Taking on an unconventional path has never been easy; with being told many times it’s not a ‘secure’ path. However, staying persistent in my purpose, building the courage to face the struggles is exactly what has shaped me into everything I have become.
Sometimes we need to get out of our way to make room to allow all possibilities and opportunities. Understanding our own mental blocks is the way forward, inside out.
Choosing the road less travelled always has several challenges. Being women plus coming from a minority background has different layers of challenges and obstacles thrown our way. Sometimes, it’s the very people we expect to support us that end up becoming hurdles we need to overcome.
"Feel through the resistance" being the most important of all.
It can be so helpful to express our unsaid words, anger and grief to those who have hurt us. There is no good reason to carry someone else's baggage up the mountain. It weighs us down on a journey that is already challenging enough.
Better to shed it so that we can move into life with greater freedom. At the same time, we have to be sure not to make our healing dependent on how others receive our expression. Many of those we share with will be too unconscious, stubborn or defensive to take in our experience, even if we express it in the gentlest of ways.
It may be too shocking to their ways of organizing reality. It may be too painful to face. Not everyone is ready or able to do the deep work those self-reflection demands. This is not to say that we hold back- we must express our truth one way or the other- but it is to say that we are best served by sharing it without expectation.
The liberation lies in the expression itself.
The healing process has a heart of its own, moving at its own delicate pace. Our survival adaptations may be tough, but our wounds are so delicate.
Emotional armour is not easy to shed, nor should it be. It has formed for a reason: as a requirement for certain responsibilities, as a conditioned response to real circumstances, as a defence against unbearable feelings. It has served an essential purpose.
To heal, we have to lift the armour carefully- it saved our lives, after all. You don’t trample on it; you don’t hit it with a sledgehammer. You honour its presence like a warm blanket that has kept you safe during wintry times.
Never rush it, never push up against it, and never demand it to drop its guard before its time. Because it knows something you don’t. In a still frightening world, armour is no less valid than vulnerability. Let it shed at its own unique pace...
I have found that emotional armouring stays in place, sometimes beyond its 'sell by' date for another reason in addition to those mentioned so eloquently. We are deriving something of value from that armour and understanding that is part of the healing process to become ready to drop the shields. There's an emotional food too, for example, self-pity.
It allows us to always be right about how hurt/damaged we are or to never have to find out how powerful/creative/strong/wonderful we are so we carry around the 'burden of a great potential' without ever having to deliver on that early promise.
The emotional armour doesn't just cloak us and protect us in silence, its whispering sweet nothings in our ear as well.
If we don't recognize that, we will have a 'false grief' over the loss of those whisperings when we drop the armour and be all too ready to pick it back up again.
And I consider that to be part of our survival mechanism. We're habitual creatures who need certainty after all, no matter how uncomfortable it is.
ps/smoh
love light and peace
