Self-love is dusting off the mirror

The Words of Chaitanya on Human Kintsugi

This image has been circulating around my social media and it resonated so much with me I immediately sent it to several friends. What better opportunity to self-reflect and do the work required for growth, then now.

I learnt a long time ago that when we are born, we are a perfectly balanced truly wonderful little bean. We have nothing but our instincts for survival, no weight on our shoulders, no trauma (other than birth which hopefully very very few of us remember), not very much intelligence other than the newness of survival, no drama.. life is literally just beginning. Before we turn 3~4yrs old we learn our social behaviours from playgroups and our parents and siblings.. by the time we reach 8 years old (sometimes later for some) all of our social filters, our view on the world, is set. Now that includes everything we have learnt from our family environment growing up to friends to teachers. We are a human sponge as children, picking up such learned things as love, relationships, respect, honesty, hard work, kindness and charity.. then we also pick up learned actions such as fears, broken relationships, broken homes, violence, solitude, envy, jealousy.. How our home life was makes a difference to how you are now. That includes decisions made that altered your environment or those that were not made, were an intervention of the forces that be, that swept you along with others to somewhere darker than anyone would want to be. Some of these subjects I wouldn’t dare dive into.. I would not disrespect anyone who has and although I’ve had my dalliance with darkness growing up, we are each of us unique in our experiences and it’s effects on us. I do know one thing.. if you have been there, done that and are out the other side of it then you have my full utmost heartfelt respect.

For me, by the time I was 8 I had known much travelling. My father worked for the Bank of Brazil and so we all moved to New York City when I was 2 months old. It was the start of several other moves, each place teaching us about some of the diverse cultures around the world.. but it also meant leaving my friends, my school, my familiarity several times. I mean, why invest when you were going to move anyways, right?.. and that made me very independent today. Everything for me has always been about being the perpetual new kid on the block, in a new school, so adapting to a new environment and culture was something like breathing to me, even now. Like changing from wearing an Autumn coat to your Spring accoutrement without even batting an eyelid at the difference. It also meant that whilst soaking up different countries I remained somewhat of a culture of my own, picking up a bit from America, some from Saudi, Singapore, another, Brazil and Portugal from my mums side of the family.. it’s no surprise to me that I’m solitary, independent and a bit of an odd-ball when it comes to belonging anywhere.. well, likely just an odd-ball.. the Uk and Brazil are prob my strongest identities now but even that has changed from when I was 12. I am ‘that foreigner’ no matter where I go and, as I know nothing else, its not something that bothers me, but is something I am aware of when I see my mother back in Brazil, me here in the Uk, wondering what will happen in the future and how to bridge the physical gap between us in the long term. My brother lives there now near her so I know she will always be accompanied by one of us. But there is a lot of guilt that comes with that, being female, and the eldest in my family where there is only me and a brother, 4yrs my junior. In Brazil it’s still predominantly the women who look after their older relatives. Times are changing in Brazil, thankfully, but it has been, to me, about my grandparents and parents culture of women running a house and kids and men, at work, which merges uncomfortably with my upbringing. It’s quite confusing to say the least and entirely contradictory. In saying all this, as I said, my brother is the one in Brazil and closest to our mother.

So other than being a cultural island and brought up in an old-fashioned set up, I was mostly brought up in an extremely loving home. My mother has always been just pure heart, a truly beautiful soul, while my father had a wicked sense of humour and always looked after us financially & getting us what we needed. It was his way of loving, while mums way was always hugging and kissing and scooping us up in her arms. Both extremely protective of both me and my brother. We have a rock solid relationship between us which I am forever grateful for and comes by effortlessly from the start when these two souls crossed paths and had a family. My perception of love and family has much to do with that although I have learned much from feminism and though I can still remember the few times I coaxed my brother into helping out with some of the menial kitchen tasks, I am forever changed to heading off my own ideas on this. My extended family have adopted different attitudes and stances on the matter of feminism but I know them to find their own happiness whatever they choose to follow and have in their own individual lives.

There’s more ‘filters’ for me, ofcourse, but just these few situations and insiggt into my early life have taught me that;

1. I can only count on myself (from moving around a lot) and

2. I would do anything for my family and knew exactly what a loving family, would do, to truly support each other

Those are scratching the surface of these illustrated points as in between lies a multitude of other dynamics affected not only by the sociology of my home structure on family dynamics but also culture of the different environments, culture of the truly International group of friends I’ve had, culture in Brazil with family including behaviours adopted.. it’s a complex thing, the human being.. and these small points I’ve illustrated above from my past are all the positives.

The negative sides from;

1. Never trusting anyone enough to fully open up to them and be vulnerable to them

2. the feminine to male dynamics wnd gender expectations still fill me with guilt sometimes, much more rarely now, for not doing certain things and fulfilling those expectations.

I feel my extended family have grown to understand I’m the slightly mixed-culture member of the family, along with my brother, no less loved by my cousins, aunts and uncles than had I stayed in Brazil with them. We appreciate each other’s differences and I see much less of the battle of the sexes shall we say, between my family members and their counterparts. It is a generic sweeping statement to say about Brazil.. that it is generally-speaking a macho society.. but the people I know fit into happiness in whatever way that brings them, somewhat more equally balanced than, say, my grandparents generation.

What has happened to you up until the age of 8, has made you, you.. today. I have to say it.., ‘The good, the bad and the ugly’. We must shed our skins several times in our lifetime as life events change us. We become the Human Kintsugi, as per my first blog, something broken and put back together again. I would urge you to read that post if you haven’t done so already. We become amazing at loyalty, bad at relationships, scared to commit, highly independent, super feminist, utterly frightened of human interaction or love, fiercely independent or entirely dependent.. whatever happened to you, in whatever way this lifetime has shaped you, we all have to, at some point, do the hard work and face these issues so that we may break ourselves, or ‘dust the mirror’ and put ourselves back together in a much more beautiful, wholesome and balanced way.

No one ever has reached adulthood in perfect balance.. there has always been something to address and the crux is, sometimes it never becomes clearer to you then when things are going wrong in your life, when the shit truly hits the fan with loss. Loss of relationships, friends, family, jobs, our health.. whatever skewered way we see the world, through those baggage-lauren rose-tinted glasses, it is not the reality of it and it becomes something we have to face to see our true selves in the mirror.

What you see and who you are, well if you’ve lived long enough to be able to read this post and understand its message, then you understand that by breaking and pulling yourself back together again you have become a much much stronger, much more resilient and, most of all, a much more balanced perdon than you were. Able now to, uncompromisingly-so, seek your true happiness, striking a balance between your own expectations of yourself and knowing yourself well enough to understand when you need to do more work on yourself and when to walk away from situations that done serve you anymore. It’s the true difference between knowing whether the situation you’re in isn’t working out because you’re broken or because the situation is, in fact, now behind you, something you know you need to leave. It takes courage, it takes guts and it takes perseverance and inner wisdom to achieve that, no matter how old you are and no matter what you are going through. The one thing that is always constant in your life, if all else has failed you, is that the Universe always wants you to succeed and it always has your back. Sometimes you just need to get out of your own way to see it.. but when you do, and realise that change is needed, something needs to give, to break.. then everything in your life conspires for your success. Opportunities will embrace you and likewise may test your resolve on the new you.. but everything changes after you’ve changed. While you hold on to an old belief of yourself or the world around you, you remain captive to perpetuating the same situation in your life over and over, making the same mistake, until you finally stop mid-cycle and wonder why you got there in the first place.

When that moment happens, the one where you stop and KNOW that it’s something in you that has to change.. You might find that the friends you once used to hang out with are no longer for your highest good, that certain jobs were not developing you or that certain family members need a limit of your time. The ‘repeat cycle’ is your signal. If you’re in a hamster wheel of repeated doomsday, stop. Take note. Ask yourself ’why’ you’re doing what you’re doing and how you ‘feel’ about it. Ask yourself if it truly is the other person or the situation, or is it you that has an imbalance? Your inner self already has the answer. You already know!.. then after that, new friends arise that match your energy and positivity, new opportunities for work in a field that sparks your creativity or joy and new people step in that become your family, like family, providing, to you, everything you have been missing. All this through your own transformation after potentially hitting your head on the same brick wall several times (yeah.. we are all there on differing levels), like a universal reward for undergoing what you have undergone and come out the other side of it, ready to take on the world!

Take note what hasn’t been working in your life, it is usually something you need to address in yourself.. it is for each of you to think about and use your own discernment on your individual situations.. but dusting that mirror is necessary for things to change.

So meditate, be still in yourself to access your internal knowledge, message your friends to talk about things, reach out to your family members. People are here to help you through whatever situation you find yourself in. This does not mean using someone as a crutch because it is not up to someone else, anyone else, to raise your spirits.. that’s just plain exhausting and disrespectful. But they are there to point you in the right direction and listen to you when you need to talk about something. Life is for living and you are the only one in control of this one drivers seat, whether you are present or gone off to bed whilst the autopilot is switched on. It has been done, literally, but please don’t take this literally.

There is no test drive here, although we do feel at times we haven’t been living our best selves, until we do. This is not so easily said when we are suffering from depression or anxiety.. and truly, if you find yourself in such a situation, please do reach out to your loved ones.

I encourage you to take a good look at the mirror and truly see yourself to then be able to breathe in the necessary change that will open up a brand new chapter on your life’s path, Always reaching to better yourself to live a happier and more fulfilled life. Everything you have done or has happened to you is in the past, no judgement.. just make sure you don’t relive it in every moment of your present life. Start with now.. the present.. make a change and watch the whole world open up to you in a most positive and rewarding way! You deserve it! You deserve a fulfilling joyful life.

Love & Light☀️