Are you ready to heal your own wounds with love?
“This isn't a journey for everyone. It takes deep courage and a willingness to go into the darkness and see what wants to be loved”
~ Nicole Barton
LOVE OR DESTRUCTION.
When I first came to shadow work, I would often use it as a tool to beat myself up with for all the ways I was 'sabotaging' my soul (my magical wand became a 'beaty' stick! )
I hadn't read the book 'Existential Kink' yet, by Carolyn Elliot (she's brilliant, by the way - highly recommended!), but I'd seek hard to find all the sneaky ways my shadow was secretly distracting me from being who I came here to be - and how I benefitted from it. And I'd beat myself up for the weird 'kink' I seemed to have for not being who I said I longed to be. I knew what I wanted - to be medicine for others - but I wasn't creating it, consistently, and I was frustrated with magic.
And don't get me wrong - these are awesome questions! "How am I creating this?" would go on to become the most powerful enquiry I'd ever be in for reclamation of my power. And, at times, it would also be the tool I'd innocently beat myself up with (being a Secret Witch who didn't yet know how to harness her power from LOVE).
I realised, the other day, just how much this has transformed (even though it can still be a temptation), and how much more love and compassion I can consciously choose to have for myself these days - and how healing that truly is.
There was something in embodying the magical, Phosphoric, LOVING healer in me that had everything begin shift. I began to see that all these things that we shame ourselves for - these fears that have us feeling paralysed - they want pure and unconditional love, because they have been created INNOCENTLY from wounding.
Ah oh God, part of me hated seeing that - because the fiery witch in me wanted someone to BLAME - and blaming myself (and others, obvs! ) was far easier
Opening to love, on the other hand - well, that was foreign! That took courage, vulnerability, and honesty. It took facing the truth of the deep wounds I really had, that were innocently and unconsciously creating for me.
That wounded little girl in me that felt she couldn't express herself? It was easier and more convenient to see that I was creating a lack of self-expression from shadow and to try and force myself out of it (cue forcing shadow, which was then shamed, too) - or to deny it and float along, not even looking there at all. It was easier // safer // more controlled to beat myself up for my Witch's unconscious creation.
In essence: I turned my FIRE inwards, using it against myself (which resulted in me denying, shaming and not being the magical Phosphoric Witch my soul came here to be)
What I'm saying is, the *deepest* work (and especially that which has us become our own remedy), is to face the TRUTH of our wounds, and LOVE all the places that we really don't want to love. The deep, dark spaces within us that have been longing for love our entire lives - often looking for it externally - and really, truly, are begging for us to love them.
When I began to have love for that scared little girl in me (bless her heart) who was still trying to keep me safe, everything began to change. I saw how innocent she was, how much love she needed ME to provide. And that's still ongoing - it's a lifetime's work.
This isn't a journey for everyone. It takes deep courage and a willingness to go into the darkness and see what wants to be loved.
We have to learn to harness our fire to unconditionally love ourselves.
That's the true healing fire
And so many women will (innocently) look outside themselves to be healed, or beat themselves up, instead of realising they can become their own remedy. Instead of realising that if they are willing to CHOOSE to open their hearts to THEMSELVES, they can learn to heal all the layers of wounding that have clouded their Phosphoric souls from their inner magic.
Likely, they may have tried #allthethings (oh Lord - literally all the things ) before - including shadow work and many other healing or self-help paths - but they'll have been missing the key alchemical elixr - LOVE.
We can only reclaim our power from this place of love. Becoming our own self-healer requires that. We have to welcome and love and hold and tend ALL the places that we have shoved into the darkness, never to be seen again.
And that's not something that every magical woman is willing to do: it takes courage, it takes vulnerability, it takes trust, and it takes fire in your belly. Ultimately, it requires you to WANT to heal (because there will be so many reasons why not to heal - for example, for me, it was that my little girl innocently didn't want to take responsibility).
I realised how huge my capacity for love had become, recently, when a 1:1 client said to me: "it’s quite a revelation to be able to share this with someone, knowing they won’t take it personally". This filled my heart because our capacity to purely and unconditionally love others is wholly dependent on the capacity to which we can love ourselves.
And so, if you're here to be a remedy for others (which the Phosphoric Witch often is), becoming your unique remedy is often an even bigger reveal of all the places you've still to love.
It's the deepest of work to become the Phosphoric magical healing soul you were born to be. It requires you to heal your own soul - to go first.
In short: we have to become our own remedy for ourselves, and heal all our layers of wounding so that we can be that pure, clean, shining light for others.
And that requires the deepest of LOVE of all our wounds (and especially our core wound, which becomes our 'niche' - if you want to get all 'mainstream' about it ).
I'll be guiding women into the tender first steps of this soul healing journey in the New Year via Invoke Your Wild Apothecary, where you will learn to harness some Archetypal Apothecary remedies that help you illuminate begging to be loved, and learn to invoke and become remedies for yourself.
Are you ready to harness your fire for love, instead of destruction?
if you've any questions, send me an email.
Nicole x
