Softening Our Barriers To Love - Insight Timer Live

Rumi said, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it, and embrace them." In this talk and guided shadow work practice, Catherine shares how we love what we feel is unlovable within us, overcoming self-judgment and building the foundation for thriving relationships. Trauma-informed & anti-oppressive. Meditation music by Jamiel Conlon.

Transcript

Welcome to Softening Our Barriers to Love.

And I'll start by reading the quote that inspired this talk.

And I'll read two versions of the quote because it's a roomy quote.

It's been around the internet and around our lives for many years,

So you've probably heard it before.

But there's the version that most of us have heard,

And then there's the completed version of it that actually I think is the most revelatory.

So I'll start with the first version.

Your task is not to seek for love,

But merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

And Tara Brach mentioned in her talk called Radical Love Part 1 that there's actually,

That's actually not the whole quote,

And that it's missing perhaps the most important piece of all at the end.

And that the whole quote,

She says,

Is this.

Your task is not to seek for love,

But merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it and embrace them.

So that last bit is new,

Right?

Embrace the barriers.

Embrace the barriers in your psyche and your body that you have to love,

To letting love in.

Yeah.

What does it do in your own body when you hear that?

What would it mean for you to embrace the barriers that you have to love?

And so the first,

The bulk of that quote,

The gist of it is really that love is our essence,

Right?

We don't need to go outside of ourselves to seek for the love that we long for,

The love that we are,

Because love is our essence.

It is,

I would add,

The fabric of the universe.

It is shining with excruciating light through all that is around and within us,

Right?

Excruciating light.

Love can be excruciating to us,

And I'll talk a lot more about this later in the talk.

So we know from this quote and from most of spirituality that we are a love.

God is love.

However you define that,

The universe is love.

It's shining within and around us,

But we're blocked to it in many ways.

And why are we blocked to it?

Because we've been fed this lie through our ancestral traumas,

Through our personal traumas,

Through our conditioning in the toxic culture that we live in.

We've been fed this lie that we need to carve out parts of ourselves in order to be deserving of love.

It's the lie of shame.

It's the lie of shame.

So we have these barriers to love that have their root in shame,

That are woven and stitched into our being and how we show up in the world,

How we show up in relationships.

And they operate completely unconsciously most of the time.

And so in colonial capitalist patriarchy that we live in,

We have this idea that spirituality is somehow this state that we get,

Right?

This thing that we achieve,

That we have to go after something.

And I say this as somebody who has utterly and deeply perpetuated this in myself.

And harmed others with this stance.

And continue to need to be vigilant about it in myself.

Even after years and years of yoga,

Healing work,

Shadow work,

Self-love work,

I continued to judge myself and want to carve out the places that I was ashamed of in myself.

The places that were scared,

The places that continued to fuel the patterns,

The addictions,

The relational dysfunction that I experienced.

I thought I needed to achieve a certain state by getting rid of those parts of myself.

And this was unconscious.

I didn't set out to be at war with myself.

This is our cultural inheritance.

This is our cultural inheritance.

Is war with the self.

So I'll share a little personal story about the turning point,

It's what I call my tender revolution.

Also the name of my podcast,

Also the name of my book that I'm writing,

Tender Revolution.

My tender revolution,

So my revelation in actually embodying the embrace of the barriers to love within me happened when I was postpartum.

So I became a mother three years ago almost exactly on August 13th,

2019.

And I read somebody,

Spirity Soul,

This account I follow on Instagram,

Amazing account,

Said recently,

No one gets out of motherhood in America without PTSD.

No one gets out of motherhood in America without PTSD.

And that was certainly true for me.

I literally got PTSD.

And what that looked like for me was,

Quote unquote,

What is known as postpartum depression,

Postpartum insomnia.

And Megan,

You're doing a week,

I don't want to scare you,

It's worth it,

It's just a long journey sometimes.

So for me,

What I experienced was postpartum anxiety,

Depression,

And acute insomnia where my body lost the ability to fall asleep,

Regardless of how my baby was sleeping,

She slept great.

I lost the ability to regulate my nervous system basically enough to sleep for more than one,

Two,

Three tops hours a night.

And that lasted about a year.

And so I was in this state of feeling torture.

I mean,

Insomnia is torture.

At the same time,

Crushing,

Absolute bone-breaking,

Crushing guilt for not being able to show up as the parent I wanted to be.

And here I am,

This specialist in early childhood trauma and attachment,

You know,

And I couldn't provide that level of attunement that I knew my daughter needed,

Right?

So just the crushing guilt on top of the symptoms that I was experiencing and feeling completely out of my mind.

And I was someone who,

Before becoming a mother,

I really thought that I had life pretty figured out.

I had a very successful healing arts practice.

I was doing one-on-one shadow work with folks.

I had this trauma-informed training.

I had great marriage.

I still have great marriage.

I was on cloud nine,

And I really,

Really,

Really wanted to be a mom.

And yet with all of this stuff that I thought I'd figured out,

I was in this rock bottom,

Like actual rock bottom state where I was having anxiety attacks every single night.

And the most acute part of that suffering was excruciating self-judgment for why,

With all of what I know,

With all of the healing tools under my belt,

Why can't I freaking fix myself?

Like,

What is wrong with me that I can't overcome this?

You know,

Like,

Why can't I fix myself?

And can you feel the war inside that that creates,

That I am not good enough?

In fact,

I'm far from good enough.

There was this tyrannical part of myself that wouldn't let me rest,

And this part was not new to me,

But it got the loudest it's ever been in my postpartum year.

And I would do shadow work on myself for hours every night.

I would do every single somatic experiencing technique I knew,

You know,

Trauma release exercises.

I would just work myself to the bone every single night because I wasn't sleeping,

So I was like,

I got to do something to fix myself,

To be there for my daughter,

You know.

And here was the moment of my tender revolution.

Unfortunately,

It took me a long time to get to it.

It was like almost a whole year of this excruciating war with myself.

And many of you know that I'm a student of Tara Brach and that I was lucky to be on retreat with her as a teenager and that her book Radical Acceptance completely changed my life and is a foundation for my work.

So I went back to Tara Brach,

Like in my moment of desperation,

I was like,

I'm going to listen to Tara Brach's talks,

Her Dharma talks,

When I'm not sleeping at night.

And so there was a talk that she gave,

And I apologize because I don't remember the name of it,

But in it,

I've heard her share this many,

Many different times,

Many different talks.

In it,

She said in one of the meditations to put your hand on your heart and say in your deepest moments of struggle,

I care about this suffering.

I care about this suffering.

And when I started to do that,

It flipped my habitual trauma response of crazed fixing of the self.

It flipped it on its head.

And suddenly there I was embracing my barriers to love.

There I was embracing,

And yeah,

Janelle,

You could feel it in your body,

Right?

It's instant.

I care about this suffering.

Instead of fixing it,

Instead of trying to make it go away,

I just care about it.

It's that simple.

And I'm not saying that was a silver bullet and I started sleeping immediately.

No.

What I'm saying is that that was the beginning of my softening toward myself,

Toward all the bracing I'd been doing against the love that was in my life,

The support,

The massive support of my husband and my friends and my family who were trying to reach me but could not in that postpartum year because I was so mired in self-judgment.

Self-judgment armors the heart.

It is a deep barrier to love.

So by loving,

By caring about that suffering,

Suddenly I diffuse that self-judgment.

It's like a switch off.

I was no longer judging myself,

And I had to solve that barrier,

And suddenly I could receive.

And I don't mean suddenly as in perfectly and all the time,

Right?

But suddenly that seed was planted to receiving where I started to recover.

I started to notice.

I started to notice the love that everybody was sending me and actually feel it,

And you know what?

That is what started my healing from insomnia and all of the postpartum stuff was letting it in,

Letting it in,

Letting in the love that's there.

And the love that is the universe and that is God,

Right?

Like in that present moment when we just close our eyes and feel the sweetness of that presence,

As any of you meditators are familiar with,

That is love.

When we experience beauty,

That is love.

Beauty is the energy of love.

And many of us have had these moments in meditation or other contemplative time or in nature where we're overcome by beauty.

That is love.

In those moments where we cry because something is so beautiful,

Those are the tears that are the melting of the armor.

When we cry,

That is often the melting of armor and our heart opens.

Have you felt this before?

A lot of enthusiastic yeses from you all.

I'm so happy you felt that.

That's like my favorite thing in life,

Beauty tears.

So I came to accept and integrate this meditation from Tara Brach into how I do my work because I used to do shadow work and I was always trauma-informed and gentle,

Right?

But there was a slight edge in how I used to do shadow work before I became a mother where there was a little bit about let's get to the root cause and get there,

Get something,

Let's make something happen and fix you,

You know.

I was never a fixer per se but there was an edge of that.

After becoming a mom,

I've let that go completely cause I've realized that that's actually violent.

It is not trauma-informed.

Anytime we have an agenda,

It's violence and we're not present with the person,

We're not present with ourselves and there's judgment in the background.

I'll tell you all like my personal daily practice and then I want to get into practicing with everyone here because this is really something you have to experience and not just talk about this embracing our barriers to love,

Right?

So I'll tell you how I have come to practice this in myself and it happened immediately before this call.

So I usually,

I wait to put my makeup on until like 10 minutes before going live because I'm usually crying.

Beauty tears.

So what I do every morning including before this live is I sit,

I have like my simple yoga mat over there and a candle and I just open to whatever is moving through me and I say yes to it.

And when something is coming up that part of me might want to be different,

That part of me might be trying to change,

I sit and I say with my hand on my heart or my belly,

Whatever feels right,

I say to myself,

I love you in this fearfulness.

Or sometimes I say,

Like this morning I was saying,

I love you,

Fearful one.

I love you,

Fearful one.

Or I was feeling nervous about going live today because like this is a topic that's really important to me and I wanted to do a really good job,

Whatever that means,

In my colonial paradigm,

Right?

I wanted to do a good job as this daughter of the patriarchy.

But what did I do with that daughter of the patriarchy?

I loved her.

I said,

I love you.

I love you.

Who wants to do a good job?

I just love you.

And I said,

I love you in this nervousness.

And I could physically feel my nervous system regulate.

It's like co-regulation but with the self.

Self-regulation,

I suppose.

I love you in this nervousness.

So I wonder if before we get into our larger practice for today,

I wonder right now if you can identify something that you've been at war with yourself about,

Something,

A state that you would like to go away,

Whether it's fear,

Judgment,

An addiction.

But try not to make it something that's too big,

Something that's little,

Maybe just shame or nervousness,

Anxiety,

Something like that.

Whatever it is,

I invite you right now to just practice this with me for one minute and see the impact that it has to embrace this barrier to letting the love in.

So you can put your hand anywhere that feels nurturing.

And if you like,

Close your eyes and really feel,

Like bring that feeling into full presence in your body now,

Whether it's fear or anxiety,

Just feel it and allow it to have space in you.

And without thinking too much about this,

Just say either silently or out loud,

I love you in this,

Whatever it is.

Or if it resonates more,

You can say,

I love you,

Anxious one,

Fearful one.

Breathing and allowing your heart to say this to yourself.

And if this is hard,

That's completely okay.

You can say to yourself,

I love you in this difficulty.

I love you in this numbness.

And if you feel something pleasant,

Like grounded and peaceful,

Just amplify that love.

I love you,

Grounded one.

I love you,

Peaceful one.

Make it bigger.

Just take a few more moments here.

Noticing,

Is there a change in your body when you say this to yourself?

And then come on back.

Come on back and let me know in the chat what you've discovered,

If you've noticed a shift.

And remember,

It's completely okay if you haven't noticed a shift too.

I'm just curious to see how this was for you.

So Megan,

You say absolutely,

You felt a shift.

Did anybody experience those tears?

Yeah,

So Kim,

Tears and then softening.

Isn't it magnificent how immediate it can be,

You know?

Jameel says,

Feeling a little better,

Hard to feel sincere,

Honestly.

Heart very blocked.

Yeah,

I love you in your blocked state,

Heart.

I love you,

Blocked one.

I'm here.

Janelle says,

Tension in my head and jaw release that I didn't realize was there.

Yeah.

Isn't this amazing how deep these barriers can run in our body?

And remember that any kind of judgment,

Tension,

Any of this is a barrier to love.

Whenever we have this in our body,

Like sometimes I say,

Anyone with a lot of body tension is going to be a very lonely person.

Because when we have a lot of body tension,

That's a mirror of our emotional state and blocked to receiving love,

Right?

Yeah,

And if doing this for just like literally one or two minutes,

Like we did today,

Had that effect,

Think about doing this for five minutes or ten minutes,

You know?

But be vigilant about wanting to use this tool to get something.

Because remember,

When we have an agenda,

We're not present.

When we have an agenda,

We're blocking love.

We're not able to be present with ourselves.

We're not loving with ourselves when we want a certain state.

So this is tricky.

It's subtle,

It's complex,

And it requires this radical gentleness and honesty with ourselves.

Yeah,

Radical gentleness and honesty.

And,

Megan,

Good question.

Is wanting to feel love also agenda?

I think it depends on how feverishly you're pursuing it.

If you're trying hard to get love from outside yourself,

Then yes.

So here's something I've come to.

So if there's the single most important piece of spiritual advice that I can give anyone is this.

Stop trying.

Stop trying is the single most important piece of spiritual advice I can give anybody.

It has roots in Buddhism and Taoism,

And it's how I do my best to live my life too.

Stop trying,

Because here's the thing.

When we try,

We exist in resistance to the present moment.

Do you see that?

When we're trying to get somewhere,

When we're trying to get love,

That's what Rumi said,

Right?

Your task is not to seek for love.

When we're trying,

We're in resistance,

And when we're in resistance,

We are behind a barrier.

We're blocking,

We're bracing against the flow of life.

Yeah,

Exactly,

CJ.

As we know from Jungian psychology,

What we resist persists,

And what we embrace and accept as it is is free to change,

And that is the paradox,

Right?

When we accept something truly as it is,

Then it's free to change,

And I think there's a quote from Carl Rogers there somewhere too,

The founder of humanism and counseling.

Like,

That which we accept is free to change,

Accepting exactly how it is.

Yeah,

And someone says,

Like,

Rashida says,

I don't know how not to try.

Yeah.

So just right now,

How not to try is to say,

It's okay if I'm trying.

It's okay that I need to try.

It's okay that I need to try.

And that might not make sense because you think,

Well,

Then,

Aren't I just going to keep trying if I give myself permission to try?

Paradoxically,

No.

Because when we accept ourselves,

Even for a state of wanting to try and not knowing otherwise,

When we accept ourselves completely for that state,

You're suddenly not trying.

You're in a state of alignment with what is,

With the present moment,

And that is the definition of not trying.

And what Andrea says,

What about saying,

I love me in this exercise?

I don't feel that that's trying.

When I do that in my own body,

When I say,

I love you,

Like,

There is not a hardness there.

There's an acceptance there.

And maybe it's different in your body,

And then you can just say,

I love you in this hardness,

Or whatever that feels like in your body.

So many of us know a certain character type,

And that is,

I know particularly,

I mean people like me,

So cisgender,

Heterosexual,

Spiritual white women.

Maybe that's you too.

I have noticed that it is particularly this type that is susceptible to have this particular pattern that I'm going to share in a moment,

And that pattern is we try terribly hard to be light and love.

We try terribly hard to find exactly the right partner.

We talk and talk about finding the right guy,

You know.

Talk and talk about,

You know,

Why can't I,

I'm an amazing person,

Right,

Like why can't I find,

And I know so many amazing women,

Heterosexual cis women who can't seem to find the right partner.

And it's a source of massive struggle and grief.

Why is this?

Why is this?

Do you have a clue?

Because people of our particular demographic are,

Because we've grown up acutely with perfectionism,

We have projected that onto our approach to ourselves and onto our spiritual path,

And we've just amplified our barriers to actually receiving love.

We still exist in this state of tension.

We still exist in this state of war with the self,

And because we have not actually mapped loving acceptance into the self in this way,

There's nowhere for it to land when another person actually shows it to us.

We have to map a state from within before we recognize it and can let it in from outside ourselves from another person,

Right.

I shared last week in the talk called How to Attract Your People that I was not at all attracted to my current husband when I first met him because he was boring to me.

He didn't fit the pattern that I had of the attractive,

Sexy,

Pretty much emotionally distant man,

You know.

But the real reason was I was too scared to really accept myself,

And so somebody who had no agenda when he looked at me was terrifying to me,

And my trauma patterning just wrote it off as somebody I wasn't interested in.

But the reality was this is a man who is healthy,

Who looked at me without trying to change me at all,

With no agenda.

He was totally present with me.

He is to this day,

And I do my best,

You know,

Every time he looks at me I still to this day breathe and do my best to let it in because it's not automatic.

There's still a kind of barrier with it.

Yeah.

So let's just,

Let's do a practice today and I know I talked about,

You know,

Cis,

Het,

Spiritual white women as just one,

That's my experience in the human body,

Right,

And that's a lot of the archetypes I've seen with this,

But you have your own,

Depending on who you are,

You have your own version of barriers to love,

And that might include a whole lot of ancestral trauma if you're black or brown,

For example.

So let's do a little practice.

So I've come to this practice of letting love in is what I've come to call love resilience.

Like we know about being resilient to suffering and pain,

Like being resilient to that,

But we don't talk about love resilience,

That to someone who identifies with struggle,

So trauma survivors listen up here,

To somebody who identifies with struggle,

Love registers as a threat to our systems.

When we've come to identify with struggle,

Love or acceptance will register as a threat,

Because remember that our bodies seek out what's familiar and call that safe.

To our bodies,

Familiarity means safety from a nervous system perspective.

So when someone comes at us like my husband,

Without an agenda,

Without trying to change us,

Without just showing up and loving us for exactly who we are,

It's like,

Ugh,

It actually can make me want to close off because it registers as a threat,

Because I learned in my early childhood that when I was open-hearted,

I got rejected.

When I showed spontaneity,

Joy,

My own opinions about things,

When I said no,

When I went with the flow of my being,

I got rejected,

So I learned to close myself.

So when someone's just inviting me to open my heart by showing up like that with me,

It's like,

Oop,

This is not safe.

I better close right now.

So this exploration,

This practice we're doing is going to bring you into intimacy with that in you if that's part of your experience.

And here's what we're going to do.

I'll explain it and then I'll lead it.

So I'll have you imagine somebody in front of you,

And this is going to be a deeper,

Longer version of what we did last week if you were here for how to attract your people.

So we're going to,

Like that practice,

Imagine somebody in front of us vividly who accepts and loves us exactly as we are with no agenda to change us.

And then we're going to amplify that.

We're going to allow that to take up space in our body,

Just like how it feels,

The body sensations of how it feels to be in the presence of that person.

And what we're doing is we're really getting curious about the resistance that comes up.

You know,

That's what the purpose is.

And then what I'll invite you to do if it feels right for you today,

Right now,

Is to map that body sensation and perhaps emotion that comes up for you,

And we're going to get curious about,

Hmm,

At what age did I experience that in my early life?

Perhaps for the first time,

Perhaps just an early experience.

And then we're going to have a very deeply loving encounter of your,

What I call your empathic witness self,

Your higher self,

I think in IFS,

Internal family systems,

They call it the self.

So with that loving,

The strongest,

Most loving version of yourself,

With that part of you at that age,

Because that part of you is still stuck there,

Stuck at that age when they learned that they would be rejected if they were open to receiving that love.

And so that's the trajectory of what we're going to do.

And so you can discern for yourself whether or not you want to do that kind of regressive work right now,

Or you can listen to the recording later,

But I invite you to try it.

I invite you to try it because this is shadow work.

Shadow work is light work,

Right?

So we're bringing light to the places that have been unconscious and hidden within us with this love.

Shadow work is the work of loving the unlovable in us.

Shadow work is the work of loving what we learned was unlovable about us.

So it is actually a practice of deep,

Deep love,

And people tend to feel quite softened and open by it.

So if you want,

Go ahead and we'll get ready for practice.

And I know there are a few questions,

But I'm going to have a Q&A after the practice,

And I'll get to those.

And if you don't have anyone in your life,

Like most of us don't,

Right,

Who if you don't have experience of somebody who loves you in this way,

I invite you to create,

Like allow your imagination to amplify and create an imaginary person.

Like what if somebody was in front of you loving you that way?

And just let your imagination create that and amplify that.

That might bring up a lot of grief too.

Yeah.

Yeah,

All right.

So get yourself situated now.

You can be seated or lying down here,

Whatever feels nurturing to you for our practice.

We'll just be here for about 10 minutes.

Go ahead and take some deep breaths and arrive exactly where you are.

So wherever you are,

Just feel the weight of the body supported by the surface you're on.

And notice anywhere in your body that would like to let go and soften,

Bringing that gentle breath of softness to those places that might feel tense,

Closed without forcing or trying here.

When we soften,

We become present.

We become embodied.

One more breath into your softening being.

As you now,

With eyes closed perhaps,

See in your imaginal plane somebody sitting in front of you at a respectful distance that feels nonetheless close and so caring for you.

And this person is looking at you with complete love for exactly who you are right now.

And you can see in their eyes the depth of this bottomless love for you.

That they want nothing more than to be present with you as you are right here.

And as you really let that in,

Notice what your body's doing.

It's likely that you feel tension or closing in certain places in your body.

And simply name where you feel that now,

Such as closing in the throat or armoring around the heart.

Perhaps you feel an urge to retreat and just notice that too.

Saying yes to whatever is here.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with your body's response here.

So now,

Really tune into the sensations you're feeling and give them names,

Maybe tension,

Closing.

Notice if there's a cool or warm perhaps,

Hard or soft,

Just give some names to what you experience here.

Also name the emotion or emotions that might be present for you in the presence of this love.

There might be a complex desire for both a longing for it and a repulsion perhaps,

Simultaneously.

Whatever is here name that emotion or multiple emotions.

And now I'm going to switch gears here very gently and allow that loving individual in front of you just to recede into the background,

As you focus now on that internal experience that that encounter created for you.

Really getting clear about the feeling the body sensations,

And expand now just a little bit amplifying so that we can really see what's here.

Really name it.

Ask your inner wisdom,

Without thinking about what the right thing is it's very important.

No thinking about this,

Ask your inner wisdom now to project in front of you.

The age you were approximately when you felt something similar a similar combination of feeling and body sensation.

So now you are looking at this younger version of you in front of you in your imaginal plane.

Now you might see this version of you in a scene or a memory,

Or you might just see kind of an abstract image,

Such as from a photograph of yourself.

It's all okay.

But breathe now into your body,

Knowing that you standing tall here are the strongest and most loving version of your adult self.

You might imagine yourself as a sovereign queen king ruler here.

That's so compassionate.

So deeply loving and has infinite resource and capacity to be present with what's here.

And from the space of loving strength really see now your younger self and notice their body language.

If their eyes are looking at you really look into those eyes and notice how they're feeling how they're really feeling.

And it's okay if they want to run from you or are hostile to you by the way,

Your job now is to simply say yes and validate whatever they're experiencing.

So either just with your energy toward them or silently or out loud.

You can say to them now I see that you're,

For example,

Bent over all alone in your room,

Or I see that you're running from me and that's completely okay.

If they don't trust you something very powerful to say to them is,

You don't have to trust me.

And the reason why the healing is happening right now is in your complete acceptance of them exactly as they are.

And hopefully you now have become the force of unconditional love.

Look at them and notice that it's very natural to get distracted here to click on other things to multitask to fall asleep it's very natural to want to resist this and just very gently and lovingly bring yourself back.

So looking at that younger version of you here.

Ask them a question and just see if they have an answer and if they don't it's completely okay and we'll just keep validating whatever their experiences,

And the question you can ask them now is,

What do you really need.

What do you really need.

Just go with whatever they say first,

And again it's okay if they don't know.

If they've named a need.

Not the way you want to the way that they would want you to.

Take a few more breaths either meeting that need or just being able to get back to it.

Meeting that need or validating down here.

And just checking now to notice and ask them is there anything else.

Anything else that this encounter needs to feel complete for now,

Knowing that this is just the beginning perhaps of a lifelong relationship.

There will be other visits.

Anything else that's needed,

Go ahead and do whatever feels needed for this to be complete now.

Gently bringing this experience to a close here,

As you feel deep gratitude for this vulnerable part of yourself for showing up.

However they did gratitude even for showing up in a hostile way to you.

And knowing that they are and have always been with you,

As you in you.

And that spirit of loving gratitude go ahead and bring yourself back now,

Opening the eyes if they were closed,

Looking around your space,

And even giving yourself a hug or just feeling that you have a body right here in this place in time.

Really helps me to look around the room and come all the way back right here right now.

And we're going to do just the briefest of little experiments.

Following that encounter and that is,

I invite you now to just tune in one last time and imagine again that person in front of you loving on you.

Feel them looking at you.

Loving you exactly as you are right here.

Breathe and notice your body.

Now,

Was there a shift in how your body is responding to this energy of love toward you.

And if not,

That's okay too.

And when you've gotten that information.

You can just come back out of that again.

Come back and just make note you might have a journal by you.

If you want to take some notes about your experience.

Or just arrive here and take any movement that might feel nourishing.

And I'd love to hear if you feel sharing might like sharing how that was for you.

Maybe if there were surprises along the way.

And I'll stay for a few more minutes to if anybody has any remaining questions or anything that you would like to share about that.

Yeah,

Jamie I had a hard time staying awake,

That's really common.

When we have a freeze response and our nervous system as our go to.

When we feel threatened.

An intense version of that freeze response can be falling asleep to or checking out.

And by the way,

Know that I have a few guided meditations on insight timer that are not talks they're just jump in and do the shadow work meditation and it's quite similar to this practice.

So if you ever want to do this again and jump straight into practice you can do like the shadow work for inner child healing meditation I have,

Or any of the other ones.

Roseanne says this was profound tears initially when feeling love,

Then more joy when feeling love from another after loving myself Thank you so much.

Oh,

I'm so glad you could open enjoy.

Did you know that and I think Brene Brown says this but joy is the most vulnerable state that there is joy is actually the most vulnerable state so it says a lot that you can feel joy.

Well,

While that love was coming to you.

So Christine you say I came in late and feel like my insecurities are resurrected and need to do a further acceptance meditation now.

Yeah.

And I wonder,

So I know you came in lace you didn't hear perhaps the first part of this talk where we talked about this but I'm just reading what you wrote and it has an energy,

At least my interpretation it has an energy of like,

I need to do something to fix these insecurities.

And my question for you is,

What if you accept your insecurity,

What if your insecurities are actually coming up to receive your loving acceptance,

And not to be fixed with another acceptance meditation.

What if they just need to be to hear.

I love you and your insecurity.

Just an idea may or may not resonate.

Thank you all for your donations to.

That's a great way to communicate if this was helpful for you so thank you thank you.

Alright everybody so I'll.

So if you don't know already know that the group that we meet in between lives is called shadow work,

We have a group here on insight timer with 1.

2 thousand people in it.

It's,

It's where I post upcoming live topics I asked for requests for live topics.

People share their experiences that might resonate with others and share resources,

It's like,

It's such a wonderful loving group so it's just called shadow work.

It's a group here on insight timer.

Oh,

Thank you all so much for hanging out with me and for bringing your hearts to this it's been a wonderful morning with you morning for me.

I'm so glad Sue's your first time here glad it's been illuminating.

Yay.

And I'll see you around in the shadow work group and however else you want to reach me and see you next time in a few weeks when I get back to my from my break.

Have a beautiful August,

Everybody.

Bye bye.

Reviews

I resist people gazing at me.. including my closest relationships. But I was awake at 5am this morning and found your recording. I fell asleep while listening :) and woke up when you asked to imagine someone gazing at you with deep love. I saw my Dad and his beautiful sky blue eyes looking at me with deep love the day before he died. I was 45, separated and grieving the loss of my marriage. He grieved with me with acts of love, and visits and gifts. I will treasure that moment in time now. Thank you for your gentle guidance that held me to really embrace this gaze of love. Something good has shifted in me to believe and receive 🩷

Wow!!
Thank you SO SO SO much for this powerful talk/meditation. So much shift and healing.

Sweet🥰in appreciation and www.gratefulness.org, ahimsa of www.compassioncourse.org

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟Dearest Catherine🙏Would it be possible to request a topic for a talk: about how to lovingly invite yourself back into your body when you dissociate? I have been listening to so many of your talks and they have been so helpful, but I have noticed (with as much kindness as possible now, thanks to your teachings) that during the exercises that you guide us through, that put us in touch with our shadow, that I tend to immediately dissociate, jump out of my body and into my wandering thoughts and distractions, and it feels like I’m “missing out” on the benefits of the shadow work. You say that we should be gentle with ourselves and kind to ourselves when this happens, and not try to force anything or have an agenda of changing ourselves or fixing ourselves, but I can’t help but feel like I want to participate in these exercises, and some part of me just jumps out of my own skin. Perhaps you’ve already done a talk like this, and I have just overlooked it or haven’t found it yet. I want to be gentle with myself, but my self seems to want to turn away. Thank you in advance for your understanding and your help. 🙏🙏🙏

I didn't expect to feel so validated and understood. So much of this resonated and the meditation was powerful for me. Thank you for this talk 🙏

Loved this. I too fell asleep but during the talk and woke up before meditation part. Interesting you said later this is normal. Also interesting you saying that joy is most vulnerable emotion. Before I would’ve guessed that sadness or loneliness or some of the more heavy emotions are. But joy also makes sense. I’d love to hear more abt it, perhaps during one of your lives :)

Very powerful and revealed more parts of my unseen self that were deeply hidden from me. Thank you Catherine! Namaste🙏✨✨❤️❤️

Tears upon tears , with I love you upon I love you, So very complex, filled with moments of freezing which I said I love you to !! Very powerful, also experiencing some nervous excited laughter from what my loves feels like ❤. Thank you for this talk and meditation 🙏

Such an invaluable talk and practice offering! So grateful for all I’ve absorbed through this experience and will continue to do so. It feels like the heart of the heart of acceptance and healing. Thank you so very much, Catherine!
❤️🌹❤️

Absolutely wonderful, thank you! ☆☆☆☆☆

Catherine, your talks are so understandable ❤️🙏
I usually listen through, then get brave enough to do the work. Thank you🙏🙏