guru of Self-Love – a journey that is a continuum rather than a clear forward moving line. I have spiralled down the vortex, into the deepest swamps of the dark feminine and I have returned from the void, dying and rebirthing over and over again as only women can really know.
I reflect on all of the inquiries, the “mindset work” I’ve journaled through over the years – over and over again sometimes ad nauseam – trying to pin down the perfect offer, craft the perfect copy, for the perfect marketing strategy that is both authentic with an undercurrent of manipulation, desperate to be seen, understood, successful, or who knows what else?
I’ve journaled for what seems like decades on “what problem do you solve?” and “why do your clients chose you?”.
I’ve been swept over the emotional falls of the ups and downs, buying into the fact that somehow articulating this thing into perfection will help me “win” the game.
I’ve come to settle into my bones, realizing that sometimes there is no root of the problem to solve.
I’ve arrived at a sense of freedom rather recently that these were just belief systems that I was trying on for a while – beliefs that work for some and don’t for me and that’s ok.
Sometimes the work of perfecting your offer or nailing down your ideal client doesn’t get you the results you expect.
Sometimes living your purpose is not connected to your wealth and how you make money in the world.
The point is, our experiences are different, and I’ve come to realize that someone else’s expression of reality that they then project into the world as Truth, may or may not also be True for me, and that’s ok.
It’s important to know the difference.
And it’s important to distinguish our work in the world, not to exploit it into our next business venture, but we need to recognize the deeper thing for ourselves.
It’s for our own sake and no one else’s.
That’s not to say, that there is a natural fit to offer your work to the world on a bigger scale, as is often believed.
Yes, your work and mine is certainly needed here.
But if we are to disconnect from the original depth in where our work comes from – at the personal level – we are in for a world of feeling not enough, pain, and emotional turmoil. We become trapped in measuring ourselves and our success based on how our work is “supposed to look”, instead of following the deep current of our soul.
One of the reasons why this prompt feels particularly resonant to me in this moment of time is how it aligns with some of my own personal work I’ve been in connection with.
In early August, I opened a free container called “An Exploration into Desire – 40 Days & 40 Nights led by EROS” , where I led a self-led somatic exploration into the big D – desire – over 40 days and 40 nights.
One of the interesting threads that came through in my own exploration was an intimacy with my sense of longing, yearning.
Yearning, longing, comes from the most deepest expressions of the human soul. It is the felt force wind that draws us into this world through the context of manifesting in a human body on this earth. It’s the hidden force, that if we are in healthy connection and relationship with it, expresses as health, vitally, creative expression, a deep sense of belonging, and a sense of feeling welcome into our bodies, and our life here on planet Earth.
It is the tides of our life force, our purpose here, our will, and our desire to be here right now.
It is with our deepest yearning – this force – that we often experience a severing, resulting in a deep sense of disconnect, often early on in our lives.
For some babies, we experience this disconnect in arriving as an unwanted (or unknown and long undetected) pregnancy. Not being welcomed into the world in our inception can sever us from our connection to our vitality and therefore our sense of belonging, security, and purpose for why we are here – after all, on the soul level, we know why we are here, however this sense of “forgetting” and this primal level separation are one and the same.
While we all have different experiences that shape us, I realize that for me, this deeper thing in my own journey, has been to heal the deepest soul level wounding of my own experience – the primal disconnect, the original separation.
My original wound perhaps initiated in my own embryological development, in being carried in a mother carrying her own deep disassociation from her body and trauma through our shared maternal lineage. It could have originated from my birth, being induced, severed from the deep primal connection to mother in this most potent and important portal and initiation – birth ignition.
When babies are induced, both mother and baby lose connection to one another, so I lost my sense of tracking, rootedness, and belonging in that confusing and likely terrifying event for both my mom and me.
All of that doesn’t matter however. The original wounding and how it happened are just information, but they do not tell the whole story.
What is the story?
Not just in how does it end, but how do I live the story through the experience of my life?
I am floating out on the ocean near my home in a small town on the Pacific coast in Mexico.
There are no waves.
I’m lazily dipping one arm, then the other into the bathwater temperature sea, looking for turtles, or fish, watching the shapes of the shoreline and noticing my unique vantage point here, floating at sea.
In this lazy, warm, oceanic scene, I’m digesting and processing an embodiment workshop I just participated in this morning with one of my longtime mentors around the origins of indecision.
I came to the sea because it feels comforting to me, like a coming home.
In the workshop earlier, we had been exploring the felt sense of our original separation, and the thing that came through for me is:
I want to be deeply loved and accepted for who I am, for my whole self.
I noticed how these shadowy waters of my core sense of separation as they bubbled up inside of me. I spend the majority of the workshop in fetal curl, feeling this deep sense of abandonment by the world deep down into the core of my being, and then I feel all of the layers of self protection I’ve built to survive this experience of being abandoned.
I feel safe in my fantasy world – safe from the harm of the harsh reality I’ve come to know as this world through my first experience here: birth.
I feel the pain of it like it was the first time.
And I feel my resistance to letting anything else in.
My resistance to being open, receptive.
My body only knows the safety I’ve self created to protect myself.
The hard shells, the force field.
And the paradox of longing to be held by the outside world.
Holding that and really feeling that cellular truth felt like quite a lot, so I slipped into the waters to move it through my body.
As I paddle, I notice something.
I’m drawn to paddle onward and I decide to get curious about the force underneath that.
I give myself permission to be still, to float, to relax.
But there it is again – curiosity.
Wonder.
A deep bones deep yearning to explore.
Explore the world, movement, what will the view look like if go just a little further.
Recognition.
An “ah, ha” moment.
This is my yearning.
This is my soul longing speaking to me through me.
All is not lost.
I may have experienced a deeply formative impact of soul level severance, however she is still with me.
She never left.
Delight at this realization.
Giggling.
Cellular level remembering of my original relationship with my own wholeness.
Before I lost my sense of belonging, I knew I belonged.
A returning home.
So where does this all sit with the original question?
What is the deeper thing?
The deeper thing is my deepest desire, my deepest longing, my soul level yearning.
I want to be loved, accepted, and seen for who I am – my wholeness, ALL of me.
Maybe Sanaz was right after all.
Maybe I am the Self-Love Guru.
Not because I profess that I am an expert, but because it’s part of my deepest soul expression here – to soften, to open, to support myself, and nourish myself into blooming.
It is this blooming of my soul in this body and continually motivates me to go a layer deeper.
It is my natural curiosity for life that keeps me going in the deepest depths of anxiety and depression.
It is cultivating a healthy relationship with my deepest soul yearning, and holding that in its own mystery, that hold me when my whole life falls apart and I am grasping desperately at threads of why I am here.
I don’t know what I don’t know, but I do know that I am willing and open to find out.
To explore.
What is our potential here?
What happens when we repair our deepest soul level wounding, not to be “perfect”, but to remember what it means to be whole?
Recently, exploring these deep wounds have continually cracked my heart so wide and open that I don’t know what to do with myself.
Authentic, beautiful souls pour into my life.
My clients thank me in opening them up to all of the magic they are creating in their lives.
I still don’t know what I’m going to “do” with this landing on the deepest thing – being loved for who I authentically am in my wholeness – but I trust that my heart knows what’s next.
With love,
jenn
photo credit to Tropical Surf Photography on Instagram.
thank you for this really sweet snap of me surfing at my home break 🙂