Your vulnerability will open you up.
However the ego often closes down around your vulnerability because in the past, your undefended openness may have become fused with humiliation, rebuke, abuse, dismissal, abandonment, rejection, and shame. The list goes on.
Vulnerability is our natural state. With healthy environmental support we can maintain a flexible relationship to our core selves and learn strong boundaries to harmonise with goodness and to protect ourselves from harm.
However when our (early) environments don’t provide this option; our discernment and our ability to develop healthy boundaries don’t form properly and our vulnerability tends to become hardwired with unprocessed pain which in turn magnetises similar destructive circumstances.
It’s likely you chose to cut yourself off from the pain of it all, because the shock, hurt and betrayal of your earlier experiences overpowered you and meant that the only option to cope was to shut down and cover it over.
Thus when life presents you with an opportunity to SAFELY feel your past trauma and unpack it so it stops repeating…you can’t 😢
It likely that you can’t melt into your vulnerability safely because of these unfortunate associations.
As a result feelings of emptyness, aloneness, sadness, numbness, listlessness, anxiety, addiction, vengeance or even endless ruminating can take over.
All of these states are a CONSEQUENCE of disassociating from your root experiences and programmes.
They signify that you are not fully inhabiting your body, heart and soul, with all of your feelings, energetic states and presence as to do so would open you up to the original patterning which you’ve protected yourself from repeating by staying shut down or masking over.
Sometimes this predates our conscious ability to remember, either in early life, past lives or even remote ancestral memories, which makes it all the more confusing.
However, as annoying as these states are to our ego’s sense of functioning, they are the breadcrumbs that lead us back to the origins of our suffering and into wellbeing and aliveness.
My Dad used to say, “we are like a car that comes without a manual.” We are born without the instructions on how to ‘repair’ and ‘maintain’ ourselves, especially our psyches, which are at the heart of most of our physical, mental and emotional ailments.
This tendency to keep on driving well beyond the need for a spiritual M.O.T is at the core of our sense of alienation from ourselves.
Self-neglect is at the heart of these avoidance behaviours. Many of us learnt to self-neglect as our coping mechanism to cover over our hurting vulnerability.
We created new habits to reinforce our sense of self through invisible signals implicitly woven in to our family dynamics, culture, social, spiritual and political norms.
“be positive, don’t cry, be love and light, toughen up, drink this shot, let’s get drunk, man up, boys don’t cry, don’t be a sissy, get your big girl’s knickers on, go get laid”
These are just the tip of the iceberg in how society encourages you to toughen up, adopt the hero(ine) archetype and be strong without taking into hand and transforming your more fragile/painful states, which ironically contain all the keys to your more enduring wholeness, vitality, endurance and potency.
It follows then, that our task in this life time, is to get under the bonnet of our psyches and delve into our misfiring psychic engines.
Instead of plastering on a new chassis to cover over our tired pistons, rusty bodywork, rotten suspension and the likes, it would make more sense to undergo a deeper ‘service’ than to enhance the external appearance of our vehicles.
But how often do we succumb to the seductions of these ego traps ?
Our egos are such cunning creatures that without even realizing it, they instead coax us into masking our flaws, and avoiding at all costs addressing and removing those aspects of us that are simply flawed or endangering our wellbeing.
So rather than risk stripping down our engines and removing failing parts, I have noticed that there is a mechanism within us all that stops us from truly embracing this process and making those ESSENTIAL STRUCTURAL changes.
When we slow down sufficiently, and re-embody, becoming more aware of all that we are feeling in our bodies and fields, in this present moment, we can start to experience the wellbeing that goes beyond ego gratification and identify what is in the way to experiencing this as our natural felt state.
This can enable us to get to THE CORE, opening up the traumas, patterns of relating, and energetic frequencies that underpin most symptoms.
It is like finally getting that SERVICE that actually addresses those banging noises and bumping sensations that you had learnt to ignore and drive another 10,000 miles regardless.
We literally need to relearn the ability to relate to all of these hidden parts of ourselves and come back into wholeness through self-awareness and embodying a field of resonant high frequency presence to bring these dissonant aspects of ourselves back into the light.