I have run the gamut of emotions since embarking upon the journey of becoming a doula. From experiencing emotional highs (nervous excitement) to lows (self-doubt), I believe that is all part of the cycle that my brain and soul takes to process new information.
I’ve been digesting tons of new material. I finished my basic workshop training last weekend and have not been able to even LOOK at the notebook in which I feverishly kept my notes. I also don’t know how to talk about my experience to my fiance or my family. But, I’m okay with the overload of information because there is one thing I keep thinking to myself:
Your Beauty Runs Deep.
I did not learn this idea overtly from the workshop. Nor did it really even come into a complete thought until today, after arriving (unplanned, but I have been having a shoulder issue, and needed some therapy) in a yoga class with one of my favorite people, Deirdre Smith-Gilmer. She offered the class a thread of thought, based on Sianna Sherman’s recent open call for a manifesto of one’s deepest currents of desire (and I think I am paraphrasing, but that’s also the way my brain processes new information). Deirdre said:
Your Beauty Runs Deep.
This idea oiled the gears of my mind to begin to process what it means to me to become a doula.
Throughout the doula training I kept pausing and saying to myself: O, could I really offer myself in THAT way? What if it is the wrong thing at the wrong time? And then I’d say to myself: YES you can, when the time comes you will know; and I’d nudge myself on to the next lesson(just a side note, this happened to me for almost every hour for 20 hours last weekend). I didn’t really know where that voice of YES was coming from–but that voice is all me and inside me and I love it for what it allows me to feel.
I realize, today, that the YES is my inner beauty telling me I am powerful.
Okay, let me get this one part clear: I am not talking about physical attractiveness when I use the word beauty. I’m talking about coming into one’s self and noticing that the complex layers of being are all there because you have a core of beauty that holds you.
Yes, it holds you especially through the gross, hard, sad, unexplainable moments. That is when your beauty runs it’s course, but it is, dare I say, always a road that leads back to that inner love.
Even through the awkward messy-messing up moments and not-knowing-the-future moments of life, your beauty is holding you.
O wait, that is all of life!!
Becoming a doula my heart offering to the world. I know that there is much that I don’t understand, that I have yet experienced, and that I will profoundly experience.
In the end, I realize that through many processes, trainings, workshops, talks with my family, I know that my beauty runs deep.
Now, from knowing it within myself, here I write to remind you:
Your Beauty Runs Deep.
It is this marvelous idea that helps a mom to push, from her inner strength and deep self knowing, a little baby out from and through her body.
Wow.
From a deep well-spring of beauty,
Rose
