Hi, my loves,
In my work, the Pursuit of Awe as a Healing Practice, I wrote about love as a part of my life purpose. To give love, to receive love, to be love. You can read that post HERE.
As I continue to explore what love as a life purpose looks like as a form of dedication to my value of beauty, recent activations provide additional clarity on how prevalent this work is in my life. Today, I ground my work not in the texts of others, but in the Womanist tenet of my lived experience.
I think of my daily devotion to beauty and pleasure, developed in tandem with my pursuit of awe, as the practice of love as a life purpose.
It is the perfect balance (beauty) to the activations and stressors of daily life. I welcome the emergencies, problems, and small inconveniences as a part of life just as I welcome the love, blessings, and unexpected moments of awe. Reconnecting to my emotions has been empowering, but sometimes when I am working through an activation, the experience can pull me towards patterns of disconnection from my current practices and body. To remain present, in the body, and aware of the emotions I am experiencing is work, but it’s good work. Work that feels worthy and loving.
Today, I want to share what one of my inner work sessions looks like.
Over the past few days, I was activated multiple times with a mix of emotions that shifted quickly from jealousy, insecurity, frustration, and dismay. Two years ago, I would have been reluctant to admit to feeling jealous of someone else. I was caught in a perpetual cycle of stress and activations from work and my relationship. Now, I am aware of my emotions in the moment, which allows me to pause, go into my body to locate the emotion, and get curious.
My awareness of love as a life purpose came with the insight that closer alignment with my Self and Source would clear my path forward. What I should be “doing” is getting closer to my inner aspects and Whole Self. When you’re hoping to find a specific profession, a career, or a job, to hear that the inner work was the work felt annoying and suspicious. Yet, this year I am leaning into trusting my intuition, Whole Self, and Source – so we go with it.
I had to teach myself how to process emotions and identify the physical sensations that accompany them within my body. Before I knew how to do this work, I would experience the feeling of heat flushing over my body, the tightening of my abdominals, and tension within my shoulders when I would feel envious of someone else. Whether it was them receiving praise, buying a new item, having a successful endeavor or relationship, the idea that I want that or that should be me would run through my mind quickly before I pushed it away replacing that initial response with shame. I knew that we shouldn’t envy or covet what others have, yet I would still feel that way.
I recognize that the seeds of this emotional response pathway were planted when I was a child. As the youngest, I desired to assert myself. I wanted to have my own space, thoughts, and experiences. To be independent. I began feeling like others had or experienced things that I thought I wanted or should have. I didn’t get to go to school; I had to wait until I was old enough. I didn’t know how to read; I had to learn. I couldn’t stay up late; I had to go to bed. Of course, to a young mind, this all felt completely unfair. Patience was not my strong suit. If my older sister received something, I got something too. That was the norm. Color me surprised when that was not how the world functioned outside my home. I spent a large part of my childhood daydreaming (perhaps leaning into maladaptive daydreaming) about my life when I was older. The friends I would have, the love I would experience, and the places I would go were bound only by my imagination. It was my escape from the stress of home and school. This set me up to depend upon those fantasies instead of leaning into taking action towards making them into reality. I was stuck in waiting mode.
Now, as a part of my inner work, I’ve been working on being beautiful (balanced and in harmony) within my thoughts and emotions to match the beauty that I value externally with my body, the environment, spirituality, and other people. My thoughts were not always beautiful. They were judgmental, ableist, and mean. So I shifted, purposefully becoming aware of when the thoughts came up so I could go through the somatic alchemy process. If I wanted to practice more compassionate loving kindness towards myself, I would need to apply this to the world around me.
I’ve learned that the jealousy I felt was related to feeling that I would not or could not have the experiences and emotions that others had. What I desired was to be included. I wanted to feel like a part of the group and accepted. To emotionally and physically feel like I belong when I often feel othered.
Through processing my emotions, identifying physical sensations, and reconnecting to my Whole Self, I began to separate what I actually want and desire from what I THINK I’m supposed to want. How did I do this? I tested it out. If I thought I wanted something or that I would experience a certain emotion related to an activity, I tried it out. The information I gathered from those last four years! There were so many things that I thought once I had it or experienced it, that I would physically and emotionally feel a certain way. But that often was not the case. Sometimes it was better, sometimes it didn’t feel like anything, other times it was terrible! But I learned.
I learned that I had no idea the emotions or physical sensations others were experiencing. That when I saw them and would project what I THOUGHT they felt onto them, I was envious of a hope or assumption. The assumption made by my mind is that if it were me, I would feel this way, experiencing this thing. Now, I know better. One, I don’t know how they are feeling, so I should not assume. Especially with the advent of social media, so much of what we see is manufactured and created to encourage us to desire or covet what we see. If we had this object, relationship, job, money, body, or habits, we would feel calm within our bodies and experience certain emotions. Then, later, we find that it was all for the camera, the algorithm, and the brand. We rarely truly know what someone is going through when they go home, close their office door, get into their car, or just finally get a moment alone.
Thus, compassionate loving kindness is not just a way to treat myself, but how I can approach living in community with everyone and everything. Compassionate loving kindness allows me to honor the lived experience of others and their desires in a way that necessitates creating paths of inclusion and equity. To consciously be aware of my projections so that I am not pushing them onto others. To see this as an invitation to get curious about myself and others. To explore, learn, and grow. And through this process to find myself over and over again. To discover my desires, passions, wants, and needs as I and the world around me changes.
We feel all emotions. Jealousy and envy deserve the space to be explored and understood in the same way that we prioritize happiness and joy. When we shame or judge ourselves or others related to these emotions, it does not make them go away. We still experience a physical sensation related to the emotions, but we may not be able to identify what that emotion is or what to do with that physical feeling. If we can get curious about what jealousy and envy are teaching us, then we can open the door to making different choices. Choices to move the physical sensations that jealousy and envy accompany within the body through actions and behaviors that do not harm ourselves or others. This is a path towards autonomy and freedom.
I’m still walking this path and learning. I hope that you’ll join me on the journey.
With love,
Kamilah Rose
Belle Awe 