2 / 02 / 26

Dear beautiful soul,

Welcome to another alchemy scroll…

I’d like you to look at this one as a sacred love letter from your higher self, a channeled message from within, to reflect, to introspect, and rediscover your truest love. After all, we just entered the month of love, and what better way to celebrate than to nurture the love you’ve always been searching for?

Self-love.

Love comes in many different forms. There are many different kinds of love, including familial love, love for a partner or spouse, love for one's children, love for one's pets, universal love, and love for the Divine.

But today, we're focusing on self-love, because all external relationships are meant to reflect the relationship you have with yourself. Everyone you encounter in life is a mirror, a gateway for you to reflect on the parts of yourself you can’t see, so you meet them outside of you until you’re ready to dive within and meet those parts with love and grace.

I used to think that self-love was as simple as claiming that “I love myself” when I wore a flattering dress and had my hair done, or the light kissed my face in the right angle that made the selfie look like I belonged on a runway.

So, when anyone asked me if I loved myself, like my therapist once did, I frowned at the question as if it were absurd to think otherwise.

“Of course I do!” I proudly proclaimed, chin tilted defiantly as my ego kept me protected from the truth of what I truly felt inside.

But how much of myself was I secretly resenting?

Was it the part of me who'd been sexually assaulted as a child? Or the part of me who'd been made fun of for being “too dark” in the communities I grew up in - colourist communities hiding behind religion and expelling me because “God hated me, so he made me black”?

Hah!

Or was it the part of me who was accused of “stealing my mother's husband” while she watched my stepfather abuse me continuously, while she stayed married to him?

There was a time when all of these things filled me with deep shame and left my outer shell looking haggard and worn from the inside out. I refused to look at that shame, acknowledge that it was there, because deep down, I resented it for existing at all.

The truth is, I didn't love myself. Not all of me, anyway. There were so many parts of me I'd been neglecting to love, rejected based on immoral and abnormal ideals upheld by society, and disregarded because there was just so much shame. But the pieces of me were strewn mercilessly across a battlefield where I was losing the fight, hanging on by a thread until the ground quaked beneath me, and threatened to swallow me whole.

My reflection all began when I walked into my first encounter with plant medicine healing after just five weeks of therapy. I'd been on the brink of dying (literally), so I was open to anything that would help me find myself again, make me feel alive, and that’s when I sat at the foot of a table with other women surrounding me.

At the time, I was carrying with me a crippling mother wound which made me see other women as threats instead of allies. That’s what mother dearest was to me all my life—someone who pointedly hated me from before I was born, and she never found her healing to show up as a mother to me, or even to show up for herself. Naturally, I grew up thinking women were meant to hate other women, their daughters, their mothers, their friends. I had no idea that I was of a very rare breed, whose mothers pushed lightening creams on them from the age of ten, because if you didn’t fit in at home, how could you possibly fit in with the rest of the world?

That’s why I couldn’t fit in with the other women at that table. My fingers trembled around the pen I held with which I was supposed to draw myself in a workshop exercise. “Draw how you see yourself”, and I was stumped, eye twitching as I stifled the urge to show any emotion. How could I depict how I saw myself when everything came up to the surface like bile rising in my throat? In that moment, when I stared at my quivering hand with hatred, despising the colour of my flesh and even the way my fingers were shaped, I realized how much hatred was pent up in my very being.

Did I love myself?

Absolutely not.

And I saw why I hated myself the next morning when we embarked on the sacred plant medicine journey, and I entered the spiritual realm where my soul hovered above the heap of my earthly vessel, my body lying helplessly on a cold, hard floor. I was struggling to move, and it was all because I was so disconnected from my soul.

My spirit whispered to me then. “Let me in…”, and a single tear fell from my eye to signal my acceptance of my soul's essence, into the body I had been hurting with hatred, and emotions I'd been suppressing.

It had been an uphill battle since that day, nearly four years ago. Grinding gears, smoke coughing out from exhausted pipes, the safety brakes failing at times and pulling me back down. But instead of letting the vehicle crash at the bottom of the hill, I got out of my comfort zone and continued hiking all the way up.

I was more determined than ever to love myself because I felt my soul's love for my body, for my being. Unconditional love from my Creator was something I briefly tasted in my psilocybin journey, but it was intoxicating in the healthiest way. Love without judgement. Love without shame. Love so free and so vast, it made me feel like I could fly.

And I reached the top of the hill, fists raised triumphantly, about to scream at the top of my lungs that “I. LOVE. MYSELF.”

But the only person I was fooling was… myself.

It was God who could see right through me, and a divine but amused chuckle of sarcasm roared out before the words left my lips. I'd been kicked right off that hill, flung into the depths of hell.

Actual hell.

The Dark Night Of The Soul.

You've probably heard that term before, and if you haven't, let me explain…

This is the part of the healing journey that gets intense. Like, really intense. It is not for the faint-hearted, and it's usually where a lot of people get stuck in spiritual-psychosis, clinging onto pseudo “love and light” while steadily losing their sanity.

Do you really think God created us in a world of duality without the existence of shadow?

Light cannot exist without the presence of darkness.

Two polar opposites of everything exist in everything.

Positive and negative.

Male and female.

Feminine and masculine.

North and South.

You get what I'm saying…

And then, there's light and dark. We were created with both; earthly bodies born from the darkness of the womb, and Divine light blown into us at the same time to give us life, essence, and purpose.

So, during a period of time called the “dark night of the soul”, the soul experiences the dark parts of our being, of our psyche. It shines a light on our shadows, illuminating the parts of us we’ve been running from. And no matter how much love and affection I spoke into myself, those dark aspects of me still existed.

I couldn’t destroy them. It was never meant to be that simple. No amount of herbal teas, yoga, and meditation could rid me of the shadow. Because the truth is, they were always there.

My sensuality, my intellect, my whimsy, the fierce warrior who stood up for herself and others… All compressed into shadows of shame because I was hiding parts of myself to be considered “palatable” to society.

How dare I say I love my body, my curves, my melanated skin, my rounded belly that houses my sacred womb from which my creativity and abundance stem? How dare I shine the brightest in a room or pass on cosmic knowledge when I’m so closely connected to Source? How dare I tell a narcissist to “fuck off!” when they overstep my boundaries? How dare I sprinkle magic wherever I go?

Cue “shadow work”, which felt more like hard labour in a desert without a drop of water. The toughest part of healing, for me, was shadow work, but after picking all the pieces of my shadow and transmuting, alchemizing them into light, I came back to the top of the hill and sighed.

Just like that, it hit me. My melanated skin didn't make me “bad”. My sensuality, my mind, the past versions of me. None of them made me bad. Neither did my shadows. Instead of denying and rejecting the parts of me that made me “me”, I was only meant to embrace them all.

That’s when I found true love again. That unconditional love I tasted from the Divine is mine to keep now, and I pour overflow into my cup each day, showing up as the best version of myself. Because when you love yourself, you do good unto yourself, and unto others, without shame, guilt, resentment, or judgement.

Loving yourself… truly loving yourself… is accepting all the parts of you that make up your unique design. The shadow is one aspect of self, of your psyche, but integrating the golden shadow aspects is what allows us to step into our divine essence, and into our power.

Today, I challenge you to do some introspection, with one question:

“What parts of you have you labeled as “too much”, “too dark”, or “unacceptable”, and what would change if you chose to love them instead?”

Sit with it. There is no rush. Love reveals itself when you are willing to see all of you.

And you deserve all the love in the world.

From my heart to yours,

Yumna Vally (Raaia)