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OLD CELTIC PATHS

Updated: Jan 21, 2023

When I was a child, time was slow, on afternoons spent in the sun in the company of my dog, in a world between worlds, following the ants' trail and creating theater plays. In those moments, time was suspended and everything was exactly as it should be.


As I grew older the rush that I thought was mine to achieve goals and objectives began. Except for the fact that I wanted to be a mother, many of my decisions were made unconsciously, based on following a kind of path on how I was supposed to live, and I adapted to fit in and be accepted in a world that was strange but beautiful to me.


After I had achieved everything I thought I was supposed to in order to feel complete, the questions came back: Wasn't this it after all? What is living then? What is still missing? And this feeling of lack translated into an incessant search for answers that revolutionized my internal world. I deepened my studies following the fascination - that will never leave me - for the human mind and spirituality, which led me to disentangle obsolete and asphyxiating structures. I changed my profession, my lifestyle, and created projects in the area of personal development; I met incredible places and people, in and with whom I experienced moments of deep sharing, connection, and magic, and little by little meaning began to emerge in my life; notwithstanding the urgency to get somewhere, and that incessant search to penetrate the core, the bones, and never stop, it was still there.


Where did this restlessness come from, this lack, this deep need? This time I hadn't achieved everything yet? How was it possible? Until life took me again through such a challenging and painful series of events that I thought about giving up or maybe starting all over again or... stop trying anything. Just being, Being, standing there cradling the idea and waiting for it to renew itself. This is what absurd pain does to you, there comes a point where you surrender, the completely malnourished body starts to die, the mind starts to break down and: that's when the door opens.









All that was left for me to do was to dive into the depths of the river... in that dive I began to get a few glimpses of what I felt on those magical afternoons when I was a child; there was no hurry, there was nothing to reach, no effort was needed.


Time slowed down and in this calmness I started to get in touch with parts of myself that I didn't know, observing that my eyes and my heart had been closed by a shadowy hand, there I started to understand that parts of my life had been spent in a paralyzing automatism, that I had lost my instincts and natural cycles, subordinated to an ideal that someone had built for me based on my condition as a woman.




Centuries of repression in a patriarchal society that tried to train us and took away our inner strength. Removed, silenced, locked up in houses, convents, and insane asylums by the embarrassment caused by our hysterical possessions. Punished, after all, for this beauty of feeling intensely and saying the truths in an extravagant way.


And in this training we have become blind, empty, malnourished, with collapsed inner alarm systems, and in these conditions the naive psyche refuses inner knowledge, and, like a meek and inexperienced lamb we don't know how to recognize the predators trafficking in illusions and psychic ecstasies, and in this we are hunted in the blink of an eye.


Between the predator and the prey there is a psychic dance through the gaze, a prey is easily identifiable by this uninhibited orbiting, by the movements and the tremor that spreads in his body, taken by the identification with this encounter experienced at the surface of the skin. The prey puts itself in a position of submission before the predator and chooses its own destiny. There are no victims.


We know, however, that it is always possible to recover our instincts, that indomitable will that inhabits us never dies; to confirm this we need only look at all the women who have survived despite all the degeneration and atrophy of their deepest instincts. To see them thus seemingly expired and as if by magic, they continued to heal and to be the mothers of the world.


In this deep dive, time continued to slow down and more and more I made room to sit beside my innerchild on effortless sunny afternoons. Discovering the beauty and strength that exists in solitude and stillness, patiently piecing together my core, darning the threads and grooming the skin, I was slowly coming home; reclaiming a place and a dignity that I had long forgotten.

Sofia Pérez

Therapist, Author, Teacher


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