Honor Your Hidden Parts
The mind body experience communicates loud and clear: when dis-ease is present, there are parts of who you are that are not being honored. I invite you to distinguish between what you are experiencing and the truth of who you are. Your experience is pointing you to your truth, where it is being missed, and the blockages in your way. Like any path or pursuit, the first thing you encounter are the blockages. For example, if you want to build muscle by strength training, the first thing you will encounter are the areas you are limited in. If you choose to avoid these areas and simply start lifting heavy weights, you are going to get injured and those limitations will let you know loud and clear that they are meant to be respected. Within your mind body experience, you may be honoring parts of you that represent areas of comfort or social acceptance, while disavowing parts that seem less attractive or more uncomfortable to acknowledge. This is not so dissimilar from those who may overlook stretching or nutrition when they start to train because they are less rewarding at first and may not seem to contribute right away to looking good in the mirror.
If you apply this idea to your personality, you may have grown up in an environment that honored more traditionally masculine or feminine parts, people pleasing and sacrificial parts, or strong and controlled parts of who you are, all the while explicitly punishing or subtly ignoring the parts that did not align with the expected presentation. You may have learned certain parts were associated with “weakness” and must therefore remain hidden. As a result, your brain learned quickly to associate these parts with danger and to protect against their emergence at all costs. One way to limit a part of you from being expressed is to layer it with feelings of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and inadequacy, in addition to a host of beliefs about yourself centered around unworthiness. In other words, the disavowed parts are covered by a toxic stew of learned emotions and beliefs about yourself that you have been carrying for a long time as a form of protection, but that no longer serve you. The learned patterns of protection may at one point have taught you how to be more socially acceptable with teachers, friends, or within your own family, but their purpose was never designed to help you meet your truth. Underneath the learned emotions and beliefs that helped you survive childhood, there are vital parts of your truth yearning for love and attention. Like hardy plants that have managed to survive with little water or sunlight, your parts live on inside you, surviving the long winter of your social conditioning.
THIS IS NOT YOUR FAULT.
These parts were never nurtured by your environment and your brain learned that they were not acceptable to see the light of day. Now, your mind body experience is pointing you there and you must listen in order to honor the whole truth of you are. The process of honoring these parts may come with fear, along with a host of other learned emotions and beliefs that have limited you up to this point. Recognize the emotions and beliefs for what they are: learned forms of protection your brain has used to quiet these parts, deemed unworthy, when they threatened to speak. Though uncomfortable, the emotion and belief energy represent an invitation to transform; they are the final bastions of an outdated defense system that must be broken through in order to reach new states of wholeness and integration. Use courage - all that you can muster - to see through the illusion of this learned messaging and show your brain these parts are no longer a threat. Only you will know what has been neglected, and it starts with listening to the smaller, quieter voices within you; the voices that have always been there but never had a chance to speak. These voices will grow louder as you clear a path through the learned patterns of protection and teach your brain that they are safe, worthy, and essential to honor the complete truth of who you are. You do not need to go digging for these parts, all you have to do is recognize the blockages in your way and create space to be with and move through them. Your suffering is not for naught, it is a beacon guiding you home. Always start with where you are and be gentle, your parts are waiting for you.