Level Three - From Mistrust to Love

Learning to love is a process of of learning to trust again.
In this workshop we deal with the core issue of mistrust and how afraid we are of intimacy. For most of us there have been times in our life when we opened and trusted and we were hurt and betrayed. Over time we have developed a layer of protection. We feel guarded, vigilant and are afraid to let our defences down. This may show up as a fear of becoming too intimate or a fear of losing our freedom. It also may manifest as us becoming clingy, suspicious and jealous, or perhaps in a fear of commitment.

What is really there is the fear to be hurt again. Our hurts in love came through either being abandoned or invaded and we re-enact these wounds over and over in our intimate partnerships. Out of our mistrust we sabotage intimacy with old protective behaviours such as blaming, attacking, demanding, withdrawing, shutting down and dishonesty. We become trapped in hypnotic states, which we call trances, that distort the way we see others and ourselves. Fed by our early painful wounds these trances create havoc in our relationships deepening feelings of misunderstanding, rejection, isolation and further mistrust.

In this section we learn about the depth of sensitivity and vulnerability within us and how we need to be attentive to that space whenever we form a partnership or go into intimacy. With a new sensitivity we learn to approach each other with awareness and respect and to create relationships that create trust as well as love. We learn to move slowly and gently into intimacy and sexuality and to keep communication open and flowing so that we do not create fear in each other.

As we learn this we begin to feel safer to relate without our strong protective layers. This leads to a new maturity in loving, a maturity based on mutual consideration and respect.  In this section we work with meditation and communication and learn to trust and share our uncomfortable feelings, rather than hiding them.