"You gonna wear heels?" she shouted from beside the stereo in the back of the darkened studio. Her brown eyes locked into mine in the mirror.
Pausing to think, I pursed my lips together. "No, I think I'll be barefoot. In stockings," I called back, nodding my head to myself as I envisioned the fishnets, the garter belt.
Curled into a tight ball on the floor several feet in front of her, I was just small enough to fit under the beige, folding chair that hovered above me like a protective shell.
I really don't feel like doing this, I thought to myself, as I breathed in the familiar smell of sweat, lodged deep in the wood beneath me. With it, I remembered the countless hours I had spent in similar studios since just after I was old enough to walk. Instantly, the part of me that knew how to let my body find the dance flicked ON.
The music started. I flopped onto my back, grabbed the chair legs behind my head, and shot my lower body out along the floor.
Hold up, they don't love you like I love you
Rolling onto my side, I pressed my hands into the floor and slithered out from beneath the chair in one, two, three pushes.
Slow down, they don't love you like I love you
Freed from my chrysalis, Beyoncé's voice boomed and my body birthed a fierceness that pounced me onto my stomach.
Back up, they don't love you like I love you
Chest rising like a cobra, I threw my head back.
Step down, they don't love you like I love you
Pushing my hips back to my heels, I SLAPPED my hands to the ground.
Can't you see there's no other man above you?
Standing up, I shot my arms and legs out into wide "V's" as I leapt through the air.
What a wicked way to treat the girl that loves you
Landing, breathless, with a triumphant smile, I turned to look at her.
She cut the music, threw her hands to her open mouth, and then slid them down her arms with a shiver.
"I have chills," she gasped. "You nailed it! In one minute, you went from A to Z. From victim to heroine. I love it."
Only an hour earlier, I had slumped into her dance studio, eyes swollen, heart heavy. An unexpected wave of grief (I had been doing so well!) had washed over me that afternoon, reducing me to a slobbering, thrashing heap on the couch.
Dancing was the last thing I felt like doing, but I made myself go. I had to go. The audition for the burlesque performance was next week, and I was determined to be there.
Since I had never danced burlesque before, I had booked a private dance lesson to help me choreograph the required 1-minute routine.
I wanted to dance to "Hold Up," from Beyoncé 's album, Lemonade, because of a text a girlfriend had sent me one Sunday evening, several weeks earlier.
"You HAVE to watch Beyoncé's new visual album, Lemonade! It's on HBO. Trust me. You'll really resonate with it."
For the next hour, I laid in my new bed, in my new apartment. My purple MacBook air sat open on my lap. Back propped up against an impromptu headboard of stacked white pillows, I watched Beyoncé bash car windows with a baseball bat; sprawl over a chair and spread her stockinged legs with lustful longing; and, make-up-less in a black hoodie, stare blank and broken at the camera. Over the course of twelve songs, she expressed the full range of the feminine heart.
I couldn't sleep that night. Inspiration tore through me. Feeling my strength and fire in a way I hadn't in months, I scribbled page upon page in my journal. Sweet relief! I finally felt me again.
I had been in my own real-life chrysalis for the past four months -- since an early-February night at the start of this year when my life, and my heart, shattered into a million different pieces.
While chopping sweet potatoes and kale for our dinner, my fiancé and partner of five years -- whom I thought was the love of my life and my very best friend -- told me that he had been intermittently cheating on and lying to me for the past two years, beginning just before we got engaged.
During the excruciating months that followed, I let life strip from me the very things that I held most dear: our relationship, the vision for our life, our home, our dog, and, hardest of all, my sense of self.
In the first weeks especially, I stopped recognizing myself. Usually a very self-reliant, independent woman who relishes her solitude, I couldn't be alone, for the shock I felt was so great it sent me into an immobilizing panic.
Many told me that's what it's like when someone you love dies unexpectedly: there one minute, gone the next. I was always texting, talking on the phone, or sitting on a couch with one of my girlfriends or sisters. They tucked me into their beds, drew me baths, brought me meals, and took me on walks. My former partner also helped to hold space for my process during those early weeks.
On a near daily basis I sobbed on the phone to my mom, "I don't know how I'm going to get through this. I don't know how I'm going to get through this," and sincerely meant it.
She always replied: "Sara, you are going to get through this. I promise. But right now, all you have to do is get through today. Let's talk about how you're going to get through today."
All those seemingly interminable one-day-at-a-times have led me to this day, four months later. A day when I feel ready to tell my story.
As a public figure, my life becomes my work. It's my path to share the pieces of my personal journey with the world as a means of helping others.
This is the greatest initiation of my life so far; and I know it's a process that I will continue to digest and learn from. I intend to share more of the wisdom I've gleaned from all of this in the future, as I'm ready.
(And, it has to be said: I fully acknowledge that, just prior to all of this, I had published my second book about the Heroine's Journey and a woman's path to transmuting life crises into initiations. At the time of writing it, I would have never guessed the far deeper dimensions at which I'd now have to embody those teachings.)
I'm revealing this to you today not to be the "expert" who has everything figured out, point fingers, play the "Poor Me" tune, perpetuate male-bashing, or perseverate on the past. I offer it in service of our healing through truth telling. I offer it to presence myself in my new life. I offer it to restore congruency between my personal and public lives. I offer it to give a fresh voice and perspective to a wound that countless women have suffered throughout time.
Over the past months, I've had to fight really hard not to skulk, silent and ashamed, on life's sidelines; for the insecurity and humiliation I felt was massive. I kept wishing that I could turn to another woman in the spotlight who shared my experience and had spoken up about it publicly. Yet I quickly saw that we don't have many empowering role models for women expressing the anger, grief, and wisdom that emerges from weathering relational treachery.
While I know that there are as many ways to handle a situation like this as there are women on this planet (and the path I've chosen through this is the right one for me and my former relationship), I wanted to feel like I was "normal" for feeling what I did. Above all, I wanted some validation and hope for where I was heading.
When I watched Lemonade, I knew things were shifting. It's as if the Goddess Herself spoke to us through Queen B, showing us a new way forward. Through her brazen lyrics and uncensored creativity and embodiment, I felt hope that there's room for me, and for us, to triumph after heartbreak in a way that wasn't available to our mothers.
I didn't want to hold onto to this pain for years. Remembering that resentment is a lazy form of grief, I vowed to myself that I would feel everything I needed to feel, express everything I needed to express, own what I needed to own, learn the lessons I needed to learn, and let go until the fire in my heart only burned Love, clean and true. I vowed that I would move on. Not part way. All the way.
To do this, like Beyoncé, I had to turn lemons into lemonade by making empowered meaning out of, what was to me, the horrific and the unfathomable.
As I choose to see my experience as a gift from the Divine Mother to help me become the woman I'm here to be. I began to view it as an answered prayer, from the deepest, most secret recesses of my heart.
When I paused and looked at what I'm being forced to learn, and the woman I'm being asked to become through this process, I knew this was what I had signed up for. I knew this was mine to take on. This allowed me to say a full-hearted, "Yes," to a betrayal that spliced all the way through my core and, at times, felt like it would destroy me.
Until now, I've never sensed much of a connection to Kali, the Hindu goddess of death, transformation, and destruction. Black-faced and clad with a necklace of skulls, she scared me. I thought, "She's for other people, but not for me." Yet, through these months, I have felt her steady presence, like a cloud of black smoke always hovering around me.
With her near, I've come to understand that it's because I am so deeply loved that all of this transpired. I now see that I was stuck and living out of alignment with my core self. Since violence is an essential part of the creative process, only brute force could shake me free of a life and identity that had become wrongly fixed and stagnant so that I could be set on my true, life path.
Owning my story includes expressing my despair, frustration, grief, shock, and anger about the betrayal, while also learning to see myself as the source of my experience.
While the immense love between my former partner and I is realer than real, we've both been looking closely at the shadow dimensions in our union, for every relationship has both, in equal measure. Through this, we've come to recognize the many ways that we reenacted the pain from our childhoods. Despite how conscious we both are, and the tremendous amount of work we put into ourselves, our spiritual practices, and our relationship, the depth of our commitment to Awakening and love for one another brought these shadow elements to the surface, in order for us to heal them -- first together, and now, separately.
During these past months I've done that through reckoning with how I withheld and lived a limited expression of my love; ignored red flags; overrode feeling myself and truly seeing another in order to control life and achieve a specific outcome; clung to immature, fairytale fantasies about relationships; escaped emotional/relational pain through isolation and overworking; didn't express my honest needs out of fear of being abandoned; devalued myself by settling for less than I deserved or desired; and relived old, family traumas. As a result of this, I lost much of my spark and passion for life, increasingly becoming a painfully dimmed down version of myself.
The biggest work for me continues to be around healing and deepening my relationship with my inner wisdom, especially since that is the foundation of the work that I do with other women. Looking back, I see that my intuition was accurately guiding me all along, but I trusted external guidance over my own. I received signals through my body and dreams about what was going on (that contradicted what I was being told). As a result, I came to believe that I was incredibly jealous and neurotic. While that was confusing, painful, and damaging, I now have a fierce respect for my intuition and how in tact and potent she actually is.
This crisis forced me into the heart of my deepest, core wound; and it offered me no escape from it. The only way out, I knew, was in and through. There was/is no relief other than feeling it fully and being alone with myself. No book, conversation, teaching, activity, substance, or healing session could lessen my pain or heal that wound. They could only support me in being strong enough to face it. Then, only my own, ongoing love and presence could begin to heal it.
There have been many hours, and many days, when I've simply had to get back in bed, pull up the covers, hug my teddy bear, cry, and feel my pain. As scary as it can be, the only way to digest it, I've found, has been to meet and feel it directly. Over, and over, and over again.
While I've suffered a lot, I have so much to be grateful for. No lives were lost. Although my body is still recovering from the stress and trauma, I am in good health overall. I have an amazing support network of friends, families, healers, and teachers/mentors; and this experience has brought me much closer to them. I live in one of the most conscious, beautiful places in the world. I'm blessed to have built a business that both allows and requires me to step back and undergo these inner journeys.
Out of necessity, this process gifted me with the opportunity to tap into my full strength and capacity. I got the chance to call on all of me, and to surrender more deeply to the highest plan for my life. I'm amazed at the goodness that continues to unfold as a result of this.
Today I'm writing to you from my new home (that I adore). I'm looking for a new dog. I'm dating. I still intend to get married and have a family. But, first and foremost, I'm marrying my Self, abiding in the truth that I'm whole with or without any of these things.
I reside in the stark recognition that true security can only be found in embracing uncertainty; and safety can only be sourced from being true to oneself. I respect and love myself and this precious life more fiercely than ever. I trust my ability to fall apart completely, allowing an intrinsic order within to put me back together.
And I fall to my knees in gratitude for the unprecedented joy that's blooming in this unbreakable heart.
Thank you for sharing this journey with me. May we always know how deeply we are loved.
Read the original post at www.TheWayoftheHappyWoman.com