A study in love.

moth mug :: "Moth is the master of disguise and is reminding you to be aware that you could be hiding from yourself. Are you using your emotions to keep yourself hidden from others? Is it time that you transform your emotional energy away from drama and into something closer to your heart? Have faith in your journey and trust that although things seem to be complicated right now – you will eventually see the light. Use your heart to guide you." (Spirit Animal Totems)

hannah nyc

:: When I was 7 I was obsessed with plants. Growing them for science projects in closets and talking to them. I wrote puppet shows and recorded them. I loved researching, studying. I went to the library and learned that eating dairy might be giving me the sinus and ear infections that had become chronic.

I loved books. Stacks of books. The study. I would play school. Chalkboards made me have a kid high.

In college I chose poetry classes, voice and diction, Shakespeare. I was in awe of the study.

When I realized that I held some seriously old anger towards my father I read everything I could get my hands on around anger. I made a practice to study anger.

I have studied health, food, coaching. Marketing. Being a woman. Abundance. Manifesting. The moon. Stardust. Meditating. Vulnerability.

This January, at 40 years old I realized that I have never studied the one thing that beckons me more than any other. That I can feel in my cells. That teases me, fertilizes me, pulses in me.

Love.

I have never studied love.

It always seemed like a given. Love.

Just love. Born with love. We are love. Love, love, love.

But I struggle inside of love. I have fed myself on crumbs in the love department. I thought in my twenties that having kids would heal all my stuff around love.

And, nope.

So for February I decided to do two things. The first was to vision around love. To find the feelings. To let the Universe know that I was opening to love and I wouldn't try to control what that looked like. (Yeah, and cue my friends shaking their heads, laughing.) The second was to gently go on a study of love. To let most of it come to me, with eyes wide open to receive the study that came forth.

vision page breathless

:: A trip to NYC to study love and integrate all the parts of me. It went something like this...

Allow kids to lead the dance of time and space, be introverts and cuddle up in hotel with take-out. Explore city and favorite restaurants with open gratitude. Pay for not one single drink and meet every spirit guide you were meant to. The gorgeous bartender from my childhood home of North Carolina, the beautiful woman celebrating her news from Princeton along side my #‎coyoteloon celebrations, the amazing man who sent a selfie of he and I to his partner in CA, the designer outside of a fashion week event who told me about what living in Chelsea is like and looked at me with such faith in my crazy desires, the couple who sat next to me at brunch and told me their love story of second partnership after divorce. And buying pretzels for the boys at LIRR before leaving the 13 year old says, "Mom. You are the most happy and chatty and way too open person." Know that this is a compliment. Plan your trip back (without kids this time) for another dose of immense magic. ‪#‎ilovethislifenow‬

Ponder the connection between love and magic and dreams.

boyshighline

:: How I want to feel inside of love with another. This one trapped me. And then I found her words.

nayirrah 1

:: I call bullshit on the whole love yourself first before you can find or allow love with another thing. I read that over and over this month. Here is what I think. Love is not our issue. We are born with love in our souls for ourselves. Then we become imprinted with touch points of pain and trauma and fear. Those touchpoints make us scared. They ask us to seek validation from others. They make us run and hide from our heart's desires. They create chaos and drama. They create the struggle to feel that love. Yes, feel it.

I don't need to love myself first, that is a given. I was born into that love, recycled into that love, my existence is that love. But there will be times when I struggle to feel it. What I do need to do is heal some old pain points. Integrate them. Feel them. I am learning that I need to know who the hell I am before I can be in partnership without losing parts of myself.

Give myself space and stillness so I can gift my beloved with the same inside of love.

Have compassion for the one person who I give the hardest time to.

I need to go out to eat with myself often and not take out my phone and talk to people around me. I need to have experiences that affirm my crazy wild sense of self. I need to be all parts of myself, visionary and mom and wild and free and safe and cozy.

Kind of like commenting on someone's photo and telling them they should smile - maybe remember that smiling is not the only sign of joy and that we all have different ways of showing up and expressing and showing our feelings. I suggest you don't tell anyone they need to love themselves before loving another, let them journey, let them make huge mistakes, let them flail a bit and become ungrounded. Then be there. Love them up. Give them space. They are journeying through and feeling so much and like the moth to light, gorgeous love already is.

Gorgeous love already is.

ilovehannah

:: When Patrick and I separated it was the scariest time of my life and also the one that I felt most sure of because we needed a new way of being in partnership, in parenting, in finding magic that we had lost for ourselves. My love for him and the way we have journeyed together and still are as ever changing beings is deep. Flawed. Messy. Raw. But we hold love as our guide. Our totem. Our feeling.

Soul contracts aren't ours to decide. They are written in the stars long before we touch down in these bodies. Of this I am certain. The more we try to control the contract, the more pain we pull in.

Surrender is the intersection between acceptance and change.

Surrender feels like a beloved.

nayirrah 2

:: I have been scared. And in that fear pushed people away who my heart loves deeply. There are times when I can't connect to my kids because I am unable to find myself inside of this huge iteration. Barely breathing.

The little one will climb in my lap and say, "Mama, we are so good here. We are just so good."

That's when I find my exhale.

I come from the exhale.

The longer the exhale, the easier it is to breathe inside of the changes inside of the love inside of the call towards beloved inside of the study of love.

And there are 3 days left in February. I can only imagine how much more there is to learn.