Oh My God!

Oh My God!

So here I am.  Right here, right now.

I have just completed a writing workshop called “Allow” with Jennifer Pastiloff.  And I am wowed, wowed, allowed, aloud.

Because, I have been on the precipice of ‘finding my voice’… but what I didn’t know was that defining that voice would be so powerful and would only come, would only actually reveal itself to me with the full impact of its “being me” if I USED THE VOICE.

And I have been scared to use “the Voice” (With a Capital V).  So scared in fact that I set up a seperate Facebook page, last year (but haven't published one thing I have written, until now...) a seperate identity so I could “express this voice” because you know, I don’t want to, “Damage myself” by putting “the real me” out into the world.  

What if people “hear my voice” and don’t like it and therefore stop buying my jewellery or appreciating my art, they start thinking and believing I’m cuckoo and I will therefore be so, and then be homeless and living on the Street.  And what if people take 'exception' to my voice and it means no one wants to work with me, or be with me, or allow me to care for them?

Fuck, where did I learn this?  I recently wrote something in a journal that I can be a ‘fatalist’.  That imminent death is on my doorstep and I “act accordingly” as if it is my thoughts and feelings and making these known to others that will be what kills me.  That it is the writing and sharing of these that will "take me down" and it is this that I have felt petrified of.  It is this that has held me 'hidden' in 'stuckville' and actually prevented ME from living MY life on MY terms!

(Ironically, I am also drawn to working in Pallative care", is it because I am used to 'being present' where death may be lurking (which it actually is, all the time, in each of us, because, ummm.... made up of cells and atoms and molecules that can run amok, all and each and everyone of us).  Have I been drawn to helping others live their best life through what may be their darkest moments because it's been easier to 'give this' to others rather than myself.

Despite all the signs.  Despite all the Spirituality and growth.  In spite of?

Who cares?

The important thing though is not where I learned it, or how, but I'm sure I will reveal all of that when I write, because maybe this is what it is about, but also maybe not.  My point right now in this moment is that I feel FREE from it.  I actually wrote about this last night (I think, I think I remember, as I was voicing several voices when I wrote last night, I thought it was because I might have felt high, but actually, it was a process).  By the way, I am completely sober, although I feel high when I write with "the Voice".

I am so used to judging my own process as “bad, wrong, weird” that I stop always before I get started.  It’s why I have 7 billion things in my “house” that feel ‘undone’, because if I do them up, clean them up, well that makes a statement doesn’t it.  It says something revealing about me, right? But having all these 'things' in the way, that also says something, but I'm not attached to whatever you think about that as it's not the 'real me'.  You don't know the real me as I have kept her hidden!

Plus, having clutter around (even if it is beautiful and shiny and from the Earth and Ocean) is one of the ways I procrastinate.  I distract myself by shiny, sparkly things.  I also put my energy into my art and everything I create when I am actually sitting with the Voice as this is where my art and creativity actually comes from.  Yet I have held it so tightly and unacknowledged.  As if giving 'voice' to it would take away my creativity, my well being, my being.  Ahhh, so this is the feeling of delusion!

Same coin, different sides.  Never knew I didn’t need to pick a side, but clearly I have done so and oscillated between the two.  Perhaps that is why I have always loved the concept of “paradox” of two things being the truth at the same time.  Because it is, always.  It’s how our bodies work, it’s how our brains work, it’s how the Universe works in fact.

Oh I love that I just used the word fact too, because within me, this is a known fact, an artefact of my lived experience.  I can write about this with great authority as no one knows my experience and how it feels better than I do.

And it is here that the Voice becomes its most free and powerful.  It is this depth of self awareness, the knowing that I will become free-er of everything that I have used to hold myself back, the more I actually use my Voice.

The more I strengthen my sense of myself by “how it feels to actually be fully present, and myself, in the current here and now, in the world”.  To free myself from the “worrying about what others think”, to actually “bypass the “what if people think I’m crazy mantra” that I have held at my core for what feels like my entire life.

To actually tell "my" PTSD to step aside, I actually got this now.  And you know what, I am going to forget and I am going to remember.  I am going to forget what it feels to be as empowered as I write this right now.  I am going to remember the shame, the guilt, the reasons I stopped myself.  Because I am going to forget just how superb, just how life affirming it is to be myself, because I’m not used to this.  I’m not used to this at all.

The screens and layers that I have put between myself and the world are so many.  I did that.  I decided to do that, I thought I was protecting myself, I was shielding myself.  The irony was that I was in hiding.  And I wasn’t feeling protected there, I was feeling unheard, abandoned, left alone.  I abandoned myself before I could ‘let’ anyone else abandon me again.

Yeah, because Ha!  Joke is on you, you cannot abandon me when you don’t really even know who I am.  So well, what if I integrated all these voices that I hold.  Because I have learned something, that when I express one of my ‘voices’, it takes me to “the Voice”, the one that feels like this.  The one that has my heart expanded and my mind clear.  Where I am fully present in my here and now, without judgement, without fear, without thought to the past or care for the future, because there is only now, right now.

And it is only when I let “the Voice” speak that I get to feel this.  The other voices try to silence this one, they are conditioned to do so in many ways but also, I have given them their strength within me.  It is ME who gives voice to whatever voice is present.  When I am in “the Voice” though, this is when I can write, this is when I can fully express myself and this is where I remember!

This is where I remember those a-ha and “I got you” moments from my life.  The empathy and compassion and the depth of which I could feel it was something that I learned when I was training to be a Lifeline Counsellor at age 17.  I only learned that I could feel this depth of empathy and compassion for MYSELF, today though, Aged 55.

After this morning’s workshop.  Which I didn’t miss, even though I set two alarms, managed to sleep through both of them and wake up 5 minutes before the 6am start time (the writing workshop was in LA and via zoom). 

And I’ve had this moment in my life before, these ‘turning point’ moments are something dear to me, when I feel empowered and whole and sincerely myself.  Very human, very loving with everything that is, the light the dark, the profound.  (I still feel the “ick” when I think of all the ‘surface’ relationships that I have had and that the work of those relationships for me was trying to make them appear (to me) deeper than they were.

I don’t do that anymore.  Not from now.  From now, I will be with my own voice and I will use it.  Because my life and the quality of my life, depends on it.

And so it is.

Oh and by the way … I have found that many of my writings are starting with the word prompt of “Oh My God” as the words seem to embody “the Voice” and not in a religious way, although for some who want to see it that way, please feel free to do so.

It just is what it is for me now, and isn’t that a phenomenal blessing in and of itself, and it has come, it has arisen from within me.

This is my God.  Oh My God.

ps:  I have not edited, not censored or even re-read this before I have posted it.  Because that is how this “Voice” embodies itself.  That’s how I actually know when I’m ‘in’ the Voice, because I am present, so present only to the words that I am seeing as I write them.  They might make sense to what came before, they might not.  But there is a knowing within me that says whatever, it’s all good.

And so it is. 

Written by Jen McIntosh, Mystic Mermaid, Mystically Amused, Radiant Spirit, all the selves, share this one magnificent Voice.  Welcome, friends.

pps:  Am putting Jennifer’s currently published book link here because, because, paying it forward, I got you, this is how to show her my gratitude for today and  moment.