How do babies get what they need?
Their laughter and joy draws people in close who wish to share in their joy. A baby is so pure in their joy that it becomes contagious.
Their tears and the full expression of their grief draws in the nurturing which they need.
The Value of Expressed Grief
As adults, we’re often taught in self-help circles to be potent in our joy, but not so often taught the value in expressing our grief. Many see grief or sadness as weakness.
It is only weakness when it becomes masked.
Grief expressed as worry or anxiety or anger or fake it till you make it joy or victimhood is weak and repelling. Grief, felt and expressed purely, is healing and draws in the nurturing we all require.
What Triggers Really Show
When I feel triggered by something that brings up frustration or anger as so many things in the media have a tendency to do for me, I used to just block that person or media outlet, or intellectually argue with them why they were not seeing the whole picture.
But I was the one not seeing the whole picture. My being triggered showed that the issue was not with another person. I have no control over what other people do. The triggering event was showing me that I still had something which needed to be healed. That there was a causal emotion that I was refusing to feel.
The Cost of Not Holding Space
I was terrified of having to feel the grief that they were feeling because it might mean I would have to feel my own grief.
To hold space for another we must become empathetic. This means we have to feel what they are feeling. We have to feel their causal emotion, not their masking emotion.
Becoming empathetic with someone who is angry or grieving can very easily put us in touch with our own grief, and it is a terrifying concept to accept that we have so much pain and grief deep within us which still needs to be felt fully.
Masking Strategies
So, rather than holding space for others, we turn to masking emotions designed to keep us from having to feel vulnerable. We get angry with them or go into fix them mode or argue that their concept of reality is wrong: anything to not have to feel our own grief.
What Babies Know
But look at how a baby does it: When they feel joyous, they really feel joyous. Their laughter is infectious. When they feel hurt, sorrow, terror, or grief, they really feel those emotions fully. In either case, the baby is likely to very quickly get what they need.
The advice of sages has always been to make yourself like a child. That is typically taken as becoming more playful in nature, but what it’s really pointing towards is this: A child has not intellectually trained themselves into strategies for avoiding causal emotions. And because they still know how to express, purely, what they are feeling, they are not vibrationally blocked by the exoskeleton of emotional injury.
Clear Intuition
When we are free of emotional injury, we receive clear non-physical guidance which equates to massive leverage for living a bigger life.
Our intuition is only as clear as our greatest emotional injury. If we are not feeling fully through our childhood wounds, which manifest in our present-day life as patterned events, we are preventing clear intuition.
A baby is clear. They let emotion move right through them. They feel it fully. They get what they need.
We should all be so lucky to make ourselves children, again.