NUDE

As I carried on through my 20’s and 30’s I kept the dream of my prince charming alive. I imagined him sweeping me off my feet, protecting me, nurturing me and most of all loving me. But my reality was much different. Every time I thought I met “the one”, they would leave me devastated on the tiles of the cold bathroom floor, in their wake, destroying my Cinderella story dreams. What we don’t realize as we move through our lives, in search of true love, is that the search is based on false expectations we have created through a ‘conditioning’. This conditioning starts with Walt Disney and then into pop culture and Hollywood, creating a fantasy world of how relationships are supposed to be. Family, society, government, and institutions instills a framework of how and what we need in order to find safety, security, a moral compass and ultimately our happiness. After we understand what is expected of us, we set off into the world to find it. We begin our journey in search for “the one”, the perfect career, to support our perfect family to live “happily ever after”, in our safe little box. For many of us, we are sideswiped with disappointment and the grieving of what we thought our life was meant to be. We endure the reality of heartbreak, disappointments, suffering, pain and grief and our Cinderella stories come crumbling down in front of us, as we navigate modern day divorce, loss, unfulfillment, mental illness and most importantly a disconnect with who we truly are. Struggling to find meaning to our existence in a material world, we fight to climb the ladder of accumulated wealth, social status and unrealistic perfection of ourselves and others. Our perceptions, values, and beliefs lead to the formation of scar tissue around our disappointed hearts. As we continue through life attempting to be who we think we are meant to be, adhering to this false sense of being, we slowly lose sight of who truly are, even finding it too painful to be ourselves. The world that we imagined as a Magical Kingdom, the one that Walt Disney created, instead becomes a battlefield of pain, grief and trauma in a war against self-interest. The true work lies in our soul’s journey as she searches to find her way back to herself and her connection with her truth and authenticity, which is guided through her spirituality and the quiet listening of her inner voice. Where we lack in faith, we fill with mere things and our hearts remain empty. We feel unfulfilled, riddled with anxiety, depression. Many become dependent on pharmaceuticals, drugs and alcohol. Exposed to conditioning from adolescence into young adulthood, we attempt to hit each life stage right on time. When life doesn’t play out as planned, we are left with feelings of anxiety, disappointment and of not being enough. Maybe you can relate? Starting in our 20’s, after high school, many of us are herded into post secondary, like cattle to get a “career”. Once graduated with a piece of paper in hand and the expectation that we will have the whole world at our fingertips, we then confront the harsh reality of the “real world”. We pound the pavement in search of the promise of a bright future but are faced with a cascade of rejection and disappointment, as we get first hand experience securing employment in the competitive job market. The world that they never tell us about. Once we finally find ourselves in a career, it is then the search for a life partner. Like a collective schedule, we have to find “the one”, around our late 20’s but no later than our mid 30’s, because these are our “child bearing years' '. Oftentimes, we succumb to marrying the person who is right in front of us, trying to mold them into exactly what we want them to be. Of course they resist us, kicking and screaming and we endure a turbulent relationship or they submit to our demands, moving far away from themselves, just to appease us. Marriage, the house, the children, the family pets follow. There we are, drowning in a life that we struggle to keep up with, wondering how the hell anyone does this ?! Laundry, dishes, a career, matrimony, parenting, activities, it becomes too exhausting to even bare. We start to wonder, why did we choose this life for ourselves in the first place? Our careers are no longer the forefront of our existence and instead just a way to afford our life. Years go by and we lose ourselves. We no longer connect with our hearts, our inner desires and we lack purpose, as our children get older and begin to live their own lives. We forget who we are. We look at our partners and we don’t recognize them anymore, as we disconnected from each other a long time ago. We start to wonder how we even made it this far, if we even did. Slowly we begin to awaken, as we emerge from this fog of life and years gone by. We begin to search for a deeper connection with ourselves and a disconnect from the pain we feel of being alone with ourselves. Who am I? You ask yourself. What is the meaning of this life?