Step Three is ‘Feeling With‘. This last step requires ‘radical compassion’ as Tara Brach defines it. Have you ever seen a wounded animal turn on the very people trying to help it? That is what we can become in our darkest traumatized Earth Heart. And it’s in everyone, a little, or a lot. But the Universe is abundant and wants you to know this when you are wounded. Because if we don’t understand, we bite the hand that feeds us.
This step retrains your brain to let in the things that are right for you. You get to decide what you say yes to and when you open up. That’s a very important thing to remember. Opening up to outside help doesn’t mean you lose your power to decide what feels right for you. That happened in childhood but it’s not true now.
Instead, when you ‘Feel With’ you to take quality time to realize you are hurt. Anger, fear, almost all the difficult emotions, arise out of pain avoidance. Until you sit with the wound yourself, you won’t know who and what to trust to help you. Rather, you isolate yourself or drive off the very balm your wound needs.
That’s why Earth Heart’s nickname is the Hermit. You pull back to avoid pain. Once you get these three steps, you will be able to handle the pain in life that goes with getting more love. To love is to risk pain. But to go without love is a deeper more damaging pain by far. Time to trade in suffering alone to safely shared love and manageable pain.
Feeling With requires physical action on your part. Put your left hand on your heart and your right hand on your belly even as you do the first two steps outlined in recent posts. If you don’t have your hands there by Step 3, time to put them there. Don’t get caught up in getting it right. The important thing is to be the adult present and ‘Feeling With’ the child within you.
With your hands on your heart and belly, feel those feelings that come up. Breathe into them. Ask yourself what those feelings need to hear. Reassure yourself that you won’t ever abandon you. Tell yourself that what you feel matters and you want to know. Be curious, listen deeply, hold yourself and stay present for your emotions. If your mind switches back to a story about what caused these feelings, bring them back to what you feel. It’s a sneaky form of self-abandonment to focus on ‘them’.
You are what matters. What you need to hear, what you feel, what needs to be heard and said by YOU. Hear yourself say out loud, “I’m with you, I’ll never leave you”. Listening to your own needs and feeling them heals you. Take time to show up for all of you, just as if you are sitting with that frightened four-year-old you once were.
The Neuroscience Of It All
The crazy part is when you do these three simple steps outlined, you rewire your brain. Your hands reflect this over time. Soothing yourself with your own attention, deep interest and compassion for what hurts, without acting on it yet activates dopamine. You get waves of it running through your body to feel better and counteract the triggers that set you down a reaction spiral.
The key is to offer the wounded child in you support as the strong adult you are now. You learn feelings won’t drown or overwhelm you when you feel what comes up and ask yourself, as often as you need, ‘what does this feeling need to hear from me’. Then say it to yourself. You may need to act on it by rocking or a hot bath. Stay in soothing mode, not protection mode. Self-care like this IS the best protection.
Remember we all drop back to our Earth Heart in trauma. Understand you’ve been taught what you should and shouldn’t express. When you lovingly sit with those places and spaces, without an agenda or time clock, healing happens. Know that you may want to do this the rest of your life. Why not? It’s free, legal and portable. You can do it anywhere.
When the results are more love who loses by practicing this? Certainly not you. For this month of love, give yourself the most precious gift of all, quality loving time with you. As if by magic, or should I say magnet, others will join the flow.
For more help with this, check out Lisa’s Expand Love Capacity Authentically Experience where you actually see the change of mind changes those lines.
Author: Lisa Greenfield https://bestamericanpsychics.com/listing/lisa-greenfield
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