Conditions on My Love: Your Words Must be Like Honey

“I dreamt last night oh marvelous error that there were honey bees in my heart making honey out of my old failures.” ~Antonio Machado

For months now I’ve had a recurring headache behind my left eye.

People tell me different reasons I have it. Stress. Sitting at a computer too long. Not stretching enough.

Last night I asked it what it had to say. It released.

Like an earache breaks, when I finally gave it space and did nothing but ask it what it wanted to say, I heard its message and it went away.

I was on my therapist’s couch. Feeling my body. She said, what are you noticing, Rachel?

I said, I have this pounding behind my left eye. I get it a lot.

She said, If it could talk, what would it say?

I’m tired of trying so hard. I am tired of trying to figure it all out. I’m tired of managing my behavior. It hurts. I am hurting.

As I felt into my pain, it began to feel spacious, less, and suddenly, my ear broke, like when I’ve had an ear ache.

The knowing flooded me like a river. I don’t want to hear mean things anymore. I want to hear words of love. My little girl just wants to hear loving words.

I cried at the simplicity of my yearning.

She put her hand on my shoulder and said, Rachel, you are so easy to love. You have never once sat in here and asked for anything unreasonable. All you want, all you long for, it’s all reasonable, they are things we all want and deserve in relationships.

I respect you, Rachel. You are so lovable, Rachel. You are so easy to love, Rachel.

Grief for all the times that my inner child needed to hear that she was beautiful. That she was respected. That she was loved.

Grateful, for this woman, whose life work is to sit on the couch beside those whose little hearts were broken, and remind them it’s okay to have needs.

“Is it a trauma for a child to not be cared for properly? Not to feel loved and tended to with consistency, kindness, and adoration? Absolutely. Can the ravenous ache created by such a wounding ever truly be healed? Absolutely. But you must first be willing to give to yourself that which you did not get from your caregivers. You have to give up looking for others to give it to you. They can’t. You cannot get what was missing in your childhood from another person, until you are actively engaged in doing all that you can to give it to yourself. It’s what we call “re-parenting” yourself.”~Katherine Woodward Thomas.

All the nights, like water under the bridge, where I needed to be seen, touched, held, nurtured, and I was not.

As children, we had nowhere to go. We could not break from our parents, we had no choice.

Today, I have choice about who is in my life; who I share my vibration with. I get to walk away from so called friends whose words hurt my ears and make me cringe.

They’re wrong, you know. Some of those people, in my life, what they think of me, who they think I am, they are wrong.

I am easy to love. I don’t ask for too much.

I deserve to hear words of love, cascading in to my left ear, over to my right brain, nurturing the real me, the dreamer, the lover, the dancer, the artist.

You are welcome here. And yes, there are some conditions. The words you spill forth from your tongue, must cascade like warm honey into my ears, nurturing my little girl with love.

If not, you don’t have to stay here. I don’t have to either.

We can leave, now, we adults, we can leave, you know.

I leave you with an excerpt from Calling in “The One” by Katherine Woodward Thomas

“It’s time to identify what was missing for us so that we can begin providing it for ourselves. We must turn our attention toward giving to ourselves the things that were missing in our past to heal our hearts of their inner poverty and deprivation. Then we will no longer be drawn to those who wound us in the same way as our original caregivers.”

Rachel, You Can Leave Them, Claire