Mane attraction

I recently developed a new passion. I've been hesitant to mention it before and have actually kept it all under wraps for a while but my obsession is growing by the day and its getting to the point where I feel I have to say something or I'll just explode! It's not really a new passion, just an old one infused with a new burst of energy and information and a whole new world of people who just like me are discovering a part of themselves that has been cherished and abused and despised and tortured. Manipulated and hated. Teased and preened and proudly flounced and shown off... Its amazing the things we do to our hair and it still faithfully just keeps growing back. Yes. I'm crazy about my hair.

I recently stumbled upon this whole hair revolution quite by accident. I have always been a rather hands on do it yourself type of person when it came to my hair. I love to do my own hair and so after I got into the whole relaxer phase and had to get my hair done at the salon every two weeks it used to bother me. So much that one time I tried to wash my own hair at home, for old time's sake, I ended up with a tangled mess that I eventually had to cut-off. That was the first time I went natural. After shedding a few tears at the hair loss I embraced it. Finally, hair I could wash again.

I managed to put up with it for a while until it grew quite a bit and became rather unmanageable, I found myself back at this lovely new hairdressers getting my hair relaxed again. She worked wonders and my hair was lovely all curly and bouncy and shiny, I played with it, coloured it and pretty much enjoyed the hell out of it, but my hands itched to get in on the action and I would spend a lot of the time braiding my hair just so I could have a part of the fun. After having my hair in braids for several months in a row I took my hair out and realised I had a sizeable amount of hair underneath after some contemplation, out came the scissors and I was free again. I was determined to stay natural this time around and decided to try locing it when it got too long to manage. Two years later, I still can't get myself to do it. Just as well because after a visit to a salon where I had to have my hair teased and pulled and fried by a hairdresser who had no idea what do with it and kept asking me every few minutes why I just couldn't get my hair relaxed, I realised that I love my hair just as it is. It was almost an epiphany. I love my hair.

Then one day while trawling the web looking for styling ideas for my hair I came across Long Hair Care Forums and it was like finding my long lost family. This site led me to tons of other hair care sites, hair inspirations. Who'd have thunk it? People who are just as obsessed about hair (many of them much more) than I am. I couldn't believe it. Now, several months, and tons of information later. Here I am... so madly in love with this stuff that grows on my head. And I can feel it loving me right back too. It's healthier and more manageable than it has ever been and I know that things will only keep getting better and better.

I was surprised to discover that this new love for our hair is being viewed as a sort of revolution. Many of the 'natural' hair sites tended to take a very militant approach to hair care with strict rules about what is or is not considered natural. I could sense a lot of pain in that and it seemed rather misplaced because this is just hair we're talking about.

But is it 'just hair'? Or does our hair carry with it our unhealed wounds of self-hatred and feelings of inadequacy from being unable to attain an illusive image of beauty that society has long presented us with? Is it the physical manifestation of our desire to fit in and our inability to do so? Sometimes it's more than just hair, it conceals a plethora of beliefs that tend to trickle down into how we feel about ourselves and how proud we are of who we are. It is so great to come to a place where hair becomes just hair, and better still becomes beautiful hair, just as it is. An outlet for freedom and self expression, no matter what it looks like. Whether it is worn in its natural state or preened and teased into whatever it is the wearer conceives in their mind. To look at yourself and think to yourself, I love my hair. Braided, relaxed, coloured, loced, spiked and barely there... it's just hair.

And if you take a good look. It is all beautiful hair... just as it is.

I Am Not My Hair - India Arie

Little girl with the press and curl
Age eight I got a Jheri curl
Thirteen I got a relaxer
I was a source of so much laughter
At fifteen when it all broke off
Eighteen and went all natural
February two thousand and two
I went and did
What I had to do
Because it was time to change my life
To become the women that I am inside
Ninety-seven dreadlock all gone
I looked in the mirror
For the first time and saw that HEY....

I am not my hair
I am not this skin
I am not your expectations no no
I am not my hair
I ma not this skin
I am a soul that lives within


Good hair means curls and waves
Bad hair means you look like a slave
At the turn of the century
Its time for us to redefine who we be
You can shave it off
Like a South African beauty
Or get in on loc
Like Bob Marley
You can rock it straight
Like Oprah Winfrey
If its not what's on your head
Its what's underneath and say HEY....

Does the way I wear my hair make me a better person?
Does the way I wear my hair make me a better friend? Oooh
Does the way I wear my hair determine my integrity?
I am expressing my creativity..

Breast Cancer and Chemotherapy
Took away her crown and glory
She promised God if she was to survive
She would enjoy everyday of her life ooh
On national television
Her diamond eyes are sparkling
Bald headed like a full moon shining
Singing out to the whole wide world like HEY...

If I wanna shave it close
Or if I wanna rock locs
That don't take a bit away
From the soul that I got

If I wanna wear it braided
All down my back
I don't see what wrong with that

Make a choice

You have never, not for one moment, been off your path.
And you have no reason whatsoever to feel any embarrassment
or discomfort about where you are at this stage in your life.
You are powerfully on your path.
And you are just beginning the best part of your life.

Abraham-Hicks, San Francisco 7/28/07

I got this in my mail this week. The words just jumped out and hit me. How perfect is that?

I am exactly where I am supposed to be. There is nothing I should be doing. Only what I choose to. And whatever I choose to do that's ok. It still keeps me on my path. Powerfully on my path even.

Seems like a simple enough observation but its not always been this simple for me. Lately though, I have decided to be conscious in my life. Take more a driver's seat in what I do rather than just go with the usual knee-jerk reactions. Part of my whole unlearning process.

I find that I am rather surprised by what I choose to keep choosing. I think of myself as a rather positive person but it seems like I was spending a larger part of my life choosing to focus on the not so positive aspects of my life. From where I'm at now I know that nothing is inherently positive or negative, that's just the label that we choose to give to it. And a lot of the time we do not make these choices consciously. We just do it because we do it.

Taking time to choose to give a positive label to things was certainly not the done thing with me. I would get upset first then once I'm there in my upset place, (sometimes for a few moments other times for days) try to cheer myself up. I don't know why I felt the need to go there... you know... to that upset place first. I didn't really choose it, just did it because that's what people do. It's what you do when a so called negative thing happens. What I did anyway.

Can't believe the difference making a choice makes. It's a split second choice too. Something happens and before I react I think "Who says this is a bad thing?" What if it turns out great? And before I know it I'm blissing on with my day without skipping a beat. And after realising how effortless it can be to go through life without the whole positive-negative spiral thing going on I wonder why I didn't choose this sooner.

It's that simple. Just choose it. Whatever you want... and usually its just to be happy... choose that and let everything in your life fall in place around that. It's not always too easy at first. They're all those buts and shoulds flying around. Pay not attention to them and they'll gradually loose their hold on you. Don't worry if everything doesn't feel peachy or if you still find yourself in that upset place every so often. You're still on your path, still headed right to where you say you want to go. Just choose again and again and again and just keep choosing what you want and pretty soon you'll find that you have it.

Joy is our natural state of being and once we get there the current carries us with it and we just flow with it until we get to a point where we choose something else and we find ourselves struggling to move against the current. Well that's my experience anyway. Don't take my word for it. Try it yourself. Make a choice.

The art of savouring

I just got something that I had wanted for so long. Out of the blue I found it and now it’s in my life. Every time I think of it I get frissons of excitement up my spine. It is such a lovely feeling. Gratitude. Appreciation. Thankfulness. Joy. I started to wonder why I don’t do it more. When I sit and think about it, I now have a lot of things that I had wanted for so long. The list is so long and so amazing. Why on earth don’t I take time to appreciate them?

It’s so easy to get caught up in the not so pleasant aspects of life that you forget to see the blessings. Rather than frown at the pile of laundry waiting to be folded and put away on my bed I can be grateful that I have so many lovely clean clothes to wear and strut my stuff in (not to mention that I have the stuff to strut ;-) ).

Life is beautiful. It’s all about the angle we choose to see it from. Since getting my mysterious and wonderful thing that I had wanted for so long. I have been trying to notice more the things that I have in my life that bring me joy. I realise now that my life is chock full of mysterious and wonderful things that I have wanted and received.

I find that I now dwell so much on adding more of this gratitude in my life, because of the immense transformational power it has. Most of my life I have been taught what others thought was fit to teach me. Now after nearly three decades of being alive I am realizing that I need to re-learn a lot of things that I once knew. Simple things like how to be grateful and how to be happy, how to enjoy things, how to have enough. I am rediscovering it in the lost art of savouring. Taking the good in your life and diving into it, basking in it, getting totally blissed out by it then when you’re done finding something else to savour. There’s always something else, and sometimes they hide in the seemingly most ordinary of things. Like a glass of water, a cool breeze, a person.

Today I am grateful for the art of savouring.