Wake Up Call for Self-Love

Image for self-Love and appreciation.

Hello, hello, hello. I am filled with gratitude that you are here reading my blog. If you are here for the first time, welcome. If you are a frequent reader, welcome back. Thank you for returning again, and again, and again. Your presence fills my heart. I see you. I feel you. I love you.

Today's blog is inspired by a recent wake-up call, a whispered truth, I got from a dear friend who's known me my entire life. Let's call him, Joseph. He asked me to draw a heart on a piece of paper and in the center write, 'me'. I drew the image in my journal and I teared up as I felt the power held within it.

Joseph reminded me, I have had the tendency, throughout my life, on more than one occasion, to put everyone else's needs before my own...my family of origin, my friends, my job, my husband, my children, my grandchildren, etc. You get the point. I have been so busy trying to take care of everyone else, I put myself and my needs at the bottom of the list.

Joseph was not wrong. It was time to remove myself from the back burner and to rise up off of the sidelines in my life. Time for me to step fully into the part of my life where my inner knowing becomes visible, usable, undeniable, not loud, not dramatic, but true. My innate gifts are re-awakening, my intuition is sharpening, and my heart is remembering itself in the way I am able to hold people with tenderness even when life has not been that gentle with me.

A Simple

Profound

and

Whispered Truth

I was an extremely shy, intuitive, and sensitive child...born the 10th out of 12 children into a large, loud, chaotic, loving, and sarcastic Irish Catholic family. You could say it was boot camp for healers. It became my coping strategy to hide my inner truths and to take care of others' needs first in order to survive. As a friend once shared with me upon our first meeting, "Here's to getting lost in the crowd!" (He too, came from a similar background...large, chaotic, Irish Catholic family.) I responded with a resonant laugh...ain't that the truth!

No one quite understood my level of sensitivity as a child or my connection to something higher. These innate gifts of deep perception, quiet strength, illumination, and resilience felt too big for the family container. I did not have permission to show as a child, but carried them quietly for years.

"Light returns to the heart that remembers itself." Joseph

My heart holds softness and intuition that allows me the ability to read the energy of any room. I hold a quiet, subtle, presence that creates a sacred space with depth, tenderness, humor, light, and a wee bit or perhaps a lot of Irish mystery. My Irish father said in his later years, I held an emotional intelligence he could not express, but he recognized it in me. I walk in the light unseen but deeply felt with my presence. Not unlike the quiet hush of the falling snow outside my window that glistens in the light of the sun and the moon.

Without always having had the words to express my quiet gifts, I could harmonize, soften, or find humor to transmute childhood wounds into tenderness that have served me in my life. I am not a victim from my childhood. Every experience, challenge, and loss I have lived through grew my sensitivity.

A sensitivity that doesn't open through effort it opens through softening. My wisdom doesn't shout it reveals. I stand steady in my life with two feet firmly planted on the earth and one hand in the light of remembering. I am a bridge between worlds and I gently remind people to feel both human and holy at the same time.

Life has invited me to this dance and allowed me to hone my returning gifts of inner knowing. I am learning to stand in the center of it all with grace and to witness without losing myself as I did as a child. I can care without carrying. My sensitivity is a signal, not a command to fix someone else's pain. I can love fiercely without losing myself and rest in the quiet knowing that I am held, guided, and enough.

You are sacred.