Love

This past weekend I heard my heart instead of my fear! I chose to step out of the darkness and into the light….

I am 41 years old and over the last few days I finally decided to live. When I say live, I don’t mean nourish my body, go on holidays and earn money. I mean breath in to my purpose, connect to my mission and share it with the world.

My purpose is to listen to my heart and honour its whisper, to honour my intuition and what it is telling me, to stand in the full light of my mission and to own it, fully and completely.

This weekend I realised that I have kept myself in a state of confusion around what my mission really is. Confusion is one of my life long strategies that has continually tripped me up and as much as it has kept me safe, it has kept me small. I realise that I have always known what my mission is, I have known the whole time.

It is love.

My mission when I was younger, in my teens and twenties was to be loved.

To fill up the hole that I felt inside myself with other people loving me, my family (by people pleasing and being the good girl), my friends (by being the funny one and giving too much), my ex lovers (by not having clear boundaries and selling out on myself over and over again!) and myself, ironically enough by treating my body badly and listening to those nasty little voices in my head.

When my marriage ended at 28, I had my first truly reflective moment around love, “why did I chose someone who was so wrong for me?”, because he loved me and at 20 I was happy to sell my soul to be loved.

My mission in my early thirties was to understand love.

I became a student of many fabulous teachers who helped me develop a much greater understanding of the human condition, our need for connection with self and others and the importance of spirit and source energy. Funnily enough, I still smoked cigarettes until I was 34, drank too much too often and continued to say harsh things to myself. I still thought my body represented me and if I punished it enough, surely, it would come to the party. I developed a deeper understanding of love through this time, I had more lovers but I didn’t let them in, there was no way I was going to truly risk my heart again. It was all very safe and seemed to make sense in my head, I mean, I got it, I just wasn’t prepared to live it.

My mission in my mid to late thirties was to experience love.

My mum was diagnosed with a terminal cancer and that prompted me to challenge everything I thought was real in the world. In taking care of everyone else I yet again sold out on myself and developed my own set of aliments and illnesses. The penny was finally starting to drop, it all starts with me! If I don’t truly love myself, and that sometimes means letting others down, then how can I truly love others and how can I let them love me?

After Mum passed and the wounds began to heal I started to take care of myself in a way that I had never done before. I began nourishing my body with nutrient dense food, I spent time and money following my passion, I took time and space when I needed it, I danced more, I laughed more and I attracted people into my world who inspired and challenged me. A year or so on, I met a man in Fiji that I had such a profound and deep connection with. We started a beautiful relationship and for the first time in my life I loved with such an open heart, I took such great risk to be seen and I experienced a vulnerability that held great hope.

And yet it still it didn’t work. Through the ending of that relationship, I experienced a pain so deep and raw that in the breaking of my heart, I was able to rebuild it in the most magnificent way. I finally got it……

My job is to love me, wholly, ecologically, passionately, deeply, abundantly, without condition, without exception, without rules.

So my mission for my forties, I realized this weekend, is to be love

What I mean by that is to love myself more fiercely than anyone else on the planet can, to respect what is right for me and to honour that whisper that comes so quietly and graciously from my heart. To be love, I will honour myself as I honour others, I will accept myself as I accept others and I will listen to my truth as I listen to the truth of others.

My mission is love and what a magnificent journey it has been coming to this point on the road.