Lights Are On But No-one's Home

I was lying in bed on Sunday morning staring out of the window, when a word picture landed on my heart, like a divinely beautiful butterfly. 

I have learned over the years that when I am really quiet and at peace with myself, inspiration often honours me with a gentle visit.   I admired its quiet presence and remained still whilst it graced me with its message.  After its departure I documented its visit, which for me is like taking an emotional photo of its imprint by writing it down seconds after it takes flight.  A bit like a bird watcher.  Bird watchers don't take up the hobby of studying birds to capture the bird, but to just appreciate it in its natural habitat, and then make a note of its visit after it departs.  My spiritual study is the same, as a devoted student of Mother Nature and Father Time's universal wisdom; I am in awe of the terrain of the human spirit and all of its wildness and wonder.

Inspiration when it comes to me, I understand is not something I own, it visits us all when we are still enough to receive it.  Sharing our sightings and experiences discovered within its fleeting visits, whether through music, art, dance, writing or any creative outlet is one of the purest ways to experience heartfelt joy in my opinion.

The heart picture that inspired me to write this blog, in the sleepy morning hours on Sunday, was powerful and plain at the same time.  I just felt in my heart and also observed the experience of a bogged car with its wheels in deep mud.  These wheels were frantically spinning getting bogged deeper and deeper in the wet, clay like earth.  The suction of the mud was pulling the car tyres in deeper the more the frustrated and fearful driver pushed down on the accelerator.

I had been reflecting on my last blog and all the feedback it received, when I wrote about Eating, Competing and Males.  I had a moment of clarity as I focused on this visual of a car stuck in mud.  It occurred to me that when I am over or under eating I feel internally like this car, and I get bogged down and trapped in my own fear.   And the more I fight it, and panic, the deeper I get sucked into the fear.  The only way out is to ask for help.  I fight asking for help less these days.  I will surrender and ask Mother Nature and Father Time to inspire me with a loving action and direct me out of my bog of fear.   I can then help myself, and hopefully, eventually help others, who like me also get sucked into believing they are trapped within themselves. 

I wanted to pick up on writing a little more to you this week about the subject of eating in relation to intimacy. After my last blog so many of my readers privately emailed me, and a few of you also decided to share your story for others to read in the comment sections, which I have published for you below my last blog Eating, Competing and Men.

I didn't realize so many other females also did this.  Wow.  I was so deeply grateful to be able to hold a mirror up for my fellow sisters to help them gain a three dimensional view of their own behaviours.  A bit like that rear mirror when we are trying on jeans that we are so grateful to be given help so we can more easily see our blind spots, and make a better informed choice.

I have in the past mastered the art of appearing to have my shit together, or having my lights on so that it looked like all was well on my hearts home front.   The porch lights and a few token lamps would be on and provide the illusion that I was at home, but in actual fact, I am not at  home in my heart when I am bogged in fear and anger towards my body.

Intimacy and heart warmth are not possible with another when we are not at home in our own hearts.  If I don't lovingly, responsibly and consistently feed myself well not just in spurts sometimes, but every day, on a private level I feel deprived, sad, fraudulent to the sisterhood, and disconnected. 

If I don't love myself, I cannot grow love internally, nor make love externally.  There is a beautiful saying "Love like bread needs to be made fresh each day."  We all know that what we focus on grows.  If we focus on our fear of food and neglect our body's basic needs by not feeling good enough every day, our fear snowballs and gets bigger and bigger as the days, months and years pass.  We lose ourselves and become fearful instead of empowered.

The reverse is also true, thank God.  If we focus on our love of good food and respect and gratitude to our loyal bodies that have served us faithfully over the years (even though we have been neglectful, resentful and mean towards it) this also results in a snowballing of wellbeing and peace of heart and mind.  Fresh bread and fresh love baked daily, for us to enjoy, what a delightful way to live?

I have made a career out of self study throughout my personal journey recovering from 19 years of active drug and alcohol addiction and a childhood of sexual and domestic violence.  I have had so many dysfunctional behaviours that have needed correcting.  But I have also come to learn we cannot change what we cannot see.  It's that old uncover, discover, recover law.  So writing things out helps me with the first step in uncovering my truth.  It seems like so many of my fears have been covering the divine furniture in the rooms of my heart like dusty, ugly grey canvass draped over the beautiful velvet antique furniture inhibiting me from using and enjoying my own inner world fully.  Instead I have spent years wandering aimlessly around in the dark, lost in my own heart not able to drop my emotional anchor and move in and make myself at home and relax into just being me.  I had nowhere to sit and recharge, no heart hospitatlity to let love in and encourage it to stay.

So writing down daily what is going on with my addictive personality, my fears, my triumphs, hormones, parenting, relationships, my eating patterns and my libido has provided me with a great deal of insight I could not have gained nor remembered had I not started daily journaling around 14 years ago.  Over the years I have removed many of these grey dust cloths to reveal wonders within my own heart that make being me a true joy.

What I have observed throughout my daily journaling, is that when I am not cultivating love towards myself specifically when it comes to eating, I cannot cultivate love, or make love freely with my darling husband. My libido is directly affected and shuts down when I shut down being loving and attentive to my body.  Ironically we all know we cannot ask another to give what we are not willing to give ourselves.  But I do.  I can be heard complaining about my man not giving me enough attention, or time, or loving preferring to look outward instead of taking responsibility for my own lack of self care. 

It is no surprise that when I am loving toward myself and paying attention to my body respectfully that my darling husband like a magnet is drawn to me.  He reaches more often to hold my hand, smiles at me more, walks up behind me as I peel potatoes at the kitchen sink and kisses me on the back of the neck, and makes delicious love to me.  When I look after myself properly only then can I truly relax and surrender.  It is then that I am able to plant, grow and tend to the fresh seedlings of love that my husband and I both long to bring to and care for in the sacred garden of our marriage.

When I don't put clean fuel into my system, it is like not putting clean fuel into a motor vehicle.  I compromise my performance, endurance and damage myself mechanically.  I clog up and get bogged.  The more sugar, caffeine and fat I ingest, the more bogged I get in fear.  My preferred response when I get fearful is to cover it with anger.  I get angry when I am afraid.  Under my fear and anger is sadness but I feel too vulnerable when I am sad, so I choose anger instead to blow myself up, push others away but this always bogs me down in fear.

I now understand that I have subconsciously controlled my instinct to eat because I organically understood that it is directly wired to my primitive instinct to desire to connect with love for myself and this will domino out into love for my lover.  If I don't control it and suppress love, it just does its own thing.  It ebbs and flows to please itself.  And ... when you have past experiences of being abused in the name of love, you want to keep control of it, and keep it at an arm's length.

So depriving myself of self care in away kept love out of my life, love for myself and ... then it makes it impossible for others to love me fully, and if they don't love me they can't hurt me, and that keeps me safe.  So in a backwards sort of a way, as a child I decided that self neglect (using and abusing food) was the best way to self care and keep myself safe.   Children often get things backwards, but it actually worked at keeping love out, trouble is it kept me trapped and bogged in fear.

It is taking me time and a great deal of patience with myself to learn new love based actions instead of self neglectful habits that no longer serve me.   I am slowly learning how to trust my body as a loving and beautifully faithful partner not a weapon to keep my heart protected from the enemy.  This is quite demanding as I used to believe the enemy was love, and now I have to surrender and let love in when I have spend almost five decades trying to control it and restrict its access to me and my heart.

Co-dependency has infected many of my emotional files, like a virus infects files on a computer.   I have done a great deal of work with my therapist and safe elders on setting up emotional firewalls, and antivirus systems to deflect any new incoming viruses, but deleting the damage from my existing co-dependent virus is still a day at a time journey.  Co-dependent relationships are the opposite of balanced and healthy partnerships.  Co-dependency is about one party being submissive and the other dominant.  There is no equality, and no peace of heart and mind.

My body and my head have see-sawed exhaustingly throughout my life in a destructive co-dependent relationship.  At times my head is dominant and my body submissive.  When this happens, my head dictates control, shame and denial and I under eat and in the past used a range of chemicals like caffeine, alcohol, drugs and laxatives to suppress my primitive instinct to eat which is an act of self love.   I could only sustain this for so long until my body staged a rebellion for survival and conquered my head.  My hungry body then becomes the aggressor and dominates my head and any hope of rational thought is slaughtered.  My starving body then is free to binge on sugar and fats to accumulate as much storage as it can, as it knows that my head will regain its strength and wage a counter attack again as soon as it is able.  I would always eat in a rush and in secret looking over my shoulder waiting for my head to storm into the room and confiscate food again relishing in starving me.

My dear heart, is left out of this picture and remains locked away, albeit protected but inaccessible to me or to others.  My desire, my passion, my spiritual intuition and self love that are all gentle angelic whispers like delicate classical music, are locked away.  Love is drowned out by the heavy metal, loud and distorted sounds of my angry fearful head and body at war with each other.

When my head and body dominate my life with fear, my hearts needs for love are not met.  When a person does not honour their own heart, they cannot expect it to be honoured by anyone else.  I can have sex like many of us do, when I am in head and body control, but at a heart level my emotional needs will remain unmet.  I often feel emotionally malnourished afterward.  If I neglect to bring my heart into the bedroom with my lover because I am drunk, high, stoned from over eating, or starving for self love, it is highly probably that my lover will also neglect my heart.

We hear a lot about safe sex.  We educate our children to ensure they protect their bodies from physical infection.  Well I would like to add to that discussion what about safe sex for our hearts?  Lets ensure we protect ourselves from the infection of fear.  If you cannot bring your heart into the bedroom with your lover, you cannot ask for heartfelt love from them.  If you bring your body and head only looking for true love, you are setting yourself up for heart ache, because your heart will not be nourished by intellectual stimulus or physical technique.  The heart is only nourished through tenderness, respect, joy, desire and love. If we starve our hearts of this vital nourishment, we will live with heart ache.

Not all of us are looking for love when we have sex.  Sometimes we are just looking for good sex and physical relief; there is nothing wrong with that.  But it is imperative I believe to remind ourselves that if we are looking for love, intimacy, care and to build a sacred garden and a future with the one we choose to have sex with, that this heartfelt truth needs to be honoured not neglected.  When we are infected with fear in the bedroom too afraid to speak up for our emotional needs, they will not be met.   This is unsafe heart sex.

I remember talking with my sons about duck sex and swan sex when they were in their late teens.  These are simple visuals, but they smiled and got the message. 

I am told that ducks have many partners in life and love to have sex whenever they can with whomever they can, as often as they can.   Ducks are the ambassadors for polygamy.  They like multiple partners and don't pretend otherwise. And then there are swans.  When a swan has sex its focus is to mate with the one partner with the view to making that partner a potential life partner.  Swans are the ambassadors for monogamy.  I remember saying to my boys that sometimes people go through duck phases in life and sometimes they are ready for a swan like relationship.  The importance is to be true to what is in your heart and not pretend.  If you are in a duck phase, leave the swans alone, and if you are ready for swan sex, watch out for ducks and don't try to convert someone who wants to be a duck into a swan and make them wrong.

When we are at home with our hearts truth (be it duck or swan truth) we are at peace with ourselves and comfortable in our own skin.  It is good to be us, and we enjoy who we are and who we are not.  When I eat well and nourish myself as I ensured I nourished my sons with a healthy balanced diet as they grew up.  I am at home in my own heart.  The lights are on, and I am home.  For those that visit my home they know I have wonderful fairy lights all throughout my house and also in my boudoir.  For I do believe in the magic of love, and making love in my home for me includes making loving meals for myself, family and friends who are my hearts companions.  I love that word companion as its Latin roots translate into "break bread with" our companions are who our heart chooses to break bread with.

 They say that home is where the heart is.  We all deserve to feel at home in our own skin and our own hearts.  May we all learn to celebrate with an abundance of fairy lights how great it is to move out of the bog of our own fears, and give ourselves permission to at least experience what it is to feel the love of the sacred swan.

I leave you with these simple Word Vitamins to ponder from Robert Frost.

"Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."