It’s not that simple.
It’s not that simple.
It’s not that simple to not care what anybody thinks, to speak up when we are terrified, or to not let our insecurity or doubt take over.
It’s not that simple to just snap out of freeze or to stop ourselves when we are losing our shit. It’s not that simple to believe in abundance or to trust and feel safe. It’s not that simple to share when we typically don’t or to shut up when we typically speak too much. It’s not that simple to cry and feel when that’s not our tendency, and it’s not that simple to shut it all down when we spend most of our time feeling, instead of living thoughtlessly in the present moment.
It’s not that simple to just see our flaws, and patterns and become bigger than them.
It’s not that simple to break addictions, shatter lifelong patterns, or see through our dysfunctional ways of being when they are all we’ve ever known. It’s that simple heal, and grow, and move on.
It’s not that simple to believe we are beautiful, and worthy, to freely express ourselves, or to free our sexuality.
It’s not that simple to just, let, go.
It’s not that simple to not be jealous, to accomplish our dreams, or to walk away from all we’ve known even if we know it’s not right.
It’s not that simple to just be joyous, and happy, and to live a pleasure-centered life.
The imprints begin before birth. The imprints that shape us and teach us what is safe, how to act, what’s easy, and what’s normal — they are personal, familial, generational, societal, cultural, and collective. The imprints, stories, circumstances, and happenings that shape us are vast.
We all are the way we are for a very good reason.
Our response mechanisms, beliefs, and perspectives of the world, fate, possibility, safety, and love are taught through experiences, feelings, and those and life all around us. It is all imprinted into our being far beneath our conscious and cognitive selves. We are the way we are for a very good reason — it can all be traced back and make sense. But, just because we have a good reason for being the way we are, doesn’t mean our ways are still in service of our greatest wellbeing. We may even know this, but knowing is not enough to change.
Our beings are wired, to act, and respond without thinking.
Our physiological ability to feel safe, and comfortable in our own skin, or to fight, run, or freeze is not something we think through and cognitively implement by choice. Our physiological ability to be aroused — sexually, in joy, passion, creativity, or our vitality is not something we can mentally or emotionally simply choose to activate at a moment's notice. We can’t force ourselves to care, to like things, or to feel or be a certain way. We can’t just decide to be invigorated, calm and peaceful, happy, angry, turned on, extroverted and social, recluse, empathetic, fierce, or needless with the snap of our fingers, no questions asked.
Our bodies and beings are wired based on our unique irreplicable nature and essence, and they are wired based on what they think our needs and desires are regardless of what we cognitively think they should be. Our bodies and beings have beliefs of what’s safe and what’s not, and how to act and respond in various situations based on our past and what they have learned regardless of what we think today.
Our bodies and beings are responding in regards to what they think is physically safe, socially safe, and what feels safe.
When it comes to letting go and allowing our innate being to lead — that wild uninhibited, unfiltered woman within whose essence is alive and well beneath all the imprints life has left — is not that simple. It’s not something we just decide to do. It’s a process, it takes time, and it’s an unraveling and unfolding that has no end.
The more we tune into her — that woman within — and the more we trust her and follow her lead, the more free we will be. Our intuition will become sharper, our senses and ability to feel pleasure and joy will become heightened, and our relationships, work, home, social lives, priorities, values, time, and energy will all be in more alignment with our most raw, vibrant truth — all because we become more honest with ourselves by accepting and following the truth that is within us.
But how do we do this?
We do this by nurturing a sense of safety in ourselves. It’s not simple, and it is. It’s not that simple because it’s layered, it’s a combination of many things and practices, it’s non-linear, and it’s a way of life. It’s a way of life that values, and prioritizes, and chooses our relationship with self. It ebbs and flows, with no direction, no destination, no rules, except to follow the wisdom within. It’s all-consuming, but the act itself is simple because it’s rooted in revolving around the woman within, the body that is ours, and the life that is our gift to live as we wish.
There’s a cognitive aspect, there’s a felt sense aspect, and then there is embodying all of it. There’s communion with our soul, and our body, and without both none of it comes full circle. Embodiment does not exclude our heart, mind, intellect, body, emotional, spiritual, or energetic nature — it’s embracing all of it as valid, and fluid, and pertinent.
Cognitively it’s very helpful to understand what we are doing and why we are doing it. It’s helpful to see our patterns and recognize how they play out — emotionally, mentally, relationally, and physically. Once we see we can’t unsee, and aspects, habits, and patterns inevitably begin to change. We do this through inquiry and curiosity, we do this through observation, and we do this with as much compassion as possible. We question, observe, and notice with love.
But — just seeing and understanding is not enough.
We have to rewire our physiology in a sense and this is where finding or creating a safe space to commune with ourselves, and others to see and be seen, and somatic practices come in. We have to teach our beings through embodied experience, not through thought or theory. We have to nurture relational safety so it can ripple throughout our lives, and we have to commune with our senses to make sense of and relate with the world in a new way.
Our bodies are wildly intelligent. Our nervous systems are designed to act without thinking. Our bodies and beings need to be quick and autonomic to survive, but what’s safe gets cross-wired when you compile, trauma, heartbreak, abandonment, grief, programming of all kinds, and simply the trials and tribulations of our humanness. We have to nurture our bodies and come in just as close contact with them as we do with our minds, hearts, and souls.
To deprogram everything that has severed us from the present sensuous moment takes time, consistency, repetition, and devotion.
It takes time to make new ways of being second nature. It takes time to make pleasure, peace and calm, self-love, trust, social ease, fierceness, softness, and unfiltered self-expression second nature. It takes time to allow ourselves to naturally shapeshift and to ebb and flow with our different energies and parts as they wish. It takes time to trust our intuition and felt sense.
It takes time.
But, when we let go of preconceived destinations of where we are going or how we should be, and what freedom and liberation are while we allow this moment to be enough, basking in our senses in this beautiful world moment, by moment — we’ve done it. There is nowhere to go. It’s all just Life moving as it will, evolving through us, as we evolve through it.
We live in a world that has valued the mind over the body, spirit over the body, intellect over feeling, and education over intuition for centuries if you consider our philosophical history. Rewilding ourselves is allowing our animal bodies to be godly, and it’s trusting their intelligence.
Sisterhood, shadow work, and the consciousness of the body are of tremendous value and power.
Women’s gatherings and share circles are powerful because they create social safety with other women in a strong, tight, container which then nurtures our ability to feel safety out in the world and to feel safety in claiming the power of our feminine felt sense nature.
Shadow work is powerful because without questioning we have no context of where we are in relationship to what’s working, what’s not, and where we want to go. Like Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, “Questions are the keys to the secret doors of our psyche” and once we walk through these doors there is no turning back.
Lastly, honoring our body's intelligence is what makes this all come full circle. It doesn’t matter what we think if we don’t feel it to be true. The body is ultimately the driver. The body and our spirit are bound, neither of them functions or exists in the ways that they do without the other. Our intuition, thoughts, intellect, and feelings all live in and are expressed and communicated through the body. It’s through the body that we rewire our response mechanisms and the way that we feel.
I don’t imagine life, or being, or loving will ever rigidly be simple.
I don't imagine life, or being, or loving will ever rigidly be simple in our ability to not care what other people think, or to never feel doubt, rattled, insecure, or scrambled when life gets chaotic, but we can tap our roots deeper, and deeper, grounding, and opening, and awakening more each and every day.
There is no end-game, and there is no holier-than-thou enlightenment, but once we lift the veils and consider the falsity of our preconceived ideas of what the world and life should be, and how we should be, we will find more and more permission to be wild, and feral, and untethered led by the intelligence and wisdom of our being — and that is where freedom lies. That is where our liberation is simmering waiting for us to unleash it.
With wild, Marigold love,
Abby
