You are the one who chooses to make your being jump and dance and sometimes, you feel like a puppet on a string. Which would be fun, if you were the one holding the strings.
But instead,
your depression is.
Your anxiety is.
Your mom is.
Your dad is.
And am I?
In that space still.
Meet yourself in the space.
The space between
there lies your greatest fears, the reasons you have created for why you just can’t touch these powers you have to control your own body you would rather have something to blame, something outside of you that pulls these strings
there lies your greatest loves the reasons we have created to keep you in the game you love music you love dancing you love cooking you love people you love life
this life
just the way it is
it’s been designed for you
just the way you asked
you can hide from pulling the strings all you like, but you’re still doing something by doing nothing.
So, we wish you would just be here,
noticing how magnificent it all is.
We wish you would just be here, in that space. I know you want to get out of it, but just stay here a while. Sit in who you are. Let yourself be.
Pretty much everything in my life is changing right now, because I’m going through a spiritual awakening + healing phase.
(Which is the main reason I haven’t posted much on my website.)
One of the shifts I’m noticing, is with my love life. I’m no longer interested in dating and I’ve decided to refrain from any sexual intimacy with anyone but me for at least six months. I did want to still enjoy my sexual nature, so I thought it would be nice to get myself a tool for self-pleasure. I didn’t want refraining from sex to feel like I was missing out on anything. I figured this crystal wand would just remind me that this time with myself is sacred and for a reason.
Rose quartz is the stone of Unconditional Love, I have a meaningful relationship with rose quartz, it’s always come into my life in the most Divine ways. The times I have meditated with this crystal have been epic.
When I received my rose quartz pleasure wand from https://selfceremony.com/collections/pleasure my life changed so much. First of all there was an energy of intention and care brought into my experience just with opening the shipping box. The vibration of the company is absolutely gorgeous.
When it came to experiencing ritual with the wand, so much came up for me. One thought that I vividly remember was contemplating the power of my vagina. Not just the vagina in general, but specifically mine. I’ve had this general respect for the vagina, but I’ve never been like, “yeah I have one and it’s amazing.” Sure, I have noticed the beauty of it and I love the way that it feels. But tonight, working with this crystal allowed me to open this new perception of the power that I naturally posses. There is so much power here between my legs. I create life here. Having the time, space, and energy to feel that and process that was extremely uplifting.
Through mediating with crystals, I have felt a sort of oneness with them before, but taking part in this ceremony is a whole new experience of connecting with the potent energy of crystals.
image from selfceremony.com
The actual orgasm was insane. Long too. My mind recited “wtf is happening” about six times at the start of my orgasm. The energy of the experience was something unlike any sexual encounter I’ve ever had.
After my self-pleasure ceremony, I stayed up for about 4 hours. I was about to go to sleep before I started, I was so tired and honestly, I usually knock out after masturbating at night lol. But somehow, I had the energy to write this, I cleaned, did organizational stuff for my business, wrote in my journal. I had this energy about me of “I am worthy of everything I desire and I need to take the actions that reflect that worth”. I truly have never experienced anything like this before, that I just had to share, even if it is intimate information.
I initially ordered this tool as a way to still experience pleasure while moving through personal growth and change. Now, after experiencing what this tool brings into my life, I see that it’s about so much more than pleasure. My body and mind are changing in so many ways with everything that’s happening right now. I’m grateful that tools like this exist, to remind me that healing can actually be the juiciest part of the journey. (pun intended)
Feel free to reach out if you have anything to reflect back about your experience of self-pleasure. 🙂
I think I might have a clue. Unlike most, you know who you are. You know your value. You know your worth. You know that being in your presence is an absolute gift. And you’re open to love, but only from the person who treats you like the powerful force that you are. The person who sees you as created from the Divine, the person who worships every cell of your body, every pattern of your mind, and every aspect of your soul. You’ve been waiting for the person who is as awakened and present as you are. The person who doesn’t waste time trying to know and understand you, they don’t need to, because they feel and know themselves so deeply, while you are just a living reflection of that inner wisdom. I know sometimes you wish you would just settle, you wish you would just give in and let someone, anyone in. The knowing you have in who you are will never allow you to settle. Because you know how you are meant to be loved.
Self love is a concept that we ourselves have created, and this concept was only created from the creation of self hate. In the abolishment of self hate, we can come to see that every action we make is an act of self love. If we never judged ourselves, we would never need to come home to loving ourselves. The judgement we have placed on ourselves in our lives is an opportunity to become even more submerged within our true nature of unconditional love. For when we truly have experienced self judgement, we can choose to turn away from this and remember how much better it feels to be loving and free of false talk from the mind in regards to the self.
Self Love is the union of heart and mind.
Self is a concept of the mind, you are because you believe that you are, I think therefore I am.
Love is the energy of our spirit.
Self love is the act of intentionally bringing the energy of the heart to the mind.
You are on the pathway to ascension, regardless of who you believe that you are. Therefore, every action you take brings the heart and the mind into oneness.
Even if you intentionally take the heart out of coherence with the mind, this act usually guides you into intentionally bringing the self into coherence with love once again, simply because allowing love feels better than the blockage of it.
How do you feel who you are?
When do you feel most you?
Do not allow anyone else to tell you how to love the self that you are. Do not participate in acts of “self love” because someone else has defined those acts to be “self loving”. Self love is whatever you decide that it is.
What are you doing when you feel most connected to you?
You are the only one who fully knows the self that you are, therefore, you are the only one who knows what this self wants. Spend time in reflection and observation of self in order to understand what brings your “self” into the state of love.
Love is an energy, a state within us all, and we all have a unique way of experiencing this state.
We each have our own unique definitions of what this energetic state is and sometimes these definitions block us from experience of this energetic state.
For example, if you believe that self love is the act of taking a bath and you take a bath once a week, this leaves you in the trap of believing that you have only shown yourself love one day of the week. Whereas, there may be another person who believes that self love is hydration, and this person would experience self love intentionally each time she/he drinks water.
Choose what self love is to you in a way that allows you to experience it moment to moment, multiple times a day. You deserve to feel the love that you are.
My first nude photoshoot. This was a time in my life, when I was finally starting to do things for me. I wasn’t going because it was someone else’s idea, or someone else wanted me there. It wasn’t to impress or please anyone. It wasn’t to prove anything. It was because I finally, finally felt unconditional love for my body, and I wanted to see my body, really see it, all of it.
I have this memory of being in the car with my mom, we were on our way home from school, and I asked her what the word ‘anorexic’ meant. “Someone at school called me that today,” I remember saying. I was in the third grade. I don’t remember anything else about that. All I know, is that was when my long journey with being teased for being skinny began.
“Your arms are like twigs.”
“Eat a hamburger.”
I remember hearing stuff like that a lot. I’m sure there was more. There were days when food was thrown at me in the cafeteria. I started to hate myself and my body. The kids at school thought there was something wrong with it, and I chose to agree with them. When they made fun of me, I would join in. Sometimes, I would even be the one to start the conversation about how ridiculously thin I was. I got teased for being too girly too. Which, unlike my body, I could change my identity as a ballerina, and I gladly did. That was the year I quit dance, something that I started when I was six years old, and really loved. I had beautiful long hair that went down my whole back, and I begged my mom to cut it to my chin. I would’ve done anything to change, so that I wouldn’t be made fun of.
I felt like a piece of clay, constantly molding myself to be what others wanted me to be. This was exhausting. I agreed with everyone around me and I did what was asked of me. It was hard to know who I was, and what I really wanted, because of how often I had changed myself based on people around me.
When I was in college, I started going to the gym with the goal of gaining weight. That was when I started to develop an unhealthy relationship with food, for the first time in my life. It was ironic that for about seven years I was made fun of for an eating disorder I didn’t have, to then struggle with eating after going through that. I felt like I was still 80lbs and underweight, and on those days, I would eat until I was sick. On some days, eating was all I could do to silence the voices in my mind that told me I was too thin, so I would eat for hours. Other days, it looked to me like I had gained so much weight, I would feel guilty about eating so much, and I would eat less. No one knew. I gained weight really quickly, eating entire jars of peanut butter in one sitting will do that to you. Everyone was happy for me, but I was miserable.
Every time I looked in the mirror I saw a girl who went to the ends of the earth to change herself, in order to please others.
Even though my body had completely changed, I was still playing the same memories of the past in my mind. Repeatedly processing everything that happened to me when I was younger, made me question if I even really even liked the gym. If I only wanted to gain weight to feel better about my body, and feeling bad about my body had come from other people in the first place, who was I doing all of this for? Did I even want to be more muscular? Who was I living for? What kind of body did I actually want?
In the moment, I had no idea who I was, I felt haunted every day, stories of my past played over and over in my head and I was more identified with that, than my current life. I couldn’t see that I was living in a reality where everyone loved me and wanted the best for me, because I was still mentally experiencing my past. When I would get invited to go out to eat with friends, I would physically get nauseous and anxious because I hated eating in front of other people. I spent a lot of time alone, which looking back, I feel like I really did need that time. That was my junior year of college, and I went through my spiritual awakening that year. I was really starting to heal and change.
My senior year of college had more positive memories and self love. But, I still had challenging moments, I especially struggled with photos. On the day of my college graduation photos, I couldn’t get out of bed. I waited until the last possible minute to get ready and go to the shoot. In my mind, I was petrified of seeing what I really looked like. I mentally would see this big and ugly person, when I would imagine myself, even though I was wearing a size 0 dress and I looked absolutely gorgeous, I couldn’t see it, because of where my mind was. Seeing the pictures after they were done helped, because I was able to see that the image in my mind didn’t match the photos that were taken.
It was hard to look back those photos, and other photos from my life, because I feel like I was numb to actually enjoying and experiencing them, as a result of where my headspace was at. When I looked at those photos, I could finally see how absolutely beautiful my life was, as well as how physically fit I was, but I knew and remembered that those were the nights I would cry myself to sleep about how I wanted to be someone else, because I hated myself. Those seemed like wasted years.
That was one of the main reasons why I wanted to have a career where I could help people live in the moment and change the way that they thought about themselves. I wanted to be someone who could help other people love their bodies. I wanted to find people who were going through the same journey, and help them through it, because I was completely alone in mine. I never talked about it because I didn’t know how bad it was.
Everyone is hard on themselves right? No one really loves their body that much? That was what I would think to myself, thinking it was normal to look at myself in the mirror and feel disgust for what I saw.
Doing this photoshoot now, meant a lot to me. I’m not sure when the change happened, but being excited to see what the pictures of me looked like, after they were taken was new for me. Years ago, when I would be out with friends or at family gatherings, I would remember feeling so anxious as the pictures were being taken, thinking to myself, “I am going to look so ugly” or “I’ll definitely look too skinny” or “I never want to see this photo” or “I need to see this photo immediately and have it deleted”. Taking photos was rarely a pleasant experience for me because of the torturous thoughts that I experienced. However, it was having photos of myself that saved me. Even though in the moment I would be negative or hard on myself, I would look back months later and think that I looked beautiful. The more often that started happening, the more often I wondered why I didn’t feel beautiful in that moment of taking the photo, and how I could help myself do that.
I really think that most of the changes in truly loving myself came from meditation. I do a guided meditation every day that has your consciousness spend moments fully in the quantum field, where you are nobody, no one, no place, and no time. Doing this, I believe, has made me appreciate where I am, because it is an experience that has you realize that you are beyond this body, you can truly feel that, so when I am awake and looking in the mirror, I am more fascinated and loving than ever, because I truly know that I am choosing each moment of my physical life.
My meditation practice has given me a break from what I think this life is, a break from hearing the same story about myself and my body, which lead me into consciously choosing a new one.
This new story I chose involves me loving myself as much as I can. I stopped myself more and more every day from giving my energy to self deprecating thoughts, until they were barley in my experience. I stopped putting focus on what I went through in the past, and was able to see who I am today. I took time to understand what I really want, and find a way to give those desires to myself, when I used to shun those parts of me away. And what kind of body did I actually want? In silence, I found that I wanted a body that can functionally move, and be healthy. That was it. I never wanted to look any certain way, when I really see myself, I find that having a beautiful body is something that happens naturally for me and for all people. We have these fake beauty standards stuck in our minds that tear our self image apart. We think we need to change or be better to match a certain standard, but really we become our best selves when we stop overly analyzing ourselves. For me, I realized that I never needed to stress or worry about looking good, because I naturally do. Good is a concept that exists in my own mind, I can choose what that means to me. People could call that conceded, but I spent 21 years stressed about what I looked like, torturing myself from the inside, so I believe I deserve every conceded, self centered, overly self loving thought that comes through my mind. I bet you do too. I’m making up for years of wishing my life away. I love being me, and I want to live in a world where you love being you.
Photos taken and edited by Mark Darren Photography
Christina Ariana 