What do you have trouble being with? What doors have you closed in fear and what treasures are buried within?
Imagine your childhood excitement if you were taken to a large mansion. So much to discover and and so many places to explore. You can’t wait! And in each one you enter, there are closets and patios, dressers – amazing options! You linger. You play. Eventually, you move on, knowing you can and will return.
Now, bring your adult to this same experience. Room #1, Victorian style, yuck. Room #2 reminds you of your first marriage … With each judgment, each fear, each opinion, you close the door to another option. The mansion shrinks.
It is the same in our emotional mansion.
As we cease to embrace, cease to allow, laughter or fear, deep love or anger, we have closed another door in the mansion of our emotional space. The breadth, the range of life that we permit has shrunk.
Where do you live now?
Sometimes, perhaps, you live in a cave. Other times, a cozy cabin with no neighbors. Rarely in that castle of many rooms and endless possibility.
How can you begin to reclaim the rooms of your emotional mansion? First, by acknowledging and accepting that by choice you have closed the door. No one makes us. We, ourselves, respond – or react – even if in old patterns. We can choose – pause – notice – own that the closed door in front of us was a choice we made. Now ask yourself, if I opened the door:
- What do I expect to experience?
- What do I least expect?
- What else is possible?
- What other life experience is available if I embrace this emotion?
- How will my life be different once I reconnect with this part of me?
- What am I missing out on by keeping the door closed?
If I rewrote the script that closed the door, if my life depended on incorporating this emotion, this experience, this personality, what initial steps could I take? What support do I need?
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” -Anais Nin
