Wow! Chelan Harkin absolutely nails it! She is able to masterfully, accurately, wisely put into words the essence of profound truth, of how we are wounded and disconnected and stuck in our suffering, and the path of heart that leads us back to ever expanding vulnerability, truth, authenticity, connection, compassion, wisdom, and love. Deepest bow. 🙏
This great wounding of separation from our hearts and a heart-to-heart connection with ourself and all beings is epidemic in our culture and world. This is the deep trauma which permeates so much, the impacts of which we can see everywhere.
At 72 I’ve long been on this path of heart. It is our greatest gift… to experience this gradual awakening from the illusion of separation and come home to the wholeness of our holy selves and the sacred thread which connects us all.
Deepest gratitude to Chelan for sharing her journey and the courage, wisdom, and fierce compassion and love of her heart. A sacred and much needed gift for all of us and our hurting beautiful world. 💜 Molly
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| Photo by Molly |
The Path Back to the Open Heart
I grew up in a family who very much cared about love but hadn't learned the necessity of vulnerability as a relational agent of love. We hadn't learned that finding healthy relationship with our pain was an essential part of love being grounded, whole, deeply reliable, safe and sustainable.
Vulnerability is disarmed truth. We arm ourselves with blame, judgment, projected anger. Beneath that is the truth of what's going on in us. Truth is always humble, which means it takes full ownership for the roots of our emotional experience, and truth always serves love, meaning it doesn't push others away in its expression, it inclusively brings ourselves and others in to more coherent understanding and a more whole perspective.
In this, vulnerability—or the process of bringing the connection of truth, love and humility to our feelings and having the courage to share with others from that place—is the path back to the open heart.
When we learn that vulnerability is unsafe as children, one painful implication of this is that there is no way to fully return to relationship, to reestablish a full and healthy bond that reflects both belonging and authenticity with those around us. We learn that some part of us has to be sacrificed, distorted, compromised to return to connection.
Many of us learned that the vulnerable process required for full relating would have been rejected. When the path that in a healthy system would close the separation gap is treated as one that increases separation, hopelessness is created. And in this environment of lack of connection, anger, resentment and hostility spawns.
When we are not on the path to full connection, we learn that to connect and get by is to live in a fragmented way of performance and grudge holding and falsity and enhancement and hiding. We learn power dynamics instead of mutuality, we learn competition and ridicule instead of support. Power dynamics are a trauma response, our best attempt at being in connection and being safe when we’ve been trained in invulnerability.
We learn that the only way to come back into connection with people around us isn’t through the healthy process of disarmed, open, courageous, humble, transparent and loving sharing, but through compromising distorting or sacrificing our integrity in some way.
I’ve heard integrity defined as loyalty to ourselves. To the degree we experienced dysfunction in our families of origin is the degree we had to come out of loyalty to ourselves to be in connection with others.
When as children we learn that we can’t come all the way back to open and full relationship with those in our family, what this imprints most foundationally, is that we can’t come all the way back to our fully open heart. The process of coming all the way back to an open heart is to emotionally move through all of the energies that are in its way, meaning, any energies that don't yet resonate with love. Any energies in us that don't resonate with love, truth and humility cause us pain. This can motivate us to move through them. We move through them by bringing love, truth and humility to them and then they open, infuse us with new energy, insight, love and wisdom and they cease to be obstacles between us and our open heart and us and those in our lives.
To not be able to return to the open heart is a big deal with big implications for our quality of life and the quality of our relationships. This split of authenticity and belonging is psychological, emotional agony. It is an atom bomb in the soul.
When our process back to the open heart is blocked through rejection, judgment, selective acceptance and condemnation of those around us, we don’t experience full resolution, full forgiveness, we don't experience our full-self, full truth, full home.
It’s in the open heart that we refind ourself, re-experience ourself and genuinely connect with our inherent worth. It's in the journey back to the open heart that we source resilience—to return to the open heart is the experienced knowing that we can move through anything, can encounter anything and we can be okay, not conceptually or theoretically, but actually, in full resolution with ourselves and others.
Through the full process back to the open heart we come to know we won’t get stranded in the remoteness of our lonely, disconnected pain no matter what anyone in our lives says or does to us. We come to trust there is a path to the grace of complete deliverance from any pain and separation we experience in ourselves and that the path is beautiful, available to us and exceedingly worthwhile.
To understand that we always have the ability to experientially return to an open heart through resolving any of the energies that block us from it is the basis of power, agency, love, forgiveness, integrity, accountability—everything.
Dysfunction is any relational dynamic that keeps us from expressing all that serves our journey back to a fully open heart.
Dysfunction comes from relating to each other while trying to preserve our trauma. Trauma is frozen energy of overwhelming fear that is stuck in the body that people haven't found the resources yet to work with, to responsibly connect with.
We identify with what we haven’t worked through or connected with in ourselves and so we are afraid of these parts of us that we identify with being seen, addressed etc. When it is too threatening and unfamiliar to let these pieces go it is also too miserable to recognize them and give them attention.
In this, dysfunctional situations hold the relational demand that vision be blurred, that knowing and perception be skewed, that truth be side-stepped. Avoidance is a requirement in these relational spaces.
Domination, oppression and control come in as crude tools to try to coerce those around us to maintain their patterns that keep us comfortable and enabled, which means that keeps our repressed fear and pain from being stirred up enough to get our attention. In this dysfunction, we demand that those around us keep their truth repressed lest its emergence bring light to the painful dynamics in the other that are still not ready to be looked at.
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