Nurture your heart, nurture your life ; and some of my fears around isolation

What might it mean to live without self rejection, to live in such a way that we hold our inner child and the inner child of others with love?  This is something I am only just getting a glimpse of learning to do at the later age of 60.  As I look back I see how bereft and abandoned my inner child was.. I gave her away at times seeking a love that was not worth it at all, because it is a clique but a powerful one that no one can fully love you until you accept and love yourself.  Loving ourselves means being a caring nurturing parent to ourselves, it means championing the true self and to be encouraging in a balanced and realistic way,  rather than critical or over inflating of our selves.  It means to treat ourselves and others with respect, above all. 

The sad truth is that those of us emotionally abandoned as children do become both instinct injured and ravenously hungry for love, bearing that longing to be deeply connected to, unless we cut if off, which often happens if the cruelty and invalidation happening to us in childhood is strong.. We then learn to be cruel and invalidating to ourselves and if we glimpse those needs in others we may see them as disgusting or shameful in some way. It is not only this aspect of ourselves we find disgusting as woman because sadly when raised in a culture that reduces sexuality to pure gratification and objectification and then shames the sexual impulse or drive, that form of soulful and spiritual expression may be come either compulsive or wounded in us as well. 

Learning what brings me joy and to be grounded in my senses outside of post traumatic trauma storms and cascades, seems to be a good starting point for this journey..  Today I made myself look at a beautiful pink pillow in my room when the morning cascade was trying to keep me internalizing and in freeze.. I had not realised for so long just how unsafe this world and my sensing self often felt.

It also means each day to touch base with life too IN BODY RATHER THAN FROM JUST IN MY HEAD, because for so so long due to the trauma of my past I woke each day feeling as if I was dying and my body and the bodies of others are dangerous  The truth is we are dying alittle every day which is why it is so important to make the very most of the present moment, instead of being forever lost or trapped in past regret or traumatic recall.

That said REGRET IS OUR BEST TEACHER it may show us where we sacrificed our own self value, or educate us to where we were living in blindness before.. So the person who claims to be bulletproof and to have regretted nothing may be only seeing part of the story, that said when we accept our level of ignorance was not our fault at the time then we do not have to punish ourselves due to regret, but we can open ourselves to the regret for learning what different steps to take this time.

Jasper and I started the day with two walks this weekend.. I was out by 8.30 on Saturday which is amazing for me and by 9.30 today.. it was a little lonely and sad at times seeing we were one of the few people walking alone  Lately I am seeing how alone I am due the way both my parents were and how alone they often stayed.. We did not have a lot of models for open hearted inclusivity growing up and all of my siblings isolate.   Really when Mum and Dad met they were mirrors of each other, having both lost their fathers as young ones, something shown in both their charts by Sun Mercury Saturn conjunctions. 

That sense of a missing father or fathering is shown in my chart by Moon Mars conjunct Saturn and Sun square to Neptune. Today is Sunday (or the day ruled over by the Sun), Saturday is Saturn’s day (ruled over by Saturn) and its the day I crashed at 17 on the way to work (Saturn).  I was working from the age of 13 in our family business as a way of being taught duty and responsibility and it was at that age my Nana put my Mum into domestic service. .

When I think about how alone and isolated my sister is in the home, of how she has no friends much now, it makes me so sad.. She tried for so many years to be connected, doing dragon boating and having a personal trainer after her breast cancer but as I think about it she was not relating from behind her mask in any of those relationships since she was not able to be honest about her mental health struggles.  That is sad to me. It’s really sad.  I actually watched part of a comedy standup with Australian comedian Will Anderson last night in which he spoke about being bullied by his personal trainer, he started the segment saying how happy he was now he was not going to the gym three times a week.  Sometimes it seems to be working out is just a way of pushing ourselves too hard, as important to health as physical excercise can be its not a stand in for deep emotional work. 

Australia is a very superficial culture in some ways, there is a lot of focus on the physical and its part of the reason I never felt fully at home here growing up and was so relieved to leave Sydney in 1999 to live overseas in the UK where there is more depth, and more connection to meaningful history.  But I am also beginning to understand that a life lived in an active physical body is a happy one, because sadly the thoughts in our mind often take us away from experiencing that pleasure.

At the moment I still have no idea how to break fully out of my isolation. The few friends I thought I had seemed to have gone by the wayside lately and I must confess this weekend to having had some very low moments over this.  The point of a human life is to be related to others, to be connected heart to heart.  In my life there just seems to be so little of that around me at present and I am not sure how to go about changing it. 

Perhaps an awareness of the problem in the first step out.  To no longer be in denial about why and how I chose to stay so separate at times and to stop using justifications such as high sensitivity, for what use is it being that way if one is not connected much to anyone at all?  This is what I keep asking myself as I experienced some suicidal thoughts this morning.. I do not like having those thoughts but lately I am having them a lot, especially in the lead up to facing another alone Christmas.