To Open or Not To Open.
March 23, 2023 5 min 58 sec read/listen
After many years of being single and being on the windy road of inner personal growth, I decided to venture back into the dating world and met someone whom I began dating.
There was the thrill of meeting someone new, of question asking, of being curious and for me, opening myself in new ways from where I am now at this point in my life.
But there was a mismatch in an area I deeply value and, as I am realizing (and owning) is a core part of who I am – that of being open. We were a mismatch in openness.
Before I go on, let me say this is not about wrong or right. Or bad or good. I try to not live in that kind of polarized thinking. For me this is about respecting where we are in our lives, what we want, how we want to be and yes, sometimes we find we are not a match, whether it’s a relationship, a job, a friendship, a city we live in. Match, mismatch. That’s all. And that’s ok.
Lately, I’ve been engaging in a lot of conversations about openness with other women, with the women I cold dip in the lake with, with my journal groups.
Openness in our hearts, with ourselves, in our lives, to each other.
What is this idea of openness?
To me it’s about our hearts, our minds and yes, our bodies. A whole being practice of living that is much like the way our lungs contract and expand. We open, we close, we open, we close and with each contraction and expansion we grow deeper, wider, bigger, maybe even brighter.
I love this line from Rumi’s poem Birdwings:
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed.
I think of the ‘hand’ in this poem as our hearts, our minds, our bodies and the opening and closing not as a stagnant or even measurable thing but as a way of living, a practice, an intention.
In my own experience I’ve learned that openness is the opposite of being small; of not trusting, of tamping down on our dreams to stay safe, of dimming our light, of building walls and wearing armour.
Being open could be considered an invitation to ourselves and to each other to move beyond a set mindset of rules, rigid stances and walls. The mental set points we impose or accept in ourselves that say, “This is who I am. That is all I am,” to a more open, growth mindset of “I wonder who else I am. I wonder what else is possible?”
And oh yes, it takes courage.
Courage to open our hearts.
Courage to feel our rich emotional landscapes.
Courage to name what we are afraid of.
Courage to offer tender space to those fears.
Courage to not run from ourselves and/or others.
Courage to create safety for ourselves, where needed.
Courage to try again.
Courage to be honest about our truths; to use our voices; to claim our worth and honour our needs and desires.
Courage to release the self-inflicted pain our armour has been holding in with ourselves, against ourselves.
Being open is also, and perhaps most importantly, about trusting ourselves.
How can we be truly open to each other if we are not in the practice of opening to trusting our own voice, our intuitive knowing, the choices and decisions we make for ourselves.
Early on in my recent dating experience, I asked this person if they were someone who was open and available to their emotions. They answered, “Maybe about 60-70%.” to which I thought, “How do we measure our degree of openness through quantifiable percentages?”
I’m not sure we can.
For me, openness is a fluid, flow state.
A heart-first intention.
A yes to possibility.
A yes to growth.
A yes to healing.
A yes to our lives.
Even if we are afraid.
If we were to assign a cerebral measurement to our own openness, I think we’d all find that the needle on that percentage is constantly moving, depending on circumstances, the person, our relationship with ourselves, where we are in our lives at the time.
Hmm, I might reach out to our friend, Brené Brown and see what she thinks about measuring openness.
What I know is that we will meet matches to our own openness, and we will meet mismatches, throughout our lives. And that is more than okay. We don’t have to go to judgement or resistance. We can see and acknowledge a mismatch and let it be and then carry on with our own practice.
What can keep us in this way of living- of opening, is a curiosity and an intense desire to discover what can be possible. What depth of love and connection, what ideas, what opportunities, what healing and release could be possible from living in the practice of opening ourselves?
I bet it’s beyond anything we imagined.
And I think it’s true that if we continue to close or stay rigid in our stances, behind walls, we will never really know. And yes, it takes time and as I said, practice.
So, there it is. The invitation to open. To embrace our own courage. To dare to be vulnerable. To decide to trust.
What does being open mean to you?
In what ways are you open to your mind, your heart, your body?
In what ways would you like to open more in yourself, with others, in your life and Friend, if you could, what might be possible for you?
These are great questions to bring to a conversation with yourself through journaling, if that’s something you’d like to try.
And if being open is something you’d like support or guidance around, I also help women through my 1:1 Living Practice Coaching in this very thing.
Openly yours,
Jenn
Photo by Jenn Forgie
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