Returning to my Self

I can hear the birds chirping in my backyard, and I smile as I sip my ice cold electrolyte water. 

Because I feel so damn grateful.

There are times that I don’t hear the birds at all. 

They’re still there, beautiful as ever, singing their happy songs, but I don’t sense them.

I don’t hear them, I don’t see them. 

I am somewhere else entirely.  

There were days that I felt that way all too often. 

Maybe all the time. 

Now it happens in moments, sometimes days or weeks, where I slip back into old versions of me. 

It happens, I think, partly to remind me of how far I’ve come. So when I’m holding a magnifying glass to my mind, body, and soul, looking for more things to fix, I remember what life used to be like for me, and how it is now. 

So I could be grateful. 

But mostly it happens, so that I can heal one more layer of wounding. So I can climb down that spiral staircase deeper and deeper into me, on my journey back to Self. 

I’m starting to enjoy it, the journey. I used to be hurried to get somewhere, and many parts of me still are. But in a way I can’t quite explain yet, I’m starting to enjoy the process. The human struggle that I signed up for. The game- because it is a game- the pain, the mess, the surrender, the unleashing and reclaiming. All of it. 

The magic of those moments that I remember who I am. The glimpses of my Divinity that I once couldn’t even see, let alone feel, let alone become. 

How crazy, I think to myself, that I thank my triggers now. Even in the depths of it, crawling on the floor, screaming with the ache of a child in deep pain, in a hell so excruciating, I both want to die and yet I  hold on for dear life at the same time, a grip so tight, that I’m learning to let go of. 

Even then, I can hold my inner child in the arms of my Highest Self, and I could feel both the pain and the gratitude for the opportunity to come back to process what my little girl couldn’t back then.

As a child I wrote in my diary when the feelings were so big and had no exit point.

I wrote to my future self. I could remember the thoughts in my mind, the feelings in my body as I cried to her. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew I would come back in time to save her.

And I have.

I continue to.

Save her.

And that is why I am thankful for the birds chirping this morning. They reminded me of a time before birds, when life was lived in black and white. 

And that is why I am thankful for the triggers that invite me deeper into myself. 

For the pain that made me. 

For the fire that forged me.

That initiated me into the embodiment of the Divine daughter of God that I am.

Even when I slip back into old patterns, or succumb to the pain and revisit an old version of myself.

Even when I close my heart yet again, and don’t act as my Highest Self.

Even when I judge and hate the wounded human that emerges.

I work to come back to myself, to love, and love those versions of me. 

“She’s enough just like that”, I remind myself.

And although I don’t always believe it, although even when I do, I forget shortly after, I keep practicing coming back to love over and over. To love not just my soul, not just my light, but to love my ego, my shadows. 

All of us is God.

All of us. 

We are all of it. 

Everything.