As I often describe to clients, we are all born into a body that is pure and untouched by life: our heart, the centre of our being, remains pure gold, shining outwards for all to feel. Anyone that has held a newborn can feel this – the love emanating from a baby is palpable.
As infants and children, we are incredibly sensitive: there is a keen sense what is going on around us. We know no other way of being than sensitivity, sensing what is going on in the environment around us. We do not yet know words; the only way for us to express our sensitivity is through crying and body language. Even if we cannot directly recall what this truly feels like, we can appreciate that as children we have an incredible ability to sense what is going on in the world in which we live. Children can often express things far beyond their age; we are aware of this and have even coined a saying, ‘out of the mouths of babes’.
Extremely sensitive beings we ALL are, and remain throughout our life.
How do beautifully sensitive, all loving beings become something different?
How do behaviours such as severe anxiety, arguing, belittling, and self-bashing, to name just a few, develop?
How does this happen?
As we begin to sense how others operate in this world, we learn what is acceptable and what is not from this. We learn to adjust.
We feel how others are hurt, and reacting out of that place of hurt. Oftentimes, they react to us, and we begin to form our layers: the layers of hurt we will then walk around with and carry in life. The layers of hurt that seemingly ‘cover up’ our delicate and sensitive nature. This is how we begin to shut down our innate sensing ability in life.
We experience hurt when others do not meet us for the love we truly are inside, and bit by bit, we begin to shut down, to build walls, to shut others out, to layer on our own hurts.
We see how our family interacts, and adjust how we are to be able to fit in. We then go to school and see how we must behave to fit in: to ensure we are liked by others and not bullied. Some of us react to it all and become the ‘bad’ kid and act out towards others, which is simply a behaviour to disguise how we are feeling inside, underneath it all.
We begin to develop layers of hurt that cover up our sensitive nature and the pure gold inside our heart.
As we move through life, situations occur that begin to layer even more hurts upon the pure gold emanating from our heart; situations that run the gamut of what we might call both ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
These situations can feel very heavy, large and impactful. We can experience things like domestic violence, physical, verbal, or sexual abuse, bullying and more.
But it is not only these situations that impact us.
We can experience so-called ‘smaller’ situations in life – things that may seem inconsequential at the time, yet erode our confidence, sass and spunk. These could be as simple as a sideways look from our mother that demeans us, a simple comment by an Aunty or Uncle that crushes our light, a jealous comment from a co-worker. Over time, these wear away at our confidence and our ability to bring the love we are to everyone, to shine that love from our heart no matter what. We begin to see how others simply don’t want that light and shut us down when we shine, because they are operating from their layers of hurts. This forms the crux of relationship ‘issues’: both parties operating from their own layers of held hurts, instead of from the pure gold within.
Even seemingly ‘nice’ situations have a devastating effect on us. We can be encouraged by our parents or by our teachers to be ‘good’: so we learn to be a straight A student, delivering what it is that everyone else wants from us, but squashing our own connection to ourselves. We begin to live another’s truth versus living our own truth. We adapt to what others want us to be to please them and do not live from what we truly are inside. Then we build resentment and act out of anger, frustration, and the like.
All of these experiences add more layers on top of our heart. We begin to develop many layers and these layers begin to feel very familiar. Everyone around us lives this way too, confirming that the only way to live is from these layers.
We begin to think these layers are who we are.
Could there be another way?
Living from the layers may seem very real. But is is very, very far from the truth. Our heart lies underneath it all, always gently pulling us back to the core of our truth.
Oftentimes, the hurts can be so subtle that we do not even realize they are there, as we think they are a part of us.
However, it is our golden solid core, our heart, that guides us through life if we allow it to.
As we connect more and more to our heart centre within, we begin to see and feel the hurts that we have buried. Now this mightn’t feel so crash hot to begin with!! But by bringing understanding to ourselves, by holding ourselves with the space and grace we deserve, we are then able to feel the feelings we have buried.
Have you ever felt lighter after a good cry? This is perhaps you feeling the layers and allowing them to dissipate. It needn’t be scary or difficult: in truth when we feel what is underneath, it tends to dissipate quite quickly. We tend to run away from feeling, for the fear the feeling is overwhelming.
The hurts and the emotional reactions we have had to our hurts are simply not us.
These hurts are stored in the body and we begin to think they are us. This is not the truth of what we are - it is simply a mask, the layers masquerading and holding us in patterns of behaviour that we operate from, thinking it is us.
We ALL have these layers, bar none. We all operate and interact with others from these layers to varying degrees. As we build a stronger relationship with our heart and we honor our truth, we can begin to let go of the layers; we allow our golden core to shine through. This can take time, allowing an openness and a vulnerability that perhaps has been shut down for a very long time. This process can feel very raw and quite frightening at times, as we allow ourselves to simply be vulnerable, which dissolves the layers of hardness we have built up to so-called ‘protect’ ourselves.
Traversing back through the layers, seeing and feeling all that was not true for us, assists us to evolve.
And this process is pure magic: for within our core, our golden heart of hearts, we find settlement. That settlement and solidness is what we truly are within. It is our internal guide post, and it holds us and all others equally.
This holding allows us to hold ourselves and others in love and understanding. We observe situations, without putting pressure on ourselves or others. We are then able to bring a softer, gentler approach to ourselves and to others. We offer space and grace to ourselves and others, knowing we are indeed all perfect within, and that anything that is not loving is coming from the layers of hurts we all carry. Reactions from others are seen for what they are: re-actions from layers of hurts they hold. It is never personal.
We begin to see that nothing in life is personal – we have all simply been interacting from the layers of hurt with another’s layers of hurt. As we operate more from our inner heart, our golden core, we can feel shifts in how we are less triggered by others, as we drop making it about us. We come from a place of steady solidness inside, our heart, and not from the layers of hurts.
And we offer this as a reflection to all we interact with: a steadiness, a solidness, an unshakeability, and a golden beacon of light for all to see and feel.
We offer this never in perfection, but simply to the best of our ability in each and every moment.
We offer a different way for others to see and to feel.
With this, the world in which we live in is forever changed, from within. ✨
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