True love is only possible when it's the real you people see
By Jackie Morrison — Written on Apr 25, 2014
One of key concepts I learned in Debi Berndt’s “Engaged in A Year” course was the difference between dating with one’s persona versus their true higher self. The challenge happens when you’ve forgotten what the real you was like. In my experience I actually believed my persona was my authentic self. When I discovered BodyTalk it became a journey back within to liberate my real self.
Before I was 17 everyone called me by my first name of Maria. What happened? I decided to become “Jackie”, my middle name, and that’s how my persona was born. Maria was then hidden and locked away in the dark corners of my subconscious. No wonder Jackie never found love. She was picking men who matched her persona. These relationships weren’t real because a persona can only be played out for so long. To find love I had to let Maria out again even if I still wanted to go by the name Jackie.
BodyTalk brought Maria back to the surface. In a recent article by Lyn Delmastro titled, “Peeling the Layers of the Onion”, the Portland-based BodyTalk practitioner shares how the modality guided her back to more of who she really was at her core. As she describes in her essay, Lyn explains how peeling away the patterns and beliefs that aren’t you eventually brings you home to your authentic self. Having Lyn as one of the BodyTalk practitioners whom I work with has also facilitated this same experience for me.
After Lyn helped me catalyze and release the false beliefs and emotional patterns resulting from my first love experience, it was inevitable that the real me would be set free. The 17-year-old Maria was expressive, sensitive, wore her heart on her sleeve, and had this capacity to love openly, deeply, and was 100% behind romance, partnership, and connection. She was capable of being raw, vulnerable, open, and emotionally intimate with someone.
The day I decided to become Jackie and opposite to whom I had been when they called me Maria, I shutdown and locked down all that. Only when I fell into a bad love pattern did the shadow or dark sides of Maria show themselves in unrequited crushes, false relationship starts, short-lived romances, and an ability to sabotage love if a man got too close for too long. Truth was, before BodyTalk, Jackie didn’t want to love you and she didn’t want you to love her either. Her persona was the worldly, driven, streetwise, and independent woman with a fierce attitude towards softer feminine energies.
Oh yes, the tough chick act, from what my first BodyTalk practitioner, Heather Strang, wrote about in her recent Huffington Post article on why wounded tough girls finish last. What I find is that being trained out of who one naturally is, is where that wounded toughness comes to develop. The kind where the walls keep everything out and the woman lacks access to vital support. Tough and strength are so different to me. A strong woman can be ultra-feminine but secure in that. While the tough chick is a walking wounded woman who is often in her own way. Heather’s article resonated a lot with my backstory. Back in my punk rock days I walked around with a geometric haircut that looked edgy and dyed my hair blue black. Everything I wore was black with boots and heavy make-up. What was so obvious to everyone else was how I shut out others so easily and struggled more. No wonder I finished last! Trying to be tough was misguided at best. How Heather weaved in author David Deida’s writings into the article brings in a much needed element in reclaiming our natural feminine essence, while expressing it in our individual ways.
After nearly 18 months of regular doses of BodyTalk I am still a tough chick. Nowadays I’d say I’m more of a “tough love gal” who believes in ruthless compassion instead of being just ruthless in an effort to keep others away. My younger self equated bonding and closeness with high hurt potential. What I needed to learn was how to choose safe people not shutdown my heart and keep the good out.
During the first year of experiencing the regular benefits of BodyTalk I discovered that my heart was somewhat frozen in a locked position. When Shelley Poovey became another one of my regular BodyTalk practitioners she introduced me to her Radiant Heart Meditation (RHM) program. The program includes a series of meditations and other exercises to help integrate BodyTalk sessions and work to restore a balanced heart energy. Neither too closed or open, a balanced heart is more intuitive, and makes it easier to sense what good can be allowed in and which bad to keep out of one’s life.
Metaphorically speaking, there were many gates and passcodes required to finally set the real me free again. A pre-requisite for this liberation was having an open heart capable of loving my real self. Through BodyTalk, RHM, EMDR, and EFT (among many others) it finally happened after 12 long months. BodyTalk has been my main modality of choice and so far in my life, the most effective and efficient of them all.
The reason why I sent my authentic self away at 17 in favor of a persona was because of rejection. Rejection back then seemed capable of destroying me. What was really going on was I had already rejected and annihilated myself. The other person’s rejection was just salt on a wound of my own creation. Growing up not looking like everyone else made me desperate and angry. I was like Vanessa Minnilo Lachey hating herself for not looking like Jessica Simpson. My adolescent self was so enraged that I didn’t look like a blonde Southern belle that I went counter-culture. Once I left home and my first love behind, I did everything to assert myself via my physical appearance that I was so not that type of female. It worked. All too well.
Eventually I didn’t want to wake up looking like Malibu Barbie which was good on the self-acceptance front. The bad part was that I was incapable of really wanting to love someone and having them love me back. Once upon a time it hurt too deeply to be passed over, ignored, treated as invisible, shoved aside, belittled when puberty hit and every year I was the only girl it seemed who never got a rose. First love Patrick palliated that hurt but he never got me a rose ever because I was the friend not the leading lady. Instead of choosing to cultivate enough authentic and genuine self-love to prevent others actions from defining my self-worth, I opted to harden my heart and numb out in apathy. The lie I convinced myself of was that I didn't want love and killed all conscious desire of it. Had I chosen the healthier strategy I would have remained open hearted. Such are the follies of youth.
A decade or so passed and the persona became me until I came to California. First I discovered family constellations and NLP with Cinthia Dennis, other seasoned NLP experts, Spirit Coaching with Jenai Lane, and immersed myself in all the transformational psychology tools in abundance in the Bay Area. Yet once piece was missing: Maria. When a series of serendipitous events led me to BodyTalk, the key in the puzzle was found.
My task was not to transform by evolving away from my original self. Rather, it was the reverse, to evolve and reveal what is my “higher self” or “soul”. I agree with the belief that the soul is who a person truly is when all patterns and beliefs of ego are gone. Many spiritual traditions and philosophies say that these patterns and beliefs are created by the ego in reaction to fear and that’s how personas are born. However, as souls having a human existence, we are born from love. Practically speaking, and in general, there would be no me or you if our biological parents hated one another at the time we were conceived. When I choose to let fear run the show my ego created my persona at 17 but it was time to give love a try and allow the genuine me to once again express herself.
It's time to love, really love, again AND allow being loved back to flow as well.