I’ve started to just feel into and really realize my deep fear of being seen. This is a wound that carried over through many lifetimes and deeply into the core traumas of my inner child.
When it came time to expose myself to a lover, to someone close to me, to really strip back the layers of who I was and let them see me, it absolutely terrified me. I knew that eventually they would come face to face with the starving, wounded child inside me that used smoke and mirrors and endless disguises to evade capture. This part would weave complex tapestries of larger than life personas, false vulnerabiltiy and false love to avoid being actually seen for who she is. To avoid actually being felt. Using sexuality, money, security, ego and other tools and distractions to avoid from people actually getting to meet the real depth and complexity that lives within. Parts of me feared that no one could actually be capable of going that deep with me, and sometimes my own depths are almost too much for me to hold it all by myself. This illusion easily comes from childhood wounds, lack of safety and acknowledgement from my primary caregivers. Always playing the role of the “golden child” who never said what she needed, shared and gave generously, loved and played with all, but deep inside was hurting with a grief so heavy it could never be seen.
Worse than the fear of exposing these depths, is when they are vulnerably shared, and the needs and boundaries and deep care needed to work with them is denied. Or even worse, condemned and blamed, saying i would never “get better” or be “whole’ again. This child has held on to this fear for so many years, the fear that by being myself, by being “too much” I would hurt the people around me.
There is this deep fear sense of “evading capture” that can come from a very real persecution wound that travels across time and space and akashic records. This is a common theme with spiritual people, healers, witches, shamans across all different lifetimes, landscapes and worlds. This fear of being too bright a light because in those instances, that could mean capture, death and violence. That’s why so many are terrifed of exposing their “craft” consciously or subconsciously, because our entire system has embedded and ingrained into us that being too different is, ultimately, dangerous. Challenging the matrix or status quo is a dangerous game, that in these “past” or alternate timelines, really can lead to death. Obviously this is not the reality we live in anymore, or can choose not to live in.
There are parts of me that ache to embrace my “too much-ness”, my Leo energy, my brightness and power and light that is so huge even I’m afraid of it sometimes. What I actually show and share with the world is delicately curated, dimmed and slivered off into “acceptable” portions to be easily digested. What I work with in the shadows, in my personal process, is a deep and endless well I can easily fall into. What I’ve allowed myself to feel, is only small portions of the true range of life’s feeling, because of that fear and desperation towards not feeling, not being, not exposing, too much.
So how do we heal this? How do we invite in being ourselves, exposing ourselves, living authentically and feeling safe doing so?
You do this step by step. You do this with delicacy. You tend the soil of your inner garden. Carefully removing weeds and making space for light and nourishment and water. You take it slow. Knowing you are imperfectly perfect always. Knowing that healing is not your whole purpose and end goal. Within your suffering and pain you encounter joy, and you savor that. WIthin the growth comes seeds of wisdom, that you collect and plant within you. You don’t need to heal it all in a day. You take your time working your way down the plant to the roots and one by one extracting each root system. You trust yourself more and more. You allow yourself to expand your capacity to receive joy, to receive love. In safe environments you undress and expose the parts of you that need to be seen by others to be acknowledged as alive. Not just your own little secrets. And with the beings who can treat your heart with impeccable love and care, you begin to share it again. Slowly, but surely. And from that sharing your heart begins to heal. Your being is meant to be shared, meant to be seen. Your magic is meant to be shared. Your light is meant to be shared.