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Intimacy
Intimacy is defined as a close personal relationship marked by deep affection and love, often characterized by a high level of mutual knowledge and attention.
Intimacy is something we long for. Being cherished and held, understood and accepted by those we care about most, is central to whether we experience our lives as meaningful and joyous. Yet intimacy is often quite difficult to achieve. As much as we long for it, being truly intimate with another human being also represents an exposure to danger. To achieve the sense of intimacy we so deeply desire, we must open ourselves. We must surrender our defenses, the barriers and walls we have so carefully built within ourselves over our lifetime. Surrender of these oft-used and very important devices is incredibly difficult. We can never be certain of the motives of the people we invite inside our walls. This uncertainty alone can be enough to prevent the development and nourishment of intimacy.
At our center, we are a 'core being', this is the pure self untainted by anger, rage, pain, embarrassment, shame, guilt, doubt. This core being is who we were before the challenges of life taught us that to be so innocent, so pure, was to be exposed to hurt, anguish, and damage. What we truly long for is for another person to care enough, to be trustworthy enough, to share our core self with. We want someone to know our pure truth. That is what we understand to be 'true intimacy.
As adults, we have not reached adulthood without sustaining damage. Without building walls and barriers to the very intimacy we want. We carry these shields as armor around our core self, protection from injury, and, unfortunately, as protection from intimacy as well. There comes a point, particularly if the damage we have endured through our life has been extreme, where we begin to understand that we must heal our old wounds, the wounds still lingering open and pained, beneath the shield we long ago created around them. To heal these wounds, we venture into our experiences of the past to face the wounds and comfort our core self, sharing self-love with ourselves as well as the determination to be healed.
Healing is a choice, a decision, a desire to be free of damage and pain. It is often a journey of the spirit, of the mind, and of the body. On some level, we understand that to be able to experience true intimacy with other people, we will have to surrender, relinquish, and release our armor. Within this understanding, we begin to know that this journey of the spirit, of the heart, of the soul has no ending. We are always in a state of being healed, of embracing wellness, and of deciding to be freer.
We often look to the mind to heal the spirit's wounds, and we carry a belief that the body is in some way detached from who we are. It is perhaps a cultural idea, this division, this focus with importance upon the mind, the thoughts. We tend to believe we can fix ourselves from the outside in. This isn't to say that analyzing, discussing, and thinking about our experiences isn't incredibly important. Often, such work opens up our mental eyes to who we are, who we have forgotten we are, under all of the shields and walls.
But this is only part of healing. When experiences happen that are injurious to us, our entirety is present. We store these memories not only in our thinking mind but within every cell in our body and within our spirit body, our belief in who we are. This is why bodywork becomes so profoundly important. Our healing therapy has touched our minds, opened our thoughts, and connected us to the intellectual memories of who we are. Yet, we still recognize that our barriers exist. They are partially addressed. Weakened perhaps. But still, too present. They continue to block our ability to achieve the self-freedom and intimacy we long for.
Until we discover touch!
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