The other night, a woman in The Refuge reached out to me and asked: How do you hold longing?
What do you do with the (almost) all-consuming feeling of desire for love that has not yet arrived?
She reflected to me what she observes in my relationship with Ty: the way it seems to her that I have worked through these questions of my own worthiness enough to have attracted and allowed the kind of safe and stable relationship that she is longing for.
And I was so happy to be able to tell her that what she’s perceiving is 100% true.
Our love is not only as good as it appears… it’s actually better.
But also, yes, there was a significant, and at times excruciating, process that I went through in my relationship with my body and the stories that she’s been holding since girlhood about my worth and lovability.
That journey of tender but tenacious negotiation with my body has ultimately yielded the result of landing me here: open and available to experience a love like this after decades of longing, denial, unconscious sabotage, codependency, and armoring.
I have found that there is, in fact, a mappable, learnable somatic process for opening to Love. It’s the most courageous journey I’ve ever taken. And now I am really and truly living a life beyond my wildest dreams.
For so long, I did not have the capacity to imagine Love like this would ever find me.
Until it did.
And I get to marry him in 9 days.
We don’t have a traditional registry — we’re nearly 40 and have no need of crock pots and toasters. We have enough “stuff”.
But we are building a life, and have a larger vision for our home and family: a communal house as a center of life, and practice, in our village.
If my personal and professional path over the past ten years has been of value to you, and you would like to celebrate + thank me as I step into this next season, we created a cash registry for you to do so.
And we would both be inexpressibly grateful to receive that from you.
And I’m looking forward to sharing more about that mappable, learnable process for opening to Love. Whoever you are, no matter what you currently believe or feel to be true, it is for you. ❤️
Married on my youngest’s birthday!