Everybody feels a need to protect themselves on some level. It’s not easy to be vulnerable with your feelings, and you definitely don’t want to feel exposed or to be taken advantage of.
So it’s quite natural to put a barrier over your heart. It’s safer that way – it minimises the chances of getting hurt – right?
While this may be true, it’s good to understand that energetically, this barrier shuts you off from the nurturing life force of your heart. It shuts down the natural healing flow of heart energy which nourishes you on so many levels.
Heart energy opens you to the richness of life. It helps you connect with the people around you on a deeper level, it makes you more gentle, compassionate, understanding, and connects you with a softness, that makes you feel comfortable with yourself and makes others feel comfortable around you. It also connects you with a greater authenticity.
People who are more sensitive, and in tune with their feelings, can tell if a person has an open heart, or if they have surrounded their heart with a wall of protection. The difference is quite literally like detecting a subtle feeling of warmth or cold.
It’s understandable why a person has their protective barriers in place. No one wants to get hurt, especially in the matters of love.
But what if there was a way to safely let down the barriers of protection, even if it was just for a short time – a time when you were in a safe place where you are comfortably alone, or in the presence of someone who understood you and made you feel accepted. What might happen if you let yourself do that?
The effects of doing this are very personal and individual. And that’s because the pain and hurt from the past which gets buried inside you is unlike that of anyone else’s. This might come from small things that are seemingly insignificant (especially from times when you were a child), or from the big impacts in your life.
While this pain is frozen inside you, it’s having a detrimental effect on your body. Your body and your unconscious know this, however they also know that exposing this energy to your awareness in all its glory is most likely too much for you to bear. So protective barriers have their place. They serve you on some level, in that they assist you to cope with the pressures and challenges of life, and their present and past effect on you.
Ideally though, it’s best if you could find a way to clear yourself of the issues, fears, or pain that you are protecting yourself from.
Which is why, when your body and unconscious have an opportunity, they will release snippets of this buried pain and hurt in a manner that you can safely process and handle.
When might this opportunity arise?
Generally, it happens when you are in a relaxed state, in a safe environment, and when the volume of your thoughts are turned down low. Your unconscious may release your pain and issues through filtering memories or images to your awareness, or by allowing a manageable dose of feelings to make their way through your body – in order to be released and cleared from your body.
All of this happens in a healing context. It all happens for your greater health and greater good.
We all carry our protective barriers to varying degrees. When we can recognise these barriers within ourselves, and give ourselves opportunities to create a safe environment in which to allow our barriers to come down a bit, and let the natural healing from our heart to flow, regulated by the inherent wisdom of our body and unconscious, we do ourselves a world of good.
In which ways might you give yourself this opportunity of self-healing?
- Meditation
In meditation, you create a quiet time and space to allow yourself to momentarily suspend the mental chatter, and connect with an inner part of yourself. This draws your awareness inside yourself, and creates an opportunity for you to notice sensations, feelings and impressions within you that you may not have been previously aware of.
You can do this alone, or in a group of like-minded people who are supportive of your feelings and your healing process.
- Yoga
By doing a form of yoga that helps you to feel relaxed, and which helps you tune into your body, you create an opportunity to connect with a deeper aspect of yourself. Like meditation, this is a process where your awareness gets drawn into a deeper space inside you. There is an element of surrender, where your body, through the act of stretching, allows the muscles and tissues to gently release, and this may facilitate an emotional letting go.
- Breathwork
Breathwork helps you tune into yourself through focused and steady deep breathing. The breathing cycles get your energies flowing and moving throughout your body. This movement of energy, along with your focused state, can assist with releasing emotions and energies from your body in a healing way.
- Journalling
Journalling is a good practice where you make time to write down your feelings and your inner processing. This helps you to be open and honest with yourself. It develops an intimacy with yourself, in which you start to understand yourself more, and to have a more compassionate appreciation of what you are or have been dealing with. This helps to set up an attitude of self-acceptance, and paves the way for your body to respond to this accepting environment with energetic and emotional release.
- Energy work
Receiving gentle, hypnotic, focused, compassionate energy work from a therapist you trust, helps you feel relaxed and safe, and helps you enter more deeply into your relaxed inner space. This is the kind of inner space from which you connect with your body, and from which your unconscious is more likely to convey what it needs to, in order to assist with your healing process. It helps you to create a state where your barriers can naturally and safely be lowered for a short window of time, allowing you to connect with the healing energies of your heart.
Your body and unconscious know you intimately, and understand the timing and intensity of what you are ready to let go of. It doesn’t usually happen in one big moment. It normally happens in small manageable pieces that build upon one another.
The healing process – whether it be physical, emotional or spiritual healing, is an ongoing process which happens in a way that is right for you.
You are ready when you are ready.
And when you are ready, even if you don’t consciously know it, you find yourself more naturally creating opportunities for lowering your barriers, even if this may be on an unconscious level. When this happens, even for just a short window of time, you allow yourself to connect more deeply with your heart. And the result of this is a richer and more authentic life experience.