All through last year when I was experiencing a lot of consistent and multi-pronged heartbreak, I started a ritual of beginning my mornings with a warm drink that I would pray on before drinking. This would be cacao, or tea, or water (which is just one of the most beautiful and sacred forces in the world, and a powerful dissolvent). And I would sit with it and ask a very simple prayer—
Allah, please dissolve any blocks that I have around my heart. Please let me move through this heartbreak and not let it stone inside of me. Please let me learn what I am intended to learn. Please allow me to keep my heart space open, and with this warm, dissolve anything that keeps it stuck.
My friend Krista Franklin also put me onto spiritual baths as a practice. Of praying to the water before you get in, fixing it with herbs before you get in, and asking the water and plant friends to help remove anything from anything from your field that kept you stuck. Any energy that wasn’t yours. The insights were wild, and very transformative.
Love is active, it’s a verb, and it’s constantly present. Including loving ourselves. We’re always in relationship to love, even if we are running from it or denying its existence in our life. If we’re yearning for it, or rejecting it. Like many of us, I’ve struggled my whole life to really love myself. Especially in the wake of pain, heartache, confusion, and that which seeks to break us. It’s such active work to love all the parts of us, including our shadow, the parts of us that have been shunned or aren’t considered okay to be in society.
We accrue gunk in our systems. And we have to be deliberate and diligent about letting it go.
But loving ourselves, really loving all parts of ourselves, is what allows us to show up for our communities and loved ones in transformative ways. It’s what allows us to hold space for others, to extend empathy, to allow for mistakes, and to move towards building communities and societies that value love, and the complications of love, at their core. It also is what makes us move not from a place of the wound-- shame, or guilt, or disgrace— but from a place of security—love, hope, and courage.
A few years ago, I used to really fixate my identity, my entire sense of self, on things that an identity should not be built on. For example, the idea that I was a ‘good’ person. The idea that I was ‘kind’. And then when I wasn’t, when I came up short on these values, I would beat myself up constantly, making small betrayals of these values into huge rationales for why I wasn’t worthy, why I was a failure, why I couldn’t do anything right, and what became justification for pain and heartbreak that I experienced in my life. I also know that this voice and pattern is very much informed by trauma and abuse, my fear that if I am not perfect I won’t be loved, and therefore not protected. And so, when I engage with that voice, I’m gentle about that too, holding compassion for that as I try and untangle from its hold.
This is after all, so much of what modern culture does teach us about ourselves. So much that beds down in binary thinking, particularly around ideas of good and bad. And so much that we ascribe to with that. Sometimes our affirmations begin to reflect that, our sense of self begins to reflect that, and can become cages of our own making. Like anything, prayer, affirmations, have to morph as we do. So that we don’t become stuck.
I’m so grateful to the many teachers, healers, meditators, friends and people in my life who have helped me see the ways that I was hurting myself with so much of this.
I value love, but I’m not always loving. I value kindness, but I’m not always kind. I fall short of them. And that is perfectly okay. Like my politics, these things are a beacon, a place I journey to, a destination I’m in route towards, and not an identity. And just honestly, sometimes in a given moment, they’re not what’s needed. Something else might be.
A healer whose work I love, Kenneth Jover, says—“it’s because of the moments that I acted outside of kindness that I recommit to kindness.” And that’s it--- the moments that we act out of our values can be moments of interrogation, of understanding what was at play and why, and a moment to recommit back to the value.
Last night, I put a glass of water by my bed and prayed for dreams where my guides communicated to me what I needed to know.
I did not sleep.
Instead, I stayed awake, my little heart beating with wild hope and excitement about writing about love. I had to keep getting up and leaving voice notes to myself for things my heart was saying to me. This meme was literally me, except the only living things in my bed were me and my heart. lol. Just my heart being obsessed with the idea of love, of writing about it. It was like BITCH FINALLY.
And, hilariously, I was trying to argue with it—like, bb please be quiet! I gotta sleep so I can dream! And then I was like, oh—the messages are right here, loud as hell, practically banging against my chest, and the reason I can’t sleep.
Over the last few years, I have been working on a book that has been extremely difficult, and extremely necessary for me to write. I really do believe that writing is spell work, and that we cast what we do as we write things down. Writing the book was an elongated ceremony for me, an undoing and a re-putting back together. There were so many times that I didn’t think I could finish it. And I had to meet myself deeper than I ever thought possible, in order to write it.
Now, after having written the book (which will come out maybe at the end of this year maybe next year) there are things I can no longer accept. I see what places tore me. I see where my wounds tricked me into accepting love that was hurtful and recreated patterns. And I can’t do that anymore.
Now, my little heart wants to write about love. Its actually telling me it needs to write about love to help it heal. I did so much to repair the damage that I had done to my heart unwillingly. I read The Alchemist last year for the first time, which was a book that really moved me. During my morning drinking ceremonies, I started to play D’Angelo’s Betray My Heart over and over again, embedding the making of the drink with the song. I would sit with my heart and promise it that I would listen to it, that I would always listen to it, and that it could be as loud as possible if I wasn’t listening enough.
Let me tell you—my heart was like—bet, bitch.
Last night it was loud af.
I hope it stays that way. I want to nourish it and show that I’m safe enough for it to continue to be loud with me.
The critic/ internalized capitalism inside my head tells me I’m wasting time, that I should be working on my to-do list, on all the things that I have to get done in order to be productive. But my little heart has done so much for me. My little heart has kept me alive for so many years. It beats and beats. It does so much. And now my little heart is asking me to write about love, to write about it freely without being worried about how it sounds or how it comes across. And so, I must honor my little heart and write about love, and live a life of love, until my little heart tells me that there’s something else that it wants to explore, something else that it wants to write about.
But, if I’m honest, I don’t think that will happen. I think I’ll write about love forever. If I look at every project I’ve ever worked on artistically, everything that I’ve ever tried to make or write, I know that they’re explorations in love. Complicated love, yes. But love. And after all, what love isn’t infinitely complicated.
Thank you, little heart, for not giving up on me.
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❤️❤️❤️