My heart on the outside

It was my 42nd birthday on the summer solstice and I was hanging upside down over a waterfall in Greece as part of a ritual to acknowledge the doorway to my Uranus Opposition Midlife Transit.

So as I hung suspended in front of a group of 40 onlookers I felt an intense urge to unzip my skin and crawl out of my form, I no longer wanted to be someone. This perfectly crafted ‘me’ that took 42 laborious years to construct was calling for demolition.

I cannot describe the urgency of this inner demand from deep part of my being, I wanted to be liberated from all roles of being ‘someone’- daughter, mother, friend, sister, beloved. I longed to rise each day from emptiness and instead of cloaking myself in a sheath of response to the external world, I want to walk naked as nothingness and nobody.

I called my mum and asked her to release me as her daughter so our love could rest together in the freedom of what lives at our core and not in the crafted coats of duty and obligation.

I called my daughter and asked her to release me as mother and instead invited her to journey into the deep love of two souls holding our highest purpose of incarnation together.

They both laughed and said ‘no’.

Cut to now and I am on the slippery slope to my 43rd birthday and facing the next stage of my heart’s journey into freedom- releasing my attachment to the identity of my daughter.

Over the past 14 years of her existence my heart has woven a precious sheath, a jewelled form that she is ‘mine’, my daughter and my soul is now asking me to unravel it.

The attachment to her form runs deep- to have a being grow inside my body, to feed her from my breasts, to be the voice that soothes her, to experience her tears of grief when I would leave the room; the heart cannot help but create a treasure of memories encasing the form of her existence.

The irony of this heart initiation is that the distillation process requires the release of attachment to the form of body/mind and a refocus on the love of soul, yet parenting itself is initiated through the attachment to form. This attachment creates a mutual bond which shapes the development of the child and is critical to both parent/child.

My attachment to her form runs deep from the first moment I gazed into her eyes and saw her tiny body, my heart gushed ‘this one is with me’. Nothing has ever felt as precious as those first few days of her life, the perfection of this being that lay in my arms, I had no idea where my heart was now it was outside of me. Nothing else mattered except loving her and I was brought to my knees by a love that demanded everything of me, through sleepless nights, cracked nipples, tears and exhaustion, this love engulfed all of me.

Ancient traditions saw parents raise a child until eight years old only to return them through symbolic ceremony to the great mother and father, parents of their soul. This ritual recognised the beautiful role that biological parents held to nurture the form of the child but asked for this to be surrendered so a child’s true essence could emerge. Without this conscious process, children often live inside our constructed forms of their body/mind and on the end of emotional/ shamanic threads that continues to feed our attachment.

I believe as parents we are asked to honour a child’s soul through the recognition that we are guardians of their incarnational purpose, which is inherently linked to us but distinct and unique. The initial stages of this process require us to nurture the love of attachment so they may grow into healthy embodiment but then shift our focus to what lives at their core, untouched and waiting to emerge.

I therefore have to manage my projections of Arjala and let her grow past who I need her to be. I can now see how my family struggled to let go of their need for me and sometimes I feel as though I have to squeeze back into an old garment from my childhood closet to be with them.

It has both filled me with such gratitude but also evoked grief to see that Arjala has been carrying the projections of my own inner girl through an outer form and I have been unconsciously parenting the child inside of me through her. She carries the fears and sensitivities of my inner girl and I often respond to her through the filter of what is difficult for me. In many ways parenting her was parenting me; I filled the gaps of love that were missing in my childhood.

I have been pouring over photos of Arjala since birth with deep gratitude and joy that I was gifted the opportunity to be the one to nurture her into being and that she carried a piece of my heart on the outside that I could love and cherish. I am now releasing her from this role, I am absorbing the child back into my own heart and holding instead a flame for who she really is; eternal and ancient.

I am choosing to love and support her from a place that sees who she is independent of me and our history together. And I plan to treasure this history, to every now and again pour over it with gratitude and joy for the gift that entered my life, bloody and screaming, cracking my heart from the outside, over and over.