I will not fear love.
How do you preserve this tender innocence, my friend? I find myself at a loss not to harden myself as I age right now. I wish to have such tenderness and joy in my heart, yet I feel I must protect myself.
I found myself awake for several hours during the night last night, and so I did what I often do these days when awake in the night. I laid on my back and breathed mindfully, deeply, opening myself to whatever sensations might arise. And this time I also explored some questions, but I explored them in a new way I'm just beginning to learn. This new way of questioning is different in that it's as much about feeling as words and ideas. It's also open to unexpected possibilities, strange or even startling insights. It's not an intellectual kind of questioning. It's more like trying to see what is going on inside-- what's really there, and it asks to be shown what may be concealed or hidden within.
As I breathed deeply into my heart area, with focused mindfulness on sensations in this region of my body, while opening to such possible knowings or insights, I felt points of sharp pain in the thymus/sternum/heart center. And I had a whole parade of flickering insights into how I've always had fear around love and loving, and how I'd try to protect myself from hurt through the construction of stories meant to corral love into something known and manageable, stories meant to offer protection.
I brought big curiosity to this feeling of need for protection, and realized I don't want that habit any more, that I'd do ANYTHING to stop doing that, stop trying to protect myself around love. Especially through stories about how other people are, which stories I seem to have believed (on some level) would protect me from feeling pain around love. But it wasn't really pain around love in relation to others. This is the radical re-framing which is just peeping into conscious awareness (a fragile, new, emerging felt insight).
Underneath stories I have told to myself about other people's unavailability for love lay still other, and hidden, stories which were causing ME to be unavailable for love. I'm bringing these hidden stories into the light of awareness, feeling about them, and releasing the contractedness and fear they inspired and maintained.
I've decided to catch myself in the act whenever I contract my heart in fear of loss or rejection, and then to bring love into my heart, and into my relation with others instead. I've decided to dig up the buried stories, bring them into daylight, and heal them with my love.
I will not fear love. I will not fear my tenderness and vulnerability. I will celebrate these instead. I will be courageous!