Beauty is all around and has brought restoration and comfort to the places within my heart and life where I have felt the most trapped. The crashing of waves, crispness in the air after an intense rain, sublime quiet engulfing the atmosphere after a snowstorm, and the smaller moments not so easily recognized- all of them have done their best to draw me into the depths of my heart and soul.
Within me, there is a little girl who is learning how to play later in life. She loves horses and the smell of freshly cut grass, and she goes barefoot most of the time unless she is freezing. This little girl was deemed by many as “an old soul,” and “mature for her age,” when what she really needed was for someone else to take back the responsibilities that were too much to belong to a child.
Now I seek to give this little girl- this part of me- exactly what she needs. I help her see that we no longer need to live by “shoulds” and “should nots.” We get to enjoy the beauty of a new day and the hope it brings as we journey into freedom and the reality of beauty untrapped. This is some of the work I’ve done in trauma therapy over the past several years. Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) have been so incredibly helpful in this healing journey. Learning more about my brain, nervous system, and how to honor various parts of myself without being at war within has been a process in coming to a deeper understanding and acceptance of who I am as me- as N.
The desire to love my body and myself exactly as I am is growing within my heart. I desire to be happy and not wait until certain dreams are actualized in life in order to be fulfilled. I want to begin to care for my body again; to feel healthy and confident in my own skin. Some days I feel this growing confidence as I want to care for my body and give it what it needs. This past week marked six months since I had an emergency hysterectomy. As the doctors did what was necessary to relieve the incredible pain I was in and stop the blood loss I was experiencing, I was met with the reality of letting go of the option to have biological children one day. Here I am, six months later, feeling much better and still healing. There is so much to still unpack from this experience, and I’m doing so a little at a time. My body has been through incredible things, many of them quite difficult, and as I sit here now, I just want to love it.
My body has carried me through countless traumas and endured intense pain; I want to care for it and remind it that it is good… I want to remind myself that I am good, beautiful, and deserve good things. I desire to feel connected to my body, and still I somehow feel like I need to treat it as another “part” of me who deserves care and comfort. Maybe doing so will help me feel like my body is truly me again- like my body can come home to my spirit, soul, and core self. Ha- maybe it will “come home” with the other parts of me who I’ve been learning to honor and listen to over these past years. The 14 year old N, the 5 year old N, the college aged N, the too rigid with religion N, the protector, professional, and yes, even the rebel; these parts of me have lived through an intense life, and they have a place here with me in the present. I cannot say they’re entirely integrated because I still have work to do, but these parts do feel less distant than they once did, and for that, I am very grateful.
Today, I am going to love my body by building a fire, enjoying the winter storm outside, using my favorite blanket and maybe my accupressure mat. I’m going to allow the diffuser to fill the room with the scent of lavender and clam my nervous system. I’m going to stretch, breathe, hydrate, live and be- just as I am today. Here in this home is where beauty is finding me and teaching me to embrace a life of beauty untrapped.