2021 What’s Love Got To Do With It Arts Showcase Exhibit

SHE (A Twin Flame Journey Memoir)
by Kim Carlson
She was born into terror. She was the embodiment of pure, divine love. All around her, in her love, she could not remember life without terror. In many ways, terror and pain had been the only ones there for her her entire life. So she, as love, had gotten to know terror and pain better than she knew herself as the love that she really was. They were like twins. Formed and created within the same womb. Nourished and deprived by the same mutual source. When love is pain’s twin, who else is there to learn from, depend upon, and turn to when things get difficult? They were like two sides of the same coin – forged in duality. So love decided to be friends with terror and pain…as love. Love decided to get to know terror and pain better than she knew herself. And by doing so she – love – lost herself completely into her other half – pain – forgetting who or what love really was. Love took on all the aspects of pain and terror until they completely destroyed her as love. Then, as love often does, she woke up and remembered who she truly was. The problem with waking up to the love that you are is that the terror and pain you allowed into your world have overtaken all of the faces, dimensions, aspects, and realities of your life. So much so that you don’t remember what love – yourself – even looks or feels like any longer. This is the path that is laid out when you decide to lose yourself to your other half – your twin.
The most challenging part of awakening is the realization of how much of yourself you have given away to pain and the shame that it brings to the surface through the betrayal of your authentic self. The hardest part of the path is finding, claiming, re-integrating, and re- empowering the love you lost, gave away, disconnected from, and put to sleep. Indeed, the awakening is the hardest part…because previously, pain, and terror actually gave you the comfort and peace you were seeking and love, or being yourself, was perceived as unsafe, lost, even irretrievable. And what’s worse, you taught yourself, as love, through pain and suffering, that you were no longer worthy or deserving of the love that you actually are.
So what could love do in this case? She had no choice but to start loving all the pain, suffering, terror, and fear that love saw in her world. And slowly, ever so slowly, slowly, slowly slowly, she – as love – began to transform her twin – pain and terror. She loved it within and without herself until all that remained was the love she had always been. Some days, the only way love could love herself was by creating pain and fear for herself. But she, as love, began to allow her own love to start healing herself by simply being herself. More and more, as love gave herself the love she had before been giving away to pain and terror, the less appealing pain seemed and the less prominently he showed up in her world. Neglect and abuse can be described as an extreme lack of pure loving attention. Some of the most profound neglect love had experienced was the lack of loving attention she gave to herself. Once love re-awakened her heart to the neglect she had experienced by placing her full attention on herself love then realized how very worthy she was of her own healing love. At that point, love’s love for herself grew to the size of overtaking and over-loving the pain and terror in her world. This began to change the people she met and invited into her life. This led to love showing up in her own life in a more authentic manner and through all of her thoughts and deeds.
For the first time in love’s life, terror and pain started to become something uncomfortable, unsafe, and less familiar. And gradually, love began, more and more, to turn away from pain… from her twin…because he could no longer love love in the same way that love had been loving herself in love’s brave new world. Love ultimately decided that if pain could not love her back in the same way that love had started to unconditionally love herself, then love would be better off on her own. But still, since love and pain are twins…two halves of the same whole…each one being the exact energetic imprint of the other in polarity…she, love, missed pain terribly. But here we see the paradox of a life lived within duality…love thinking she has to miss or feel ‘without’ in pain’s absence. For truly, he is always there for her if she ever wants to return to him…with open arms. This is where faith and hope enter, for the first time, into love’s world. For love has to maintain and truly believe in the power pain has within himself to change, transform, and love himself into the love that he actually IS. Because, after all, if love could do it, so could pain. They are the same, unable to be separated but for the moment utterly incompatible. How could love have ever known who she was without pain and suffering. And likewise, how could pain ever come to know who HE actually is without ever having gotten to know love for love’s sake. Each of them dependent upon the other for their actualization.
So love became pain’s greatest liberator and pain became love’s. Not through annihilation or punishment but by loving each other so unconditionally in their most authentic way that each one had no other choice but to come into alignment with their true selves. Both having made the ultimate sacrifice – to have lost themselves completely in the other in order to ensure each of them could never be the same again. But what love and pain would know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is who and what their twin’s manifestation looks and feels like whenever they encounter it. And each of them, love and pain, will always be awaiting their counterpart’s return home into the love they are. For home to them resides within the other. That knowing of home. This is the gift of the path of Twin Flames. To both embody unconditional love and also recognize it in their world. And to invite the other to come home. Forever….