Tender Revolution Ep. 3: Forgetting And Remembering Our Brilliance

Welcome to The Tender Revolution.

I'm Katherine Liggett.

I'm here today on The Tender Revolution,

Forgetting and remembering our brilliance.

As I am emerging now from a year of intense postpartum struggle.

I've often asked myself who I am now,

What my essence really is.

And the day I was gifted with a vision that showed me something about what it means to forget and remember who we are.

And so I felt as I usually do this uneasiness within me,

This pressure that tells me there's something in me that needs to be felt all the way.

And I allow this pressure to call me to my meditation space.

And I sat there.

And in the stillness,

I saw then my four year old self.

And I saw her in all of her fearless enthusiasm for life,

Her playfulness,

Her wisdom,

Her spontaneity.

And then I saw my higher self,

An angelic version of myself.

Draw close to her.

And my higher self was holding an empty lantern.

My child self looked into her eyes with a knowingness far,

Far beyond her years and it was clear,

The two of them were in sacred agreement about what must happen now between them.

With immense love my higher self spoke these words to my child self.

Dear one,

To shield your tender heart from the pain you must face in your life,

I will keep your brilliant light safely here with me.

Years will pass,

And you will grow distant from your brilliance.

You will try hard to live a life that others tell you is noble and good,

A life that is sensible and what they call successful.

You will try hard.

And dear one there will come a time when you will grow weary of this life.

You will look at what surrounds you and notice how far it feels from the deep longing in your heart.

You will hunger for home and not know what that means.

And at that time,

Just when your desperate cries have given way to hopelessness,

I will come to you.

Being fully given into the pain of your darkest hours you will feel me there with you as a lightness,

A grace.

I will come to you and shine this lantern of your essence upon you.

You will see the light,

And you will be lost,

No longer.

As you rise,

You will grow stronger and in time you will be ready to hold the lantern on your own.

One day,

The door will open again and your brilliance will flow back into you fully and completely.

You will be one with the light that is you.

Judgment,

Loneliness,

And competition will dissolve and you will rest in joy.

After speaking these words with great care and gentleness,

My higher self opened the tiny door on the lantern.

And then a glittering golden light,

More beautiful than anything I can put words to,

Emerged from my four year old heart and swirled up into the lantern,

Settling there into a radiant golden orb.

In this lantern was my unique brilliance,

My spirit.

I looked at my four year old face in this vision and saw the light in her eyes grow dim.

Willingly and with great wisdom she had agreed to forget herself.

She had become fully human and had begun the path of remembering.

So this is the human experience we forget,

And we reclaim our brilliance.

We must lose it in order to claim it fully and completely as our own.

For if we had never lost it,

We would be like one who spends her whole life in the most beautiful town in the world,

And yet never knows how breathtaking it truly is.

In reclaiming our spirit we feel an urgency to shine the light of our brilliance,

For we know the pain of a world without it.

With clarity and purpose,

We fully commit to our lives,

And we fully commit to being ourselves.

But here's something very important,

Something I don't often hear in conversations about authenticity and brilliance and truth,

And that is our brilliance is our tenderness.

In other words,

The essence of you.

What makes you absolutely unique is also your greatest vulnerability.

It is you wide open to the world.

It is what your conditioning has taught you that you most need to hide about yourself.

So it's precisely what we most fear exposing about ourselves.

That is our greatest gift and our divinely given recipe for happiness.

That's why it's so often takes hitting rock bottom for us to believe or receive the light of our essence.

We have to be in a space of radical openness.

We must have nothing to prove.

We must release attachment to outcomes,

And we must find ourselves in a place of not knowing what's next and accept that uncertainty.

This is a space of true vulnerability and it's extraordinarily uncomfortable for most of us.

In other words,

We'll only be ready to fully receive our brilliance.

When we're radically open,

Not only to facing our fears but to actually embodying them.

And let me give you now a personal example from my own life.

My ongoing reclamation of my brilliance.

I was raised in a way where I had to do the right thing all the time,

Or face dire consequences.

And so when I was about four years old and my younger brother was born.

That's when I did forget that's when I lost hope that my brilliance would be seen and heard.

So I spent that time,

All up until really this year,

Proving myself to the world by achieving things by being somebody.

And I had a successful academic career.

And that successful academic career became a successful career in the intuitive arts.

And long story short,

I had a baby.

I had deep postpartum depression.

I had chronic acute insomnia that created almost nightly anxiety attacks and sometimes also during the day for almost an entire year.

And I was in survival mode during that time at rock bottom,

Several times a week,

Completely at rock bottom begging God for relief.

And it was in those moments of complete letting go into the uncertainty of if it would ever get better.

That I began to receive grace that I began to hear the whisperings that my heart needed to be heard.

And so I did I sat with my heart.

The work of Tara Brock and Sarah blonde in were immense helps along this path of simply sitting with my heart and feeling what was there.

Doing nothing and simply being,

Which was the greatest fear of my life to that date.

Simply being risking being nobody,

Or so the ego would say.

And the more I leaned into feeling exactly what was in my heart and sitting with it and breathing with it.

The more grace I felt,

And day by day,

Month by month,

I began to remember and feel to an even more beautiful extent.

The true love and joy.

That is me.

That's at the heart of us all.

I'd love now to guide you in an exploration of forgetting and remembering of your own.

So now,

Make yourself very very comfortable,

Wherever you are either sitting or lying down.

And breathing,

Noticing where your breath enters and exits your body.

A feeling of breathing right here.

Allow the exhales to bring you deeper into stillness,

And your body into heaviness,

Sinking into the surface that supports you here,

And the events of the day so far to melt down,

Down,

Down.

And finally,

As you're here in this present moment,

Simply get curious and ask yourself,

Ask your inner knowing the question,

Is it now in forgetting or in remembering?

And your body,

Your emotions will give you the clue to where you're at in that process.

When we forget,

We're stuck in the mind.

In other words,

In evaluating and looking for what's wrong,

And feeling dull,

Stuck,

Depressed,

Or angry or anxious.

These are the feelings of forgetting.

And on the other hand,

The feelings of remembering are joy,

Peace,

A sense of alignment with who you are,

And the surroundings in your life.

True happiness.

So simply get curious now about where are you on that spectrum of forgetting and remembering right now.

You might forget and remember in the same minute.

Certainly many times a day.

Where are you right now?

Breathing now and accepting that that's exactly where you need to be right now.

Now another question for your inner knowing.

Really activating your intuition your imagination,

Ask yourself,

How old was I when I gave up my brilliance.

When I gave over to my higher self,

My unique spirit for safekeeping.

How old were you?

And now allow the wings of your imagination to take you to encounter yourself at that age,

Simply see yourself,

Your child self at that time across from you and notice how their brilliance manifests.

This is before they have given it up to be forgotten.

Notice them in their brilliance.

In their spirit.

This might be very very young for you.

And if you don't remember yourself or in your childhood which is common,

Simply allow your imagination to vividly create a version of the child you the brilliant you.

So name in your mind words that describe your unique brilliance.

Perhaps a playfulness or a mischievousness,

A love,

A joy,

An adventurous nature,

Whatever you notice,

Simply name it.

Feeling in your heart.

No matter where you are on the spectrum of forgetting and remembering that this is still very available to you.

This brilliance,

This aliveness.

Go ahead and please one or both hands on your heart space right now.

Start to breathe into your heart and visualize a brilliant glittering golden light emanating from your center.

This is your brilliance.

Breathe and integrate it into every cell of your body.

And say these words to your precious heart.

I commit to remembering the fullness of who I am.

I commit to reclaiming my unique brilliance.

I commit to giving myself the time and the stillness to reclaim my brilliance.

I really feel what needs to be felt to open wide and fearlessly embody what is truly mine to embody.

I commit to myself.

Taking deep breaths now,

Breathing into your heart space,

Removing hands if they're there if you like,

Start to bring yourself back.

Knowing that you have set a powerful intention from the depths of your heart to reclaim what is truly yours,

What is only yours.

And the more you live in alignment with this brilliance,

Inspired by the wholeness of your child self before the great forgetting,

The more you'll experience joy,

And the more your path will be very clear for you.

For when we are trying hard and living a life that isn't ours to live,

That isn't a product of our brilliance.

We are judgmental and competitive.

And it seems like a dog eat dog world,

Like a crowded marketplace in which we're fighting for survival in our career,

In our family,

And everything.

We feel great stress.

So my hope for you is that the more and more you remember,

The more you see great ease in your life.

Great love and great joy.

Again,

Layer by layer,

Moment by moment,

Knowing that you will forget again.

And remember again,

Sometimes many times in the same day,

And that this is the music of being a human being.

We close,

And we open.

That's how the music happens.

So I wish you all great remembering and great acceptance of yourself in times where you forget.

Thank you for taking time for your soul here in the tender revolution.