“If my guarded heart could speak it would say that I spent years terrified of love because I did not know it was possible to experience safe love. It would say that I built an armour so high, so hard because deep down I desired love, but I was also so terrified of it. I thought that love was pain, love was abuse, love was neglect, and all of these experiences of love were so normalised for me that unlearning them led me to a journey of learning to love myself… and when I finally learnt to love myself, I began to experience love in every encounter I had, and I realised how much I was neglecting myself all along.

As I began to tend to my own heart, making space to witness its hurts, its armour, its heaviness, my heart was also expanding. It was contracting and expanding, with every encounter.

I learnt more about the guard around me, but I also learnt to let it go, slowly, with every contraction and expansion I tuned into my capacity experience love, to experience pain.

I realised that to embrace love, we also have to embrace pain. They do go hand in hand, but safe love, real love, that is rooted in trust, safety, compassion, reverence, respect, does not make you feel pain, it simply shows you where in your heart perhaps there is still some past pain that wishes to be witnessed.

So that you can experience love, to the fullest capacity, as you deserve to. To the fullest capacity as your soul was born to.

Pain is just hurt wanting to be seen. Love shows you your capacity to feel. Feeling everything, is loving, Loving everything, is feeling. Feeling is freeing. Loving is freeing.”

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~ Hansika