Discovering What Self-Connection Actually Looks Like

self portrait inside the Self Study Lab, 2020

There is a story that each of us holds within that has been created over our lifetimes. That has been carried over from the lifetimes before ours and the generations that created the genes that make up our DNA.

I believe that aching and longing, the pains and pleasure, connections and inabilities to connect deeper are built from these places.

And until we tap deeper into our own selves, and unleash the bounds that tie down our soul, whether self-inflicted or collected along the way, we will never feel that sense of fullness or freeness that each of us aches for in our own individual ways.

I’ve been on a cycle of hurting and healing, wounding and bandaging parts of my story for as long as I can remember. Learning habits I am crippled by, and breaking binds that no long serve me because they were never actually my own.

Right here, right now, I am on my own self connection journey. And as I rolled into a new month, into the turning of a new season, I also greeted the one year anniversary of one of the most painful, yet most freeing points in my life.

This time last year, I was broken, shattered, confused, and contained in the grief my body held. The sadness my story toxically leaked out from within me. Earlier this week I was reminded, that March also holds the anniversary of the death of my grandmother and the severance of the relationship with my birth mother. This time last year, I cut all ties on a romantic relationship that was damaging me. What an abundance of cycles this season continues to unfold.

But over the course of this last year, I’ve poured out in every way I could imagine, which for the better and worse of it all along the way, has healed me.

By exposing all my old wounds, all my heavy baggage, and all the things that were never mine to carry, I have begun to open space for me and the whole world outside to see these strange vulnerabilities that encompass me.

My “stuff” surfaces from my roots. My womb. My pelvic floor and the story that it holds deep in the tissues that make up every part of my body.

I have been tapping into that story through all sorts of outward expressions. And honestly, I know I’m just getting started. But that’s what this whole thing is about. Life. Tapping in. And then waiting. Opening up. And then letting out.

We can let our stories transform us into things we don’t want to be. Or we can face our stories, and somehow let that transforming evolve along the way and recreate us into newer versions of ourselves that we perhaps never had the space or imagination to see before.

I work intimately with Brittney Ellers a Doctor of Physical Therapy, yoga instructor, and pelvic health educator. She’s my muse, my mirror in many of ways. And in exchange, she’s helping me to tap more into the feminine wounds I carry deep inside myself.

I wrote a piece earlier this week about my period truth for her blog, She is Being Better. It touches on things I’ll continue to uncover as they days, weeks, and months turn to years and on and on. And in turn, that I will be developing into stories to share with you. This piece brushes the surface as to why I hurt, why I love so deeply, and why I believe we have the power to heal our own selves.

To wrap up the beginning of this story + tap deeper in, I sat through a self-portrait session + my first connection shoot with and of myself.

To see what my own human container, uncovered, captured and frozen still in time looked like. It was heartbreaking, soul-quaking, nerve-wracking, and emotion-provoking beyond the words I currently hold inside my mind. Soon enough, they will come to surface and I’ll meet you back here with more readable dialog and visuals expressions to piece another layer of the story together. You can check out the images on my Substack and leave a comment if you have any thing you’d like to share — I would love to hear from you.

Until there is more, I’ll leave you here with this outward expression of a piece of me that’s ready to transform externally in some sort of perfectly, imperfect way.

Originally posted to Medium and the old Not Without Dirt blog in 2020.