Protection or Growth?

Anytime I read a book and it stays with me long past the day I finished the last page, I know that there is still more to learn from it. Just this morning I was thinking again about Dr. Bruce Lipton’s book Biology of Belief (referred to in Blogs below). One of his stipulations about the human body is that we cannot choose to be in a protection and a growth mode at the same time. As the immune system is being utilized for fighting off a disease, those same cells cannot simultaneously be in a growth mode. What that says is that if we are in a protection phase, we cannot also be growing, or as I like to think of it, evolving.

Getting back to my original reason for writing this article is that I was thinking about what we say to protect ourselves from being hurt and wondered whether or not that has the same affect. Think of it like this…you start dating someone and your instinct may be to really like them, the problem is you’ve been hurt in the past by an unhealthy relationship. Rather than commit to liking them you start nit-picking and saying things like “I’m not sure that we totally mesh”, “I’m not crazy about the way they wear their hair” or “I’m not going to get my hopes up, he could by like all the other guys”. On the one hand that is all successful dating strategies for someone who doesn’t want to get hurt, but on the other hand by focusing on protecting ourselves are we actually holding ourselves back from getting what we really want, which may be in fact a relationship with that person?

What if what you’re doing by protecting your emotions from being hurt by this person rejecting you, you’re actually stopping yourself from evolving naturally into a relationship with that same person? Rather than allow the relationship to take it’s natural course, we hinder, slow it down or change it’s course altogether, just by protecting ourselves, which in effect makes us right! If every time we go into a self protection mode, we slow down or stop our evolution, think of how many times we may have held ourselves back?

From personal example, I have been doing Reconnective Healing for five and a half years, always part time or on the side of my other more corporate (and socially accepted) careers which have been recruiting and training. This healing work is amazing, inspiring and allows people freedom from their physical, emotional, spiritual and other binds. I love to think about it, talk about it, and do it. So why haven’t I committed to it as a full time career rather than my part time hobby? Have I been trying to protect myself from failure just because I didn’t trust that I could make it a full time career? Have I been holding myself back from evolving because I’ve been so busy protecting myself? I think the answer, now after reading that book is finally, yes.

What this means is that any time we’re in the mode of protection, whether it be from a flu or from emotions, we’re holding ourselves back from doing what we really want to be doing, which is growing and evolving. Although it’s essential for our cells to focus on our immune systems, I’ve seen through example with Reconnective Healing that anything can be healed in an instant. Maybe what this work gives us is the chance to let go of protection, if only for a moment and that’s all our bodies really need to evolve and move past our illness/disease rather than grow through the extraordinary process of standard healing which can be anything from days to years depending on the illness. Similarly on an emotional level, if we can stop trying to protect our little children inside our hearts, we may just start living the life we’ve always wanted to live.

Here are a few pieces of advice for today with this in mind:

1. The next time you hold yourself back from saying something so that you can protect yourself or someone else from being hurt, ask yourself the question “What would happen if I just said exactly what I was thinking?”

2. Write a list of everything you can remember doing for the last couple of years that you did purely from a self-protection standpoint and ask yourself the question “What would have happened if I let it run its course without worry about being hurt?”

3. Write a list of things you would love to do and all the reasons why you deserve to do them, then then next time you start to downplay something on that list remind yourself that by doing that you may be stopping it from manifesting altogether!

Thanks for reading this article, I’d love to hear how these exercises work for you, what awakenings have you had by asking yourself the questions?