“Claim my space,” is what my soul wisdom recently told me when I checked in.  So much of my life has been spent putting aside who I really am to make space for whom or what other people need me to be or do.  When I do that, part of me gets lost.  When I do that, I feel like I’m not good enough, there’s something wrong with me, I don’t deserve to have a life that validates me.  I might as well give up now because it’s too hard to shine the light of my soul.  Then I stuff my emotions, get depressed, and my body responds with pain.  When I stifle the feminine power of my soul the pain can show up in my pelvic area (chronic pelvic pain syndrome, vaginal pain, low back pain, side pain) and in tightness in my chest and throat.

When I check in with my soul and the path I have taken on my life’s journey, I keep coming back to this:  The pain is a spiritual journey calling me home to my soul so that I claim all of who I truly am through mind, body and emotions to be fully integrated, aligned with my feminine power, and present in each moment.

Wow.  How do I live up to that? How can I be brave enough to have just me be enough, to allow my light to shine through, to be fully loving and kind, first to myself and then to others?  Who am I to carry this message?  This has been my life lesson.

I live up to it by continually coming back to my wholeness every time I stray from it.  I live up to it by recognizing it in my spiritual teachers and feeling it within myself.  I have so many shining examples from powerful teachers in my life.  The best teachers are the ones who see me, really see me, as my whole and divine soul.  My lesson is to continue to see it in myself and to recognize and validate other women in the wholeness of themselves.  My lesson is to believe it and to live it.  My lesson is to stop hiding and taking the easy way out, to remember that the easy way, in reality, is stuck and miserable.

Several teachers have told me “Once you ‘wake up’ your soul won’t let you fall back to sleep.  You can’t go back to your old ways, because they no longer work.”  Life wants me to keep stretching out and shining my light brighter and clearer.  It wants me to push the edge, to fully step into all the colors of the beauty of my true self.  I do this by paying attention to what my soul is telling me through getting quiet and focusing within my body to access my emotions, the fractured bits of myself, my inner wisdom, my worth, my value.  I do it by moving my body and speaking my truth.  I do it by deliberately inhabiting my body, by taking charge of my life, by being a soul in a body rather than a body with a soul.

I practice and I practice and I practice and I keep opening and going deeper and learning my power, aligning with it, claiming it, burning through old emotional pain and protections, believing in myself.  I do it by looking in the mirror of the souls of my great teachers and seeing myself reflected there, seeing the beauty, the possibility of the greatness of what I truly and deeply can experience in this phenomenon called life.  I do this by feeling it in my body, feeling my body open, feeling my emotions release, by claiming my space.

I reflect my wholeness back to you.  From here I see your beauty, I see your power.  I see you.  Can you see it?  Can you see it reflected in my eyes, my voice, my heart?  Can you connect with and claim your own inner beauty?  Can you claim your space?  Come with me.  I’ll show you how.