A Celebration of Love
About Kelly Brogan
KELLY BROGAN, MD, is a holistic psychiatrist, author of the New York Times Bestselling book, A Mind of Your Own, Own Your Self, the children’s book, A Time For Rain, and co-editor of the landmark textbook Integrative Therapies for Depression.
Videography: Ana Paula Alvarez
Music: Mardeleva
In November of 2019, I married the man who catalyzed my spiritual awakening and activated the creative life force that has brought my offerings to the world through my own healing. This marriage is now since dissolved, and we have released one another to find new romantic partnership at a level that is only possible because of the rebirth portal that our 8 year love affair represented.
All of those affected by this seeming cataclysmic love happening would attest to there having been equal measure of suffering and harmony emergent in the process. Our irrepressible soul connection reconfigured our families, former marriages, and unleashed an organizing force that seemingly liberated all of us from too-small boxes we had placed ourselves in. A passionate erotic whirlwind, our relationship afforded us, each, the opportunity to revisit with the patterns of love, pain, and programming that we knew from our childhoods, and to learn ways to provide the experience of love that we were seeking from the other, to ourselves. Through this relationship, I learned to love myself and provide myself the validation, approval, and safety that, because of our respective wound-structure, was not available through this man I so adored and longed for connection with.
These kinds of dynamics - call them Twin Flame or Imago - are predicated on a kind of perfect mismatch for the fulfillment of love because the deep attraction is an unconscious attraction to the unrequited love of our early years. Radical personal transformation is required to find secure love in these relationships, and that level of transformation is not always available to both individuals. And so dissolving these romantic dynamics can feel like a death worse than death, and it is. It is the death of a lifelong fantasy that secure love could possibly be sourced from an impossible source. Your mother and father simply couldn't have loved you in a way other than how they did...and similarly, Sayer and I could only love each other in the ways that were available to each of us...ways that were ultimately acknowledged to be fundamentally incompatible.
Because of Sayer, I began my heroine’s journey home to myself, I dropped a dozen masks, and was reborn as many times into deeper and deeper connection to my feminine essence. Because of our dynamic, I learned to remember love and to soften when I wanted to run, to offer kindness when I felt owed it. I learned about relationships and how they can be powerful mirrors reflecting all that would otherwise remain invisible. I learned to become my own masculine container, how to learn and express my needs, and how to alchemize the feeling of being experienced as bad and wrong. I learned that groveling for validation was the ultimate invalidation of myself.
In ending the marriage, I claimed the hugest gems from the cave of my deepest fears.
When I watch the video above, I see a celebration of the love we all know is possible in our hearts...
May this video awaken your birthright to the sacred joy that is on the other side of owning ourselves, transforming our traumas, and embracing the vulnerability that comes with truly feeling. It is because of lived experiences like this that I created Vital Life Project, knowing that resonant communities can indeed change the world.
