Vol.16

Beauty as the thread that connects us
For those of you who don't already know, almost two weeks ago now, I was tending to my garden. One minute I was trimming plants and cleaning up some palm fronds on my front lawn, and the next minute I had slipped on said fronds and landed on an open armpit. As you may have seen from my Instagram stories, I am in a sling as a result of tearing off the outer corner bone of my shoulder. And so, for the time being, I am one-armed, my arm tucked into a sling because the shoulder area I've broken is not a part of the body that you can plaster. So my only options were to have surgery to have it stapled back or to keep my arm still for weeks so that it mends itself.
The first few days of this caused a massive shift in myself and my family. Being incapacitated, for the most part, has forced me to ask for help and has also resulted in my young family to take on some responsibility. I have been helping as best I can and doing my own work here and there (typing on my phone and recording videos isn't too bad), but the balance within our home has shifted considerably. Whereas before, I took on a lot of the responsibility, it is my husband who has had to take over. He is now working from home and therefore doing school drop off and caring for three young girls, where I cannot. He learned quite early on (and very quickly) how full on it is to work full time, take care of 3 girls, one of which is a rather energetic and boisterous 3-year-old, cook food and do the grocery shopping, while also trying to make sure that there are clean undies and clothes for everyone. Oh! And remembering, in between all that, to feed and give fresh water to a little sausage dog. To say he felt overwhelmed is perhaps an understatement.
This shift in dynamics, however, has worked in our favour, as it's brought us closer together. We have an average healthy marriage: we're still in love, we don't fight (we have disagreements), but this experience has us empathising with one another and with it comes a deeper respect for our roles as parents, as guardians, as working adults, as lovers and friends. I see him doing all these things from where I am, and I know how hard it is – I've been where he is now, and I see the struggle but also the dedication, the commitment, the way he's just taken this on. And he, in turn, appreciates all the roles that I had taken on and that now he's had to experience firsthand because, with my arm in a sling, not allowed to move it in any way, there isn't much I can help with (my right arm is literally strapped to my body).
The balance shifted quickly since I got injured. And the duties have tipped to one side. My husband, in fact, has been helping me pack orders from sales I've made on my website. This was a huge test of trust: allowing someone else to put together a Ritual Kit while I am standing there, ensuring for the first few that he was doing it all correctly and that nothing was missing. It takes patience. And I would say we passed the test. In fact, he expressed to me how he enjoyed seeing what I did: that it was beautiful to put together these products that help people improve their relationships with themselves in some way. And it solidified his desire to work for me full time eventually when we move, when we change homes, scenery, and location.
So, although being in a sling is a very inconvenient situation, I would say that our relationship and appreciation for each other has grown stronger. I see it in the little glances we give each other every few times throughout the day when we just look at each other and smile out of understanding to relieve the pressure of it all. It reminds me that we both get it, that we both respect each other and value one another.
As for my experience of my injury, it has been nice to just be still. I am usually the one doing, and I enjoy getting things done (I am a Manifestor in HD, so my energy is go go a lot of the time). In between these moments of ensuring everything is taken care of, I have had a lot of time to pause and observe. I cannot do as much, and so most days, I am sitting, thinking, and practising presence. And this has been a personal challenge in many ways because I've had to alter the way I tend to myself to remind my body that I am not in a state of anxiety or PTSD. This injury has brought me back to this place as a result of my past.
All the modalities that I share and that I express through the lens of The Ritual and this branch of Behind the Veil are the things that have helped me get to where I am in my life in some way, shape, or form. And I've been having to really evaluate how I put them into practice now that life has shifted for what may be a good few months of healing. Practising presence, meditation, and ritual are not the only things that have helped me get to where I am, but they are the focus that keep me there, that help me to sustain it. So, when you can't put on your own undies or do basic things like wash your own hair (I can't move my arm at all so it's next to impossible to even get my hand under my arm to clean it because that moves your shoulder), or you can only wear like three things that you own because they have an elastic band off shoulder to accommodate the sling, it almost makes me feel like I am removed from myself. Add to that, that I am an extremely aesthetic person, and I like to create beauty and see beauty in everything (even in a traumatic experience), and life (literally) begins to look different. I cannot see things the way I would like, and I've felt in many ways like an outsider. I sit here on my couch, watching everything move around me. But I am left waiting, waiting to be taken care of, to have people help me do these basic things. And I've never been taken care of before. Even when I went through my kidney experience, I was pretty much doing everything for myself as I genuinely didn't have people coming to help me. It was the same when I had my children: there was no family to come and help or cook meals or support.
So, to go from caring for myself and everything around me to being taken care of has been a shift, a learning curve, and it's resulted in big realisations of how I want my life to shift. In many ways, it's put things into perspective. Everything that was brushed under the rug or overlooked because I was always onto the next and pushing forward has come forward, and I am evaluating it from a different vantage point. When you want things to smell a certain way and to look a certain way and to feel a certain way, but the experience of creating it is out of your control, there is no choice but to re-evaluate who you are and how you do things for the time being or for this phase in life.
In my day to day, I would always ensure that I took care of my body. Knowing that my body is a temple, regardless of the adversities that have happened to it, I always took moments to honour and cherish it and remind it how beautiful and exquisite it was. This is one of the reasons I created the Venus Body Oil because oiling my body is a way for me to caress, love, cherish, and honour myself regardless of what my mind is trying to tell me is wrong with me, regardless of what society tries to tell me about how I should look, regardless of how it's been mistreated or abused. And when you can't do those things that have allowed you to feel cherished and cared for, the brain quickly starts to unravel. I can't take a bath (in order to get into a bath, you must be able to get out of the bath!), I can't do these things that I've relied so heavily on, and so the pieces of you that you pulled together to make you who you are begin to come apart, and you're left with the bare bones.
For those of you who did my Awaken by the Ritual Course, you will know that I have spoken about this idea of being reduced to the bare bones: where you're left with nothing, everything is stripped away, and it is from this point that you evaluate yourself, your life, who you are: from the core, from the very foundations of your bones. It is from this point that I've had to think about how I'm going to pull myself together. What parts of me am I going to be able to pull in so that I feel safe and don't fall into that trap that I often fall into, anxiety, or worry, or fear.
The anxiety that I have felt since the experience is real and has manifested not only as a result of the things that I cannot do or the fact that I must rely on others to do things for me but also the actual wearing of this very constricting sling. It may sound like first world problems, but the sling that my arm is wrapped in is not made of natural fibres, and so I can feel it rub against my sensitive skin, and I have all these little dots and marks that are itching me, making me hot and anxious (in this terrible humidity we've been experiencing here on the East Coast of Australia) and reminding me of where I am, of what I cannot do – reminding me to remain still.
And so, most days I am feeling sweaty and yuck and gross and I hurt all over, and I feel the impending panic attacks where I don't feel safe and all over the place. And it's been challenging to find comfort, to find ways to be comfortable and remain comfortable. I've had to change a lot of my ways to accommodate this crutch. For instance, I must sleep elevated with all these pillows behind me, and I can't move because all these pillows are underneath my shoulders and they are supporting it so that it doesn't roll back because otherwise this bone must be stapled back and that means surgery, which in turn means more healing time. This experience has me feeling suffocated from the beginning when I first had to get it checked out and had to have an MRI in which I felt even more constricted in such a narrow and uncomfortable space. And all I could do was breathe, trying not to feel like I was being suffocated and heating up and panicked and on the verge of hyperventilating because I was so triggered.
Both while I was at the hospital having my MRI and now that I am home, I remind myself to take deep breaths and to use my resources, the tools that I have cultivated, to help me feel safe and calm. This unintentional pause, glitch, bump in the road has enabled me to take the time and evaluate where I'm going in my life, as it has brought up a lot of things that I didn't know were there – I am forced to see the skeletons in my closet, so to speak.
One of the areas in which I have been pondering is the meaning of success. I often wonder about this – the thought slips in and out of my mind as I am doing things, preparing a workshop or planning a product or creating a meal for my family. But now that I have been forced to be still, my mind has gone away with the thought, making me wonder about it so strongly and my idea of it, my relationship to it, the meaning of it.
A question I've kept pondering is why have I never had any real success in my life? I have achieved things, but it's never got to the point where it's matched financially in the way I imagine it to be, like buying a new car or going on holiday after sales of a product. Rather, everything has been very difficult to achieve, and it's made me question whether I am successful or not.
I am going to be really honest, and I might regret this in the future but maybe a year and half ago I got featured in Forbes Magazine, and there were actually two write-ups: one about me and one about the Ritual Kits and my products and they came out within six weeks of each other. But at the time when that happened, my bank account didn't even cover the amount of expenses that I had to pay. I am entirely self-funded. I have done everything with the cash that I have got, and if I don't have the cash then I find ways to make the cash. I don't have any funding either, I never have. And all my savings had gone to pay for stock at the time. This has been the most ironic thing that I think I have ever experienced. And this experience pretty much sums up everything that I have achieved in my life. Even in the beginning, I would work for magazines and make cocktails, and at one point, I even managed one of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants… doing things that people would view as being on a grand scale and then at the same time having to pull together cents to buy things. Going even farther back, my grandfather was and is a rather wealthy self-made man, who I would spend my weekends with sailing around on his sailing yacht from island to island along the east coast of Australia while when with my mom, I would feed me tin soup over rice and I was quite malnourished, to say the least. So there has always been this incredible duality and sitting here, observing it, noticing it, facing it... but I am over it.
This experience of not being able to do the things that make me feel good has made me really evaluate what happiness is. At this moment, happiness is my husband being swamped in a filthy, dirty kitchen with breakfast plates everywhere trying to cook dinner and a three-year-old running around who wet her pants, screaming and refusing to take them off while the other two are playing their violins like they're in a rock band together and although it's loud and noisy and out of control, my husband smiles at me, and I get to enjoy two seconds of happiness, its in honest, raw simplicity. That's happiness, being able to share what I am going through in my life and knowing that someone, even if it's just one of you, is reading it and discovering that it resonates and supports you in some way. Happiness is creating, it's making art. And ultimately, happiness is helping me refine who I am and what I'm putting out in the world and, therefore what I do even more.
I had a session with one of the most amazing medicine men (this is what I will call him since I don't think calling him a psychic does his work justice – if you want to know more, just message me, and I'll send you his info) in which he gave me some huge truth bombs. Part of my practice now is recognising that I am success. I've always believed in my capabilities and the things that I can do, and what I can achieve in this life. I've never put limits on myself creatively or artistically. But mentally, I've allowed myself to stay in that victim mindset. And so, I have come to a point where I tell myself that my past is no more, it does not exist and that I am success.
And I realise that success can be a bit of a trigger word for people. Success doesn't mean that you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Rather success means that you're happy and you have all the resources that you need to stay happy, right? And sure, the process of asking ourselves what makes us happy and having a ready answer can feel daunting. Truthfully the only reason I know I have answers to share with you all is because it has been what I've been thinking about over the last week. And while I might not be able to do rituals and ceremonies or practice self-care in the way that I would like, in these Venusian ways, I've been instead leaning much more into the written word. I've also realised that a part of me wants to be more low maintenance in a way that recognises that things don't always have to look a certain way. Even so far as the way that I look. I have had the same hair for ten years, and I am sick of it. Of course, I get compliments but as I approach my 39th year, I am wanting to lean into the simplicity that makes me feel beautiful, to feel more feminine in the way that I dress, adding more colour, perhaps (and by colour, I mean gold jewellery and touches of white – I don't think we're ready for the full Valentino pink!). But overall, I would say that I am re-evaluating what I luxuriate in.
At this moment it might look like: buying myself new undies since while I cannot wear bras, I can wear underwear; I can wash my face and I've even been putting on some gorgeous red lipstick because I can do that; I got some new shampoo and conditioner, and while my eldest daughter and husband are the ones helping me to wash my hair, I can lean into the sensual experience of the beautiful ocean scent and the almost salty texture of the shampoo and the delicious rose scent of my conditioner. And these new earrings that I bought myself… These are the little things that I can lean into and simplify and get used to and choose to build upon. I want things to taste nice, and I don't want to waste my time with people with which there are red flags. It has been a time to shed, to pare it back even further.
This whole journey began to encourage women to interact with the complexities of their own divine feminine. Personally, I always found it difficult to subscribe to the versions of the feminine that were around me. We are all unique, and we do things that serve ourselves rather than the types of people we choose to hang out with.
Passion, beauty and things that we find luxurious all come from understanding ourselves at our worst points, at our low points, and then choosing how we pull ourselves back together. We are collectively coming together because we are choosing to see through the eyes of beauty. I think that is the common thread that we all have here. It's not meditation, it's not mindfulness, it's not witchcraft or Wicca and magic. It's the idea that we see and identify the beauty in each other. I have had people message me lately telling me how much they find my packaging and product beautiful and how the whole process of opening it and moving through it is pleasing and feels good. I am elated by messages like this because this is the thread that ties us together: we allow the things that ignite us, the things that we thought were out of reach once upon a time; we do not allow ourselves to stay static, but explore different ways that we can use our power and our uniqueness in the world. We're finding ways to discover new possibilities so that we can live a happy, fulfilled life and have the courage to step forward and practise them without feeling like we're being held back. Because let's be honest, we can feel lost in the world when we're trying to bring forward something like success or abundance. And it's with grace, humility, and vulnerability that we can reprogram ourselves to use our intuition and the belief we have it within ourselves to be successful.
So, in short, the things that allow us to honour the senses in our physical, materialistic world (and by materialistic, I mean dense matter objects and things), they exist. If a plant makes you feel there's a little slice of luxury in the corner of that room where that plant resides or if wearing some rose body lotion on your body or for the men here, if you feel that having a collection of instruments or a specific type of art or connecting with the coldness of metal or something, makes you feel that you are regal and you are royal and that there are these things within you that make you feel powerful, then connect with that. In doing this, in choosing to value and honour your beauty and simplicity of it, you are not defined by class or any of these things. But rather, you are beautiful and magnificent, and that is your greatest success. The past no longer exists because you're choosing to stay in this moment and take one step forward with every piece of the bridge before you, choosing to live awakened and heart centred and that makes you come alive – because the things we find beautiful have the power to do that. That is why we're here: to support each other, to be uplifted in sharing, to feel supported through the power of words, and to be on this path together of self-discovery and healing because we're all on our own journey and if we can come together with one single thread or many threads and we know that we're not alone. We are never alone.
Amoureuse,
Brooke x
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