Healing through Landmines
Hey fam, welcome back! Today's post is going to be a little more intimate as I am slightly stoned, enjoying some lemon ginger tea and a few indulgent drags of my spirit cigar in my zen room. Gasp! I preach all about yoga and wellness and here I am tainting my lungs with a cigar. Yep!!! I sure am. You know why? Because it helps me reconnect with my soul from time to time.
Today's post is going to be a bit personal, and it's going to be one that comes from the heart. It's a bit dark, but it's not scary. It's life, and there's a happy ending, so hang in there.
It appears as though his last year or so was sought out to completely destroy me of my essence. I found myself asking, Where did Anya go? Even as I type those words right now I realize how quickly I am still able to lose myself as I'm still finding stability throughout this topsy-turvey maze of healing.
Let's rewind a bit to August 2022, where one major life change led me to a journey of fighting to maintain homeostasis while living life at a series of crossroads.
I made the decision to leave my husband August 2022. Originally, the process started with normal amounts of grief that one could expect when dealing with heavy loss. However, I'm a highly sensitive person. So this means, I feel emotions with great intensity and it's sometimes I feel on an excruciatingly painful level.
As a result, I've learned how to navigate this process, as one does when they are on a mission of mending their broken heart. I have since learned that this is a hard task for me because when I finally figure out how to be open, my emotions just burst from pressure. When, at my core, I am feeling alive, and connected to source my positive energy is infectious and I become a magnet and the life of the party. The downside is, when I'm feeling down, the heaviness that surrounds me becomes uncomfortable and nobody wants anything to do with me.
I am quite introverted by nature so much of my human interaction these days has been dealing with clients which, as a hairstylist is a bit of a mind fuck; it's often a superficial and highly transactional relationship. This means I have to appear authentic, despite what's actually going on, which during this past year has been a constant explosion of really heavy....let's call them life bombs (new and unexpected traumas).
So, in order to successfully keep my business afloat I've had to learn how to mask my emotions, leaving me learning how to appear happy when I'm actually in a zombie state on my worst days. Often times throughout this year I would find myself crying in between clients in the back room, having to suck it up, and then go back to being a happy hairdresser, and making sure to not only appear happy, but not screw up a clients hair I am am specialist and people pay a premium for my skillset.
Any hairdresser will tell you there is no worse feeling in the world then when you mess up someone's hair despite your best efforts. For many people , their hair is among their top two favorite features about themselves, and it's a lot of pressure to make sure your client feels great about themselves when they leave that chair as "good hair" is a very subjective feeling.
Technical precision aside, it has taken a lot of energy to mask my true feelings, and even more energy to find the will to come home to an empty house. Despite being an introvert, I'm also someone who very much enjoys her home life, which used to consist of having someone to come home to, the cutest most loving and adorable furbaby Loki to snuggle with, where my home is my happiness.
So, it was really hard to leave my marriage and give up my dog to my ex; it was especially hard since it was in Loki's best interest to give him up. Oh that one hurt. Despite the hurt, I realized I had to completely change up my entire life as I once knew it in order for me to give myself this gift of time to heal.
Throughout this new time in life, I've also learned that my healing has required that I distance myself from a lot of people, and many of my family members to protect my inner-peace at all costs. This shift resulted in feelings of even more isolation, and an emptier, lonelier home life which I so deeply long for once more.
What about your friends, Anya? I have friends who adore me, and I adore them. But I have to battle my demons alone at this point. The journey requires it. Because adding a little more lonliness sure sounds great, doesn't it? I have spent many nights curled up in a ball, laying in bed engulfed in the broiling flames of pain and suffering through the agonizing process of transformation. The process of death and rebirth through spending a season of having the courage to give myself an opportunity for a fresh start; the Season of Anya.
What is a season? A season is not determined by a calendar year, but rather, a shift in energy and the world surrounding us. All it takes is one small shift to set off the domino effect and the next thing we know is that the heat of summer turns into a brisk fall chil. One thing which is important to remember, is that while there are indicators that seasons are changing, everything has to fall into place, at it's timing, for the transformation to complete.
The Sweet Nectar of Clarity
Throughout this process, there have been many lessons, many observations, and a distinct feelings of clarity: Moments where I feel my heart, my body and my soul aligned in a harmonious dream state which can only be described as "an exceptionally vivid feeling of being alive and grounded", a place where where both love and fear live in beautifully chaotic harmony".
With that it's as though the the world around me has changed because I have somehow managed to learn how to upgrade the technology of all four of my senses. Suddenly I physically see and receive information in 4k, while before I experienced the world in sepia tone. Scents and aromas have managed to grab my attention, joy is discovered in the smallest of events and the heavy fog has finally started to dissipate around me. A feeling which is described in the yoga philosophies as Samadhi, a divine union of inner and outer consciousness; a healed spirit.
The Dynamic Depths of Healing
However, throughout the healing journey, what you slowly find out, is that these moments come and go. To experience and realize the shifts in your reality is quite literally heaven. This state of clarity offers hope and endless possibilities with just a tiny dash of magick, I am a witch afterall. Haha.
During these moments clarity I have proudly announced to myself so many times that "I am healed!". Somemtimes I get cocky and announce it to others, o
only to fall (again) and be met with an old, oozing and infected trauma wound in dire need of tending to. Every, single time, my spirit would die I knew that taking the time to tend to that wound would send me all the way back to that painful, scorching, and soul-crushing inferno once more. Except for the longest time I didn't believe that I would come out the other end with an even more renewed strength.
I cannot tell you how many times I have fallen, and taken a step back to this dark and isolating place of despair, and just losing all hope, losing all of my clairty, my magick: Losing Anya. I'd revert back to that familiar feeling of laying in my bed, unable to move due the shell-shock of the pain from revisiting forgotten trauma and having it suck the soul out of me once again, that very soul of which I have worked so hard to create.
Did I want to revisit this trauma? Fuck no! But god damn it, every time I try to ignore it those emotions burst out. This is why I adore shadow work because as a highly sensitive person, I need a place to deal with my deepend sadness. When I live out of balance to try to favor my light, my shadows only grow stronger.
You see, the majority of my life, I didn't know that a "happy life" (happy meaning one filled with normalcy and stability) existed for me this lifetime. My life was been filled with what I refer to as "la pazzaria" in Italian: A never ending deranged circus, if you will, and I figured I was given a specific hand of cards which dictated my life. I submitted to the fact that my prior conditioning and repetitive life experiences was forever going to be my story.
I didn't realize that I had the power to fold my cards, and simply reshuffle and try something new. I didn't realize that having a beautiful relationship with nature, and with my soul through yoga witchcraft was going to forever change my life and grant me the tools to find myself and regain my power.
I can't even begin to describe the sensation of this empowerment. "Freeing" is a vastly understated way of putting it, as I didn't know I even had any power to gain. To be able to rebuild myself was never even an option for me. My calling along this process has given myself the power to shine, because when I shine, illuminate others, it's my magick, and it's why I started this blog.
Here for a Short Time, not a Long time
Imagine finding your soul, your purpose, and that insatiable feeling of alignment, just to have to stripped away from you in a depressive episode with no glimmer of hope in sight. However, I learned that despite the setback, every time I connected with the moon, stayed consistent in my yoga practice, and gave the middle finger salute to my demons, my inner peace would always find it's way, because I am manifesting my dream life filled with love, magick and happiness and simply will not take anything else for an answer.
This has not been an easy process!!! It's taken me over an intense year to keep having the gumption to press forward. Finding that balance of allowing myself the grace to rest and nourish myself amid mental setbacks and then to press on with full steam ahead when I'm back to flowing and creating magick along the way.
Loosing my long lost light has been a difficult, process. But when connect with my higher self, with spirit, I always seem to find my way back to heaven once more. I know soon that my version of hell will be a distant memory, and I will be fully integrated to my seasoned of living life as a healed woman, who is no longer afraid of the dark.
I've decided I'm no longer going to put a timeline to my healing, and I will continue to surrender to the journey of healing. I surrender control and resistance and simply allow myself to flow. I choose the path of healing, which in a sense is a path of darkness: If i knew where I was going I wouldn't have chosen this path. I surrender.
Final Wisdom
Every time I fall, I build strength, from the ground up, while navigating my darkness head on. I keep reshuffling that deck I've been given, and the cards I'm dealt seem to be more and more in my favor, so I keep pressing on, despite any setbacks.
I started this blog post at the beginning of this week, feeling optimistic, with a sense of purpose. Then on cue, unexpectedly processed some deep and heavy shit while encompassed in a whirlwind of heavy emotions. Yet, here I am, finalizing my edits and ready to hit "publish" while sitting in front of an illuminated altar, connected to Divinity.
For those of you on a healing journey, I want to offer you love and compassion with this this wisdom: You willfall. Just when you think you have life figured out, something else will come in the way and bring you right back down to your old habits, and you may revisit a place where you never wanted to return. However, to fall is to have had the courage to climb.
To see both the light of heaven and the engulfing flames of hell while living here on this earth means to know there is always hope, so long as we find the courage to have it.
When you have no where else to look, gaze up at the stars and the moon and you will always find your way.
A message from Anya
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