Sanctuary for Heart Magic

RETURNING TO THE UNARMORED BODY

A body beyond armor

A body beyond armor. You might wonder what that means. Armor is protection. In the most physical of ways you can relate this to the armor worn by law enforcement, military or first responders. It is the gear they put on their bodies to protect them from physical insults or attacks. This necessary layer of clothing is worn as an external survival mechanism to keep the physical body alive in potentially dangerous situations. 

Similar to physical armor there is psychological armor. This type of armoring isn’t as easily seen by the ordinary eye, but it does manifest in the body via patterns in the nervous system. The eye that is trained can readily see it. The muscles tighten in certain ways, the structure of the body changes its shape, the breath is shallow and the facial expressions are altered. It can also be seen in a way a person moves, the range of emotions they allow, and on subtler levels how they engage with world around them. Do they lean in, lean back or appear frozen? Does their awareness hang out in a certain part of their body and avoid other parts? Is their energy down in their body or up in their head? All of these things point to patterns of psychological protection and neurological tension that manifest through the body.

Just like physical armor of the police officer is a survival mechanism, so is psychological armor. 

The difference is that that later is what we wear internally. Both mechanisms are aimed at keeping us alive. While one is more obvious, both are equally important in terms of maintaining a functioning body and mind. You might wonder why we develop psychological armoring. When we perceive and receive hurtful information either directly, or through the collective field of information, we feel it. For example someone might tell us, or even just imply, that we are ugly, worthless, stupid or wrong. The first time we receive that information we have no protection against it. It just hurts. We feel it and it registers in our nervous system. The next time it happens we may not have a fully developed protective mechanism in place yet, but our nervous starts to react in ways that protect us from feeling it. The third time it happens our armoring comes online more quickly. Soon enough when the person we received that hurtful information from simply enters a room our defenses engage. Even if they say something nice to us, we are in defensive mode ready for the attack that might come at any moment. Eventually all we have to do is think of them, or even anyone we view as similar to them, and our system is in defense.

Most of these neurological patterns develop by the age of 6, but some of them continue to refine themselves into adolescence getting more sophisticated and harder to see. 

Our identity often merges with our defenses and we believe we are these mechanisms rather than recognizing them as the protective strategies that they are. This creates confusion as we feel we don’t know who we are without them. This creates an affinity for us to hold onto them and perceive solely through their lens of threat. Through their perspective nothing is safe and therefore protection becomes the only available pathway we can see.

THE EFFECTS OF PROTECTION

Vitality, relationally & self-actualization

While I have simplified the process here to explain it easily, the crux of it is that we end up living defended and protected even when there are no threats. We perceive that a threat could be around the next turn so we are always on guard. In our conventional system we might call this anxiety, worry or depression. It may also be the manifestation of trouble sleeping or reduced capacity to be or stay present. We might have fatigue and difficulties with digestion. We might struggle with relationships or feel uncomfortable in social settings. While the expressions of this are varied, the essence of it is that we live scared, in limitation and not fully connected to ourselves or others. This all paradoxically makes us less able to perceive real threats when they are present because our system is hyper-vigilant. This hyper-vigilance perpetuates the cycle of fatigue, trouble digesting and challenge with resting and relaxing.

People often ask me, isn’t protection good? 

It is good when you need it, but understand that it has a high energetic and relational cost. When our internal energetic resources are being utilized to keep us safe, we don’t have as much resource available for other aspects of our being. This means our body runs on less vitality, we have greater challenge recovering from illness and tend to get sick more often. We frequently have more sensitivities and less capacity to tolerate environmental irritants. Our systems are depleted from the flux of constant stress hormones that are being pumped through our blood stream and our tissues. We attempt to get artificial energy from caffeine, and then on the other side, get relaxation through alcohol, cannabis or various other sedative substances. For many people this is the status quo, ie. their “normal” state of being in their body. Culturally we have normalized this without even really knowing we’ve done so. Without significant physical pathology there are no answers to what ails us. This is because we aren’t going deep enough. Our focus is on the surface appearance rather than on the patterns which are creating the surface manifestations in the first place.

Where do we go from here? 

First is the recognition that these psychological & neurological protective mechanisms exist and do indeed have significant impact on our body and life. While they might not always manifest with physical symptoms in the body, they will manifest as other things such as difficulty being in connection with others, challenge in feeling your emotions all the way through, or not actualizing your gifts in service to the world. These are all fundamental aspects of being human. Second is we need to find ways to work through and unwind these patterns, not so that they don’t exist at all anymore, but so that we can modulate, regulate, assess and respond appropriately to our environmental conditions. Without this we are not really fully conscious beings or empowered agents, rather we are at the whims of our protective mechanisms. While this is one way to live, and many do, there are other ways of existing inside of this human experience.

We are born unarmored…

Our nervous system open, in full energetic exchange with life and connection with our spirit or original self. We have all seen the baby just smile, then smile again and again. What are they smiling at? We often think it us, but truly I believe they are simply in the bliss of connection, and are expressing it through their little bodies as a smile. That smile is contagious and the pure joy they emit can be felt by most people. Their energy is free, unbound by conditions and unharmed by the confusion that lives in most peoples’ minds. 

We are all that baby. While our form has changed and we’ve been effected by the conditions that exist within our cultures and the collective field, that baby still exists inside of each and every one of us. As we make contact with the pure radiance and love from where we started this human journey, we share that with others just like we did when we were babies. 

That has impact. With more and more people making connection to that aspect of themselves we start to create a different collective planetary field. One that is filled with the information of belonging, connection & support This is how we change the experience here to more of what we all want to experience. More freedom, more love, more joy. We each have the responsibility to do this for ourselves. While we might not change the whole world, we will change our experience of it.

Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, DC, MSAc, L.Ac

Network Spinal Chiropractor & Nervous System Specialist at the Sanctuary for Heart Magic, a Mentor for Heart-Led Healers at Soul Luminaries & the Writer of The Everyday Divine.