Close your eyes, take a deep breath.
Hold… wait, can you smell that? LOVE! Love is in the air. Happy month of love, beloveds. May you practice healthily giving and receiving love to yourself and those dearest to you.
For giggles, I call my mom every Valentine’s Day and we catch up and I make sure to randomly say: “Happy Valentine’s. This is ordinarily followed by loud and uncontrollable laughter, and her exclaiming: “I don’t celebrate pagan holidays, my child!” This has been a running inside joke for years.
Paganism aside though, I accept February as the month of love based on my keenness to thematise my life, which affects my monthly spiritual practices. This, I’ve found, helps keep me present in my surroundings and immediate reality. I navigate February by aligning my spiritual practices with love, affection, commitment and passion. Now, how on earth do I even do this, you might wonder…. Let me explain.
I remind myself to stay connected and committed to myself and the goals I have set out for myself through overt acts of self-love. These acts usually include gifting myself with items that appeal to all parts of who I am. These are usually items of clothing, shoes, crystals, candles, books, iziwasho (salts), flowers, solo dates, massages, hair and nail treatments. Although I do some of these things more regularly on a month-to-month basis, I am more intentional in the month of February about these acts of self-love. I am also intentional about why I perform self-love in the ways that I do.
I do self-love like this to affirm and validate who I am, as the physical being that is Zipho, as well as the spiritual entities represented by my spiritual personas. Allow me to be candid for a second, going on the spiritual journey of ubungoma is difficult and I have said this. Leading up to my initiation, including my time(s) as a thwasa (in initiation school), much of my life was about giving up who I was to make way for who I was destined to be, not only as a singular entity but as a valued member of my varying clans. It is almost like a complete dissociation from myself, for a short period, only to re-emerge in unison with spirit. It was a difficult, but I maintain, necessary process.
Post initiation, because I had given salience to my spiritual personas (Gogo Mayihlome/Gogo Nazi), I had to be intentional about being Zipho again by actively pursuing my passions and re-integrating back into my social world. This was difficult, I suppose due to the trauma I endured during initiation. Again, I will say I was not traumatised overtly by oGobela (my shamans), it was because I chose to postpone initiation on countless occasions until my own ancestors were ultimately showing me dust, consequently.
It is difficult to imagine whether I would have been so intentional about self-love as a precursor to any kind of romantic love, had it not been for my ancestors. Do not get me wrong. I have always displayed self-love, bordering on narcissism. It was naturally easy to find romantic partners because all one had to do was to appeal to those parts of me and I would easily love them for simply loving me. Romance was easier, in my opinion, then. iDlozi teaches the possibility of a transcendent type of love.
I know this is not the argument or position popularly accepted by my other sangoma counterparts. Their arguments paint romantic love as unattainable because of the direct interference of abantu abadala, which may be true. The other part of it is that because you have sharpened your intuition by undergoing your initiation, your ability to see people’s true characters and intentions is heightened. iDlozi offers you all the information from the word go. And, it is often out of self-love that you choose to halt the possibility of that love from further materialising. The ancestors are, therefore, not hurdles in our pursuit of romantic love. Rather, they are our secret weapon because they make us intuitive.
I want to offer young spiritualists an alternative perspective by saying that the reason that romance is difficult is because you love and value yourself. This love is reflected in the vow you made to your ancestors as well as your commitment. Trust that and stay true to it. Your romantic love will align appropriately.
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