human – ginger's galaxy

The Shame Behind the Creative Process

In college, I remember telling my poetry professor that I didn’t like editing my poems. That it felt like I was taking some of its magic and significance away. That I preferred it raw and “real”. It felt watered down, too technical and unemotional, and not as impactful when I would go in to tear it apart to “fix” it.

I guess the mistake on my part was thinking that this process of editing is anything like “fixing”. I also think that it correlates to my childhood wounds where I felt my mom was always trying to make me into someone I wasn’t by telling me to change this thing and that thing, all these parts of me. And so to take something, like a poem, that was seemingly poured from my heart, and trying to make sense of the process of editing to make the piece “better”, just made it feel like it was not good enough to start with.

And this was the problem too, I think, because when we are always sensitive to not being accepted or seen, we perhaps, some of us, cling even more to certain parts of our identities. Rebelling and exaggerating and defending what feels “real”. I felt those first drafts of my poems were real. So I didn’t want to do anything that would signify erasing it, since I have felt erased all my life.

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Why Listening to Your Heart Only Works When You Listen to Your Body

A part of why “just listen to your heart” doesn’t work is because people tend to get their minds mixed up with what their heart and soul is actually telling them.

The mind and the ego both for all its time in existence has tried to mimic the heart and the soul. The more that is found out about emotions and spirituality and things like that, the mind and ego will create a rigid pattern so that they can follow. This is because we still adhere to certainty, we still want a guide to present to us our vulnerabilities and moralities.

“Listening to your heart” only works when you get to know how your body works and what it communicates to you. If your body is rooted, it will naturally give rise to the heart’s song. The mind can go round and round in circles for years before ever touching a toe into the heart’s pond.

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The Extraordinary Ordinary

I used to want to feel normal. That’s all I ever wanted. Now I see that my perspective and definition of feeling normal was really just to have a sense of belonging, a right to be here. No explanation needed for why I exist.

I’ve equated the feeling to how babies in their first years of life start to learn how to manipulate and exert their influence onto the outside world. How you can see them growing more and more aware of their own power and joy. To feel “normal” to me meant just that – such alignment with your physical reality and the freedom to know you are capable of bending it and being a part of it. A dance between you as an individual and the larger world around you. That you don’t need to hide or feel hindered.

And I kept seeing that everywhere in others, except in me. I wanted so much to be someone else in order to be free.

But by accessing all the blockages I’ve been knocked with and learning to heal and bring my own inner child through more, I’m beginning to sense the rightness of my being more. And sometimes that’s all you need to start with : just the sensation of having the right to be. Quiet gestation.

So I guess the world normal wasn’t the most adequate word at all. All I wanted was to be so exquisitely blissful in my own inner world and being able to touch the skin of the outer one. Magic within the ordinary.

reminder: depression happens. and the opening it provides does too.

I was wondering why, these last couple of days, even when my period and pms symptoms subsided, was I still feeling so lethargic, and unmotivated, and lifeless almost. Then I remembered – I have chronic depression. And it is not something that goes away permanently every time I feel ‘good’ again.

I think sometimes we tend to want to avoid very uncertain or despondent feelings like this and just want to power through with whatever we planned to be on track with, not taking time to rearrange and deal with the unexpected. It never works like this especially if you deal with any mental/emotional health issue. I was being really hard on myself, feeling angry about why I couldn’t just get up and go outside or enjoy the routine I had going this past month. I was trying to override this “fatigue” and finding loopholes to snap out of it. But it doesn’t work that way and it’s never worked that way, so why did I still try ?

Continue reading reminder: depression happens. and the opening it provides does too.

from sun’s core

Vulnerability is like drowning, but finding out you can breathe, albeit in a different way. And although some people find this out, it still can be a discomfort to not resurface and not go back again to the kind of air and pressure they were used to all along.

But vulnerability is really submerging all of you, and letting all the masks and layered insulation you’ve had in place slowly loosen and release under water, being carried away because it’s no longer needed.

You don’t experience yourself clearly when all the mirrors you’ve placed around yourself only reflects the small of yourself that you were comfortable being uncomfortable with.

Tenderly living is like the sun’s shine. How it continuously radiates but can never peak back inside at it’s own core to define it. It just lives from it. Breathes from it. Always in touch with it.

And what feels like fire to your lungs at first later becomes what you know is necessary. Because it forces you to stay in between each moment instead of trying to conquer each moment, with swords and armor and vigilance that only tires you out at the end and beginning of each day.

Learn to be submerged. Learn to breathe inconspicuously. Learn to love and be loved in a different way.