Beyonce is a fan
I have the photo to prove it
Hello beloved community!
I know I’ve been sending a lot of emails promoting New Cycles, but I took a break for a couple of days!
Did you miss me?
This week I learned that my grandmother’s birthday is on the same day as Beyonce’s birthday.
Did you hear that Beyonce has been putting my name in lights and sharing it with the world? Thank you to my beloved friend Diana from Tres Lunas consulting for sending me the below photo and letting me know that Queen Beyonce is a fan!
I know I am being a little delulu (as the tiktok kids say), but it truly feels like a love letter from my grandmother, who loved me so intensely that she provided me with a reference point for avoidant attachment.
Honestly, my grandmother sharing a birthday with Beyonce explains a lot.
My grandmother loved fashion and wore Revlon’s “Toast of New York” lipstick shade almost every day of her life. She loved shopping. Her spirit would easily overtake a room, and she was unabashed in her desires.
In her lifetime, she survived the partition and physically walked from modern-day Pakistan to India. She relocated to the United States in the early 60’s.
Initially, she worked at a zipper factory, but one day while walking around Lake Michigan she struck up a conversation with a nun, and was able to secure a spot for herself in a master’s program for early childhood education despite not having a bachelor’s degree (the university did not know this, and when they figured it out she convinced them to let her continue).
My grandmother was low key a scammer y’all.
She told me that she didn’t write her own thesis, but that my great uncle did. She offered him Indian food in exchange. After graduating, she began working as a preschool teacher. According to her, this is when she really learned english by listening to the radio during work.
Eventually, and I wish I knew more about this part of the story, she became the director of the preschool.
My grandmother was also a fiber artist who would withdraw from the world and pray while knitting hats and blankets for cancer patients. She would use lightweight yarn and pray over every stitch. When completed, the knitted objects would seem to levitate with energy.
Watching her allowed me to ground myself and orient myself to the unspoken and unseen art of healing. It allowed me to know that the lives we live are not just physical; they are also spiritual.
I credit her, my mother, and my Dadi as my first energy work teachers of this lifetime. They taught me through an open heart, nourishing food, and kind hands. They did not call themselves healers (would never), but I was cradled and nourished by their love.
It is the memory of their love that heals me now.
My grandmother passed away on a full moon in Aries.
I remember I had just gone to a therapy session where I was unpacking ideas of control and obligation, specifically parsing through the relationship between me, my mother and my grandmother.
In this therapy session, I could surface and make explicit the ideas and agreements that existed in my family and consciously release myself from the idea that my life belonged to someone else.
This idea was one that I saw play out regularly between my mother and my (paternal) grandmother. While unique, their dynamic resembled an archetypal dynamic of violence and abuse between wives and their mothers-in-law.
Ultimately, it is a dynamic about power, and my grandmother not only claimed her power but often would wield it over my mother, who in turn would attempt relational justice through passive behaviors.
I can still remember laying on my bed and spotting the full moon from my window, and feeling giddy. While I didn’t have words for my feelings, I knew something big had happened. Looking back, I can see that I had broken a generational curse by claiming my life and power. A mindset that had been passed down, festering in the minds of my maternal line, feeding resentment.
The next morning I received a call letting me know my grandmother had passed early that morning, and I felt humbled.
It was not an accident. I had set myself free, and hours later my grandmother and mother were freed from their toxic dynamic.
A new future was in front of us.
Recently, I learned that children draw their identity from the identity of the family until they reach adolescence
Knowing this helped me better understand the impact of the high conflict power struggle between my mother and grandmother on my identity.
As a child, I watched my two primary caregivers, people who loved me immensely, bicker constantly. At times, their conflicts would escalate to screaming matches, and more than once, the cops were called to our home by our neighbors.
This fighting created a split within the foundation of my identity that was so deep and present that it was ubiquitous to my experience and paradoxically imperceptible.
What I could perceive was:
an everpresent sense of grief that I couldn’t find a cause for
deep self-loathing and self-judgment
explosive negative self-talk when I made mistakes or when things did not go the way I expected
rigid ideas about good and bad
the feeling that I needed to fundamentally change aspects of myself
constantly feeling the need for external approval to validate choices
intense fear about making the “wrong” choices
Connecting these behaviors to my family of origin and childhood experiences has allowed me to view them differently. When I hear the judgemental voice within me, I no longer hear a voice of truth, or “what everyone else thinks,” both are ways that I have previously interpreted this voice.
When I hear this voice now, I see my mother in deep pain and anger. The voice is no longer about me or my goodness. The voice is one of the last remnants of a toxic relational dynamic spanning thousands of years.
The chasm in the foundation of my identity still exists, and there are still days where I find myself split along the opposing sides, but more often than not there is a bridge, and in the space created by this metaphorical and spiritual split, there is a gushing river of truth, healing, and presence that flows through me.
Our wounds are not meant to stay wounds forever
I believe that we are meant to heal, learn, and grow from the things we survive.
This is a part of why I created New Cycles. Nothing motivates us to grow and change quite the way pain and trauma does.
I know how powerless it can feel to find yourself living out the same painful stories over and over again. It can be easy to lose hope, to blame oneself, blame other people, or to try and make drastic changes to prevent it from happening in the future.
I have tried many of these strategies, and while they may work temporarily, I always end up back in the pattern.
what to do when everywhere you run you find yourself?
sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. By this I don’t mean, continue buisness as usual. I mean, literally, do less,
When it comes to breaking destructive patterns, self-reflection is a valuable tool.
True change takes time, commitment, and devotion. It is nurtured into being.
If you are trying to heal, make changes, or bring your dreams to life, I hope you consider New Cycles!
Today is the last day to enroll !!!
You can enroll here and use code VAMPIRE for a special discount
Hope to see you in the container!!
