This has spoken to my heart. It is so hard to balance what your mind says to you with what you feel in the core of your person. I find myself making the choice to go from the heart more and more these days. There is a truth each of us carries in us. It is sometimes difficult to face but having faced our own truths we lift the veil that is over our life and can experience the world with a new perspective. I applaud you for you openess and for the courage it took to examine your relationship in the context your heart. I plan to share this entry with others as so many women I know look outside of themselves for happiness and self esteem. Thank you so much.

Lord… have I ever had experience loving from ‘out there’, and all of the pain and rejection that goes along with it. Probably like Dian said, in every relationship except for my current one.

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a post about a great loss, and it was during this period in my life, that I was reintroduced to ‘loving in here with me’. I experienced betrayal, rejection, choosing to leave a relationship and the loss that went with that, soul wrenching pain, and ultimately the loss (meaning death) of my soon to be ex husband.

It was during that time, in the deepest depths of despair that I’ve ever experienced, that I found the greatest gift I could have ever received. I rediscovered me, and got back in touch with the importance of loving me first. My heart was cracked wide open – in a very very good way. I learned so much…I had never treated myself so awful. My first reaction to everything was to torture myself, and punish myself as much as possible. Coming out on the other side of it, was one of the most enlightening, and best experiences of my life. My heart more open because of it. Me more rooted because of it.

“power” is such a loaded word for me. so much dirt clinging to it – i am in my own “in here” process now, and part of what i’m doing is shaking the dirt off that word to get a clearer picture of what it is to me. you have helped with that. thank you.

as i read your post for the 2nd time (i love that your posts slow me down, ground me, push everything else aside), i remember how when my chiclets were teens, i held an in-house How To Flirt class. (i am a strange mother. yes i am.) (and, really, it was about so much more than flirting, but i could never have gotten their attention without using the right words. marketing. it was pure marketing strategy.) one of the things i told my teenbabies was that there’s something downright sexy about a person who knows who they are. who is confident in their own skin. who enjoys love and companionship but is enough on their own. told them their hearts are precious, and they should be very careful about giving even the teensiest part of it away.

okay, enough about that weekend.

rejection is another word i’m shaking the dirt off of in my “in here” work. i find that too often people want to talk about rejection in victim voice. and here you are, shaking the dirt off and letting the word, the act breathe and glow and lead. you write of how death landed you in oz and you had to find a different path. of course rejection is a kind of death, too, and the trick is finding the road that leads out of the darkness.

when i started graduate school in 2003, my husband bought me a piece of art from ebay – something he thought represented what i was doing. it’s a figure making her way into the earth, into what must be a cave. a cave positively glowing from the light within. husband may be an engineer, a linear thinker who doesn’t always get me, but occasionally he does. and this was one of those times.

this is another jewel of a post that i’ll chew on for a long, long time. unlike a stick of gum, your posts do not lose their flavor on the bedpost every night.