Recently a friend said to me how amazing my life looks. Now you and I both know she is talking about how good my life looks on Facebook right?
I had to laugh out loud, because YES she is right. My life IS amazing right now, and it's not just on Facebook. I am alive and feeling good. But the truth is that this year my life FELL APART. Oh it has been so painful. Everything of WHO I WAS BEING & DOING was stripped away. I felt powerless, hopeless, rejected, a failure, and so so much grief. My identity was dismantled. It was destroyed. AND I died.
My liberation, the discovering of the truth of who I am has had to come through this dismantling and death.
During this time, I was studying with Mama Gena's School of Womanly Arts, and she was teaching us about rage, sadness, and grief. And oh did I know about them! They were my constant companions. And instead of trying to make them go away, she taught us to exaggerate them. To act them out, to feel them in my body, to use my body to show what they felt like. She taught be how to move through these emotions with my body. And I did just that, privately, in the safety of my bedroom where no one could see.
But then I knew I needed to capture these exaggerated emotions on camera. To photograph how my body moved through the pain. So I dug deep; what would that exaggeration of my pain look like, what would it feel like, how could I use everything in the photograph to tell the story of my rage, my sadness, the shattering of my soul? I knew my deepest fear and it became my inspiration: I was terrified I would end up being a bag lady, alone, living under the freeway.
And let me tell you the experience was transformational. It was easy to call up the pain because it was always just right under the skin, right there, waiting for attention. So it knew what to do. And I released it. Right there. Right into the camera.
This photograph is what my grief felt like. Allowing myself to be seen like that on the street, by my friend, by the camera was transformational. But that’s not all of it.
When I got home and started looking at the photographs the most beautiful thing happened. My heart leapt out of my body as I saw myself, my spirit, and my body in so much pain. I started sobbing once again – I wept for myself, my pain & suffering, for the old dreams and old ways of being that was so painful stripped away. And in that moment I was overwhelmed with a tender kindness and a deep love for myself. A deep surrender into acceptance.
This is what it took, the pain, the grief, the loss, this has been my path to the life that I am living today.
And I am willing to share it here. It's part of my diving into being real, real right in front of you, going head first past my fears that you will reject me even more. And into sharing with you all of who I am, of what I have been through.
If you can relate, or if my story resonates please share your thoughts with me on my post! Click on this link: https://www.facebook.com/lindsay.a.miller.3/posts/10208953966580171.