Last week’s whisper on The Art of Receiving brought up emotional availability. Opening the heart to reception takes a willingness to be vulnerable and available to love. Emotional availability is being able to sit with difficult, upsetting, or challenging emotions and to avoid running away from, dismissing, or attempting to minimize those feelings. It means being able to be with someone in pain and not trying to fix it. Instead, being a loving, brave, mindful presence in that moment.
Emotional availability means being open to, confident, and courageous in the face of all human emotions and experiences, not just the ones that are rainbows and butterflies (tee hee). The person who faces both the beautiful, the light, and the good, as well as the painful, the difficult, and the dark makes themselves willing to feel all emotions.
A one-sided relationship can be exhausting as well as abusive. Strong relationships work in unison to build a team that moves both people beyond the imagination to gain strength in the effort to reach common goals. The ability to sustain a healthy bond and healthy emotional connection is characteristic of emotional availability. Let’s use our emotional connection with the angelic realm to learn more about emotional availability:
Parents are the archetypes who teach the basics, but the greatest examples of emotional availability are embodied by the community and the culture. The modern world has turned to technology for connection, which has led to dissociation from the emotions and feelings inherent in a true heart-to-heart connection. The eyes, body language, facial expression, choice of words, tone, and inflection form the energy behind expressive communication.
Without the subtle energies translating authenticity, honest expressions that lead to a soulful connection can be lost. It’s possible to articulate language through writing that connects two hearts, but just as possible to lose meaning with the reader’s misdirection. People aren’t intentionally dishonest, but sincerity can be lost when there is no value landing with the words.
Discussing tough issues is a form of spiritual training. Rising above a reactive state into an observational state is the role of the master within. The ability to be non-reactive allows access to the deepest emotional energies where truth is discovered. Every individual holds the answer to their problems within their hearts. The strength to be present with someone in pain is the power of love that builds the bridge to self-awareness, where all emotions are available.
Being direct and honest are hallmarks of emotional availability. Regardless of the discomfort when facing darkness and negativity, compassion shines the light of truth on any situation. Fear, frustration, anxiety, shame, grief, sadness, and anger are often the product of abandonment, abuse, and disconnection from love that blocks the heart from feeling emotions.
Instead of withdrawing into your corner out of a perception of safety and shelter, do something counter-intuitive. Express yourself from a grounded reality, and feel the freedom that comes when there is nothing to prove and less to gain but the voice of your own spirit.
Bring joy, ease suffering and create beauty, then dance like you mean it!
Blessings, Russell
“Hardening the heart against vulnerability, trust and a new partner will either forever keep us from a truly emotionally satisfying, enriching, and growth-producing partnership, or will throw us unwittingly back into precisely the same type of painful thing again, because we have not examined what happened, except under the out-of-focus microscope of blame.”― Gabriella Kortsch
