Yesterday I learned that I truly love attending to the inner realm and to my home life – a very feminine quality that I have discovered I thrive in. Also, I am very receptive to other people’s energies and emotions, another feminine quality. I am a nurturer of the world’s children never having had any of my own. I feel a deep love for so many, especially my nieces and nephews and my great nieces and nephews. I am intuitive and I am learning to trust and respect my intuition. The more still and quiet I become the more clearly I am able to hear the wisdom of my internal intuition and follow its guidance. In the stillness I can clearly hear what I truly need.

I am making the transition from the masculine path of “doing” to the more feminine approach to life – a state of “being”. My reality is that I have challenges with the basic necessities of daily living. However, I am learning to make those basic activities into acts of self love and self care. It is truly amazing to make taking a shower or eating a meal into beautiful acts of love for myself especially my body. It brings me great bliss and I feel so alive. I feel so blest to have discovered this type of self love for my body.

One of the things I am addressing this year in my evolution is whether I can really fall in love with my body as it is. I have put on 15 pounds from the medication I am on over the last 10 years. I eat well and do movement to the best of my ability every day but my chronic fatigue and pain are always an issue. I am certainly building new neural pathways around food, hunger, eating and movement. It is a learning process and I have tried to gently and compassionately give myself time for a learning curve.

In the past, I have tried getting off the medications whose side effect is weight gain (which are most of them) but I was not able to do the basic necessities of daily living like eating and sleeping. So I realize that, for now, they do help me and are a necessity in my life.

I was disappointed because I really wanted to experience and love my body at its natural weight, not what the medical professionals call the “ideal” weight. I cannot figure that out on the medications. So basically I have to learn to love my body for the first time in my life at the weight it is at. I see myself progressing in this area every day.

Recently I went to try bathing suits on and I was up another size. All the old tapes came flying back. “No one can love you at this weight.” “You are fat and ugly you will never be able to keep your husband happy.” The nickname “pork chop” came flying back – a nickname given to me by my siblings. The rage, anger and hate started to rise within me. Experience has taught me that underneath these feelings is deep shame. I had to let myself feel the deep shame I felt for my female body. Luckily, I am reading this book Wild Feminine by Tami Lynn Kent and it is teaching me how to connect and love my feminine body. It has brought great freedom and beauty into my life. Because I was reading this book, I was much more capable of turning the shame around and finding great beauty on how my feminine body is now. I feel this sense of incredible power. I feel like I have gotten taller already in the way I can stand and take up space some of the time. Again, it is all an evolving process which I am very grateful to be on.