Pt 8. Diary of an Awakening Woman

Love in all the wrong places

If you’d like to catch up on previous instalments of ‘Diary of an Awakening Woman’ you can do so HERE. Many of you have said you prefer to read my emails on your computer or on the Substack website. I recommend the website, it is much more pleasant to engage with IMHO ♥️

---

Saying goodbye to the beautiful, lush, green meadows, hedgerows and trees that had enveloped me deeply for years was really hard.

Living in the Cotswolds was the closest thing to heaven on earth I have ever experienced. I felt blessed to live there. Most recently I had shared a small cottage with my Yoga teacher on the edge of the Dodington Park estate. James Dyson, the inventor, was our landlord.

My bedroom window looked out over his fields filled with pedigree race horses and sheep. I had to pinch myself. Deep down I still felt like the poor kid from the council estate. By the time I left that had changed somewhat.

The landscape had become another dear friend, I knew it well, walking it daily, sleeping under tress, helping to birth lambs, picking wild garlic and watercress.

However, leaving my soul family was even harder.

For the first time in my life I had felt truly seen, safe, loved and accepted equally, where I wasn’t seeking to save and rescue people. The teachers, healers, seers, visionaries and new friends had all poured so much into me, quenching parched areas of my heart I had no idea were there. I had been so used to being the one giving my time and energy to others.

After the relationship with Jack I had been left broken and utterly empty. Rung out and left raw. The process of moving beyond that and learning to also fill my own well was a tough initiation.

With all that love and support from my new community, and living in beautiful nature, I now felt buoyed up. I had received the gift of that dark time, and I felt better than I ever had on every level.

A WILD RIDE

This time in my life had been orchestrated by my mother in spirit, I was sure of that. It was a fast-track path of learning, healing, growth and mastery. Massively transformational and designed by her.

I had been cracked open, flooded with ancestral gifts and wisdom, cleansed, polished, upgraded, rebooted and dropped into a totally different reality. Divinely driven and soul-guided I moved from place to place, teacher to teacher, never of my own choice entirely and never part of any life ‘plan’. I wasn’t running away from anything. I was running towards myself and being pushed faster than my own legs could carry me.

My only role was to let go of the handrails and let myself free-fall in the hands of a power far greater and wiser than me.

This next move was equally Divinely guided and spirit-led.

It was time.

I was as full, fit, healthy and ready as I could ever be to head home to be near my blood family again. And I would need to be!

I packed the last of my things into the boot of my old blue car I had named ‘Buddy’ and said goodbye to my housemate. Another adventure lay ahead of me and I felt the adrenalin of that. These few years had left me with a fierce confidence, courage and self-belief. That sense of a benevolent power with me and within me gave me rocket fuel to face anything. I felt safe in my skin and safe in the world.

The elation, hope and sense of purpose I was feeling as I drove down the motorway towards my hometown was amazing.

I turned the radio on, music up loud, opened the car window and let the wind whip my hair in my face and the sun burn my cheek as I drove home. It was exhilarating. I felt so free. I felt strong, sexy and unstoppable. I lit a cigarette and felt like a character in a movie as I whooshed past all the other cars on the road singing to the radio at the top of my lungs, singing to tracks that had unwittingly become a soundtrack for my re-entry into the world.

🎁 I have created a Spotify playlist of that soundtrack for you. See below.

(By the way, the smoking, was my way of self-medicating ready for re-entering family territory! I could see the energy of the smoke cleansing and protecting my aura. Not the ideal solution but I knew it would be temporary. These days I have friends who work with the Spirit of Tobacco in a sacred way as the ancients did and many Shamans still do.)

BACK HOME - TENDING THE MOTHER LINE

I ended up living at my Nan’s. She always had rooms for family that needed them and I had already lived with her twice before. Pitstops between homes and lives.

Nan was petite and fierce with large bright blue eyes and full red lips. She had looked like an early Hollywood movie star in her day. Now where auburn waves once grew there were curls of silver. Nan was more frail these days after losing her husband and then her daughter. She was also now estranged from her son. So my arrival was welcomed warmly.

Her former fierceness had withered into brittleness and bitterness. Her once beautiful nails were twisted yellow with nicotine and her back, hunched since childhood due to Rickets, was worse than ever.

I had always felt Nan was largely misunderstood. Her attempts at expressing herself would often come out wrong and upset people.

Since my Mum had died, those close to her couldn’t look at me without their eyes filling with tears. I am very like my Mum to look at. This opened my Nan’s heart towards me perhaps a little more than usual so I saw her softer side.

She was a sensitive, psychic soul who’d been through a lot in her life but never really dealt with the pain, as was the way for that generation. Her heartbreak had calcified, frozen in time, taking its toll on her body and mind. Her intuitive gifts, mediumship and ability to communicate with animals had been suppressed beneath layers of fear. Her mother had been a tea leaf reader and Oracle and mentored my Mum from a young age. But Nan had done all she could to stuff it all down.

I just saw the lonely little girl in her who wanted to be loved.

My beautiful Nan. Photo restored by a friend.

Mum was still very much with me, I could feel her prompting me to say things to Nan and to do things to help her.

So one day I offered to give Nan a pampering session. She was thrilled.

“Oh yes please!” she giggled.

She washed her hair and sat on a stool in her bedroom, in front of a mirror propped up on the windowsill. She found it hard to let kindness in without pushing it away and was chatting nervously. She looked so vulnerable sat there with wet hair, soggy towel around her shoulders. Like a small bird that had dropped from a nest.

I gently combed some styling products through her hair and began winding prickly rollers in straight rows front to back, pushing through the little pins to secure them in place.

This was intimate. It was moving her I could sense it. The touch. The kindness. The decades of memories of Mum having always previously done her hair. We were both close to tears. Back then I didn’t have the words for how this felt. It was devotional, ritual, granddaughter honouring grandmother. It felt sacred.

After finishing putting in all her hair rollers I helped Nan get seated beneath the old plastic hooded hair dryer in the corner of her room and went to make her a cup of tea.

Always the same porcelain china cup and saucer and silver spoon. Another ritual.

“Oh you always make a good cup of tea Kimberley”, she said as I placed it beside her on a little table, along with her ash tray and cigarettes. She was overcome but smiling, grateful for the kindness.

When she’d finished her tea and ‘ciggy’ I sat before her as her hair continued to dry and took her hands in mine. The blue raised veins and thin bones pressing through almost translucent tanned and wrinkled skin held so many stories; tales of love and loss, of illness, of hard work and hidden gifts.

I grew up staring at the hands of the women in my world. Women knitting, cutting hair, holding babies, scrubbing floors, making ball gowns, mending jewellery, reading Tarot cards and tea leaves, smoking cigarettes, making food and crafting school projects. I thought their hands were beautiful. Maps of life. More life resulted in even more beautiful contours and cartography.

As I gently massaged almond oil into my Nan’s hands and nails she welled up, holding back a sob.

“I can feel your Mum with us” she said.

We shed a few tears together. Then I fetched her another cup of tea.

That summer we spent a lot of time together, sitting in the garden, going through family mementos, telling stories and pottering around the shops. Nan was always grateful to have someone staying with her and several of our family had lived with her over the years.

I helped with cooking and cleaning and taking her out. One afternoon she let me paint her portrait, a quick watercolour sketch really. She altered a long red dress of mine so I could wear it to the winter ball. It was a special time of tending to each other and making things together. It felt like I was gifting Nan some more time with Mum by spending time with me.

I could cry now just thinking of Nan’s garden and the time we spent sitting out there. I’ve never seen or felt another garden like it. It wasn’t huge yet it was so beautiful to me. So peaceful.

In my childhood there had been two fish ponds flanking the back door and patio, a lush green lawn in the centre that nobody was allowed to walk on, two apple trees on the left, hugging a wavy stone path and a huge drooping plum tree on the right of the garden. The bottom was lined with huge trees.

We would sit on chairs on the patio near the house. There were often birds, butterflies, dragonflies, frogs, newts and bees having a fine old time hanging out in this green haven with us. It was a healing space, deeply still and enveloping.

It was the perfect transition from my homes of the past years where I had been immersed in nature. I had become so psychically sensitive, so tuned into the energies of nature and the invisible world that being in nature was my oxygen. My safe place.

By this time all I needed to do was sit quietly by myself in the garden, or anywhere, and I could feel that powerful Divine connection flowing through my body again. It was like I was dancing with divine love; breathing the universe in and out of my lungs, it was blissful.

This is how I imagined most people thought awakening should feel. Mine had been so traumatic that it had taken me a while to recover from the effects of it. I had been in healing mode, I had been integrating a spiritual crisis and coming back into my body and allowing my nervous system to find balance. Now I could feel the love and bliss as a permanent feature of my inner landscape. Sitting in Nan’s beautiful garden amplified this feeling.

SEEDS OF A NEW LIFE

I had applied for two jobs before moving in with Nan and was waiting to hear about them.

Rather boldly I had written to the only two places that I wanted to work for (yes actual letters!), in the only town I wanted to work in. They weren’t advertising for staff, but I was being bold and proactive.

I had learned from my time with Sally to open my mind to the infinite field of possibilities available to me. If I could imagine it and set a clear intention followed by action, anything was possible. So, I wrote to my favourite spiritual bookshop in the Devon town of Totnes to see if they needed anyone.

Totnes is one of the open-minded ‘alternative’ towns in the UK. It has narrow winding streets, open air markets, crystal shops, complementary health clinics, very hip coffee shops, arts, crafts, environmental projects and leading edge sustainability colleges.

It’s a bit like a mini Glastonbury.

It’s an amazing place and my Mum used to take me there when I was younger if I was getting stressed. I always felt comfortable there, I had no idea why at the time. Mum saw things in me I was totally unaware of.

The second business I wrote to for a job was a colour therapy college. Again, they weren’t advertising, but I thought I’d go for it and see what happened.

I received polite letters back from both places thanking me and saying they’d keep my details on file.

I was determined this second chance at having my life back in Devon was going to be done right this time and I wasn’t going to do anything that didn’t feel true to me and my unfolding path.

My purpose sat in my heart like a precious gem. I’d been through so much in order to connect to it, I wasn’t going to do anything that might spoil that. Not intentionally anyway. If I was going to work out in ‘muggle land’ temporarily at least, I was going to be selective.

Eventually I heard back from both businesses I’d written to, saying there might be work available for me but it wouldn’t be for a while. So I got a job at a publishing company working in the marketing department while I waited to hear.

Working full time hours was a shock to the system after basically living away from the world immersed in a spiritual cocoon for years.

Each evening after work I flopped into bed for a while, often feeling achy and feverish. I was also starting to have palpitations, something I hadn’t experienced since just before Mum died.

Gradually it got easier, but I didn’t know I was running on adrenalin.

The high of feeling better than I had ever felt was starting to wear off as I started to run my tanks low. Getting up at 6am driving to work, doing a full day, driving home, making dinner, possibly going for a run or out with friends, those were things most people my age were doing, but I was struggling.

So far I’d managed to cruise on the energy and resources I had built up within me in my years of daily spiritual support and healing, but I had gone from a total immersion in spiritual devotion to barely having time to wash my hair.

I was now basically living on coffee and cigarettes.

Any energy I did feel was fake energy. But I didn’t know that.

I didn’t know I had Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I didn’t know I was Autistic and also had ADHD and I certainly had no idea that the previously disabling health issue I had been diagnosed with 4 years earlier could come back.

The ecstatic feelings of the Divine within me, along with the power and purpose I felt and a body that had never felt or looked better were all masking symptoms bubbling quietly in the background.

I had also started seeing someone.

Noah.

I knew him from school. We had reconnected online and had been out a few times.

It was very exciting. Nan seemed to like him, and she rarely liked men! I got the strong sense my Mum would have approved too, which really mattered to me at the time.

He was the classic tall, dark and handsome gentleman. He swept me off my feet. It was yet another ‘high’ that kept me going.

One day, Noah came to pick me up to go out and he was wearing a sage-green, long-sleeved top with a number on the chest. I had the biggest déjà vu moment. I couldn’t shake the feeling off that I had seen it before.

So, that evening when I got home to Nan’s, I had an intuitive nudge to look in my old journal. There at the back was a story I had written months earlier. I’d written it as part of redefining and imagining a healthy relationship. I hadn’t been trying to manifest a partner, as such, but was simply writing from my new perspective of healthy self-esteem, what my next relationship would feel like and look like.

In the story in my journal, I described a clear vision I’d had of what this man looked like, right down to his hair and clothing. I nearly fell off the edge of my bed when I realised that the story was about Noah!

RED FLAGS

Our relationship was gentle and I thought respectful. I had been determined to choose more wisely when it came to men

I was feeling so happy. I wasn’t having many night time seizures anymore and the overwhelming sensitivity was easing slightly. The spiritual crisis symptoms seemed to have almost totally gone. I was feeling grounded and a bit stronger, but I also knew it was a fine balance and that I had to take good care of myself and avoid too much stress.

In the heady months of falling in love and the excitement of a new life I was totally blind to all the little red flags both from my body and in my new relationship….