We have so many reasons to close. To protect our hearts. It’s tragic, really, all the excuses we could have for self protection.
I’ve had plenty.
And I’m happy to say, they are being challenged at the next level as I’m being invited to open in places that I maybe didn’t know I was closed.
I recently found myself in a situation with a man where I did not expect there to be attraction. We’d gotten together as friends and colleagues and then, on this particular day, as he said later, as I’d opened the door and he found me to be “radiant.”
Radiant. What an “open” expression. I am quite sure that that is the first time a man has ever called me radiant, which is such a beautiful compliment. More than a compliment, it’s an affirmation that as I have been doing the good work of tending to this feminine essence, it is reflecting outward.
The thing was, however, I felt quite tired on that particular day. I’d had a really deep session with a practitioner the day before, and perhaps I’d describe myself as tender. I wasn’t sad or armored or anything like that. I was just integrating some information that was making me a little tender. So perhaps I was even more unguarded than usual.
I’ve done a lot of work on my body and the traumas it had endured, and I’ve done a lot of work on my heart to unguard it. I think the feminine heart could be at any given point tender, or elated, or somehow otherwise feeling deeply. If we’re not guarding our hearts, then it will be feeling something, because that’s what it does.
And so I’ve been contemplating this thing of opening. There’s always the interesting thing we do as humans where we ask, “What am I opening to?” and then we decide if we can open to meet that external thing – whether it be an offer, an agreement, a man’s invitation, etc. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I immediately noticed that the external situation was not my first reference point. For decades in my life it had been. “What is the man doing? What is the man feeling? What is the man offering and am I open to it?” But this was entirely different.
My reference point was entirely internal. I was pacing with my nervous system. “Is my body opening toward this idea, or closing?” Did I feel the familiar old closure of guardedness, and if so, what did the body need? I was tracking my opening and closing. Anyone with previous trauma related to men knows what I’m talking about – the familiar guards come up as we feel things out. There were plenty of times in the past when my body gave me “Closure! Constriction! Do not proceed!” warning signs that I did not head, which lead to more of my own depletion later. I was noticing this time that it was just natural to stay attuned to myself first – I was going to follow my body’s lead.
“No moving forward, on any given day, without openness in the body.”
That’s progress. For any woman. High fives all around when we’re listening to the body.
However.
I realized something major. When I was tracking my body’s contraction or expansion, I was essentially tracking the nervous system. I was tracking whether or not the nervous system felt safety or fear. And in doing so, I was not attuning to whether or not my heart was opening and what my heart’s truth was.
This is really important, because given the way trauma works, we could be experiencing somatic symptoms of a past trauma in a very safe present-day situation. And if we’re only attuning to that and forgetting the heart, then we’ll make it about the past, the trauma, and the nervous system. The attunement to the body is amazing, but then, there is the next-level attunement to the heart.
Beyond previous experiences of depletion or hurt, beyond how the body holds trauma patterns of constriction, there was a new invitation to notice and expand into. “Does the heart want to open? Is the heart opening?”
I’ve been traveling with the real-life sequence of the teachings I call Heartland now for over a year, but when I felt Spirit nudge me in February to open them back up in in April, I was immediately inside of a next-level learning about the heart. I was back inside the “initiation” of learning these deep transformations to leave more and more layers of feminine depletion, guardedness, and old story behind, and to come into feminine replenishment, the heart, and the experience of the spark of creation.
In Heartland, we journey to a place of prosperity in the Heart. Not just money and wealth, but true, soul-aligned, heart-opening, blissful, no longer afraid, understanding the creation energy of the cosmos HEART.
There are eight areas of the Heartland teachings, like a sequence. I had told this man, when sharing about Heartland, that I felt that I was somehow in stage seven of eight. I had conceptualized what stage eight might look like, but was still stretching into it as a woman. Well, you can’t stretch into the Heart of the Heartland until you’re really, truly, willing to move beyond the stories of depletion, fear, the times things were taken from you in the past… the traumas we’ve held in the body, and all the reasons to close the heart.
And then I saw myself doing it – tracking the sensations of the familiar fear responses in my body (which again, it is really important not to override those sensations) instead of tracking the radiance of my own heart.
And I think that’s a big part of the leap. Tracking expansion just as much as we’re tracking constriction. Tracking the heart just as much as we’re tracking the nervous system.
I am not the woman that previously attracted men who were willing to take my life force energy from me. But sometimes something in me forgets and still thinks that I am her, and then my nervous system has a closure response.
I am instead the woman who has worked on the radiance and prosperity of my own heart. I am the woman who has honored the journey of this body and soul. I am the woman who will decide how to proceed, and I am the woman who is choosing to stand now fully in the New. And the New is the land of the Heart. The place of internal and eternal prosperity. The place beyond taking, where we remember the stories of depletion as a distant memory we have overcome, but where now, we radiate. We shine. We shine our diamond, crystalline hearts, and as we are, good men like this one will not help but to be magnetized and awed by it, and because we are ready, the feminine can now open even deeper.
First open the body, as the body is ready. Then, open the heart. This is the place where the cosmos will join you in the dance of creation. This is the true Heartland, accessible beyond separation, closure, and fear. This is the place your soul deserves to reside.
