This is What Fierce Self Love Looks Like (P.S. It Ain’t Easy)

It has been a humbling eight months for me.

Maybe some of you will relate to the story I’m about to share. Sometimes, when you get too comfortable, too set in your ways, the Universe turns your life upside down and inside out as a gift, to shake you up and help you remember who you really ARE.

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Last year, I was in that safe but stagnant place, where I had gotten comfortable and stopped growing. I was in the tail-end of a five-year relationship that had been incredibly beautiful and loving, but had run its course. We both knew it, but neither of us wanted to leave the safety of what we had built.

A relationship can become a home. When it’s built with mutual love, truth, connection and a framework for providing what each person wants and needs, it can make you stronger and help you rise to your highest potential. But sometimes, even when a couple builds a relationship “house” lovingly from the ground up, they can outgrow it.

The truth is that if you are on a path of growth, you may outgrow even the most lovingly built relationships sometimes. And it will feel hard when you are thrown back out into the world. It will feel scary and cold, like you have been newly born, and don’t remember how to do anything.

That’s how I felt when my common-law relationship ended two weeks before Christmas. By that point we had ignored the (fairly loud!) messages from the Universe for months that we had outgrown our shared relationship “house” and it was time to move on.

When you ignore messages from the Universe, they get louder and uglier. So, of course, our relationship exploded from all the tension. I had to move out suddenly, with no real plan or savings.

I went from living in a beautiful, quiet, predictable environment to moving in with a male entrepreneur roommate, a friend of a friend, who was sleeping on the couch in the living room, while I had the bedroom. He had good intentions and tried to be caring, but I’m an introvert who had grown used to living in silence. He was loud and always on the phone, or listening to videos, or having people over. He was a polyamorist, and had sex with one of his girlfriends in the living room, while I was home. He was messy, and I had become used to a very organized environment.

In short, it was exactly what I did not want, but desperately needed. He shook up my world, and I shook up his. Though it was challenging, he was a beautifully genuine human being, and we had some powerful, loving talks where we met in that place of truth and grew like gangbusters together. It was hard, but now I’m so grateful for the months I shared space with him. They prepared me perfectly for everything that was yet to come.

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I had lined up another apartment with a long-term client who had become a close friend over the years; an inspiring woman leader I dearly loved. I had used my intuitive gifts to help her on her journey from lawyer to high-flying world changer, helping Mayans and other Indigenous people better navigate their relationships with big resource companies, and to share their wisdom.

She was one of my first clients, and now, just a few years later, she was doing exactly what I had seen was possible for her. She was hobnobbing with UN officials and having dinner with head government honchos in Central and South America. She had successful programs running that no one had ever even tried to create before. And it was amazing and validating (because we all need that) for me to know I’d contributed to that…so it felt perfect we were going to share space together while I figured out what I was going to do next with my life.

But, as the Universe would have it, the arrangement fell through at the last minute. The apartment wouldn’t be available for another month, which left me with nowhere to live. My heart had been whispering that I should go live and work from Mexico, but I had ignored it because it seemed ridiculous. Now I knew it was what I had to do.

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So I “moved” to Merida, Mexico for a month, where I lived at the basic but magical Santa Ana Hotel, and faced my fear of travelling alone–it had been almost 15 years since I last did that. I studied and practiced Spanish every day. I braved eating in both fancy restaurants and local markets by myself. But I felt incredibly lonely, and wondered what the hell I was doing there.

Then magic happened.

I “ran into” the same Mayan Shaman three times in totally different places, and every time he taught me a powerful lesson about loving myself, and how NOT to give away my own power (including to a Mayan Shaman!).

I made local friends with three other intuitive healers (who I met at my hotel, the Universe being the miraculous place that it is) and almost had an affair with one of them, a devastatingly charming Mexican-Italian musician. I stopped myself because he was married, and I have rules about that sort of thing. But he still gave me exactly what I needed; to remember that I’m still alive and magic is real.

When I went to Mexico, I was in a very dark place. Like genuine moments of thinking of jumping off a bridge and writing goodbye letters to the people I’ve loved, kind of place. Maybe you know that place. It’s a place you can find yourself when Life rips the ground out from under you one too many times, and you don’t think you have the resources to continue.

But Mexico taught me I could start over again. Which was important. Because when I got home it felt like the ground was ripped out from underneath me yet again. And then again.

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The day after I returned to Toronto, my ex (who is thankfully still my good friend) kindly helped me move my few belongings into my new home—where I discovered I still had to adjust to sharing a very small condo with my new roommate.

Yes we loved each other as friends, but once you move in with someone you’re in a relationship, and you will act as mirrors for each other to work through the parts of your ego that still need shaping and polishing. Fortunately, we both understand that process, so we were able to come to a place of love and support for each other.

Still, it was hard starting over again, so soon. All I had was a desk and a chair to furnish my new tiny room. I had to go to Wal Mart and buy a twin mattress in a box and bring it home in the back of a cab, so I’d have something to sleep on.

That night when I slept on my child-size mattress on the floor, I felt like a loser. I felt like a failure. I felt lost and alone.

“Forty-six-years-old and this is what my life has come to?” I thought.

The Universe was shaking everything up for me again.

It was around this time I remembered something I had read about butterflies. When a caterpillar changes into a butterfly, it releases enzymes that digest almost all of its own body inside its cocoon, and then it uses those nutrients to be reborn in a totally different form.

I felt like that was the process I was in, and even though it was painful and confusing, this context gave me hope.

Soon after that, I fell in love. Twice.

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First I fell in love with latin dancing, because it reconnected me with that aliveness I had felt for the first time in Mexico. After a lifetime of avoiding dance floors, because I’d always felt disconnected from my body and unable to feel the music, suddenly I was in my body and I wanted to use it!

I began taking salsa and bachata lessons, and soon was going to either classes or practice socials almost every day. It was a revelation. For the first time in my life, I felt sexy. I lost 15 pounds. I’ve never thought of myself as unattractive but, for most of my life, I’ve felt invisible. Now men were literally chasing me out of buildings to ask me out!

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Then, at one of these classes, I met and fell in love with a man from Trinidad. He stole my heart with the deep well of kindness he hid behind a goofy smile. Even though we were polar opposites, and both Leos (there’s basically a warning in every horoscope guide that says “Don’t attempt this!”), being with him was so easy, I felt like I’d always known him.

Soon I was staying over at his apartment. That was where I discovered he had quirks that pushed virtually all my buttons. I felt the Universe was testing me to see if I was able to walk my talk, to tolerate differences with love instead of judgement.

First, I’m a minimalist. I love luxury and beautiful things, I just believe in only having what I will actually use and appreciate regularly. His apartment was packed with random stuff he bought on the Internet, sometimes in triplicate, boxes everywhere. And while I love a great movie as much as the next person, I don’t own a TV and would much rather do things with real people than watch actors live out fake lives on a screen. He was really into his TV shows. I also prefer living in an organized environment, so I cleaned out his fridge—there were eggs in there that had been expired for three years. I care deeply about the environment, and things like recycling. He insisted on putting everything in plastic bags before putting it in the garbage.

And maybe most important, I’ve spent years learning to eat things I don’t love and to appreciate different foods out of a desire to honour when someone else cooks for me, or shares their cultural food with me. But he was so picky with food that, if I wanted him to eat something I cooked, I would have to learn how to make it exactly the way he liked it. And this was heartbreaking, because I pride myself on being amazing at creating great meals from whatever’s in the fridge.

You might be thinking this sounds like a recipe for disaster. But my usual rigidity had already been broken down by all my experiences living with different people in different places over the past few months. I still struggled with judgement, and I’m not proud of that, but I was able to ignore these superficial things, and just BE with him.

I’m so grateful I was able to do that. Because we woke up laughing every morning and danced before breakfast. We made love for hours. We had a picnic on the beach and he took pictures of us together with a tripod, and we danced on the sand. He held my hand tight through the scary parts at the movies, and helped me avoid puddles when we walked in the rain. When my hair had knots in it, he gently brushed them out. He was the most physically affectionate person I’ve ever met, and I can still feel the way he touched my face, or placed his hand on my back. And when I felt overwhelmed, he listened to me, and even put his leg over mine while we talked because I had told him that makes me feel safe.

In the end, none of the superficial things mattered, but unfortunately there was still a problem.

It felt like there were a series of tests I had to pass before he could let me in. His smile melted my heart, but it was also a shield; there were parts of himself he had learned to lock away. And because he had learned to bury his own feelings under a smile, it seemed he expected me to learn how to do the same. He thought if a relationship was right, it would just work. My experience in my own life, and working with clients, is that all good relationship get built from the ground up, with regular communication and a shared intention to support and love each other. Further to that, I’m someone who needs to talk openly about my feelings on a regular basis, or I get flooded by them, like a river overflowing its banks.

So that fell away too, right after one of the best weekends of my life, where we hadn’t done anything special, but being together WAS special.

It was just one of those days when we both felt tired, and our egos were triggered. We both got defensive. He tried to say the right things, but I felt him withdrawing, so I felt afraid and I withdrew too.

There was a phone call after that, where I focused on the wrong things. Looking back, I wish I’d told him all the ways he had made me feel safe and loved and supported, because there were so many. But I also know that in a real relationship—the kind that can weather a lifetime, which is the only kind I’m interested in—there has to be room for mistakes, for ongoing conversations, for human imperfection, for growing together and learning how to support each other.

A good relationship is like salsa dancing. When you see people on the floor it looks effortless and beautiful, but you don’t see all the sweat and tears they put into learning how to be good at that. They had to learn techniques and practice them until they became natural.

And, still, every time they get up to dance, they have to listen to the other person’s body closely, and respond moment-to-moment, taking nothing for granted. And a truly great salsa dancer never stops learning, always trying new techniques and improving the basics, knowing that it creates an ability to share beautiful experiences with another person that brings joy day after day.

When he drove to my place to drop off my things, wearing his smile mask, I held him tight for what was only a few moments, but it felt like forever, my heart racing. I couldn’t breathe. I was afraid to let go. I knew I was in love with him, and I also knew that he had never really let me in, so he was probably going to shut me out and move on.

And that’s what he did.

That was a couple weeks ago. I’ve done my usual retrospective, where I look at my role in where things went wrong and what I can learn from that. And I look at all the things I’m grateful for that I experienced and learned.

My heart is still raw and broken, but fortunately, I know that means I had the courage to put my heart out there and try for something. Giving love is a big, brave act in this world that sometimes feels like it chews you up and spits you out. Sometimes our hearts need to break open, because that’s how they expand and become bigger. That’s the cutting edge of where deeper compassion for ourselves and others is born and can grow.

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I won’t lie to you. It has been a rough fucking year so far, friends. And I’m fairly amazed that I have not lost my mind with the massive amount of changes I have navigated so far. But I’m grateful for every excruciatingly beautiful moment, even when I have to let go of people or things that can’t or won’t go forward with me.

I have learned fierce self love, even though I still have to fight to practice it–to draw those boundaries, even when it breaks my heart.

Because, yes, it’s important to love others, but it’s mandatory to love yourself whether they love you back or not.

Over the past few years I’ve found that, the more self love I’ve practiced, the more people I’ve had to let go of, including long-time friends and extended family members who could not accept what I was becoming. I’ve had to build my own family, my own community of people who can love and support and accept me as I AM, and cheer me on when I have those “I-just-want-to-curl-up-in-a-ball” kind of days when everything is liquifying and I can’t remember how to crawl, let alone fly. We all need support on this path, because human beings are interdependent. We can’t do it alone.

It is hard to walk the path of truth; to listen to and trust yourself and follow the whispers of your soul. No one wants to tell you how hard it really can get, but it’s part of the deal, and knowing that can make it easier.

You will be broken down so you can be rebuilt. You will be liquified to be reborn as something greater, stronger and wiser…with wings.

Becoming a butterfly is not a fun process. But it’s worth it.

Yes, I’ve been through it all, but that’s because it’s the only way I’d be able to help others get through it all. Every day, in my work as an intuitive advisor, I help my clients go through this same painful and challenging, uplevelling and expansion process.

And it’s because of all I’ve been through over the decades, because my heart has been broken and expanded so many times, because the ground has been ripped out from under me and I’ve had to start over from scratch again and again, that I am able to show up as LOVE for people in that process. That is why I am able to fiercely hold that space and reconnect them with themselves and take them to that next level, where there’s more joy, and where their wings will carry them wherever they want to go.

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These seemingly horrible things that happen to you, are actually happening for you out of LOVE, to help you expand all that you ARE, so you can become something you have only dreamed of and maybe not even imagined possible.

Life is always happening FOR you, not TO you. Often, it’s very very hard to believe that, but it’s always true anyway.

The Universe dreams bigger for you than you do. It already knows you can fly. And it knows the joy and freedom you will feel when you do. And it knows that in that moment that you take flight with your wings, you will be grateful for all the pain you went through to get to that place.

Already this summer, I did test flights with my newly forming wings, and I can tell you that the joy I touched there was beautiful. I can’t wait to feel it again.

Dancing was a gift that was given to me through this transformation process. I had to let go of parts of my old self-conscious, restricted self in order to become a new self who dances freely and, I daresay, sexily. Romantic love was another gift I received this summer, and it was incredible. Who knows how many more gifts I will receive? I believe they are unlimited.

Don’t fight to stay a caterpillar. Be grateful that you experienced being that, but let it go. It’s not who you ARE. It’s who you WERE.

You were born to fly. You were born to feel the joy of just existing as yourself. It is your destiny.

Just don’t fight the process. Because that shit makes you really tired. ;)

See you in the sky.

Shawn xo