I made a terrible decision and the best decision BOTH when I decided a few years ago to buy an old farmhouse that needed a lot of work. The thing is, I needed to stop and take a look at some things in myself that needed working on too.
I had gone through another dark night and found myself really needing to peel back a lot more layers than ever before and I was ready to step into a different way of living. I’m still peeling back that which no longer serves me and day-by-day recovering from the indoctrination of an insane world that sucked the life out of me for far too long.
The thing with building anything new, be it a new life, a business, a skill...is that you have to tear down the old, sacrifice something, let something die…. sometimes that is ourselves.
So one thing I “do” outside of this Substack is Feng Shui.
I have a practical way of relating with this modality in how I help my clients understand how to see, and deepen, their relationship with themselves through the environment. To know thyself is not just an act of going within and doing the shadow work, but becoming more self-aware in everyday life.
Like all relationships, our home can also be a teacher, a sanctuary, a safe place for exploration. It can be fertile ground for real living or a place where walls represent blocks, hurdles, and obstacles that reinforce the very things we no longer desire to inhabit, believe or experience.
My old farmhouse has taught me how to let go of constantly striving for perfection, keeping up with the Jones’s, or caring what others think.
It's taught me the beauty in the messiness of living. It's shown me that scars have stories and sometimes it takes time to accept them and integrate them into my physical being.
Working with the energy of your home goes beyond optimizing energy flow and furniture placement. It’s about relationship, exchange, acceptance, compassion…it’s about releasing stagnancy, making “room” for living, nourishing what is.
I'll be sharing more of the farmhouse story in time, but today is about healing walls.... energetic and literally.
A wall is a boundary, it's something we build up to protect ourselves. Sometimes the wall is needed, it offers protection, safety and privacy from things that aren't good for us. Other times, it closes us off to opportunities that are for us, from people that are meant to be in our lives or from love.... love for ourselves and all that is around us to give love to and the act of receiving.
Often people build walls because they don't want to feel the pain that might come from losing something they love. This seems logical, yet to feel pain is to recognize the depth of a love lost, to alchemize it into our bones as a memory to treasure and take with us. The people that love the most, risk the most, they are warriors of courage.
I think a lot of people fear love because they don't know how to grieve. Our society doesn't exactly encourage the bellowing out of agony through wailing.
The world needs more wailing. It's no coincidence how close this word is to wall (walled-in) just an i (eye) is the difference. Wailing tears down walls, it alchemizes instead of storing away feelings in a stall...which then, literally, stalls the process of grief and creates a domino of wounds never mending, scars that can form because the pain is never ending.
So how does this relate to the story? Well, there is this one spot in my kitchen around the electrical box that needed painting and yet for over a year I could not bring myself to paint it. It was an eye sore and I was not motivated to do it.... until I was.
You see, this patch of dry wall, was representative of a wound that was not yet healed. It was only when I could see through that the scar could form and heal and, in that moment, I was ready to finally paint that little section of the wall that had been staring at me day after day.
This area in my home is connected to an area of life I needed to heal. A wound I needed to sit and look at for a while until I was ready to take action towards change.
My client's, like me, would usually want to rush to fix it, but sometimes we have to go deeper. Sometimes things need to breathe for a bit, like a fine wine, it needs to age in order to taste all the flavors and be able to fully grasp and give the attention something deserves.
This spot over the electrical box is indicative of a fire that happened when I moved in here that left me without electricity for 5 weeks. A sign of "burn out" followed by a deep excavation of walls built up around my heart. As the electrical line ended up being moved underground, I watched center of the property get dug 6 feet down (right in the heart center of the land) to bury the new line in order to prevent this from happening again as it was the line rubbing on a tree limb that initiated the event.
I had to sit with myself in the dark and re-ignite my own inner flame. I had to bury an old version of me, let the old me die with it.
“But love is much like a dam: if you allow a tiny crack to form through which
only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure, and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current. For when those walls come down, then love takes over, and it no longer matters what is possible or impossible; it doesn't even matter whether we can keep the loved one at our side. To love is to lose control.”― Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
I had to see the heart connection in myself reflecting back to me from Mother Earth. The reason I keep giving love another chance (in all aspects of life, not just “partnership” is because I am strong enough. No matter how many times something doesn't work, I keep loving life. No matter how naive it may appear outwardly, I love with intention. I look through the surface, the reality, not the fantasy…I see...I feel...I hear. I am enveloped by the gifts bestowed upon me and one of those is to love with great expansiveness, knowing that with it, I will feel the burn of pain as if eating embers…ah, so hot. 😉
My grandmother showed me this depth of love…and my cat. It’s not about the word itself, but the soul connection, what is not said, it’s a verb and it’s a feeling, it’s a choice or it is fleeting, it makes no sense, you can’t conceal it.
We live in a world where apathy and a false perception of self-love reigns, it's shrouded in an illusion of numbing out with the label of love. Terms like neutrality, peace and non-attachment make it easy to keep your distance, keep your walls up and let scars hide behind stories that can never be told because they haven’t been released from behind the armor of self-induced protection…protection that stops life, stops loving.
You can see this in a home, where the walls are too perfect, void of depth…surface only living will reveal itself on your walls.
As I write this, I watch the paint dry with a sense of knowing that scar is healed, that fire has been reignited for life, that as alone as I feel sometimes, I am rooted in a deep love and reverence for life that is anything but lonely.
I love my animals and show affection knowing that I will outlive them, but I still love. Many things we love are not guaranteed to last, yet to not do it is to deny thyself and that which is loved what is necessary for a full experience to be had, for the circle to be completed.
I let people in sometimes that I shouldn't, but I forgive myself, because I did it from a place of openness, curiosity and a heart that would rather feel and break than always be walled up.
Some walls need to be climbed over.
Some walls we must repel down.
Some walls need to be mended.
Some walls must come down.
Some walls are made of scars.
Some walls need to be built up.
Some walls must crumble to the ground.
One thing I know for certain is that walls talk.
What are your walls saying to you?
What are you saying to them?
How are you interacting?
What is the story that needs to mend?
What needs to crumble and be built up again?
The scars in your home and your body tell your story, they hold magic, transcendence, alchemy…they are wounds that grant entry, a key to unlock mystery, an invitation to let your light shine more intensely.
Every scar is an act of remembrence, a lesson learned, an experience apprehended.
With love and appropriate boundaries,
~ Angela