I inherited a big, heavy momma-bear voice and sense of gravity when I was pregnant. Suddenly, I stood stronger, firmly rooted in the sense of myself. I’d never felt so whole before, so sure. It was out-of-this-world beautiful.
Until then and still sometimes after, I’ve struggled with assertiveness—being firm enough in my integrity and value. I’d say something once, maybe twice, and if someone else or something else disagrees, I’d witness myself bending to their will, even though I knew it wasn’t good for me, for the business, or simply the right thing to do. Upon reflection, I realize I defaulted my value to value others or to create a false feeling of harmony in the world around me (sometimes with strangers, sometimes with well-known structures).
My parents raised me with three ideals in mind, confidence, creativity, and integrity. I’ve always been a noticeably kind and intelligent person who thinks deeply. I consider multiple perspectives before coming to conclusions. Justice and harmony are my way of being. Still, it baffles me why I reverted to create an internal dissonance instead of sticking up for what I knew to be right and good. It was icky, awkward and weird to watch myself bend in my memories. And one day, I decided I don’t have to see it that way. It doesn’t have to be that way.
When I tune into my inner guidance, I tune into the ultimate truth. She’s me, but somehow everything.
She’s direct and concise, commanding respect. When it comes to my girls, it’s so easy to listen to and learn from this wisdom, but applying it to myself is more difficult. It’s a process, but each decision is a catalyst.
This momma-bear-me is always right, even if I don’t like it. Sometimes her advice threatens my comfort levels, but it’s only to encourage me to become more courageous in the name of what is right. While life feels like fine-tuning at this point, it’s sometimes still a lot of work to get myself past my limitations. My girls are like my training wheels, teaching me not just to hear but to listen to this Universal wisdom. When I understood that notion, something changed and the ball started rolling.
A true decision is p-o-w-e-r-f-u-l-!
When I immerse myself in this wisdom — purely beautiful and loving—I speak up, I act, I create with ease! Wow, what power and strength I feel when I take seemingly scary steps to boldly co-create my life with what feels like reckless abandon but is anything but. I have many people to thank because the concept of courage is disappearing as it becomes clear that it’s the only true way.
The idea of courage itself becomes so human, so boring, so restrictive. I’d like to get beyond it without having to think about it—there’s so much more! I love being human though. Haha. I love being fully present and plugged into my life — while remaining connected to this amazing limitless realm.
Immediately, I feel a zing of energy through my body, a connection with my wholeness. Waves of light flow through me, vibrating the collection of my cells that I know as myself. When I am whole, I am brave because I am here. I am somehow everywhere. I am a warrior and this wisdom is my weapon and with it, I can speak no evil, hear no evil and see no evil for what I say, see, and hear exposes the original wound and helps it heal.
Love is the weapon to end all weapons. It is LOVE, a love that is bigger than an experiential love, a love beyond all the constructions of our imaginations.
Aligning with this frequency of LOVE invites joy, wonder, and bliss. It is incredible. I’ve been training myself up to it my whole life, but I don’t suppose why it couldn’t happen overnight too.
I’ve felt compelled to share these rich, out-of-this-world ideas for some time now, but I didn’t feel it wasn’t time. Now it is. I feel it is my mission to share this infinite wisdom (that isn’t even mine, I’m simply privy to its inspiration as it comes through me) to be shared with anyone who wants to listen.
I’m grateful my passions set me up with well-rounded and grounded methods to translate my perspective. I studied ancient cultures, to understand and offer parallels to philosophies and myths throughout the ages. Integrating myself with open-mindedness and a curiosity for different cultures as a world traveler, my international experiences offered me perspective and practice in creating (conscious) campaigns for global brands at stellar advertising agencies (with glorious mentors). Strategically communicating complicated and highly technical concepts, processes and systems as a leader and advisor with impressive startups have furthered my confidence in my abilities. I’ve been so lucky. My collection of experiences are gifts, teaching me in the moments and expanding in reflection.
I share my stories because I feel you may be aching to experience these frequencies, exchanges, bits of information. I, for one, am always aching for more, yet conscious to ask for ‘whatever’s next’, trying not to dictate what I think I need to know to allow myself to be inspired.
For me, it’s not just about knowing the truth, but a knowing of what to do with it that transforms me, allows me to just simply be.
With that is an enormous responsibility to be brave, be here and share these experience that even the version of myself yesterday was too afraid to write, too afraid to share. It’s an opportunity to transmute darkness into light, pain into healing, for me, through me, and to whoever felt it first.
I am here. And I know you are out there, listening too.
The lens of love I see my children through makes what’s right for me become abundantly clear too. Taking a stand becomes obvious and easy — love allows me to be brave with ease.
When we decide, we create.
It is up to us to decide how we experience our lives, how we interact with others, and how we judge ourselves. Will we offer ourselves permission to be authentic? To act with integrity? To allow grace and love to flow into and among our experiences? Our memories? Our lives? To heal our hearts? To be better humans? To be better, together?
When we speak, we solidify — for better or for worse. I learned to choose my words very carefully and it’s made a world of a difference.
In doing so, when I speak to my daughters, I catch myself sounding incredibly wise, teaching them to live with divine integrity, in the simplest of sentences. Being a mother reinforces the knowing through my own words. Sometimes, I’ll let something I’ve just said to them sink in — my parental teachings are uncannily applicable to areas I find difficult myself.
Take, for instance, eating lunch at “lunchtime”. My daughter sweetly let me know she wasn’t hungry, looking at me confused and with big eyes when I told her it was lunchtime. She wasn’t hungry for lunch. The part of me (the conditioned part) that told her it was lunchtime took a pause so a new part of me could step in. Wow, I realized. She’s simply listening to her body — that’s such a gift and it will serve her so well in living a healthy life. Yes, it’s a little annoying that she’s not eating when it’s convenient for society, but it’s certainly manageable for me to accommodate for her today. So she ate later.
Being assertive for my daughters happens so naturally. Never will I let someone (even innocently) degrade my children, harass them, or make them feel as though they aren’t enough.
I have already stopped each these situations in the act—with gentle kindness, consciously leading by example. As an example to my girls and an example to the offenders (who are really only hurting, themselves) we can all step further into LOVE, allowing love to surround us in offerings of clarity, healing, peace, and safety.
Our experience of life is just that — an experience. Our stories are constructed through our perspectives, our labels, our judgements and ultimately nailed down by our decisions. We are co-creators of our experiences, collecting to be our lives.
It’s a learning curve for sure. I have witnessed my resistance. Repetition and practice help me break through walls with new perspective and purpose.
A scene from the recent “WonderWoman” film comes to mind — the one when she climbs out of the doomed, dark grayscale bunker and steps into the fear in full color, creating an alternate reality of time as she fends off the bullets from automatic weapons aimed at her Matrix-style. (Another film to rewatch if you haven’t seen it in a while.)
The abundance of these mind-bending movies gives me courage that people are ready to hear these far-out concepts. Or the green (heat-chakra) space-points-in-time continuum grid/matrix in Interstellar, the time-traveling spaceship encounter teaching and experiencing unconditional love and the natural dilemmas of communicating with words in Arrival, or the scene with the bubble shield of protection as the main character’s special power in Twilight. (That scene has stuck with me for years.)
There are tons of great references in the media these days. We curate our content to invite what we will allow into our home. Watch (Season 4, Episode 1) Doc McStuffins and you’ll see parallels too—haha. Love shows up everywhere when we align with it. It’s synchronicity. (So fun!) Music too… songs are full of this esoteric wisdom if you truly listen to the messages, and it’s not just The Beatles.
But why, mommy? (Focus, be present.) Extrapolating these life lessons from my kids helps me find and reinforce my strength—in my voice, in my beliefs, in my value of myself, and of humanity.
There is a fierceness in me to do what’s right and good for my girls. And for me. For everyone. It’s a fierceness that doesn’t have anything to do with claws but everything to do with love.
I am a lightworker and an agent of transformation.
If you’re asking yourself what in the heavenly days is a lightworker and what does it really mean? Well, I’m not exactly sure either, but here’s how I see it (and I think we are all capable of this too, by the way):
Light is love. Love is light. Truly unconditional love is the most beautiful, cozy, delicious, perfect-temperature all-encompassing light-love that never requires sunglasses.
Every time I release control and surrender to the ultimate light-love-truth, a wave of serenity washes over me and shows me how everything is going to be better this way. All is well. All is beautiful, peaceful, calm. Everything becomes easy and moments become miracles.
Stay with me here, please allow yourself to stay open. I love you. You are loved. You are here. This will be fun. Keep going.
I am responsible for choosing to stay in the light, to stay brave, to keep creating, recreating and shifting. That’s the hard part, but it gets easier. Our conditioning, our labels, our judgments all make the shift to a higher consciousness feel uncomfortable and threatening but it our conditioning, labels, and judgments that are the obstacles for our alignment with everything that is light, love and pure goodness.
Once I’d decided to fight for the light, there was no turning back. It wasn’t just me, my soul helped me decide and then guided me the whole way. Every dive healed my psyche’s scars like a gentle massage heals my physical ones. Slowly but surely, the light offers me as much as I can handle, healing me every day, every way I need it and patiently waits for me every time I try to step out of our mind-body-spirit alignment, on my own (mind-body).
We (my soul and I) sifted out of a lot of crap that just didn’t work for me anymore. I naturally began to curate everything that allows in as my experience. Choosing what comes into my life, my home, my body…
…but somehow, my morning Mountain Dew got to stick around. Haha. It makes me happy and amuses me (and others) because it’s a paradox to my otherwise organic-ish lifestyle. Hahaha.
I like a good paradox. I’m perfectly imperfect and with that, life is a lot of fun.
The journey of the path to wherever we’re headed is not all paved in glitter or gold, or at least not obviously so. Perhaps it is and is covered in some soot, invisible to our eye until we scratch the surface and brush it off. Who knows. What I do know is that sometimes the journey feels toxic and disgusting. It can be so uncomfortable to remember my wounds that I wonder why I wanted to try to heal them in the first place. But then I’d remember. Again. And, again. I remember that my soul is so worthy of healing… And I’d remember again…
And again… There have definitely been moments where I ask myself if I am becoming ill or need to see a doctor. Cycling up and down, high and low, elated by the connection and then deflated by the work I have to do to heal. I somersault through what I call ‘body-garbage’ or ‘soul-pollution’, that I’d stocked up inside of me and simply have to release. I cry. I meditate. I sleep. I lie awake. I get diarrhea. Haha. Yes, I’m talking about this here. I even have weird meconium- (a baby’s first poop that consists of all of the dead skin cells and hairs they’ve ingested while in the womb — gross, I know, but absolutely necessary, and all babies do it) like ‘spirit poops’ as I fondly named them in awe of the clearing cooperation between my physical-body and my light-body. Haha, I can’t believe I just told you that, but I did because I’m stepping into my fear and releasing judgments.
My soul is hungry and I know I can take it… this time around. The timing is right now, and writing (and sharing) these words are part of it. This feels like a new plane of existence that I’ve found myself to exist on, maybe it’s a new dimension, I don’t know, but whatever it is, it is big, brilliant and it changes my experience of life all the time. It’s so cool and so lovely. And even more magnificent when I can help someone else witness their heightened awareness, creativity, courage or to know themselves so that they can love themselves… and then find someone who truly loves them, find the work they truly love, etc.
It’s okay to take it slow when soul-searching.
There were years when I let the drudgery depress me, deepening my pain as I relived painful experiences. At one critical point, I cracked. It was simultaneously surreal and spectacular. Certainly life-changing. This crack was the catalyst I needed to get out of my own way and listen.
I needed to give time time. My life-force kept me going. It was much larger than me, just waiting for me to look up and know it’s okay to take it slow, as long as I kept going. Gentle guides helped me along the way — many teachers, friends and family members whose wisdom and guidance continues to reveal itself to me in layers as I am ready to understand.
I bypassed my pain, temporarily deciding to pick myself up one way or another, or another… and I eventually picked myself up and took myself halfway around the world, half running away and half following my dreams. There, I learned to love myself. And because I’d finally found myself, my now husband was able to find me.
He became a new dream-reality and I eventually followed him to Paris where another adventure ensued. With a willingness to be increasingly introspective, a critical student of the Parisien ‘joie de vivre’ philosophy, and under the influences of being Mr. Spontaneous’s girlfriend, I found myself supported with a constant stream of amazing people and experiences, I learned to let life take the wheel. As I surrendered my patience, I gave life the gas-pedal too. And I learned to like the ride.
At first, bursts of insight from my future self would reveal themselves here or there. My ‘future self’ is a place-in-space where I go to get advice from the most perfect, amazing inspirational future version of myself, as though I already exist there. Maybe I do! I think I reconstruct her with every choice I make. She’s quite the inspiration and sounds similar to my grounding momma-bear-voice that I found when I became pregnant a few years down the road from that present point in time.
The time to continue on my path of transformation revealed itself to me gently but repeatedly until I woke up to its wisdom. I got to pick up where I’d left off on my path to heal my pain and find my light. I was stronger. I was ready. And I had a new partner in life who commits to reflecting more pieces of myself with love.
Darkness is only the absence of light.
This light that I seek to find is illuminating in every sense of the word. Like a candlelight on a mountaintop, its incandescence penetrates the night and allows us to see for miles. This is a light that disappears fears, washes shame and judgment away from our experiences so that we may heal through the pain to cure it with pure potential, healing not just ourselves but everyone involved in a cosmic-level of consciousness.
Now, as if I am about to dive into the depths of the ocean from a boat floating in the middle of it, I set myself up with a ladder and a fresh towel to help me up and to get me warm as quickly and gracefully as possible. Diving into all the darkness and disgustingness in doses helps me maintain a productive sense of self. I require myself to be an active participant in the real world. It’s a decision.
Trying to find a crack where the light can start to shine, I really appreciated those ladders and towels I’d prepared — a clean and tidy home, a rose I bought at a favorite florist in preparation for the occasion, a delicious home-cooked meal ready to feed me from the fridge, sweet smelling shampoos… something to remind me:
I am the only one who gets to choose my happiness. In every moment, I get to choose my experience… the broader the perspective, the better.
Now that I’ve been down in the depths before I kinda know what to look for. I find it easier to sort through the sludge and find the cracks to let the light in the more I do it. I do it for myself and the greater sense of myself as a mother and member of society. Seeking straight for the darkest parts, I dart in to pierce the veil of the scariest of memories to fill them with the pure potential of LOVE, thus transmuting their void (and their ability to suck the energy out of me like a black hole might bend light.). I see society’s pain paralleled in my own and vice versa. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone took a moment to reflect and come from a place of LOVE? I believe it’s not far out…
If I need to take a breath and remember that there’s always a crack for an alternative reality waiting for me/us to step into, I come back to let this quote sink in:
“…grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference…” — Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971)
Yeah, that’s also the quote you heard on “Fight Club” at the AA meeting…could not be a better place to prove its value. Getting sober is no joke, but neither is making any change we truly want to make. Same principles apply.
It may sound strange, but I actually appreciate it when I get a pang of fear nowadays because I don’t have to look for it, it found me for me to turn it into love. I’ve picked up the phone to make long overdue apologies, accepted others with grace and love, and I have cosmically forgiven people I’d already forgiven to their face. Then, each time, I’m rid of an energy vacuum that I didn’t realize was buried somewhere inside. When the fear is healed through and through, I know it will never bother me again. Healing my darkness transcends my own to heal someone else’s along the way. That’s how this connected healing light-love-truth feels anyway.
Healing feels like a wide-ranging ripple, an orchestrated harmony of a higher tune across a sea of perfectly tuned instruments singing together. It’s beautiful. I feel peaceful, strong, beautiful.
Every time I seek from a place of alignment (or am in the ‘flow’ as I sometimes call it because it just feels easy there) the universe activates a resource for me, to find whatever it is I need to learn. Oftentimes, it’ll be an encounter with a stranger, a teacher a guide, a new friend or a really old one who magically pops into my thoughts at the exact right moment for both of us, leading us to have a pivotal and mutually healing conversation.
Sometimes guidance comes as a simple feeling that everything is going to be okay — a feeling of peaceful serenity in a moment of total chaos.
Sometimes new information comes as a new book title, an article here on Thrive, or like a little game of synchronicities I notice, helping me to discover another nugget of wisdom, to open my eyes, to dare me to become more courageous or to learn to be more discerning. I devour every offer of assistance with gratitude and astute reverence.
“I don’t believe in shame.”
I said, to a man I’d barely met. I’d been in a blissful state wandering a gorgeous ancient site soaking in the radiant sun as I gazed over the rooftops of a new city we traveled to explore. He’d started a conversation and it happens a lot — when anyone gets to this blissful state, it’s attractive — like bumblebees to honey.
Both stunned by this affirmation spoken with pure love, “I don’t believe in shame.” Wow, is this really how I feel? I don’t believe in shame? Interesting. I let it all sink in as I thought back to specific moments and I suddenly felt proud. Yes, this is how I feel! I don’t believe in shame!
Whoa. [Shift.] New alignment.
Memories from my past click into place with this new belief that I apparently hold. It’s working for me… suddenly, I feel clarity and ease, a wise and motherly understanding for many pain-points I’ve created for myself which I am now able to see through the lens of unconditional love. Or rather… I’ve wiped my lenses clear of all the junk that I’d accumulated, of everything but this unconditional love. (Again, the music… if you’re not thinking what I’m thinking, go play yourself some Jimmy Cliff, seriously!)
Every experience I’ve had is mine.
Every experience of mine has made me who I am today, has given me depth, pain, healing and perspective to be able to feel no shame now — only love. I feel love and faith that people will stop telling other people the ought to be ashamed, for anything.
In this particular instance, I saw that this man didn’t know me but for a three-minute conversation prior to selling the shame that I wasn’t going to buy. I saw it with ease and clarity. Seeing the situation this way gave me a time-warp feeling of space to reflect and D-E-C-I-D-E how to react, not just to react.
This man didn’t know any of my experiences, yet he thought I should be ashamed of myself because I hadn’t learned a dialect of Chinese while I lived in Singapore, a pleasure he picked up 20 years prior. (Fantastic for him! But that was his experience.)
Facing me frozen in reflection upon hearing my words, I watched him transform as he received my reflection. He saw a way to experience a higher consciousness, a new way to align his experiences.
He paused, looked me solemnly in the eye and said, “Thank you.”
Thank you for sticking with me through this long and abstract piece. I hope it brings about peace, beauty, light, and love into your life, maybe even a giggle. I’ve got lots more where this came from, so questions, claps, follows and words of encouragement are always welcome. Below is a bit on what I’ve created now that I’m brave enough to live my life purpose. Thank you, Love you, ❤ Jennie Souiade.
_____________________________
Be brave, be bold.
In a conscious effort to transform my life and to create a path of the purest authenticity for myself and my ability to serve others, I created a company where kindness, curiosity, ambition, family, and integrity are paramount. Rewarding these valuable pillars creates a ripple effect for our higher good. And in doing so, I get to work with beautiful souls ready to blossom and high-vibe businesses on beautiful missions every day. Heavenly days.
At Magentic, we’re creatives and consultants guiding the brave to transform with clear-sighted curiosity, truth, compassion, and purpose. Our creative services complement our consulting and coaching by actualizing transformations with brand, print, digital and experiential artifacts. (Meaning, once you know who you are, we’ll design your logo, write your website, update your profile… or whatever it is so the world can see you how you see you.)
You are yours to transform today. HelloMagentic.com
Originally published at journal.thriveglobal.com