Self Love

Growing up as a young girl, self-love and sensual embodiment were not a part of my education, rather I was educated in the denial of these things. The cost of this appartied against the feminine nature was profound,  the loss of energetic availability to my very own body, an energetic absorption of so many things that were not ever true to me, a crippling assumption that there was something deeply wrong with me, with my body and my beingness.  My instinctual self was suppressed, the forming of addictions that numbed the pain of my own unlivedness and a myriad of beliefs formed in my psyche that compensated for the lack of love that my body experienced in my becoming. This was not conveyed to me in a malicious way, it was done very subtly, in a myriad of small, innocuous ways, because I was born to a culture of women whose feminine impulse, the impulse to love and to love fiercely, the impulse to protect, the impulse to pulse and sway and croon and keen, to shake and rage and transform was deep deep underground, in the subcutaneous layers of the suppressed self, sleeping, seething with rage, exploding to the surface in toxic and confusing ways. The dark face of the feminine has been stolen from my people.

Now, after years and years of unearthing, of digging and delving, of howling and weeping and crawling through the dark passages of self loathing that have festered in my mind, I am finding my way home to the crucible of self love. And from this place I am asking how much of myself can I allow myself to feel? How open can I allow myself to be? How deeply can I allow myself to drink and receive of that great earthly love, that vast cosmic love that is actually my true birthright and available to me in every living moment of my life? How exquisitely fine and magnificently beauty full can we know ourselves to be, individually and collectively in our world, not just on the outside but from the inside? How much capacity for love is available to us? How much love do we allow ourselves access to from the inner font of source, exquisitely nestled within our bodies, in our yonis, our wombs, our hearts, our throats, our mouths?

Deprived of my right to love myself, I grasp in the futile compulsion to fill myself from without, grasping at the teat of the mother/lover, ravenous and separated from the well-spring, hungering to know the source of love, seeking it from without, not knowing that the font springs eternally within, the infantilised woman, sold our own reflections and exiled from the internal experience of being. How can I come to dance this exquisite treasure of a body from within, as a sacred gifting of beauty between self and God/dess? Transcending the imperative of the external gaze, the judgemental paradigm of performance and critique and the desire for superficial validation. What does my song sound when it is a pure expression of experience, unique and raw and primal, the uluations of this sacred instrument, emptied of shame and expectation and illusions of unattainable perfection?

As women in this world, our exterior surface is taken from us by the external gaze and then sold back to us as a commodity, when all along we were free to fully own ourselves from the inside out, our natural beauty and belonging burgeoning from the source of creation within our very own beings. Self love, deep belonging in one's own skin as a woman in this world is an act of revolution against the colonisation of the feminine and of the body, by a brutally suppressive imperative. When we belong to ourselves we are powerful beyond measure, when we deeply own our own voices we cannot be controlled, when we are swayed by the cosmic energies and the pulse of the Mother's heartbeat we are autonomous co-creators, when we are home in our bodies we weave the sacred web of life and are connected to all things, and the putrid paradigm  cannot touch us there.



Text © Lucy Pierce 2017