I Free Myself

Reflections from a member of Ana’s audience…

From the Founder and Chief Executive of Faith in Change Publishing, Hannah Sim: When facing off with your own patterns, programmes and cycles, this poem might just help to adjust your insight and perspective of the self vs the soul. As an independent working woman, I feel tangled up in the messes of this world, the gender confusing ‘norms’, the battle of the sexes – to be equal and therefore the same – when my own equality comes from the uniquely feminine and innate traits and qualities that I possess as a part of my nature…

My unique disposition as an emotional, empathetic, and highly intuitive creature, has been proven to be nothing like the masculine archetype. I am no man and I never want to be, I am a woman, and this world’s version of success was never something I was able to bend to meet, for something inside of me will not allow me to align with the values of the modern world. These ‘strangling hands of success’ have choked me, killed my natural form and figure, and bent me to an illusion of what the female must become before finding her voice and autonomy, and before finding the freedom to genuinely express from the heart and soul. The white male version of successful living is nothing if not something to manipulate the masses towards their ‘finish line’ of white-picket fences and things and stuff, for this is no dream of my own.

I cannot, have never, and will never, meet your expectations, and now that my own expectations align with the divine’s manipulation of this life that I am now living, I surrender to the inevitability of a new age. I embrace a new perception of the female, a new balance, wherein I may find the way ahead of the curve, through the fogs of the dissolution of my nature, and back to who I really am – A WOMAN IN A WOMAN’S WORLD!!! Never again to bend, shape and cramp myself into this man’s world and shrunken vision of who I was born to be… 100% female!

‘I Free Myself,’ this poem-like-prayer guided me towards the actualisation of this recognition of self… I came to see myself as a person deserving of freedom, as a human being who was wholly complicated and buried alive beneath a whole bunch of fairy tales, none of which were my own design, nor choosing, none of which felt much like love at all… Ana Maria came to find my world stuck, motionless, repetitive and cyclic in nature. Once the work started, much like the seasons change, after every single shift through my ‘stuff’ I always found myself sitting in the winter all over again… letting parts of me frozen through time come to thaw out and reveal more life, beauty and soul on the other side, all the while clearing out spaces to refill with joy, light and laugher. Clear, refill, clear out, and refill, that was my pattern, perhaps it will be your own too…

Having Ana Maria see the real me, having her eyes burn through the lies I felt confined by, without ever having known that was the case, I am living free of the past, untouched by the future, and happily residing in the present, a gift unlike any other. My past still crops up, but it no longer consumes days and nights as I work to undo the damage done through trauma, loss and grief. I can wholly accept this experience of reintegration and reprocessing, and let it go when it has run its course. To be free of the past, I have come to learn and gather, is not about undoing life, although it can be a part of the health recovery chapter, during which one can regain vitality, energy and a feeling of youth; where the past is concerned, I came to fathom that it all lies in the acceptance of your stories and an awareness of their residue still impacting upon the present. The present is where I choose to be, the past can show itself to have shaped parts of the present, but it no longer defines it in its entirety.

With blessed thanks to Miss Santuario, and with encouragement to anybody out there reading her words, I propose you look inwards, for that be where the real treasures are hidden… but like every navigator of the unknown seas, storms lay between you and your very new destination, let Ana Maria’s words become your compass, let her point you home, and always remember to take care of your ship, your vessel because you only get one.