I still do this sometimes. Learning to trust and let love in when we grew up feeling unprotected or unsafe is hard work. It’s completely normal to be guarded or self-protecting when we’ve been hurt or betrayed in the past - without the ability to self-protect we wouldn’t have evolved to where we are today. But that same instinct to self-protect is the instinct that can keep us at arms length from true intimacy and connection. If we project the people who hurt us in the past onto the people who want to love us in the present, we are cutting ourselves off from the healing that can occur when we re-write our stories about how love and relationship can be. Trusting love is always a risk. Showing our hearts is always a risk. Letting love in is always a risk. And as with anything in life, all of this is impermanent. No matter what, everything ends. Sometimes love can stare us right in the face and all we can see is our past. When we’re wounded, extensions of love can feel suffocating, attempts to connect can feel like control, nothing feels safe. But the solution is not to avoid relationship all together, to set rigid boundaries that prevent intimacy, or to test a person until the straw breaks. The answer lies in your own healing. And your healing happens in relationship - to yourself, to your heart and mind, to how you respond when your mind conjures up the old story and when you feel your heart going under lockdown. And to the ones right in front of you, extending their love and asking you to see them clearly. We don’t escape our pain by avoiding it, we heal it by sitting in the fire and being with the intensity that arises as we relearn what it means to let love in. And you deserve to know what it means to co-create mutual trust, admiration, respect and companionship. The practice is in letting love lead. Words @sheleanaaiyana