As I am preparing to run a course on opening your wild heart I keep returning to the question of “what is a wild heart anyway”?
I have said this before but I will say it again, it can be pretty easy to feel our beautiful juicy open hearts, to feel loving, generous, creative and expressive when all the conditions are right, i.e we feel safe and we feel connected”, and to be willing to open your heart when these conditions aren’t around feels wild. The wildness is touching the vulnerability or the fear which is also your precious heart.
Like a turtle when it senses all is safe its world and there is no danger, it will happily wander around munching away, enjoying its terrain, following its flow, but when it senses imminent danger the turtle will retract into its shell.
Whereas the little turtle is willing to come out of his shell when he senses the threat is gone, the tricky thing with some of us human beings is we get stuck in the shell and our world becomes, well, hard and tight. We can’t move forward, we can’t connect to our loved ones and we miss out on all the things we would love to be creating or being. We miss the beauty of this wild and precious life when we are in our shells.
Something in me is always telling me we have no idea of our limitlessness. We are pure beautiful wild potential.
This thing about being stuck in your shell, its not just you, it’s also me and the one thing that has helped me more than anything else is authentic compassionate heartfelt connection and learning how to come back into presence through my body.
This is what keeps me unfolding into my own expansion, my own self love and dreaming my life into reality.
I won’t lie, it takes time.
It’s important to add that this self-protective retraction is almost always an unconscious response. It is the intelligence of our body and the trying to be helpful but often unhelpful ego mind.
Somatic awareness is about slowing down and bringing presence to the felt sense within the body, noticing what thoughts or beliefs are getting in the way and causing the shut-down response.
When we can do this with presence we begin to see that the thoughts or beliefs have their own identities like male or female, old or young, bossy or fearful. As we get to know them we can become less identified with them and we can even sense into what they might be needing, this is usually around feeling safe or a way of being that the conditioned mind is trying to achieve. When we are doing this from a place of curiosity and presence we become more able to sit in awareness and stay in connection to our self, our loved ones and our dreams.
If you are someone who would love to experience a beautiful, supportive, short journey based on learning to open your wild heart and feeling the compassionate presence of other wild hearts, I still have a couple of spaces left before we kick off on 1st June.
Love Jody.
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