My Soul Can No Longer Be Contained.
We’re shots of universe poured into unique skin-suits.
We’ve come here to vibrantly live, experience and explore the edges of our individual yet collective existence. We didn’t come here to be safe, coddled, or sedate. We came here to brilliantly alchemize our unique interpretation of this journey. Innately resplendent light contained in what appears to be neat, separate boxes where we spend our lifetime, sometimes feeling small, neat and safe.
Are we looking to prolong a benign, sedate existence? A boring ho-hum redundant seemingly endless progression of days where we stay confined to that small, boring space? What if we embrace life from a decimate the box mentality? What if we creatively approach every situation, looking for ways to set our spirits soaring by investigating the infinite possibilities of who we really are?
Why wake up each morning to the feeling of dread and the thought of oh, this again?
What if there’s more? What if we’re selling ourselves short by conforming to these societal demands and constraints? What if we own our choices and responsibility for the rising darkness that threatens to obliterate our hope? What if we acknowledge and free our power, releasing our pent-up passion, and soar with unlimited potential and possibility?
The illusion of safety is overrated.
We’ve forgotten what it feels like to get out of our own way, allowing the Divine/Universe to flow through us unrestricted. Dancing uninhibitedly, face turned up to the moon, embracing the magic of the cosmos.
But, what would people think?
For most of my life, I tried to neatly fold myself into the tiny box I was assigned. I gave it my best shot for decades, all the while knowing it was wrong. It felt wrong. It made me sick. I always had an undercurrent of resentment and desperation. I felt as though I was suffocating in a prison of my own making.
After the death of my best friend and aunt, I sampled an aperitif of pure authenticity. Just enough to know what was possible, but guilt sucked me back into societal expectations and my soul began to die.
I slipped into the abyss for two years with suicidal ideation and depression, in and out of psychiatric hospitals, surviving against all my efforts and left confused after two attempts to end the small, safe, but horrible existence. I couldn’t assimilate again, I could not don those heavy, obstructive facades.
I couldn’t do it.
I would have preferred dying.
My soul could no longer be contained.
It was screaming for expression.
The last doctor, at the very last hospital of my two-year bid in hell, planted a seed that took six months to root. Tilting her head to the side, she said, “Shanti, you have the most powerful mind, you have literally created your hell on earth.” It took almost six months for me to fully grasp that if I had indeed manifested hell, I could then manifest heaven.
Off I went to Puerto Rico, accepting my dad’s invitation to take the apartment over his house and to figure things out. 15 months later, on 11/8/17, after Hurricane Maria’s devastation, I found myself on a plane back to the States, sans medications, panic attacks and depression, six classes away from my bachelor’s in psychology (concentration in children and adolescents) and having authored two books.
I became the (s)hero I had always been waiting for.
I saved and freed myself from the prison of my own creation.
My soul could no longer be contained.
Can yours?
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Shanti Shaharazade is a senior in college on the cusp of earning her Bachelors in Psychology with a concentration in children and adolescents, which perfectly places her directly in line with being an ambassador for at-risk teenagers. She is a mother of three, noni of five grandpeeps, and has overcome many obstacles and transcended many contractions birthing higher expressions of herself necessary to be of the greatest service. She is not just a survivor of sexual traumas, but also lived as a homeless teenager on the streets of NYC, becoming a battered wife, single mother, enraged woman, to surviving two suicide attempts, learning how to live again with constant and profound gratitude in order to contribute to the world in the way only she can now, as an empowered goddess.
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