I wanted to share about a dream I had recently.

 

I was reconnecting with an old and very dear friend of mine.

As we hugged, I could sense the layers upon layers of hardness that her body, and her being had developed around her.

She was struggling with relationship, with deeper connection, with intimacy.

And as I embraced her I could feel the hard shell of protection she had built around her – both her saving grace and her barrier.

 

The truth is that many of us develop a similar kind of barrier – one that protects our soft and tender interior. It is the softest and most tender that requires the most fierce protection.

As I held her in my arms, I could feel this tenderness within and I could simultaneously feel the edges of the hardness that protected it.

 

In my own experience (expressed as the strong, independent woman archetype naturally, who needed no one), of getting intimate with my own protective system, there are a few things I found to be true and important to peel back on my own journey.

In no particular order, here are the truths that I have integrated through the natural unfolding of real life experience and healing.

 

Energy.

It requires an enormous amount of energy to both create and sustain the hard shell of protection.

 

It’s lonely.

If you do manage to create a functional, tough, exterior shell that really does protect you from harm, it also prevents you from being able to feel and connect. Being cut off from yourself means that you are cut off from others.

 

It makes us sick.

Building too good of a wall ends up cutting you off from the very fountain of source that created you. It can lead to various expressions of disconnection from life force itself, including chronic illness expressed through our bodies, depression, and more.

 

But what are the alternatives?

 

Honouring our self protection is one of the most important keys to unlocking our own freedom. In my experience, my attempts to protect my sensitive and tender self actually just disconnected me from my capacities, my gifts, and was a very energy inefficient band-aid solution. But ripping off the band-aid isn’t the answer either.

The truth is that we create all sorts of obvious and subtle systems in order to protect our tender most places of our being – often places we don’t even like to accept as a part of us (also known as the shadow). We do this because we have to do something. There is usually a very good reason underlying why we create these patterns to begin with.

We don’t just wake up one day and decide “I think I’m going to disconnect from myself emotionally so I can protect myself from getting hurt by others who are supposed to be my caretakers but who are really totally just traumatizing my system”.

No.

 

This is one of the reasons I’m not a big fan of the whole self help world in general.

There are often these forceful strategies through aggressive self inquiry that excavate our most tender parts for “fixing”, subjected to more judgement, and extraction. Yuck.

Using trauma to repair trauma makes for great sales in the self help world, but perpetuates a super toxic cycle keeping us all trapped on the victim hamster wheel.

 

In my own experience, authentic protection and sense of security comes not from fortifying the fortress walls, but a willingness to surrender more deeply to my own self.

It is in knowing myself, and little by little, accepting my own wholeness that has allowed me to create authentic boundaries and to understand that boundaries are not fortress walls.

Boundaries and protecting my energy are more about my capacity to be able to be deeply connected to myself, and feel, in real time my own honesty in responding to another person or situation.

Boundaries and honouring yourself are not a hard cage you must live in. The are living fluid beings that are part of your own sense of connection to self.

They are agreements you first make with yourself, then use as a reference point – your compass – to align yourself in how you direct yourself in your engagement with the world.

 

We protect our most tender places by first getting to know them, nurturing them, becoming intimate with how we can best support them.

To know our strength is to know our softness, for our fire comes from the tenderness of the belly.