21/02/2023
So here's a thing, your mind is really smart. It's built all of these mechanisms to protect you. Not only from what you've experienced first hand but from what's built into your DNA. Your fight or flight response, is a truly awesome reaction. Only, when the danger is removed, and you are in a safe place, your active mind sometimes has a problem coming to terms with and recognising this and recognises all kinds of really harmless things as threats. Your brain can actually be really unreasonable, irrational and really really unhelpful! Sometimes you need to put yourself outside of your comfort zone. To add to your experience and relearn that you are in fact safe and that actually nothing bad is going to happen. Tried tested proven relearned. I hope I can add to one persons healing, to show them that they matter, to plant a seed, to begin a journey into the beautiful unknown. 🕊️💚🌱🙏
TRAUMA, THANK YOU FOR PROTECTING ME
Here’s the main thing you have to understand about trauma:
It wants to keep you hidden.
Why? It’s trying to protect you.
It’s only ever trying to keep you safe.
It imagines threats where there are none.
Stuck in the past, it wants to keep you close to what you know, close to what you can control.
And away from death.
When you begin to leave your comfort zone, take that brave step, express yourself, assert a boundary, try something new, separate from the known world, it will assume, based on past evidence, that YOU ARE IN DANGER, and it will do everything it can to get you back to safety, convincing you to be small again - in order to protect you from failure, ridicule, abuse, further shaming.
Your mind will scream.
Your body will shake.
Your muscles will tense up.
Your heart will race.
Your breath will quicken.
Everything will feel… wrong.
We can’t destroy this conditioned fear.
We can’t get ‘over’ it.
The more we resist it, turn against it, judge it as bad or wrong, or fight it, the worse it gets.
The more we reject it, the more we reaffirm to it that the world is TRULY unsafe.
We cannot delete the fear but we can turn towards it. Understand it. Have compassion for it. Have a more loving conversation with it:
“Thank you for protecting me, trauma. You’ve served me well. But maybe the danger has passed. Maybe I don’t need your protection today. Maybe I am bigger, stronger, safer, than I knew…”
Then, the very same energy that repressed your authentic self, starts to work for you. Liberated, it begins to express your authentic self, helping you play, be creative, speak up, take up space, and take those courageous steps into the Unknown.
The very same energy that suppressed you, now works to express you.
The energy that used to shut you down from life, now spends its time trying to open you up to life.
You learn, IT’S SAFE TO BE ME.
This is the greatest thing of all. It really is.
To feel safe within yourself.
To know that your nervous system is always working for you.
To love your body, and to know that you are not your body.
Trauma is condensed life energy, that is all.
Stuck, constricted, it longs to be liberated.
It longs to be seen, known, felt.
When it's met with love, it can blossom, YOU can blossom, into pure creativity.
Jeff Foster (www.lifewithoutacentre.com)
Artist: Unknown
