Have you ever had this conversation with yourself? Setting this intention or focus for your behavior?
“I’m not going to do that any longer. Even though it takes everything in me and feels so very difficult and uncertain and even inauthentic, I am going to turn into my vulnerability, connect with the hurt and fear that drives my reactivity. I will care for it, tend to it slowly, and choose a new way; choose to pause and breathe and soften.
I will befriend these wounded parts now. I am no longer willing to resist when they arise. Even though I will not be perfect at it and will forget or fail at times, I will remain steadfast in my commitment to attend. I will not turn away; I will no longer abandon those parts of myself that seek expression in moments of activation."
You probably recognize that this movement in your system marks the point at which your inner work shifts more to the heart, where you will not be as focused on clear insight and awareness, safer as a witness. But rather you begin to experience and understand what it actually means to open your heart to your pain, confusion, and grief. Those moments when you are able to set aside the need to understand your experience, let go of determining its cause, or any attempts to transmute it into something else . . . Those moments are new moments, different kinds of moments. Being with what is arising . . . being with what is. Being what is. Tracking the body, the breath, the vibration.
This can be a radical exercise and truly challenges old habits of reaction and repression. Are you able to hold the moment like a mother or father surrounding and enveloping an infant? To make contact with the energy or frequency moving in mind and body and remain spacious enough to allow the movement to ground, reorganize, complete or resolve? Consider bringing curiosity to your commitment and willingness . . . kindness may then emerge for the feelings, for those parts that were disowned at an earlier time.
This is the work of balancing intention and attention . . . bringing intelligence, purpose and wisdom into the action of paying attention to yourself . . . generating the action of tendering and tending the hard bits from the warmth of your heartful presence, which these moments of activation, these parts, need now, more than ever.
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