Today is my Re-Birthday.

I've spent the last four years working hard to find this girl again. This spunky, spitfire who loved with everything in her, raised her chin and eyebrows in the face of the haters and was glad to take a backhanded comment by a tired parent ( "Go jump in the mud, Kiki!") and make it into an adventure in joy.



I needed to understand her, help her, and make peace with her. And I needed her help as well. To reclaim my joy, my spontaneity, my desire to live as my soul was made and not be ashamed of how I am. To take all the things that could seem negative about myself and claim them as my gifts.

It's hard work to look inside yourself and be unflinchingly honest. It's a difficult truth to know that the things that hurt you the most are the places where you are the most tender, and where you are the most tender is where your love springs from. These are not places to be ashamed of or hidden, but to be honored and magnified.

Our deepest insecurities are our deepest gifts. As we come to honor our sensitivities, we gain a quality of dignity. We are less hurt by rejection (Oh, it still hurts, but the hurt is less soul-crushing) because our ultimate commitment is to surround ourselves with people who love us for WHO WE ARE.

As we are able to honor instead of shame, acknowledge with compassion instead of being swallowed up in, the fierceness of our passions, we will be able to practice expressing those passions to the world instead of hiding them and letting them be twisted into instruments of self destruction.When we honor the tenderness of our sensitivities, we become beautiful through the expression of our true self.

There is and always will be work to do, but I feel like claiming this year as my Re-Birthday because I can feel all my parts coming into alignment. And is this not a re-birth and a re-claiming of the self? This is the work; to be present, mindful, honest, and real, to give love and receive it with no expectations, to set your intention and hold it in your mind, to decide what your boundaries are and honor yourself by holding to them, to acknowledge the wrongs you have done and seek to repair what you can, to honor all that has come before, not to be chained down by the past, but to learn from it and move forward. Perfection is not the goal. Peace is the goal.

This painting, Inner Child Work, was done a few years ago. I have to laugh at the Prophetess in me. I had no idea when I did this painting that this would be the work I would be for the rest of my life. How could my soul know how to put an image on canvas that would become the actual representation of hundreds of healing visualizations before they even happen? Because we our our own best healers. The knowledge is in us if we can get out of our head and into our body, our feelings, our dreams, and our spirit.





THREE

maybe i’ve done enough,
and your golden child grew up.
maybe this trophy isn’t real love-
and with or without it, i’m good enough.

maybe i’ve done enough,
finally catching up.
for the first time i see an image of
my brokenness utterly worthy of love.
maybe i’ve done enough.

i finally see myself.
through the eyes of no one else.
it’s so exhausting on this silver screen
where i play the role of anyone but me.

i finally see myself.
unabridged and overwhelmed,
a mess of a story i’m ashamed to tell,
but i’m slowly learning how to break this spell.
and i finally see myself.

now i only want what’s real-
to let my heart feel what it feels.
gold, silver or bronze hold no value here,
where work and rest are equally revered.

i only want what’s real-
i set aside the highlight reel,
and leave my greatest failures on display*

(*worthy of love anyway)

-Sleeping At Last


Happy Re-Birthday, Kirsten