All parts welcome here

Last full moon I cried for about a week. 

A different type of type of tears. Those that know me well, know that ‘Heart Waters’ is not just a FB alias. I’m a woman whose tears flow readily and recklessly, I can’t hold them in. They are the song of my heart’s deepest aching, for all of life’s beauty and all of the struggle. A language of water that connects to all things. 

There are so many different types of tears. Tears of resistance and of of release… Tears of remorse, of regret, of remembering, of revelation. My own tears and the tears for another. My kids laugh at me because Im crying within 2 seconds of watching a video of another human in a state of joy or loss. I even cry to the olympics! But this last full moon, I cried a different type of tears. They were tears of self loathing. 

Here I am, single for the first time in 13 years; Having emerged from a relationship where I experienced a lot of external criticism. And alone with myself, what I found is that my own inner critic is actually the most brutal of all! Relentless. Like a really bad song that gets stuck in your head. I looked into my own eyes and found myself sitting in this deep pool of self loathing. Drowning in the parts of me that had been looping in certain patterns for so long! Pages and pages of journal entries telling myself to do things differently, to look after myself better, to put myself first (or at least somewhere near the front!), to pause, to breathe, to listen more, to overshare less!! 

But here I am, still playing that same annoying soundtrack. Fuck! The frustration of feeling like you keep “fucking it up”. The Regret. The Guilt. The voice that says “You idiot!”. These dense under-worldly creatures that we don’t want to dance with, but they draw us under when we’re not hiding in the charade of productivity or the illusion of success. 

Self loathing is not something we get to talk about much. We can bypass to self love, but self loathing? well it just isn’t that spiritually attractive!! And I get it, the story we weave has power, and we don’t want to cast a dark spell with our words. We don’t wanna get lost in it, or let it totally run the show… But what if we sit with it for a while. 

What if we get really real and say, “Hey, there are parts of me that I really loathe right now!” It’s like choosing to enter into a deep dark cave with jagged edges. And there’s a really disgusting smell in there, maybe its even a monster?! You have a whole bunch of tools on your belt, a peg for your nose, even a torch. You could reach for the torch right away, and turn it on like a positive affirmation, and light up that whole cave with with love. 

But what if you stayed in the dark long enough for your eyes to actually adjust to the darkness and make out the monster. What if you sat with the monster long enough for it to tell you its name, and what it’s hungry for? Can you listen and validate it instead of dismissing it and turning away. 

We are masters at hiding from ourselves. We make another cup of tea, pull another tarot card, clean the kitchen, reach for a de-vice. But it’s only in the darkness of the void, where the spark of creation can ignite. I’m not suggesting you act from the self loathing as this invariably leads to acts of self annihilation. But how about checking-in instead of checking-out. Sitting still on the hill, through the dark night of your soul, and an inner knowing comes that feels like the arc of light from a shooting star, lighting up the darkest night. 

Self loathing is not motivating in itself, but it can flip into a simple act of self love.. Like the choice to push aside all the excuses and finally go for a run. And when you are running and feel the burn of your lungs as you get real about the toxic shit you smoked to bypass that hard feeling last night. When you actually feel the pain in every part of your body and your heads screams out a million excellent reasons for you stop and take a break, but you keep running…sweating and panting, patchy red like a hyper-colour t-shirt in the 80’s (you had to be there). 

Then it’s just you, breaking through the relentless voices of your mind that tells you you’re not good enough. You’re ugly and messy and sore, but you’re more alive than ever been, and the soundtrack changes to Elton John’s “I’m still still standing, better than I ever did!” (again, the 80’s). So my tears asked me, “Can we truly rise to self love, if we don’t first descend into self loathing?”. 

These darker juices of our discontent are the marinade that tenderises our meaty hearts. In the spiritual community, I see and experience a lot of spiritual elitism and riotousness. People saying things like “I pray for your healing”. And something in me cringes, because theres an undertone of “you’re not healed enough”. 

Truth is, I’d prefer to sit down at a round table with all the messy parts of me, and look them honestly in the eyes. Let them know they are all welcome here, serve them a plate of raw tenderised heart and a cup full of genuine compassionate tears . That’s spirit food.