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One of my greatest healing lessons has been that “until I can feel enough without it, the Universe won’t give me what I want.”

It was one of the most healing things I learned, which also took me the longest to understand.–that I wasn’t waiting on my healing, my healing was waiting on me.  And it was waiting on me to feel enough and lovable, without it ever having to come.

Feeling enough didn’t come easy for me.  As a child, I knew I was gay when I was five years old.  And the moment that I realized it, I also realized that in my family, and in my community, gay was not an ok thing to be.   Iwas also bigger in size than most of my peers, had a high voice which led me to often be mistaken for a girl, and wasn’t often the subject of desire for the opposite, nor the same sex.

So I grew up feeling that being enough meant being something different, something more or less than who I currently was.

And that feeling followed me into adulthood (as all of our childhood messages do).

No matter what I looked like, feeling lovable or enough was always “out there somewhere,” tied to losing more weight, doing more sit-ups, looking thinner, more muscular, more model-like, more than, less than whoever Jerome currently was being.  Even when I achieved my dream of being a model, doing magazine cover shoots, andads, I still didn’t feel beautiful or lovable “enough” because I was always comparing myself to the other models, and seeing how far away I was from their level of beauty.

So the idea of loving and accepting myself, just as I was, was foreign, and very hard.  And it became even harder when I became sick.

Experiencing kidney failure, and being on dialysis meant there were scars—lots of them, and a slight deformation to my right arm.  The surgeries and scars were all a necessary process to be able to accurately receive the dialysis treatments, which my body needed to survive at the time.

But to someone who felt that their degree of lovability was solely determined by how they looked externally, this was devastating.

And to top it off, I felt that being sick made me open to rejection from others—it was as if because I was sick, I wasn’t lovable somehow.  “Who would want someone with scars allover their body, on dialysis and hiv+? Who would be attracted to such a person?  Who would love such a person?”

So healing became my goal—not to simply to return my body towholeness and wellness—but to no longer be an object of rejection, to no longerfeel unattractive and unlovable.

But time and time again, I would hear my soul whisper to me that there is such a person who would love me with the scars, with the dialysis, with the diagnosis, with the pain.    And their love is the very healing that I needed.

And that person was me.  It must be me.

We’re often told that healing is the process of releasing disease, or pain, or hurt from our bodies and lives.  But in truth, healing is the process of releasing fear, so that you can return your heart to wholeness, and open yourself up to true love.

And the fear that healing is asking us to release is the fear that we are not enough somehow. The belief that in some way, something about us makes us less than, or unworthy, or incapable of being loved or raised up to the Light.

And to heal, we must release this fear without anything needing to change about us.

For me, the turning point came one day in meditation, when I realized that until I could stand in my now—in my present reality with being ondialysis, with being HIV+, with being scarred, with multiple surgeries leaving my arm slightly deformed, with being 20 pounds over my ideal weight—and feel beautiful, and lovable, and worthy, and like I deserved to stand in the Light with my whole self, then my healing would not come.

Because healing is about accepting your life, embracing yourself, and realizing that neither you, nor your life is ever something to run away from, but always something to lean into.

And I had been trying so hard to run away from my difference, run away from my experience, run away from disease, run away from myself, that I never allowed myself to just let go, and LEAN IN.

To lean into who I was right now, in this very moment—with the scars, the disease, the difference, the shape–and accept it all as the gift of my life.  To accept that no matter what is here in my life, nor how it all looks, it is good, and it is all me,and I can use it all to live well.

And to once and for all lean in to the truth that being well and healthy didn’t make me any more beautiful, lovable, desirable or worthy than being unwell.  Nor did being ill, scarred, and gay make me any less lovable than if I was not.

 

So even though my body was ill, my level of worthiness was not.

It was still at it’s natural level of operation—complete, whole, undeniable, and totally lovable.

So once I had this realization, I began to slowly but surely stand naked in the mirror, taking all my scars with me, and all the negative test results, and began to give myself permission to feel beautiful, and to accept that my body was still a safe and loving place to live.

I began to affirm out loud that I could be on dialysis and be HIV+, and still offer myself unto the world, unto potential lovers, and unto myself as a viable, lovable option worthy of claiming every bit of light that shines of my life, and worthy of getting all the joy out of it I desired–right where I stood, just as I am.

And that was the healing that I had come for.

To stand in my now, with everything that my now currently involved, and realize that I am still enough. And that nothing needed to change about me in order to be so—not mylooks, not my weight, not my diagnosis, not prognosis.   NOTHING.

Nothing ever needed to change about me except how I felt about myself.

And my journey with knowing that I am enough allowed me to stumble onto another discovery—the better and better I began to feel aboutmyself, the better and better my health improved.  And often, without my having to do anything to improve it.

As I began to love myself, accept myself and celebrate myself, it’s as if my body got the message, and began to mirror back to me on the outside how I was feeling on the inside.

My test results got better.  My kidney function improved.  My t-cells counts skyrocketed, my viral loads drastically decreased, and my doctors were baffled.  And it continued to get better and better, until one day, I wasfully well again.

Some even say miraculously so.

And what I now know is that it’s not so much a miracle what happened with my health, as is it is a result of spiritual law.

For there’s a law of spirit, that I understand now so well, that states, “once we feel enough, life must begin to prove it to us.  But never before.” 

Once I began to feel enough—lovable and whole—without my body ever needing to be different, to be healthy, or to be other than how itwas in my present moment, then the Universe could give me what I had been so craving, dreaming, visioning for. But it couldn’t before then.

Because my life, like all of our lives, is only a reflectionof how I feel about myself.  So as long as I stood in the space of my life feeling that who I “wasn’t enough somehow,” then I could not attract the very thing that I thought made me“enough” or “lovable”—the health and beauty I desired.

Everything I ever wanted was waiting on me to finally remember who I really was, and to own it, and to feel it.  I am a soul.  Which makes me ENOUGH.  LOVABLE.  WORTHY.

Just as I am.

Just where I am.

And nothing would ever, could ever change that.

And remember that, beloved, is what true healing is all about.

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