Sometimes when we are reading about trauma we get re-awoken to our own trauma that is still inside. And after years of internal exploration and opening to my shadows and pain I still get this, and last night I woke up about 12.30 and I could sense that I was not going to go back to sleep.
That no amount of lying in would send me back to sleep.
So I got up and did some things, and I went back to bed with a book I’m reading (Eastern Body Western Mind) and it was like someone had found my journal and all the rawest exposed pieces of me were being read back to me, and for a moment there was shame and hopelessness; and then I remembered just to allow, just to allow it to be here, to kind of broaden and soften so that it was the opposite of tensing and deflecting it, or turning away from it.
And in that moment I just returned to loving the part of myself that feels scared that this will never change, that this is who I am. That this is ONLY who I am and this is only who I can be. I just softened and held that part, then eventually that part felt soothed enough that I could go to sleep.
And really this is the beauty of how we can work to become whole, to become integrated, to become open compassionate beings. We allow ourselves to notice, and instead of tensing we open ourselves to soften and we become a compassionate elder to the child, and we choose to love every time.
When I see clients meet their inner parts who have been holding the decades of rejection, abuse and mis-attunement who have been protecting them through the years with their shields, their masks and their hideaways it’s a privilege.
From this place we get to understand what our needs are and what is getting in the way of what we want. Because those parts will create the lenses in which you look through life, those parts will keep calling out, pressing your buttons.
Yesterday I was about to start a walk into a labyrinth, and at the entrance there was an explanation and the last piece was all I needed.
The way in is also the way out.
When we understand all those parts have been holding and meet them with compassion, attunement and devotion, it’s the beginning of a whole new journey.