“For a person with a lifelong habit of contraction from receiving, a skillfully-landed generosity can break the husk on the heart and release the grief of how long they have survived without their needs feeling seen. But know that this grief is the sign of healing, the opening of those places which for so long have been declining love. There is a deadening that can set into the heart that has borne too much pain. There is a deadening that can set into the heart that has borne too much pain. When a situation becomes too shocking or painful to bear, we may develop a chronic sarcasm or minimising attitude that says, “oh yeah, that’s nothing new.” But over time, this protected way of being can have a sterilising effect on the entirety of one’s feeling alive.
Coming out of numbness and back into feeling can be initially painful and jarring, like blood returning to a sleepy limb–but those pins and needles are a sign of life returning. The undamming of tears in your unfelt places are what Gibran calls “the pain of too much tenderness,” but there is a healing grief that restores fertility to your soil.”
– Toko-pa Turner, excerpt from Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home
