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Today’s note is a continuation of the series that began on April 24, 2024. Click on the links to read the individual parts if you have missed them:
Part I: Flirting with Fear
Part II: Our Call for Courage
Part III: The Thirst to Know
Chapter 4: The Courage to be Loved
In the environment I grew up in, it is easier to ask for food or money than it is to ask for endorsement. Generally, asking for emotional support or backing is uncommon. In this respect, the child in me held these unspoken pleas, “Please back me up. Please stand by me.”
Having suffered repeated heart-wrenching losses and abandonment, the thought of going through another heartbreak is terrifying. What if I open my heart to trust only to be betrayed again? Perhaps I will survive since I’ve survived the previous times, but something in me does not want to go through the same ordeal. Does this strike a chord with you?
When we close our heart, we take away our chance to feel love.
The truth is betrayal can still happen. The truth also is that there will be people who will act otherwise. But when we close our heart, we take away our chance to feel love. The act of opening up seems too big a risk, because an emotional heartbreak does manifest itself as physical pain that can be so intense our minds believe we will die from it. There is so much sense in closing up: we are choosing to live.
Except, living without love leaves our soul arid.
What if the two choices are not to live or die? What if the two choices are: live open and risk dying, or, live close and die dry.
When I see the choices in this light, I feel a rush of vitality. I deserve to be loved by those already loving me. The act of receiving is also a part of reciprocity—being willing to meet the other hand awaiting mine.
Closed-ness is not necessarily better than openness. There is a time, a need and readiness for each. We do not make openness a goal; we do not force a closed heart or mind to open. Rather, we can keep checking in with ourselves and inviting ourselves to open when we are called for, and if something in us still does not feel ready, it is okay to be just right where we are.
Part of the movement toward being able to receive includes allowing ourselves the freedom to exercise our choice. Sometimes, the choice is to linger just a moment longer. Other times, the choice can be to walk away. If our tendency is to dwell or overstay, perhaps consider if that’s truly a choice we are making or a reaction. Likewise, if we tend to leave, consider, even experiment, what it may be like to stay.
Chapter 5: The Choice to Walk Away
When I was going through the Compassionate Inquiry course, taught by Dr. Gabor Maté, there was one question that he asked the person he was working with, “What gets abandoned?” You see, we only use the word “abandon” in relation to something small and helpless like children or pets. Between adults or equals, we do not use this word at all. As an able adult, we cannot be abandoned. People can leave us, choose not to side with us, betray us, but they cannot abandon us.
I had been chased out of the house with the door shut tight on me when I was about six years old. The sun had set, and I was desperately wailing and banging on the door begging for my mother’s mercy. That door remained shut until my father came home from work. Mom was terrifying when she closed her heart. Regretfully, I had a taste of the coldness in a closed heart when I shut the door on someone two decades later. No mercy. I learned what I experienced.
In my healing journey, it was important for me to see that I have choices, of which one is to walk away.
Hurt people hurt people. Without compassion for ourselves and the hurt we carry, without experiencing a new possibility, we will continue as victims and perpetrators.
Another aspect of my aversion to asking for what I want stems from this old story. I do not want to bang on shut doors or beg. I identified with my inner critic, viewing myself with contempt and disgust. Deep down, there was the terror of being cast out all alone in the night, and the pain from losing love and dignity.
As that six-year-old, I had no choice. There was nowhere else I could go, no one I could turn to but desperately plead for the closed doors (the physical one and my mom’s heart) to open. But I am that six-year-old no more. The child could not leave, but the adult that I am can. I do not need to beg.
As we work to feel the frozen experiences and metabolise them, we grow in capacity to be who we are in the present day. The old threads are less tangled and we are less activated by them.
We can ask for shut doors to open or we have the choice to walk away from them. There are many other doors, including my own, that will warmly open and welcome me, including my own. Do not shut our door to the world just because we had that shut on us. The more work we do, the more we will come to realise that it is not about them. It is about us.
The second chance we are waiting for is the one we gift to ourselves.
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Hello & welcome — I am glad you are here. I am Rosslyn Chay, an inquirer, poet, and coach. The Dandelion Notes are field notes on my process and learnings through my human journey as I go on a quest to mend our fractured relationship with our nature.
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