Sunday evening, lying on my bed wrapped in a blanket my mother crocheted for me. The wind is battering the window making the panes shudder, the guttering outside creaking in protest. There’s a storm coming tonight they say, the biggest storm for twenty years. I’m leafing through the pages of my old journals. 2003, 2004 and 2005 already relived and tear-stained — now I’m wandering back through 2006. I hadn’t intended to read so far, but I want to know how the story ends. I turn the page and read a description of my imagined future life and immediately my heart starts beating faster — everything I’d written describes my life as it is today. Where I live, what I earn, the work I do, the places I have been. My achievements. My goals. The way I spend my days. All of it was written out on October 25th 2006. But what makes me smile the most are the pieces of the future I hadn’t even imagined: my love for my nephew, the deep friendships I treasure. Work that feels meaningful. The connections I’ve made. I couldn’t have imagined any of that, yet it came to be anyway. I open my current journal and set my pen to the paper: what future life can I conjure up now, knowing that something even greater will arrive, the pieces of the future I can’t yet imagine…
The final layer
Part of my journey towards readying myself for a new relationship is making peace with the past. I’ve got a book, blog posts and hundreds of hours of therapy that tell me I’m healed, but there’s one more layer I’ve yet to unravel. To me, ‘making peace’ means looking at every aspect of my previous relationships to really understand the lessons and gifts of my time spent with each person. At a friend’s suggestion — and not one to do things by halves — I’ve been reading up on the shamanic process of recapitulation. This article has been particularly enlightening:
“Recapitulation, and in particular Shamanic recapitulation (as popularized by Carlos Castaneda‘s books), is the art of excavating through our past storyline chapters, locating the emotional imprints and releasing the charges. The process, like most things we engage with in our lives, rewires our very brains and establishes new neural pathways. Once done a few times, it is possible to be re-framing our experiences in a continual (moment, daily, weekly) fashion so that we don’t lug so damn much baggage around.”
Using a combination of journalling, meditation and talking with my therapist I’m slowly working my way back through the years. Some recollections are easier to work through than others. Last week I began reading the journals that chronicle my relationship with my love. One of the benefits of being such a compulsive journaller is I have everything written down in the most astounding detail: conversations, feelings, events, realisations, turning points, printed-out emails… it’s all recorded in a big pile of Moleskines. In all these years I’ve never sat down and read it through from beginning to end. It’s not the most fun I’ve ever had, I’ll be honest, but I’m joining up the dots and learning so much about who I was back then. Who WE were. The frustrations and love…. All of it.
Next will come a whole 10-year relationship to piece back together — I have a box full of journals and photographs for that one. Then the shorter connections of my early twenties and teens, leading back to the relationship at the root of all of this: the one with my absent father.
There are days when I wish I wasn’t such a navel gazer, but it’s the only way I know how to be. I want to know what makes me tick so I can feel deeper, live wider, love better — the unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates boldly put it. In many ways I’m making up for all the wilfully unconscious times in my life when I plunged into situations and relationships without considering the consequences. Now it’s different. Now I’m different.
I’ve honestly never felt more awake, or alive, in my life.
Something for the weekend
Literary guide to San Francisco
[video] The most astounding fact
A scientific guide to saying no
Inspiration for the coming months: Rachel’s Wisdom Notes + Marybeth’s Our Word
Beef & sweet potato stew | creamy avocado pasta | espresso martini
Free 2014 calender template for your photos
Grace’s most meaningful decision
Happy weekend, loves!
Circles, cakes and magic
The truth is, I had no idea how the retreat would go. Meg, Sas and I had created a program we felt was juicy and inspiring, but there was no way of knowing whether the participants would get anything out of it. I swung between worrying it was all too simple to fretting that maybe it was too much. There were so many unknowns running alongside the reassurances that the food would be good (it so was!) and the venue was lovely.
As an introvert, albeit a confident non-shy one, I was also worried I’d find the retreat exhausting. I’m so used to being on my own I didn’t know if I could handle the energy of 19 women basically living together for five days. Sharing my world from behind a screen, book page or photograph is extremely comfortable for me — doing that out in public is something else altogether.
But as it turned out, it was one of the most illuminating, connected, nourishing and humbling experiences of my life.
From the moment we welcomed the first arrivals to the final farewell on the last day, we were carried along by something much greater than us. The pace of the days was perfectly in line with what everyone needed. The workshops and exercises stretched us all in ways we couldn’t have imagined (we were working right alongside our vixens). We stayed open to the witchiness that circles of women tend to bring, and we honoured our energy levels by retreating when we needed to. When I fell into bed each night I was tired, yes, but not depleted. Personally this was one of the greatest gifts of the week, discovering I can do this work and not be destroyed by it.
Every evening Meg, Sas and I would gather to prep for the next day, lying on each other’s beds, marvelling at how well it was going. It was such a joy to witness my two friends truly blossom into their roles as retreat leaders — you would have thought they’d been doing it for years (SO PROUD OF YOU GUYS!)
Each of us had a role to play – every woman in our circle brought something of herself to the group. We were a yurt full of equals, and that was exactly how I’d hoped it would be. There is something so powerful about being a witness to each other’s transformation. I’d seen it happen in my classes and have read about it in testimonials and emails, but to be there in person, looking into a person’s eyes as they tell me their story… I don’t really have words for it, actually.
Each woman went home with a map to her future and a tribe of women walking beside her. I returned home exhausted to my bones, yet also oddly filled up. I have a better idea of what I need to do going forward with my own goals and am ready to take that first step into the next chapter of my future. And part of that includes another Redfox retreat next year. This is just the beginning, in so many ways…
Thank you Amy, Amy Gretchen, Anne, Elizabeth, Esme, Fiona, Gerri, Jenny, Katherine, Kelly, Nicola, Rachel, Sarah, Susanne, Wendy and Yvonne for trusting us to be your guides for the week and letting yourselves be seen so beautifully. I’ll never forget it xo
If you’d like to learn more about next year’s Unravel Your Story retreat you can sign up for the mailing list over here. We’ll be updating the page over the next few weeks, but I can already tell you the dates: November 4th – 10th, 2014