I Want Us to Show Up Real.
By: Aimee Hansen
I want us to show up real, right here, right now, as is.
I want us to gather to feel all the feelings and to write all the things.
I want to walk up to shame and fear and look them in the eyes.
I want us to look into the eyes of other women, and hear them say words that we too have thought.
I want to reveal the lies we tell ourselves and the ways in which we act like we believe them.
I want us to break the habits that we repeat that only shrink our spirit.
I want to name the edges and corners that are folded within.
I want us to unfold them. I want to dance with our shadows and see what they have to show us.
And kiss our contradictions.
I want to throw away our inner apologies and tear up our hidden contracts.
I want us to stop trying, so damn hard, to merit our existence or love.
I want to tell our truths and loosen our constraints and turn up our voices and shed our skin.
I want us to call ourselves out and to call ourselves in.
I want us to know and feel the holy itch, and wonder why we have it and where it leads.
I want to reclaim our stories. I want to break open the narratives that bend our being.
I want us to wrap our fingers around the pen.
And feel the courage that rises within.
I want to awake what lies dormant within us, what is essential and vivid in our nature, what aches to be expressed and animated again.
I want to hear what beats at the seed of our hearts.
I want to sense what gets in the way of listening to it, or admitting that we hear it at all.
I want our hearts to lead us back to ourselves.
I want to follow all the crumbs, all the clues. I want us to follow our thread, no matter how it changes.
I want to find a thousand ways to name our desires and to validate that they are sacred.
I want us to know our lives are ours for the taking.
I want us to realize what sisterhood feels like when it shows up in full power.
I want to play and see beauty in the places we couldn’t see it before and in our connection to all things.
I want to dance the metaphors and honor the sweet, subtle signs.
I want to invite the surrender.
I want us to live in whatever way lights us up from within.
I want us to choose it, again and again.
I want to heed the wild drum beat that calls us home.
I want us to become that beat, to live and breathe the particular sacred expression asking to be lived through us.
And to allow it to be winding, wandering, wielded and wild.
Like you.
About Aimee:
Aimee chases big questions with butterfly nets, only to set them free again. She's always had an irresistible attraction to words and metaphors as a way of playing, provoking, revealing, exploring, understanding, and connecting. Fifteen years ago she began sneaking away from the office for creative writing classes at Central Saint Martins College while living in London, writing short stories and rekindling a childhood love for all things lyrical.
On a quest for more meaningful plot in life, she left her corporate job in London years ago to travel. In 2012, her travels guided her to Guatemala and back to herself. Her intensive studies with an intuitive mentor who called her "the storyteller" and her own passion for human insight started her on an ever curious and unfolding journey into the nature of perception. Her work explores the power of the stories we tell within our lives and invites a creative and playful adventure in the yoga of perspective.