We're all seated here at this gathering to experience the truth about our ability to be true. Yet your truth is offensive to my very core; my essence of being of oneness with myself, at one with humanity, an inner eptitude with my Soul FULL dance with life's experiences .
How? I ask myself can I deal with compassion for you and maintain a pride for myself?
Born with a beauty FULL hue yet constantly called by a dominant culture to deny basking in my glory remain unseen. Sunkissed yet ravished by the depths of self hatred - invisible.
How? I ask myself can I sit here, hear and listen to your pain without courting a response?
Most definitely a reaction.
Right now sitting here hearing you, inner turmoil bubbles for me as a witches cauldron yet mine has no other ingredient besides rage and anger. Rage and anger because you can share with "others" even smile about your ability to make friends with "others", but you are unable or unwilling to reach out, to look at or see me and in turn witness your own profoundness.
You seem unable or unwilling to search, to sit still and feel how those of us who look like you are resonating and empathic with your plight, are you even aware that to love "others", you must first touch yourself.
Anything else is fading blackness the ability or disability to be any "other" besides yourself by any and all means necessary. To sabotage a heritage whilst embracing the dominance of a hegemonic nightmare is to render ones self useless and Soul as dead.
I won't be invisible. And no matter what you decide to share, I see you. I will continue to grow empathy and reach you.
I didnt have a childhood, there wasn't much time to grieve for that either as I stepped effortlessly into oblivion followed shortly by my first of 3 children. I had to grow up really quickly although I was emotionally lacking, no time to mourn, no time to process anything I had earned and learned from the streets of brutality that had constantly battered me upside down and back again. I would remember though from time to time, or, I'd call it forced remembrance. Yes, the type where it would take you by surprise and you could sleep the bitter after effects of for years and barely remember a thing again until the next time you found your self confronted.
A vicious cycle has already been re perpetuated when violation takes place. I mean an abuser has normally been abused and I wonder, does "he" choose to do it again? I mean what was "done" to him? Does "he"? Does "he" make the decision to violate your very life force so that "he" can ejaculate venom that will hold you stiff with fear that you will endure to relinquish for life? I wonder. I always knew it was wrong, even if at times it felt so right.
What happens to him? Does "he" take my fear on with him to his next "victim" like sodden prey? Does "he" ever ever think of "me" , soul tarnished? "Me", who left with my scarred soul screaming to be recognised but forced to learn to recognise my own self. No. "He" never did.
Lifetime upon lifetime it has taken "me" to find myself, discover worth, release and bury deep pain once uncovered and dusted off. Tears upon tears I cried, for no matter how much I loved mine, I passed something of "him" on to mine. My babies like scattered petals blown away in the storm who in the aftermath like "me" will choose to master life using tools to build a sense of tenacity against lifetimes of procrastination no more.
I've grown even if worn like an old Souljah battle wounded, healed through from victim to triumphant victor. Mine, my own who at last, through me will bask in this glory because of sheer determination, I have handed them this empowerment via glory. Come in "mine", sit down, get comfortable as I prepare to tell you my story of lost and found.
She honoured her self with the truth, even if he couldn't; even if he believed he did & he didn't! She didn't know where she wore her heart but it sure aint on no sleeve any more. For as long as she can remember, she never did relationships like many people she thought did. But despite that, she had figured out by now that as a daddy's girl who lost her daddy's love far too early for reasons too sad to reiterate here and now, she never stopped looking for and loving her daddy. He will always be "daddy" to her and is still alive and kicking it somewhere and although most of her other siblings ( & there are so many of them, of which she is the eldest), have not a good thing to say about his role as father, she knows her "daddy" is not a bad man, just weak, very sad, very true and very weak. Even sadder is that he chose weakness over the responsible role of teaching his little girl how to love and choose and trust a future partner.
Daddy's girl searched for an eternity for her prince charming, her knight is shining armour & fell flat on her arse each time she came across a distorted vision of whatever she believed was the "real deal". Crying over spilt milk for much of her adult life and now she has reached the golden gates (aaaaaaaahhh!) of middle age and thankfully she has arrived. She has arrived and she is safe; her heart is firmly beating with joy in the right place!
What a long and bitterly lonely path she travelled and there is no blame to be cast as choices were made and finalised and growth has been experienced; there is no price you can pay for that! She learnt from a very early existence to spell r-e-s-p-o-n-s-i-b-l-i-t-y! & took it by the mantle and wore it round her neck like a badge of honour. She is hmmmm...? grateful? for the pain, the beat downs that came in physical, emotional, spiritual and mental phases and she learnt to recognise and walk straight with her head up and not sink struggling to swim in D-NILE a river too deep to carry the burden of shame that others whisphered behind her back...Ssssssssssh!!! Huh! Pick herself up and dust herself off she did; many, many , many times after she let the dust settle to process it a little that is.
But this time round, this ending is different. No bittersweet endings here for her at least not this time. She heard the whisper from High on in her Soul and did what she felt best and bided her time. She knew that true love would shine through this time and she truly trusted that; yes this time she trusted the Power that is. She listened to her heart and felt the rumble and it moved her to centre stage and the truth that shamed revelations. There was no time for tears or bittersweet memories. Sweet liberty came for her to surrender and she left the room with her heart intact, and she didn't blink an eye. Her "daddy" if he knew his daughter as well as he thought he did, would be so proud of her.
I Love you Gyal! You have arrived at centre stage! Be love for yourself and resonate!
Codependency is a real bitch if you don't recognise its sense of no self esteem. If you're pouring your oil into a fire and not realising you will get burnt, you're gonna catch a hell to pay.
I love my children with my life. I believe I have probably wanted them to succeed in life more than I've been willing to live my own life. Today, I stand here with no children to care for on a full time basis (youngest is returning soon), except the one inside my self. The core, the root of who I am, the only child I clearly didn't pay enough attention to - "Wendy" my inner, little me.
Wendy is a name I happily acquired as a child of immigrant West Afrikan parents who came to the UK in the early 1960s. Our parents chose names for their 2 sets of twins that honoured their ancestral heritages but unfortunately, weren't honoured by the culture they chose to raise us in. Thus, it has taken me years to deeply understand, acknowledge & resonate with knowing how important it is to be connected with Wendy who I rejected as she was the anglicised version of my name I used to "cover up" and now I acknowledge that by not connecting, I lose out on taking the roots of self love & care deeper within my soul for a deeper knowing & intimacy with my self, my truest nature.
Nurturing this love has to become a reality for me as I've been somewhat of a rescuer, a people pleaser all of my life. Thus there is always the tendency to play the martyr, the role of victim. I don't need it anymore.
I've been in so many situations, found myself in circumstances, facing consequences where I have compromised my self for the sake of others & the end result is that I end up totally frustrated and often angry and drive that pain of despair and disappointment right back deep inside of myself!
To honour my little girl, I don't want that for myself anymore. We deserve better.
After 33 years of existing with codependency and codependent habits, I have definitely managed to see, hear and feel the light, shining from the inside out. I have taken the lead and stepped out on a road where the depth of my healing has taken a more intense form of recovery. Moving up so that I can move on. Whatever it takes to nurture and celebrate my inner child, I'm willing to explore it. Right now I'm in a space where I'm just willing to observe who I am and discover what my needs are and I crave intimacy with myself thus, my little "Wendy." Sometimes it's a bumpy ride.
Intimacy starts within. It's funny how you can wake up close to someone you share an intimate relationship with, claim to love them and don't even know what direction you're headed in regarding career or any other necessary path etc. My new perspective is I cannot feel good about you, love you; be respectful toward you; care about your well being; or take care of you effectively if I'm not feeling those ingredients intrinsically from within myself. It is my responsibility to do this for myself and not rely on another to do this for me.
So I'm going to keep on at nurturing my lost childhood by playing with my little Gyal! The word intimacy was broken down for me many years ago whilst reading something by Iyanla Vanzant or some or another author. "intimacy..." = "..in-to-me-see..".
You get that? Got it??
Embrace it, wear it well, taste it, play with it, whatever you do, work your hardest to make intimacy emanate from within, thus it's what you will magnetise from within your environment!
The Buds Of True Self Love Blossoming! Being
true to oneself means trusting your inner guidance via intuition. It has taken me years to follow inner guidance and truly trust myself. Now that I have arrived at this position, it's still really scary. I don't have a great supportive network of family and although I have friends that I value, I am mainly a loner and do like my own company. Point of correction!
When you grow up with abuse and caos as the daily ingredient, you learn not to trust. I had children early and my last born a whole generation later so didn't have much time to nurture friendships through trusting. Friends come and they go. I made time to nurture myself and I guess I did this by constantly choosing the path of self healing through counselling, most of my life! I thank God for this, I wasn't ashamed to talk and be open about my feelings, fears and inadequacies. Although the remedying of childhood stuff has taken many years to settle, for goodness sake I was running round chasing my tail as a lone parent!
I have always had a rich and quite vivid relationship with my innerstanding of "God", but truthfully, I found this very hard to be consistent with; yet through all my troubles, I have always relied on & reached out to a Higher Force, just as one may reach out to a parental figure or sibling or close childhood friend; so the concept of personal relationship with "God" is not new to me. I feel blessed for that as I have developed a spirituality which is not religous.
The most challenging part of my evolution has been (up to now), feeling at peace and ease with that part of my soul, that yearns for Afrikan centred spirituality. Let me tell you I have travelled a very long and broad road with this and have finally arrived at a place where I'm beginning to feel myself entirely in all of this endeavour; and it's not without it's highs and lows.
I have visited Sages, Babalawos, Healers, Shamans and powerful women both in the West and in my Beloved ancestral home on the continent of Afrika. I have felt ill at ease with some of these meetings in both places also. I have learnt extremely valuable lessons too about my spirit and the guidance and have reached a destination where I'm still trekking forward, yet I am finding that I'm stepping up and reinventing my spiritual stance and practice. No longer do I need to go outside of myself to look for authentication of my Spirit, my Soul. I mean I no longer need to just go for readings with others to empower myself or get answers for questions that lie within that are answered with quiet reflection, journalling, meditation, walking in my local park or practicing yoga or listening to uplifting music.
For years I've given my power away to be manipulated by those no more "powerful" than myself! All of this was based on the lack of anything for myself; self worth, self esteem, self comfort, and self TRUST. No longer can I stay with this. No matter where I go; wherever my search takes me to continue an authentic Afrikan centred spiritual practice, I will stay with a loving sense of myself and pray to share that with all I can learn from. The voices I heard from childhood, who know one else could hear have finally connected to my heart and are now calling on my heart to manifest. Being pro Afrikan centred in my spiritual endeavours doesn't make me anti anything else because I'm done with the politriks of "lack".
I have arrived at a juncture wherein lies a vast void to be filled with a new sense of myself. Still a bit confusing, or rather I should say, that there remain many questions that will be answered and revealed with the process of living daily life. I possess something very powerful in my Soul that I have denied for too long because of "lack" and self denial. Now I embrace all of the love inherent in all of the darkness of all that I have learnt about an Afrikan centred spirituality. All the hocus pocus, negativity projected by the mainstream medias famously known as "Hollywood"stands no chance and is defeated no matter that its presence is an extremely power FULL one. I have waited all my life to share what started for me over 40 years ago and there is no time like the present.
From a very young age, I had "pretend friends that no other person could detect. Don't laugh, they were very real to me and it's taken all the New Age, love and light diatribe to emerge for me to acknowledge that perhaps these friends were not as uncommon as I had felt. Now with the prolific access to the world wide web, I know that millions grew up like me, with "pretend" friends.
Who were these friends that I now know where no longer pretending to be with me as a little girl. On one hand, I can say that they were definitely a very defensive protective side of my nature trying to emerge or merge with some kind of sweetness, some type of joy as there was so little of that in kidhood. So, were my friends present to help take the edge of some of the overwhelmingly traumatic experiences I'd had so young? Is it the human brains type of fight or flight that it creates experiences that feel very real to tap into to lessen the harsh reality?
I don't know, but i know and I still feel that these friends, although at times not as vivid due to the fogginess of growing up to face the responsibilities of adulthood, are real and still walk with me. This is already a very non conventional way to perceive myself, but I do. I really believe that I am heavily guided by a loving presence that has been very responsible for my progress on a mundane day to day level, as well as at times of deep distress and crisis. I have always been lovingly guided, even when not acknowledging the power of this presence.
Now I'm faced with really acknowledging authenticity with myself and this warm, loving fiercely protective divine presence. I'm constantly being alerted by others and told how "powerful" my energy can be and that I possess a lot of knowledge regarding my innerstance and non conventional perception of the guidance I tap into. I know this is because I have strived to practice what I know, I've faced challenges by looking them straight in between the eyes & even if I have felt not much confidence or trust at times, I keep hold of the Divine in all instances and it has grown and grown and now I'm at a place where I can blossom. So for me, I've arrived at a stage in my life where I want to develop this sense of myself and authenticity and to use this "power" that I've employed to meet all challenges in my emotional & spiritual evolution, to support & facilitate others. I have never felt clearer and will continue to practice this deeply ancestral, spiritual presence for the unfolding of the process of my life, for as long as I live.
I'm not your average fortune teller and don't want to get involved with disempowering people, I want to work with love and intuition to facilitate people to become empowered for their own authentic selves. This has always started with myself. My spiritual premise is not your average one, because it's based on an Afrikan spiritual concept and anyone who knows anything, knows that most times when we speak about Afrikan and spirituality we often come up with "dark", "evil" malevolent forces.
I'm here to break the mould; a trailblazer. I'm not compromising, I am learning. I'm going to break down boundaries and expose superstitions and in my own unique way, put Afrika on the map in terms of the many spiritual traditions that emerge from the continent that holds the world at it's centre.
I am a mother to 3 fantastic children who are my world absolutely. Although I come from a huge Afrikan family, I had the most minimal assistance even though I pleaded with them to help me and was promised I would never be left alone, unfortunately talk was very cheap. Being a lone parent bought lots of unwarranted activity from others who I guess felt the need to batter me with their own negative projections and I became a scapegoat. Fortunately for me, childhood had taught me some harsh lessons all too quickly and I was burdened with responsibility from a very young age; plus I was born fighting leaving my mother's womb, so I appreciate now looking back, that I was very well equipped.
I wasn't equipped however , for after 31 years of motherhood for the vast void of emptiness I would experience with the "empty nest syndrome". Nothing in life before had prepared me for the grief that I was to encounter & have faced this past few years. Coupled with all this is that my youngest born in 2000, was born with Down Syndrome which was a blow that I had not expected and as soon as he was born along came many conditions that are often associated with this condition; heart defect, severe respiratory problems, seizures that fast escalated into epilepsy, eczema and asthma, sleep aponea. I slept with one eye open for the first 3 years or so as my little one experienced too many life threatening experiences including meningitis sceptacemia, his first surgical procedure at 17 months old, the first of many many more to follow. I soon quit asking God "why me?" as I was instructed that "why not" and after all my son (SUNSHINE) had chosen me, his mother a true warrior to come through and be guided on his very purposed journey.
Thirteen years on, my son is in the care of the local authority, who refuse to give him back. I asked them for help and they took things into their own hands and as I am one of those annoying parents who speaks out for her kids & especially my youngest who is non verbal, I guess they felt they need to teach me a lesson after years of me fighting and winning to improve the care package that you don't get if you don't fight for it.
Anyway let me digress no further, and reiterate how challenging it has been just to be me without my kids, my world. I have likened myself at times to depictions you see of lionesses in the wild safeguarding their cubs with their lives and daring with the wild glint in their eyes any predator human or whatever to try it! I fought hard for my kids, left, right and centre and we experienced lots of bumps and bruises along the way and most of them due to the fact that I was a little girl raising babies alone after a very troubled and challenging childhood. I fought seriously to do my best and looking at my children today I am pleased. I mean I was not strung out completely on any hardcore drugs or alcohol, but I had an addiction that kept resurfacing and of course looking back now I can see how it was responsible for lots of erratic choices, still, I did my best to face front and keep it moving. I may be in debt, but all 3 of my children have travelled abroad because of my desire to broaden their horizons and my own. My 2 eldest had several opportunities to spend 3 months in west Afrika once with me and once with family as well as opportunities to see Europe and North America.
This has resulted in 3 of my children being very ambitous. The 2 elder in the sense that they love travel; one has actually emigrated and the other looks as if he may go the same way as they felt that there are not as many prospects and career opportunities here in Britain. The youngest ones ambition and determination comes in that he is still alive today and is the "miracle child" an elder had described he would be when he was still in my womb and I had no idea!!
So what does letting go and moving forward mean to me now? I believe almost all of the heart breaking experiences I have had and am still currently experiencing in and out of court for a year now fighting to get my son back, are enabling me to let go because just this past year both my youngest son have had to deal with so much grief being apart, although I still have unsupervised contact twice weekly. At times I have felt so hardened and bitter that the only way to deal with these emotions was to let go of everything even my addiction to marijuana that I guess helped to numb me down and has been an addiction that had filled a void from young adulthood, off and on.
Today, I still wake up crying for my youngest, but I am now very aware and acknowledge that by holding on to grief, my youngest who is highly perceptive is also directly affected. I pray, practice yoga and meditate and have done for most of my adult life, however; I have had wonderful opportunities to step up my practice and elevate my often sorrowful soul. I rely more heavily on my spiritual practice today more than ever, especially as is usual in a crisis, I have learned who my friends really are and yes even my 2 eldest children who are not yet parents have shown little empathy at times. I have also relished the opportunity to move even closer to my Goddess energy that had always instructed me as a young mum, even if I never always heeded her call being too busy being a mother with not enough energy at times to mother and nurture myself.
Today, I smile because my Higher Self has taken charge and I am letting her take the lead to assist in fighting my battles, as my own inner strength and non religous faith guide me and lead me to Higher Ground.
