Self Love Journey: Update 4
It’s Diwali 2019 – a special and heartfelt Indian holiday that celebrates the light above any darkness, the win of goodness above evil. It’s a special day today and it personally feels one that has seen me embrace my own light indeed. I have come to love and feel so welcomed by the Indian culture in endless ways and for it I’m deeply grateful. In this Diwali, I want to celebrate by sharing this, my deepest and largest share in this self love journey. May the light, love and prosperity live and expand in you all. <3 Happy Diwali!
It’s been a year and I’m suddenly struck by it, by this number and by the things I see in that past.
It’s a really crisp Saturday morning today, the sky is blue and spotless, the sun is shining and the air is chilly. Just like a perfect Mediterranean autumn day.
I can’t help to feel as if I was being transported in my mind to that time a year ago. The feeling of it all, the sensations from back then, all that my mind, body, skin, heart and soul were going through at that time. As I recall this all, I suddenly realise I woke up to a loving day of reflection. I must remind my brain for a second that it’s just memories and not the actual present, which brings me to these pages with love and gratitude to reflect and write on one of the biggest chapters of my story. Let’s go.
It was October 2018.
I was living temporarily at my friend’s home that she lovingly opened for me in a time of need while I rearranged my life between continents as I settled down in Barcelona again.
Three months prior I had decided I needed to make that move for my own sake and things started flowing in that direction. Three months is a short period of time – I’m feeling today – yet in those three months I see how much I went through.
October 2018 felt like cold air inside of me, so cold and deep to the bones, mixed with a deeply vulnerable soul and a completely fragile, broken heart. I was finding my way through grief. The grief for home, for lost relationships and for my entire sense of self. Despite having been on change-mode, embracing it all and trying to let myself flow with what life brought, I honestly felt so fragile. So confused as time went by yet able to troop through as best as I could.
A year has passed and I am suddenly thinking on that time, realising how much it was in such a short period of time. No wonder my heart was an absolute jello of feelings stumbling through.
A year later I find myself knowing and understanding so much of my own journey, realising that loving myself (or any lack of it) was the root to it all. I am being taught through all experiences now and then, how my own value is key and how it dictates every decision, choice and more in our lives. The big ones and the small ones.
I was in so much grief on top of a long period of added burnout. How do you even realise that or recover from that? With the help of friends and family alone. It’s the right and only answer.
Unlearn to Relearn
Many years prior, I had had erased any devotional faith in religion from my system. I had been raised in the catholic dogma which made me feel terrible for most of my life. A sinner, a bad kid, a bad person who wasn’t worth of anything. Then I travelled, and met people, and opened up my views over the years and decades. I was able to choose my own faith and live by it. But something was always missing after all those years.
In the last year I was exactly brought down to my knees about faith. After more than a decade of unlearning, learning, discovering, experiencing, I seemed to have been brought to a key point where life would show me slowly the missing key.
In the span of 15 months, I have been shown love in ways I never really knew, and by this I don’t just mean romantic love. As if a whole army of incredible souls had been sent to me to walk by my side and show me through time all the things I have been needing to see my entire life. Let’s say it’s been an express PhD. on Life.
Self Love
That has been the missing key all along. Since childhood, since birth, maybe even lifetimes.
Just writing this suddenly overcomes me with overwhelm and a deep release of salty water through my eyes. Like a veil being taken off your eyes; like a reality being shown to you with so much love you can now understand.
I’ve been taken through a big, long journey of now knowing myself loved for most of my entire life. Why does this happen? No idea. What for? So that we can come learn our needed lessons in order to evolve.
In this last year of my life, it seems I was ready to be shown so many of the secrets and magics of life, making me dig in and out all the many old and useless programming that we’ve all been taught. We have been born into a society that has structures and ways – which is okay. The problem is that these ways have always been based on fear. Religion as I knew was based on fear. Parenthood as I knew it was based on fear. Education as I knew it was based on fear. Sexuality as I knew it was based on fear. Growing up as I knew was based on fear. Relationships of any kind as I knew them were based on fear. Even family was somehow based on fear.
Fear is a killer of life.
And then, because of our journey and life agreements, we come to this point when a new and really deep journey begins. I’m somehow only understanding and joining the dots today as I am typing these words.
My entire life was lived from a full-on fear perspective. I ignore the facts or events that made me be this kind of person in this life. All I know now is that I was living in fear all of my life. And I am also seeing how most of society is built this way, damaging our souls so much, making us loose precious feelings, moments and times of loving growth. Our biggest failure as a whole and yet our biggest growth process.
So, after unlearning through the years, trying to find my own ways, trying to recognise myself and define who am I in this long journey of living, it seems that I was ready to be shown the truth that would correct my path and put me back on the love track.
Love like I had never understood it. Because love to me was always a feeling if trust and support and many more things, but apparently there is something else, so huge, so deep, so mysterious and so rich that I had only heard through the grapevine of daily living.
In October 2018, I was put in front of the biggest mirror of my life. I had never heard of people as mirrors before until a friend brought it up while I was sharing of a deep, personal and even spiritual experience I was going through. I started learning about it, feeling amazed to this understanding of the mirror-people. In this process I would feel things I had never felt and seen myself in a way I had never seen myself before. I was sharing time with people showing me a side of life and myself I had never known. Making me feel in ways I never did yet I could recognise so perfectly like the most me ever. After a while, I became aware of this other Mariana…who was she? How is it possible to feel this way? – I thought to myself many times.
Deep down I kinda recognised her to be honest, but only from memories in my mind, memories of me being absolutely free to express and be; memories that never went out of my head…until this time and through this experience. I saw the Mariana I always dreamed of being yet I never let her out of that little room. She became trapped and used to live just as an illusion. And now something or someone was spotting a light right on her. I barely recognised her at first and then…I was only hooked and in love. I became comfortable to be free all of a sudden. I recognised her, I was in awe with her. I was suddenly her.
I had her, all of her, and then I lost her. I couldn’t understand why but I just lost her and I felt the most lost ever.
After months of grieving yet another loss, I came to remember about the mirror-people and then it hit me. My mirror had left and with it, free-Mariana went away too. I saw her, experienced her, felt her but I never made her stay. I just didn’t know at the time how it worked. Self love that is.
The Mystery
As months went by, I found myself rebuilding my entire world from the inside out, unsure of so many things, fearful and sad many times, yet also with certain mysterious pull that would have me going up and forward other times.
It felt like a big thing that kept ongoing. I was so puzzled about it, trying to figure out what was happening and why. My life was both a hot mess and a huge success. One as seen from the outside and the other as felt form the inside.
The balanced life I was rebuilding was looking good on the outside. Slowly getting more aligned into a better job that would allow me better opportunities. Eventually it was time and I moved out of my friend’s place, with a big heart and ready to find my own space again.
But the insides was a whole different story. The mirrors never went away and they kept showing up. The more I tried to heal, overcome and move on, the more they kept showing up. As magical as life can be, more guides, angels and beyond showed up in my path. I was suddenly surrounded by an army of incredible souls and experiences that were only there to help me grow and evolve, yet I was still fragile, unable to see how this was all happening, yet it happened.
The mystery continued. Something else was there, behind me, helping me.
Love, God, Source, Universe
I had been puzzled with these terms after having unlearned and making my way to relearn certain things in new ways. Ways that felt comfortable for me, and not just ways dictated to me.
It was quite marked and defined that my unlearning process ended and I was then taken into a discovery and research journey. That’s how my sabbatical and entrepreneurial season began, lasting for 3 years. By the end of these three years, then the new learning would show up in my front door without notice. In October 2018. I was brought close to a way of love I never knew before; also to cultures, people and experiences in such depth I didn’t know existed. Apparently, life knew it was my time and despite my severe vulnerability and fragility I was still able to cope and embrace with all this newness for a reason.
This gave me such a push inside like I hadn’t felt in a long while. A desire to learn, to embrace new things and recover old learning desires back again, a new language, a new dance, new ways of thinking. Seeds I had in me suddenly woke up and they just kept pushing life and pulling forward from the inside. I was still puzzled and with little understanding of why I was feeling such pull but as troubled as I felt, I always knew that my gut is stronger than anything and if my gut was telling me one thing, I was going to follow along.
The same things that I felt pulled to do and learn as a way to start balancing my insides where the things that would teach me everything I needed in every exact moment.
The outside started balancing itself through work that would give me the income to get myself a home and my own safe space again. While all this happened, the insides were a mix of messy, excited, happy, hurt and confused. Yet life has a way of taking you through it all no matter what.
When the outside was more balanced, then the real, deep inner work would begin – as if there hadn’t been enough of it already. Little did I know!
Back to Today
15 months have passed and today I sit here in reflection of all this, coming to a massive and deep awareness of this journey, having tears of joy and seeing how I am being given what I have asked for: to feel love. The Love. Not just through the grapevine but in my actual own skin, heart and soul.
In these last 15 months I had been given people, experiences, tools, opportunities and more that were only guiding me back to this thing I didn’t know I needed, wanted or was missing. Yet I can see how it was exactly the endless longing I have had for all of my life.
Life’s relearning process has brought me back to faith. But not the religious kind, the one that I always feared and felt an absolute punisher. No. This time it’s a faith of life, in life, in a major force, in love. In the understanding that all this huge force doesn’t live outside of us, up in any heavens but inside of us instead. In the very heart centre.
The place where it all begins and ends. Where everything takes place and where everything makes sense. It’s here in this place where we just know things, where things just feel right and good, doubtless and reassuring.
It is in this understanding where peace lives and guides our lives. It is in this understanding where love resides.
I never knew love in this way. I just knew other kinds that were different but always missing something, and even then, I never knew. Life is only a constant learning process. But then it comes this one thing and time where you are hit by something else. and this thing starts to open you up, to make you feel new things. You’re left amazed and confused, suddenly wondering of all this newness, where it came from and how have you lived life before then.
You might get puzzled trying to think and understand yet it’s pointless. Nothing will make sense if we try to look for it. Until one day, after many days, weeks and months of life passing by, you growing, struggling, loving, and evolving, you come to one understanding.
The Understanding of Love
Love as the major force of life. Like when you hold a newborn for the first time; like when you cry happy tears that feel like an outburst from the heart coming out of nowhere and flowing through your eyes instead; like when you feel a sudden absolute joy and gratitude for a person or simply a memory; like when you cry over a rainbow, or a hug, or a kiss.
Love is this major life force indeed that can’t be explained yet it makes everything flow and in order when it’s time. No matter how hard we try at times, when it is love, things just flow alone, effortlessly, and with so much light.
I have been brought to a new faith that some may call God, Universe, Source or Love. God had always had such a negative connotation in my life and I still feel wary about that word or concept alone many times. But somehow, it all tried to find a way to find me, to get to me. I had then learned about the universe, the vibrations and energy of earth and life, of things. I have learned and brought closer via different beliefs by different people around me to angels and spiritual guides. I have been shown and taught so much around this, thanks to other people who had known life through love more than fear, showing me how love feels.
15 months it’s a short time and not so much, it depends. It has certainly felt like a long process of healing and recovery to me. And it’s only today, as I sat down to write and explore my feelings and memories that I can come to these conclusions so clearly.
The missing key was always love.
And the only way to get to understand love, was to come back to myself and realise that I had be born as Love all along. That I am Love. That my purpose is to love. And through this I am and will always be shown more about love, about the life force and about how it is all one same thing, only separated from one another by a set of skin.
Understanding self love is only beginning for me, and yet I can already see how everything that I have lived in life so far – my decisions, my choices, my thoughts and so much more – had always been made from a place the didn’t know self acceptance, self enjoyment, self love.
And the more I tune into this, the more I can forgive anything that I thought had harmed me, whether myself or others. It was always in my own lack of self appreciation. Thinking my family didn’t love me enough was only me not loving or accepting myself, not even knowing who I had been all along in the first place.
Identity is such a big thing. And in this lack of self appreciation, we grow knowing nothing about ourselves and more about what we are supposed to be. Some people cope better into not buying into those things, and some of us bought the whole thing. It’s life.
So far I am only starting to understand self love with such clear eyes, but it was only thanks to a long dark night of the soul that I have been able to come to this point.
Despite any fragility, any vulnerability. Despite a massively broken heart on top of more broken parts of me that had only piled up and up. Despite all this, I was able to still pull forward somehow blindly, being shown the way by something else outside of me, something invisible, something guiding me.
Call it as you wish. All I know is that life has a sweet mystery and that there is no absolute need to ever worry, doubt or suffer really. When you trust, you just know. And when you just know, you just flow. With love. In love.
“Live today. Love tomorrow. Unite forever.”
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