When to lose your Innocence!

Remember your first Love?

Seeing something beautiful for the first time. Feeling something move you to “happy” tears?
It can be intoxicating.

That memory can make you blush like when you see two young lovers & their wide-eyes holding each other’s gaze. It reminds you when you felt those same things. When Love and life felt less complicated.  Innocence and full of possibilities.  And as alluring as innocence can be to try to recapture in some ways…it can become an addiction.

James Hillman Author of The Soul’s Code, called it an “Addiction” when he wrote about our need to leave innocence behind.  He calling it;
“The addiction to not knowing life’s darkness? Not wanting to know.” In other words, in order for us to come into consciousness, innocence must be broken.

It’s a strong and controversial statement, I know! But it’s helped me a great deal in coming to terms with my own losses & disappointments. We can not un-know our experiences…  returning to a more innocence state.

Fixating on the wrongs that have been done to me or I’ve done to myself … obsessing on how I can wipe the slate clean & return to my former self was exhausting.  It was only in seeing my own heartbreaks as necessary learnings that I could see them becoming the means for a more conscious me… life.

And as it turns out …those experiences I use almost daily to navigate this life, my future.

‘It’s surrendering to what is and not resisting & learning that allowed me to open and start to make the changes I want. After all, I now knew so much more about myself and my world.”

Innocence is great and serves a purpose for a time… but the more deeper understanding of life that I long for can only be known through absorbing my experiences. It’s the intimate touching of all the layers and textures in them that increasing my vocabulary-of-emotions & broadens my engagement in life. Helping me to express fully me & understand the unique experience I can co-creating and not just stand by innocently waiting for it to happen to me.

… “The gift of consciousness is a more mature and nuanced relationship to life.”
Says Topoka Turner and her book Belonging.

XX Kathy

Kathy Camp is cultivating her brand of Ageless Living & Next Chapters as a “midlife” strategist based in Madrid, Spain, where she coaches International Clients and hosts Transformational Retreats for Women in Europe.   “No More Aimless Wandering Toward Happiness! It’s time to get obsessively specific about what you want & start filling your life with it.”