crown of violets

How we express our love for each other and the role it plays in our happiness was a huge theme for me last year. When I was younger, I used to think that love was complicated and fragile. I thought that it was something rare and strange that existed between two people that were then devoted to each other. Not surprisingly, I was often a lonely child.

As I’ve gotten older, I’m finding love to be very simple. Love is what connects us to those around us. Love flowing through us rejuvenates our spark, giving us vitality and passion. We love spontaneously, without reason, and with surprising strength. We love people, ideas, animals, objects, tangible and intangible things. It’s natural for us to love. Our hearts were made for it.

We’ve chosen to teach each other that love must flow through certain channels (friends, family, lovers, etc) to be valued and celebrated, but I’m learning this complicates and confuses my feelings. Instead of focusing on expressing what I feel naturally, I worry and begin to concentrate on expressing my affection through ideas of what is and isn’t acceptable based on what class of relationship I’ve put someone in. Love doesn’t flow as easily and I start to feel a lack of it in my life. I block the love that is being given to me and my spark doesn’t burn as brightly.

This year, I’ve let myself love much more. I’ve explored different types of emotional and physical relationships, deepened existing connections, let more people into my life and shared more about my inner self. I’ve been more assertive socially, more forward about what I wanted, and when in doubt, I did what my heart told me to do. I indulged my curiosity and instinct to explore. I learned to first speak my mind in difficult conversations and later to initiate them if I felt confused or that it was necessary. In return, I’ve found more joy, more connection, and more self-confidence. I’ve felt both happiness and sadness, clarity and confusion. I’m a lot closer to many people in my life and farther away from others who I wasn’t compatible with.

Because I was often pushing myself to express what I felt, while being afraid to do so, sometimes I felt erratic and foolish. I felt a little like a child who was learning to speak. The act of loving felt natural, but holding it back also felt natural, maybe because holding back was something I’d practiced so often.

When I express love for different people, what I’m feeling is a mixture of affection, affinity, intimacy, desire and other things I don’t know the name of. How I feel about each person is unique and the way I want to express it is fluid. Sometimes it can be material, like the desire to give gifts or to pamper (making food and feeding people is becoming one of my favorite ways to express love). Sometimes the expression of love is physical. We associate physical intimacy with sex and romantic intentions, when it’s just another way we express ourselves with each other. I’ve found the more I let myself express love organically, the more physically affectionate with my friends I’ve become. I hug more, hold hands more, kiss more and cuddle much more. This type of affection used to be reserved for romantic relationships but the friends I feel comfortable with physically are often also the friends that I feel emotionally close to or strongly about.

How we love is shaped by our personality, past experiences and the choices we’ve made. When we interact with someone, it can feel complicated because we’re often struggling with ghosts of jealousy,insecurity, paranoia, anger, and other demons. Even if we’re able to love with an open, care-free heart, we often use the same words for different things and forget that our desires and styles of loving are unique.

Communication has been the most useful and hardest skill to build in my relationships. It can be hard to talk about intentions and where each person stands in a relationship. It can be hard to talk about something someone has done that has hurt or upset us. Sometimes we just don’t know what we want or feel vulnerable talking about things that hurt us. But it’s necessary to build the skills of expressing to others what we want, what we’re feeling, and our intentions and boundaries. We learn how to do it by opening up and trying. The more we practice, the better we get. This is an integral part of showing love for our self and for others. It can build stronger relationships or show us the ones that we have to let go of.

I’m learning that the relationships we have strongly shape our view of the world. If I spend time with those I have honest and loving relationships with, I feel that the world is a safe, loving place. If I put energy into relationships that are full of insecurity and confusion, I end up feeling insecure and confused. Our relationships are reflections of ourselves, and where we put our focus is what we’re going to create. Looking forward to this coming year, I want to focus on being around those that value the things that I value (honesty, courage, and abundance in love). I want to share my time with those that bring joy and wisdom into my life by inviting out the best in me and asking the best of themselves.

Broken Heart
Originally uploaded by Gabriela Camerotti

I decided this year would be my year to build my courage, while carrying forward my gift of a loving and compassiionate heart. The past months I’ve made challenges for myself and achieved them, building my strength and breaking free of the fear that once ruled my decisions. The biggest challenge so far has been one that I didn’t expect and couldn’t plan for, but has been teaching me some great lessons about myself and my heart.

One of my challenges was to come clean about a lie I’d told when I was sixteen. The last person I had to tell was one of my closest friends, who has been one of the most important people in my life for the past six years. I’ve always cared deeply for her, but something in our relationship changed that day.

We had actually been living quite separate lives for a while and I couldn’t get a hold of her to tell her the truth in person, though I’d left messages and sent an email. She heard it from a mutual acquaintance and called me to talk about it. I went to see her and after clearing the air somehow ended up in her arms in an intense kiss. I still can’t quite recall how it happened.

The next week or two was a roller coaster. Wanting her passionately brought up new challenges related to past relationships. She has been a catalyst for amazing growth for me. She mirrors my own giving heart and was the first person I could begin to open myself to. She has shared both the best and worst of my life.

I wrestled with the shadows of an open and receptive heart and fought the urge to push the whole situation away. After all, I’d just starting taking clients as a companion. Was pursuing a romantic relationship what I wanted? I’d never really considered how having a personal intimate relationship would manifest while being a companion. I had been so focused on what I was creating for myself, I didn’t think of how another person would fit into that. How much of my time and energy would go where?

Having an intimate relationship with her in particular would put us in unknown territory. We’ve grown up together. We’ve been witness to some truly messy growth spurts and energy cycles, many of which we’ve acted out on each other. Our greatest strength has always been that we’ve both made a commitment to love each other as unconditionally as we are able. We both lead very spiritual and independant lives, and have a history of codependant relationships. Codependency happens when instead of nurturing ourselves, we nurture someone else and expect that person to fulfill our needs. Instead of bringing a whole to the relationship, codependency is about halves. We energetically polarise and instead of completing the cycle of giving and receiving ourselves, we give and expect someone else to complete the exchange by fiving. Neither of us has chosen that in a long time, but I’ve been working with old ghosts of fears and releasing them, so that energy was very present.

I also worried about how a relationship between us would develop. We have been children together, each other’s mothers, friends, sisters. I had my first spiritual companionship and sexual healing experience with her. But my love for her never felt passionate until that day. I felt like something had aligned in me.

Overwhelmed by conflicting thoughts and desires, I sought refuge at a friend’s place to vent my fears and thoughts. I ended up forgetting a very special necklace there that Sarah at Glamourkin had custome made for me last fall to celebrate how much healing gardening had brought into my life.

After letting myself sit with all the things I was afraid of, I decided that I wanted to try. After all, it was my year to build my courage and not let fear stop me. The universe had chosen a challenge for me that went deeper than I could have imagined, but I wanted to meet it. I talked to her and asked that she think about what she wanted. I tried to act with grace, openness, and courage and was so proud of how I approached. I felt incredible.

And then, she turned me down.

I was heartbroken. It had seemed so perfect and so congruent with the growth I was experiencing. It had seemed like it took so much for me to more forward and open myself. But more importantly, I loved her deeply and wanted to see what would happen if we explored this new dimension to our relationship.

All of her reasons had been the same things that I myself had been struggling with and I had to respect that we had come to different conclusions. I made a commitment to love her unconditionally and it was that I chose to renew. I turned my attention towards processing the experience and working with the parts of me that it had unearhted.

It was difficult. The next few times I saw her, I tried to process what had happened and my attraction. I felt that she was attracted to me too, but honoured her decision.

A week later, I made plans to visit the same friends who I’d stayed with before. They returned my necklace and I realised that the new moon was approaching. I was mystified to learn the whole experience had occured within the cycle of one moon. I renewed my desire to let go of what didn’t serve me and to meet the challenges unfolding with strength. I sang to myself on the walk home. I mentally thanked her for everything she’d given me over the years, everything we’d shared, and asked for a more appropriate romantic interest.

She visited unexpectedly the next day. I learned that she had stopped by the night before, while I’d been out, and had spent the evening very similarily to mine, releasing her attachments and inviting clarity into some situations she was going through. She told me she’d been mistaken, that she wanted to try. We spent a lovely day together and kissed in the snow, under a tree.

I didn’t feel anything. For about a day and a half, I felt numb and sad. Wasn’t I supposed to feel happy? Even more confused, I realised I needed some counsel. I turned to another friend of mine, whom I’d know even longer than the one I was attracted to. She suggested that I was in shock and the change in our relationship, coupled with rejection and then the sudden change of heart had all happened too quick for me to process. I had to agree. I went back and forth, first shaken by her rejection and then, finally we both agreed to honour what the other was feeling in each moment and hold each other to nothing but that we explore what was going on with compassion and trust.

I wish I could tell you I’ve figured it out. I hesitated to share this story, because of the deeply personal nature and because I don’t know the ending yet. But sharing the journey as it happens, with all the ups and downs and confusion is part of opening myself to others and part of the reason I decided to start this website. I’ve learned from this situation that I can invite and plan, but the really tough lessons are the ones that come from opening myself to the mysteries of the universe.

So unexpected or no, I’m going to try to meet them with as much grace and courage as I can.