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

When the Ungrieved for Past Besieges The Now

When The Ungrieved For Past Besieges The Now

Inside, deep, deep inside, there is the wounded one, her hurt so deep she has sabotaged all love in my adult life. She has been so hungry for something to come from the outside to sooth and to see and to attune and to somehow accept her and celebrate her, praise and validate her in a way she has not known how to do for herself.

And because this exultant claim of love does not come, or at least never enough of it, she has been filled not only with longing but also with rage, with bitter entitlement to some grand recompensatory gesture, some magnificent atonement for all the things she longed to have received but could not ask for, swaddled, bound, mute. 

She has been punitive and judgemental of any expressions of love towards her. It is never enough to appease the hungry and the rage-full one. And always she lives with the apposing centrifugal forces of the yearning for intimacy, immersion in a primal unified field of attunement, and a repelling of connection because it is not safe. She knows not how to trust what comes as love. Is it a wolf in sheep's clothing? The impulse to push away just as she pulls towards herself. 

It is her time now for me, I can go no further without meeting her in all her tyrannical complexity and narcissistic entitlement, and aching need and punitive protection and vulnerable longing for love. And it is no longer appropriate for that love to come from outside of myself, and thank the goddess, I've done enough work to know now that everything she needs I have within me. 

Enough of me knows how to mother and attune to other to meet her there in her deep dark cave, her shadowy crevices. I know my heart is a font of foreverness that is longing to flow to her, to retrieve her from the barren lands of her withholding. I have learnt enough about boundaries not to be subsumed by her. I can say no when it does not serve us for her to call the shots, but I can say yes to her longing and I can love her cleanly and true. 

I can wrap her and croon to her and tell her that after all she is okay, that she is enough, that there is a home for her here inside this body, that she is safe to grow from this infantile encapsulation, that all of me is safe for her to play in, to become. I can tell her that everything she needs is here within me, she need not be dependant for love on those who know not the depths of her longing. She can drink from me, from the vast elixir of star milk that flows through my being, from the deep primal vibration of our first mother. 

But I will also say that she will no longer make decisions for me in this life, no longer will she choose to put all her eggs in the basket of one who knows not how to give of their love. I know that she does this so that she can stay in the wound and perpetuate the pain and always have someone to blame for the lack, the poverty, so that there can always be someone there to play the role of the withholder, shaming and threatening and belittling her need. She perpetuates this for it's all she's known. Not any longer. 

She will no longer sabotage my initiations of power and emergent creativity, I will not believe her anymore that the world is not safe to share in, or that I am not safe to give of myself. I will take from her hands the reins of my power and evolve beyond her pain, and the great stuckness of her grief. I will reclaim from her the parentified imperative. She will receive her age-appropriate care so that she may return to her place in the line of my evolution, she will always be there but not as the wildcard that covertly governs the strings, but as the one, that received late, but not too late, the things she missed when she needed them most. 

I feel this great inward turning, an impulse to be still and to meet this one, for she is mine to meet and I will never be home if there is a part of me that believes my salvation dwells outside of my own being. So much longing and grasping and hungering and removing myself from the needful one. I am turning now to meet her, with all my heart.



Prints of the image available at my Etsy site.


Words and image © Lucy Pierce 2017

A homage to what moves through us from beyond.