Workbook13

Opening Your Heart and Feeling Safe

The Conundrum

As you progress through your emotional healing process, recovering yourself, feeling your feelings, and being true to your self, you come face to face with your heart. When we are children our hearts are wide open, but as we begin to learn about shame, fear, helplessness and other painful feeling, they begin closing out of self-preservation. AT times it may have felt like your heart was blown wide open by a consuming but devastating love, yet to the degree that you have been wounded your have erected protective barriers. The original reason you closed your heart was because you didn't feel safe. So it follows that you would need to feel safe to consider even opening it again.

As you come face to face with your love relationships right now, do you feel a twinge of fear as you contemplate risking your heart again? Yes, risking. Having an open heart means risking at first - beginning to really trust your gut-level feeling, consciously identifying enough to act on your gut-level feeling and checking in with you internal aspects to elicit their insights. You must take your own advice.

You need to feel safe to open your heart, and you need to open your heart to feel safe. Feeling safe is a feeling of connection, not just a sense of not being in danger. When you feel emotionally safe, your feel connected to the environment and to life. It's the feeling people describe as "in the groove." It takes an open heart to feel in the grove. The mistake that most of us make is that we try to connect with someone who is not available to make the emotional connection. We attempt to have something "real" with someone who is still pretending. The counterstrategy is to create a safe place within yourself, to create an internal organization ( harmony and equality among all your inner aspects) that aligns itself with "that which does not threaten" (people and circumstances that are non-harmful).

Creating safety in your life does not come from changing the external world. It appears as if it does, but it doesn't. Creating safety in your life comes from making an internal change; then the external world changes accordingly. If you were to try to change the external world while your were still under the influence of the compulsion to repeat, all emotional hell would break loose.