If we’ve experienced painful relationships, break-ups or betrayal, love can feel terrifying.
Learning to trust and let love in when we grew up feeling unprotected or unsafe can be challenging.
It’s completely normal to be guarded or self-protecting when we’ve been hurt or betrayed in the past – without the ability to self-protect we wouldn’t have evolved to where we are today.
But the same instinct to self-protect is the instinct that can keep us at arm’s length from true intimacy and connection.
If we continue to project the people who hurt us in the past onto the people who want to love us in the present, we cut ourselves off from the healing that can occur when we re-write our stories about how love and relationship can be.
Trusting love is always a risk.
Showing our hearts is always a risk.
Letting love in is always a risk.
Sometimes love can stare us right in the face and all we can see is our past.
When we are wounded, extensions of love can feel suffocating, attempts to connect can feel like control, nothing feels safe.
But the solution is not to avoid relationship altogether, to set rigid boundaries that prevent intimacy
The answer lies in your own healing.
Your healing happens in relationship – to yourself, to your heart and mind, to how you respond when your mind conjures up the old story and when you feel your heart going under a shutdown
Your healing happens with the ones right in front of you, extending their love and asking you to see them clearly.
We don’t escape our pain by avoiding it, we heal it by sitting in the fire and being with the intensity that arises as we relearn what it means to let love in.
You deserve to know what it means to co-create mutual trust, admiration, respect and companionship.
The practice is in letting love lead. And in letting love in.
Lots of Love to you!
Sheetal R Ahuja