Mystic Venus

Embracing your body.

I was 4.2 Kgs when I was born. Yep! That’s how I landed in this world. All fat and screaming. I know that that isn’t a big deal now, but this was in the late ‘80s and 4.2 Kg baby, that was news!

My mother, Mary, was in Form Four then and being pregnant at that time carried with it a sense of shame, to herself and her family.

If this same fate befell you, your life would never be the same. You would be the talk of the village and Daughters were told not to hang out with you because you had performed a sinful act of getting pregnant (having sex) before marriage. Your parents would be seen as failures and your father would not talk amongst the “wazee” and his dreams of you becoming a pilot would have “drank water”

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She was just about to sit for her exams when she went into labour. However, she still did her exams in that condition because her mother, at that moment, was a single mother who couldn’t take any excuse.

Whenever my mom narrates this story to me, she reminds me that it’s still the single most courageous thing she has ever had to do; after all, she had the option to abort.

 Her entire class, the entire village as well, came to see me on the day I was brought home from the hospital. Let us say, I was already famous: a 4.2 Kg baby! All these redmeat and mukimo…lifestyle concerns were a scam back then.

And, thus, my struggle with weight started as soon as I was born.

Throughout early primary, I had a name in reference to my body; Esther Kanono, as if fat was my second name.  When I was in class three, I changed school.  Because my parents thought a girls’ only school was more appropriate for me. My new school was the best girls’ school around but it was almost three kilometers away which meant I had to walk each day to and fro. There was no other option back then, school buses were an unheard of luxury. Weight issues and I parted ways at that point because I had to walk six kilometers each day and handle school work too on githeri for lunch only. So weight and I ended up separating. We walked on different lanes.

The issues with weight re-emerged when I got to high school. I wasn’t in the “fat” category, per se, but I had gained some weight and, so, I struggled to get back to where I previously was. There was one time when, after we closed school, I came home having gained so much weight. In four weeks, I didn’t eat, only tasting food as I cooked it because I really wanted to bring down my weight (The struggle was real!). That’s how I achieved losing more than five Kgs in four weeks.

Then I joined university. Again, I was a bit overweight according to my own measures. Here, too, I had to find a way to handle, to tackle, this “problem”. By the time I got to second year, I had lost much weight through exercising in the morning. On most days, 6 am would find me on the school track: that way I got to 50 Kgs – the weight I desired.

But I wasn’t happy. Not at all. Though my outside was what I could have termed as the “right” size and body weight, I was, nevertheless, unhappy. I had changed the outside but the inside remained the same.

Truth is, I have never been overweight in the real sense of it in my adulthood. This I can only speak boldly about years later and in retrospect. Even with my pregnancy, the highest I attained was 80 Kgs, a weight which, thereafter, I managed to bring down to my current weight: 65 Kgs.

My issues with weight were conditioned from childhood. The negative sentiments that followed the name Kanono were deeply embedded into my subconscious. The child in me, then, was bothered, and, as an adult, the sentiments still stand. This is because who we are taught to be, and who we are, in the first three years of life acts as a control center to our lives thereafter.

Scientists are now proving that negative experiences encountered within the first five years of life do cause more damage than those in subsequent years; because these years are crucial in the formation of the sense of self for the individual child.

Rarely, do we take into account the effects that words have on us, or the consequence of the names we give ourselves and our children. We forget that naming something also empowers it. A name creates. We forget that God spoke this world into existence, and thereafter man was requested to name the things in the world.

And, so, when I started studying myself as an adult, I started, for the first time, noticing how these subconscious beliefs controlled my life. I understood that for every effect there must be a cause and, when I finally found the cause, I was able to fix myself.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate

-Carl Jung.

I no longer obsess over my body. When I work out, it’s without a certain goal in mind. I simply shifted my focus from that “idea of perfection” in my head, to who I am right now. I decided to focus on who I am in the present moment, not what I believed was the “perfect me”. This change in perspective has brought such a huge sense of relief in my life. I no longer struggle with my body, it is what it is. I am who I am. After all the body yields to the vagaries of time and nature in spite of our costly care for it. Why then should I waste my energies disciplining and shaping it into a perfect figure instead of enjoying the time I have with and in it? The body is what it is, even against our wills and desires.  

When you take a moment and sit, all by yourself, and contemplate long enough, enough to shed light in into the dark corners of your mind, you will notice the things that control you without your own awareness. Truth is, you are always controlled by your strongest emotions.

You just don’t wake up and find yourself in a place of acceptance: you have to work yourself through it.  You get to a place of total love and acceptance by accepting your flaws, one by one and understanding that you are not in competition with anyone but yourself, and that you are not, and can’t be, anyone else other than you – and your body is no one’s but your own. When you get to a point where you love yourself whole, you rest easy; you stop struggling with yourself and enjoy each moment of you, each moment with you.

Everyone is judging you, but of all people you yourself are the harshest. You suffer most in your own hands. You can begin, now, to treat yourself with the kindness you would accord a child because deep inside you are still a child, it is not too late. It never is. We give to others freely the love and affection that we don’t give ourselves. It’s about time, to create a new way of life by loving ourselves whole.

You are whole with your imperfections, in spite of the imperfections.

Breathe.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

Marred with scars, we keep trying to run away from the person in the mirror. The person who stares back, reminding us of our helplessness. The world is too big and vast. We feel small and humbled at its sight because we know that there is nothing we can possibly do about that. There will be bruises on the walk through life. The scars will be there. They are there to stay.

So what do we do?

We start peeling back the layers that we can see; so that we can reveal the layer within. Who we were before we were torn apart and who we are in the aftermath. All through this there is the presence that doesn’t change.  The kingdom of heaven within. The beauty within. The gold that we are told is hidden beneath the sand. That road is narrow and painful. Sometimes you dig so hard, your body will start to ache. Other times you will scratch the surface so hard that you will start to bleed. But you don’t stop. The pain is so fresh and familiar.

You still hold on to the comments they made when you were little. Somebody said your eyes were too big (compared to whose?). They said your nose was too wide, your teeth not white enough or properly arranged. They laughed at your flat chest when everyone’s was fuller and intimidating. You can’t forget the tout who had the guts to say that you were so ugly just because you refused to stand to listen to their nonsense. Then there is your skin color. You don’t think it’s good enough. You think it is not easy on the eye. And not smooth enough. So you dig in deeper.

They reminded you that you are hard to love. Over and over, with this and that and you started hating love but you cant. You desire it with all of you.

Lucky enough, there is a store at the corner of every street that promises to solve your problems. Albeit give you an image that won’t scare you in the mirror. And maybe, for once, you can love you and people would consider you lovable. So you get a plastic surgery, you bleach your skin, you enhance whatever you think is too small. You work so hard to make that package look pleasant and saleable. You tire for it.

At first you will love the results. You will take selfies. You will celebrate. But not for so long. The person within will creep back up on you. The shadow that you can’t really shake off. It will bother you to love it. Love me now, without the mask. Love its scars and flaws that you hid under the new package. Love the crevices, the shame, the pain, the brokenness that makes you who you are. The ones that remind you of your struggles. The ones that made you so opinionated. The inner person that knows to be real and true no matter what.

Before so long, you will start feeling ‘not good enough’. Again. The loneliness will give you sleepless nights. That tattoo you had will start to look funny. The make-up will not be enough to make up. You will start thinking of Botox and maybe some injections to make your menstrual friends appear smaller. Damn it! Don’t they just love to appear at the wrong time right in the middle of your forehead? Not one or two. Just enough to make every Maasai hawker walking around with those concoctions to stop you in pity.

Well, the struggle never ends. We never seem to have it all. Until we have it all. Because what we are looking for is not out there. IT IS DEEP WITHIN.

Until we are comfortable with the person inside. Until we love ourselves unconditionally and accept the fact that we can only be ourselves, nothing we do on the exterior will help. When you love you, nothing you see, nothing you hear, no worldly standard will make you feel unworthy or not good enough. You will stand proud of your ‘being different’ from their standards.

You will smile inside. You will have a friend to wipe your tears when you are alone. You will find peace within yourself. You become independent and unstoppable.

You will have arrived at yourself and you will realize that it was all you needed. To be at home with yourself. To be at home in yourself.

Storms will come. Oh, and they will! There will be moments of self-doubt. Sometimes the wind will blow so hard and you will be afraid that it might just pull out the nails on the casket that you buried. But even then, you will be still within. Why? Because you know that you will survive. You know what you are made of.

My point?

Love starts from within. You will have to shrink and go inwards first. You will have to be silent to listen to your own heartbeat. You will have to move to the rhythm of your own song because no one will sing it better that you do. Even if it’s bad, you, only you, sing it best. You will have to laugh out loud because there is no energy better than the one that comes out of your soul. You will have to breathe slow on other days and fast on other days. Depending on the rhythm.

Whatever you do, everybody on this planet is a visitor on a journey. Don’t let them define you. With their rules on what makes the cut and what doesn’t. On what is good enough and what isn’t. Craft your own path from within and let your spirit rise. Let the multitude of your sin and imperfection be covered within it. It’s only in love that we find perfection, completion and rest.

Come home to yourself and find the love within and it will show you the way.

                        Love always makes a way.

By Mystic Venus & Betty Cherotich.

A story is told of a young man who went to his master and pleaded to be taught how to be wise. He kept persisting. So one day the master took him down to the river and when the young man plunged in, the master held the young man’s head under water by his force. The young man struggled for a while to breathe before the master eased his grip on him and allowed him up.

When he asked him what he wanted most when he was under water, he responded that it was air to which the master replied that if he ever wanted wisdom the way he wanted that breath of air, he will, without a doubt find it.

That’s the state of our lives. We desire things but we can never bring ourselves to the point of wanting them so bad or understanding the process of desire. So we stay in the state of pursuit all our lives. We search for everything that we think will give us fulfillment outside of ourselves and when we get there, we find nothing but a temporary thrill.

Life is about becoming and we harbor the urge in ourselves to expand, to become the best versions of ourselves. For a long time, we have translated this urge into wanting more and more material things and so we have kept ourselves for billions of year’s busy gathering more and more stuff to the point of endangering the planet itself. As it is, we have made so much progress on the outside but on the inside we crave love, we crave peace and happiness. These desires keep us on the pursuit. A constant reminder that something is missing in our lives.

 Everything else has changed except for man. Our world is still full of hate, fear, war, corruption and people dying of hunger.

We keep pursuing more and more material things because, the emptiness we feel inside us lingers and we keep thinking that more and more stuff will fill this void. We are out of balance no matter how much we acquire. You could have everything you ever dreamt of on the outside but still not be happy. Why? Because man has the capability to expand not just physically in terms of more materials but also psychologically into a more open minded individual free from the conditionings of his environment. Out of this freedom of mind, the spirit of man is able to rise up without it being restricted to a certain form of belief, idea or structure.  It is the spirit of man that gives the highly sought out happiness that man craves for but most people are out of touch with their inner world.

Life is about balance. Of body, mind and spirit and it’s this balance that we have neglected for such a long time and in that forgetfulness, we have given birth to a world full of suffering.

Man is a psychological being, a thinker.

It’s not what we feed upon physically but what we feed upon mentally that we become. We become the embodiment of what we feed upon mentally because the mind is the link between the body and the spirit.

It’s crucial now that our efforts be geared into understanding ourselves, the way of our thinking and feeling, the movement of our thoughts, our responses; how we conform, through fear to public opinion ,to what others say because who we are, in person, matters more than what we do or what we own.

I have been meaning for such a long time to start this blog. Finally here I am, saying hello in 600 words.