Self Care, Self Discovery, Self Improvement, Self Love, Wellness

The Importance of Communities and Self-Awareness

The importance of communities and self-awareness begins here.

Hi beautiful, I’m Lumalia, beauty hunter and plot twist alchemist here creating portals of discovery and connection for humans like you desiring to live a life deeply in tune with the magic of being human, you know like loving your body, emotions, existence, desires and rolling with life instead of feeling ike you’re always wrestling life. The fight is over and the bliss begins here.

I spent a lot of my life feeling like I had to suffer to belong, fight to fix things that felt broken, but all along life was leading me to remember and tap into her magic. (More on that in my memoir Blooming Upside Down)And that’s what I do inside my women’s retreats, all that I share here on the wellness blog.

Chocolate-covered dripping fingers licked before I gripped the steering wheel again. He’d just accidentally grabbed my thigh with his and was scrubbing off the chocolate stain with a wet wipe.

“What song are you playing for your flash mob?” My husband asked me as we drove out to the coast on our anniversary staycation.

“Unwritten by Natasha”

“Whklasdf!?” He mashed his words together in a wobbly mouth full of chocolate banana bread.

Giggling, I replied, “Oh my god, I love when your feral little boy comes out.”

“What?”

“You talking with your mouth full, it’s cute.”

“What do you mean I was mimicking you talking with your mouth and didn’t understand a thing?” He replied smiling.

Mirrors. It’s why relationships are so complex. They show you the deepest things you are too afraid to see yourself. They reflect what you swore wasn’t true.

The mind can lie to us to survive.
The heart can be swayed to stay connected.
However, the body does not lie, and rarely do relationships fail to reflect a truth.

It hit me then that this is why we struggle so much in our marriage. I do something, he responds, I react, and we escalate.

Yet I know, I know the power of a pause. To become an observer, non-judgmental, and to stay in states of beauty and wonder are the keys to disrupting the patterns of the mind, including those of conflict and stress.

But for the past few years, I’d stopped doing that and I’d also been out of communities

I’d slipped deep into a pattern of reacting to him reacting to me.

Creating an exhausting loop.

And I knew I would have to break it.

But I fought it for so long because, for once in my whole life, I DID NOT WANT TO BE THE CYCLE BREAKER!

I already had in my family abuse and volatility.

I had already been a small, quiet, obedient wife.

I had already been sexually oppressed as a female.

I had already been disconnected from my body and the magic of the earth.

FOR ONCE, I wanted someone else to do the “work.”

So I stayed in the cycle, just hoping he would change.

Yet deep down I longed for a community of others doing this with me, and all the communities I’d been in or where a part of weren’t in this circuit either.

Spoiler alert, he did eventually. It took me blowing up for him to listen AND for me to communicate this was a non-negotiable for me in my life, and I need a partner willing to look at the hard things, put ourselves in places to learn from others, and be in a mindset of growth.

“I’m sorry I made you get to a point where you had to get loud to be heard, that’s a shitty thing men do to women.”

Yet something needed to be done to break this cycle, and we did. I was astounded just list weekend I heard him saying “there’s room for growth here.” When historically, he’s been the man of “good enough.” Now, we hold both together.

But I don’t want to keep living in this pattern of shoving others into the life I know is so deeply possible.

Yet I don’t just want to talk about what’s wrong in our lives anymore.

I want to get to the roots.

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Because when we understand why we have so much to complain about, why we are so tired all the time, why we say we want to do something and don’t actually do it, or why we keep in a cycle we don’t want to be in we actually gain the power to choose and co-create something differently.

But it takes awareness first.

Then, the awareness can bring us to ask where this came from, and here’s the best part: we don’t always need to know the details; our bodies do, and that’s fine.

But most importantly, we repeat what we do not witness.
My marriage, my relationship, has been a literal reflection of this.

But now I finally see it clearly, and it has allowed me to take supportive action. It has allowed me to embody the lesson and then watch as the world around me effortlessly changes, as I model for my environment a new way of being.

No fighting

No yelling

No wrestling to meet your needs.

It all comes with ease when you step into a new environment, yourself, and a new way of being held not by your two hands alone but by a community that you get to recalibrate yourself to. I just did this for myself knowing I have to be supported to grow and I know this for all of us.

This IS the secret to a beautiful life: to put yourself in the room with people who are living the beautiful life you desire and start making decisions and acting on them as if you already are the answers to your prayers.

It’s that simple. Yet that’s difficult for us to remember.

We want to watch it happen, then live it.

But as I told my daughter, weeping in front of me again, after trying something new and not “getting it the VERY first time.” (a lesson she’s been learning her whole 11-year-old life) I asked her, “How do we get better at something?”

Tears dripping down her cheeks, she replied, “We practice.” (she knows just forgot and needed me to reminder her.)

Sometimes we want something so badly that we quit before we even try. We let the road getting there mean something about us before we even give ourselves a chance to walk it.

But when we put ourselves with people who have walked it, who can say KEEP GOING, IT’S WORTH IT! It gets a lot easier.

This is why I’m here. This is why I share everything I do and why we’re just getting started.

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THEN get your spot, in Blooming Caverns , our next gathering in community to practice new ways of being using the SIREN as our “new environment.”

Find Your Self Love Muse

Want to go explore more of your self-awareness, but make it fun? Check out our Self Love Quiz, where you can discover a self love muse archetype to dive into an fun self love exploration!

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About the Author

Hey, I’m Lumalia, photographer, author, certified somatic movement yoga teacher, and the main voice behind Celebrate Again. I call myself a connection architect because I have a deep passion for guiding us all to fall back in love with life through states of beauty, but many of us are far from feeling at home in our own bodies, so we seek to find safety in others.

Yikes, that’s scary, I know; I did that for three decades, too, until I returned home to myself.

I’m so excited to share with you all I’ve learned and this beautiful journey back home to what makes you absolutely stunning just because you are alive today.