I felt so tender and a bit untethered when I woke up today.

So, I started my day avoiding my meditation cushion or moving my body, and the discomfort just got worse.

I’ve been feeling so alive—why today this tenderness?

It’s uncomfortable. When I finally sat down to connect with it, I felt so many fears popping up, and I gave them all a lot of space to just be—the fears I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge.

It became clear as I listened to the fears, that this made space for my heart to open to deeper layers of emotional cleansing.

Grieving clears the way of the fears so that all that can be projected into the unknown are my desires, visions, and love.

I heard the small, still voice within whisper to me:

“There’s nothing wrong with feeling vulnerable; there is a great aliveness amidst uncertainty. Open. Open.”

We tend to project our unacknowledged grief into the unknown, which pulls us closer to stagnancy than aliveness. The things we are most afraid of continuing into perpetuity in the future are all things that happened.

Tending to the edges of our vulnerability is a self-loving act because that place that deeply aches or feels raw in our hearts is also the place where we experience connection to love, divine source, and the intelligent quality of our own life force energy. Eros—which is so much vaster and profound than our sexuality.

I often listen to clients expressing to me that they are feeling raw or vulnerable, and they don’t know “why.”

So begins the great analytical expedition into why there is tenderness, which pulls us out of the raw aliveness of the wisdom the body is sending up, and dissociates us from what wants to be known in the nourishing darkness of our own attunement.

Our mind senses pain and seeks to find certainty.

Much of our self-learned psychoanalysis is an attempt to seek certainty, rather than deeper understanding, amidst vulnerable or scary feelings we never experienced being loved or respected in. Pain that wasn’t witnessed or acknowledged. Space wasn’t given for the grief to do its thing and move through.

We have a response to our feelings not being safe to feel. The mind perceives our vulnerability or rawness as something being “wrong” that we need to figure out in order to feel safe again.

Such is with most of our feelings that also contain the innate intelligence that runs through our life force energy.

Eros runs through our emotions. She is the intelligence residing within them.

She is what awakens our grief, because grief is love, and we do not grieve or feel sad or angry or scared when we do not love.

This energy of desire for love and union is also the desire that plants seeds of creativity and vision, of change and rebirth. It is what sets in motion the great reclamation and embodiment of our full selves, if we are willing to surrender and pay attention. It is our vitality that pulls us deeper into aliveness and truth and freedom, into deep intimacy with all of life via breaking our hearts open to ourselves.

We live in a world right now that does not honor vulnerability or tenderness as a valuable experience. It doesn’t respect the soulful depth of all that Eros is.

We see strength as suppression, denial or, worse, repression to the point that we are simply tension walking around, afraid all there will ever be is this tension and disconnection, and we try to find certainty in our mental body or through filling our lives with things that give us a sense of some stable ground, that isn’t quite as nourishing as we deeply crave.

This is our modern dilemma, the seeds of codependency and addiction to suffering and things outside of us—that our grief can free us from.

Our grief heals us; it releases us from holding on to the past in our bodies, which is the only place that the past lives, until we decide to set ourselves free.

More love.

Not less.

~