Tag: Personal Expression

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Alarm, Articulate, Assertive

kimberleen

IMG-3350These have been three words floating in and out of my thoughts for the last few days. Alarm came to me when I realised that most people woke up to one each morning. Articulate I considered when I realise that so many of us can’t say how we really feel and assertive I was pondering when I thought I was being a lower vibrational bitch. You know cause we all have these thoughts sometimes.

Alarm, like really? How many of you are waking up with this each morning? I’m hoping that my days of waking alarm are now long behind me. I sleep when I need to and have the luxury of waking up gently most mornings. I forget regularly what a privilege that is and how it’s improved my mood over the years. Lack of sleep and waking up with alarm are literally two things that have the ability to push so far over the edge of mental hell that a good sleep routine has been a priority in my life for years. It’s all about knowing your limits. 4 am starts and 12 hour days are not for me. As a result of this, I have been slowly implementing and changing my work schedule over several years to make sure that I am at an optimum and that I even have time for a nap in the afternoon. It’s just as effective as meditating in order to clear your mind (you should try it sometime).

Articulate it’s a word that has often been used to describe unless of course, I’m getting up at 4 am. I have often wondered what that has meant to the people around me. Now I think I know what it is. I’m always searching for the right words. The right string of thoughts in order to express where I am in any given moment. That expressing a genuine reflection of the world, my life, my mind, my heart, my soul all at the same time.  As always there is a lot to consider. My honest personal enquiry has always engaged people and now more than ever I am beginning to understand why. That even though my emotional environments changes and my ideas about life are shifting as I grew that I am able to share who I am and how I feel.

Assertive, sum how this about expressing how we feel to people even when it’s uncomfortable. This is something that I have been working on for years. As not expressing ourselves honestly can lead to pent up emotions. For me, assertiveness can cut out a huge amount of confusion in interpersonal relationships when we let the small things become big things. I see it so often with people and how they cope with life if they had just said something the moment it started it may have prevented an outburst or explosion late down the line. We always have the right to say how we feel. We are not responsible for how people receive the information that is given. It also opens the doorways of communication to help us gain insight into other peoples experiences. Sometimes as a woman I think that assertiveness is often what is mistaken or interpreted as being a bitch when actually we all have the right to live in our truth and be heard.

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Our Bacon Tree

kimberleen

IMG-2295Our Bacon Tree is actually a Spekboom (Which is Afrikaans for Bacon/Pork Tree) that were given as a token reminder of our wedding. At the moment it lives on our balcony and has had a pretty epic year on its own. Having survived two moves, re-potting and being devoured by caterpillars. (Yes your right that is very symbolic, our wedding token was devoured by the Earth’s universally accepted animal change agent.) It has also given up a limb to spawn a fully independent mini-me.

The good news is that is has survived the process. Like most living things it has a variety of moods that I now use it as a relationship weather vain. Which has forced me to create a new relationship in my life and I find a place to focus the nurturing qualities of marriage. I talk to it. I encourage it and I tell it how beautiful it is. That it belongs in with us and that I am very grateful to have it in my life. That I love the work it does and how much it is doing for the planet. I make sure it’s loved, though I’m not sure it believes it after the caterpillar incident.  I wonder at what lengths people go through to keep a plant healthy and happy. Especially in the times, we live now.   I know it is a miracle in my life and it represents hope for the future. Especially as it loves munching carbon. Over a decade ago someone once told me “If you think you are ready for a relationship to get yourself a plant and if it lives a year, you are ready for a pet”. In recent weeks it has also been highlighted to me that a husband is a sort of pet. (I know it’s terrible) As we shouldn’t have such high expectations of people. After all most pets behave and do as they like and we love them anyway regardless of how inconvenient that might be.

The marriage process has made me confront things that I literally never thought possible. Miya Angelo said, “When people tell you who they believe them”. All of a sudden I do. There are many things that we choose to overlook when we get into relationships. For all the right reasons. We want to love through it. We believe that anything is possible. That we can love far beyond our own truths and live somebody else’s. Then we begin to understand just how wild that is. What a massive adventure is laid out before us and that in undertaking this path we are reconstructing the world in which we have chosen to live. That our world is no longer controlled by our personal truths and that shared realities are complex. That living with another person is like living with another reality that we might never fully discover. That we can’t colonise another person’s mind with ideas that aren’t true for them, any idea, and that somehow we might be able to navigate that together. That these are the decisions we’ve made and that we resist them at our own peril. Alternate truths are real. Yet somehow we are surprised by this. As if politics alone wasn’t enough to play that out for all to see.

The thing is though we don’t have to convince anybody. We don’t need to change anybody’s mind. We don’t need to make them understand how we see it and we certainly don’t have to expose facts in order to be heard. All we can ever do is turn up and be ourselves and live our lives as fully as we always intended, love ourselves enough that there is space for another perspective. Live our truths and through the process and know that we are enough and the world’s madness doesn’t change that.

They say that there are lessons in everything and that what we see is our mirror. What we don’t fully understand is how deep that reflection goes. Of course, what I’ve just said is a paradox. As there is no depth in a mirror. All we have is a flat perspective that can move and change giving us all the information that we need in it. Reflecting back all the details of our backstory and simultaneously our present. It soooo fucking magical. It’s totally understandable that we would be highly confused by it. Relationships take personal understanding deeper, as we unpick everything. We find that our internal traits, have external matches. Cause meets effect, openness meets rigidity, reflective meets reactive, embracing meets denial, truth meets reason. There’s also no telling where each of us may take that ground in the ever-shifting sands of life.

We all like to believe that we know the best way forward and that we can talk through everything. Then honestly what if you can’t? What if after nearly eight years of being together you finally realise that actually, you have totally different belief systems that literally took seven years to show up. That the veils have well and truly fallen and love can still dwell in the places where we can’t meet.

We may be very familiar and safe with our own demons and the process it might take to coax them into a ferral state of benign co-living. When all of a sudden you find yourself discovering somebody else’s lurking in the previously unexplored recesses of their mind.  We don’t know where they start and end or even their true form. Like the film, Alien we don’t fully understand what we are seeing. It takes a while for the nature and intentions of the wee fucker to fully come to light.

We can liken personal relationships to revelations in history. Where the nature of the universe even now is under debate. That the best ways forward are often argued about. Great breakthroughs are often dismissed and even ignored until we find ourselves in a new reality depending on who has the fortitude to push through. The lesson will be repeated until it is learned. Love always, especially when it is hard, confusing and frustrating. Yup.

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Imagine

kimberleen

IMG-0839So here it is. I have made it to the end of my personal working year. The end of the working year is a strange idea when you are in the wellness business. My personal work is my business, so although I may be powering towards writing the last few words of this post trying to put into perspective a 12 month cycle for a customer facing debrief, the work is far from over.  In fact it has only just begun. My head is already spinning around a year in review. The big lessons. How to integrate what I’ve learned into next years planning. How to plan differently. Who to partner with and of course much much more…..

What I find incredulous is that I started out this year hoping to write a blog post each week. Which I’ve kept up with far better than I expected.  I have certainly committed to the process. This time last year I was trying to plan blog posts, schedule them in time with the seasons and my own forced ideas of personal progression, only to find out that the spontaneous nature of my creative intuition has been my premier guiding force.

I found that even though I had started a huge amount of posts, that when I sat down to write or complete them that I simply wasn’t inspired enough to get the words out of my head onto the paper. The things I thought were important didn’t some how  live in the forefront of my mind at that moment. I have often misguidedly thought of myself as deeply liberated and if anything this year I have learned the opposite about myself. That I am very much confined by the idea of what people might think of me. Being a bride has amplified that awareness and I hope in the long run to have broken down that limitation for my benefit. This year blog writing for me has been transformative and become about flow, instinct, personal journey and quite frankly not giving a fuck about what anybody else thinks. That I need to write what I need to write when I need to write it. Sometimes that means I’ve been way ahead of the game and other times it means I’ve been way behind it. What has been the greatest thing about blogging here is emotional freedom it has given me to express myself. What had stated out as a brave step in personal exposure has become a gradual liberation of my personal opinion. Which can at times be totally contradictory. Good Luck with that.

2018 It’s been wild. It’s Scottish wild, here that I refer to – that it’s been a totally out of control bordering on misadventure, with most of the planets going backwards it’s hard to imagine that the celestial beings that roam our skies have not played a hand even for the most detached humans. Luckily though it is where the magic happens. For life to be spectacular it has to have some darkness and intrigue to be able to see the fireworks right?

I’m hoping that the Brexit fiasco is last of what encroaches on my personal life after all a shift in statehood is a big moment in anybody’s life. Along with marital status and nationhood. It’s been a big year…..

Now my need to collapse into myself grows. It’s the end of the year. It’s time to reflect, reward and plan for the next. To expand the time scales and begin to manifest again. As you wonder at it all. The big messages, the major fuck ups, the small victories. And in fact new Scottish words to describe it all clusterburach. Just the other week I was saying to a friend of mine that is 2018 had a meme it would be getting slap in the face by a seal with and octopus. Yes it’s been that kind of year, and lets face it who saw that coming!!!

There is so much to let go of in order to catch another star, to ride a bigger wave and swim in deeper oceans. We are all trying to hold on to so much….. while time slips gladly by. It’s only time, non-linear, perfect time that might only be another illusion to unblock. Maybe we can be it all. Maybe we can understand it all. To do so we have to be able to lose it all. There only moments after all, days, weeks, months, years and decades just strung together in such a way that we can watch them fade aways. Lose the attachment and wonder what could I be if I let go of more. The world turns and we all learn a little more how we change with the seasons and that we have our very own seasons to live through.  So on that note I’m giving myself the next few weeks off if you hear from me consider it a Holiday bonus. I might even surprise myself. Have a great few weeks.