Understanding Defenses
In your natural state, energy flows in a balanced way. Your system is designed to constantly metabolize everything you need. With your breath, you draw in energy. Each of your chakras metabolizes energy from the environment. You are fed from the Earth and the heavens. Like water, your energy is designed to flow. The more freely it flows, the greater your state of health and well-being on every level - physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
Unfortunately, like most of us, you've probably learned how to function in a chronic state of imbalance or lack. This state is so familiar, you might not even realize it. From a very young age, you learned how to block or redirect your energy, or create a "defense" against its free movement. When energy moves freely, you feel every aspect of who you are. A defense walls off or redirects that natural flow and state of awareness. Defenses are like little dams in a stream. They change or block the natural movement of energy, literally cutting you off from yourself.
Your defenses likely started to take shape in early childhood, when you experienced something that was emotionally overwhelming. As a child, your energetic system was very open. Life was full and exciting, and you felt your own life force streaming through you. You were also very vulnerable and dependent upon others for your survival. You had a lot of very real needs, and sometimes those needs weren't met. Sometimes you had to face difficult experiences that caused you great pain.
You weren't able to understand what was happening, or to process it in a healthy, life-affirming way. Perhaps your parents were unable to help you, or even made the challenging experience more difficult through their own ignorance. The emotions you felt were simply too strong. The pain was too great. It hurt too much. You had to make it go away. So you did what you needed to do to survive, closing off the channels within your own body where the pain was being experienced. You defended against your own energy, as a way to protect yourself from being overwhelmed.
And it worked, at least temporarily. In the moment, the pain lessened. You shut off the part of yourself that was hurting, and you got some relief. Your defenses protected you from feeling overwhelmed. They protected you from feeling something you simply didn't have the capacity to feel. You didn't know there were other ways to deal with your pain. You were too young, and you didn't know any better. But you found something that worked. The next time you experienced something similar, you knew what to do. You cut off another part of yourself, so you didn't have to feel the pain. Again and again, you blocked more of yourself from flowing. Over time, all those blocks solidified, creating a pattern or a defensive structure that shaped how your body grew and what you could experience.
Likely, you don’t even remember what most of those challenging experiences were. You also probably don't remember what you told yourself about life or about who you were in the world in those moments of pain and confusion. All the pain and the distorted thinking got locked into those blocks in your body. For a long time, you were able to pretend they weren't there at all. Your defenses worked, because they not only took away your pain in the moment, but helped you forgot the confusion and the doubt, too. You didn't realize the price you were paying for your relief was access to your own life force.
As an adult, you might be feeling the physical or emotional results of those blocks, even if you don't remember putting them there. Maybe you've experienced some shortness of breath, but don't remember how you closed your heart in response to your father's rejection. Maybe your thyroid function has declined, even if you don't remember closing your throat when your cries weren't responded to. The gift and the challenge of defenses is they work. They cut you off from your life force so well, you neither feel the pain nor remember the choice you made to defend against it. They deaden your energy to the point where you might not even know you're an energetic being. Left alone, defenses eventually cause physical sickness or disease. They make relationships more difficult and less fulfilling. They prevent you from “living your light.” Defenses block the full flow of energy through your system. They limit you. They narrow your experience.
But defenses are also life-affirming. Without them, you wouldn't have survived those overwhelming experiences or had a way to deal with your pain. Your defenses were a way for you to say YES to going forward in life, despite the pain you were experiencing. They are life itself, being nothing more than your own life force, being held in a static structure.
HOW DEFENSES WORK TO HEAL THEMSELVES
We live in a world of attraction, magnetism and resonance. Everything "sends out a signal," including your defenses. In a vibrational world like ours, energy is constantly moving, combining, separating, creating and destroying. Life is in a constant state of change. Differently charged atomic particles will attract and bond with each other, creating new things. Magnets will repel or attract, depending on their pole. Two tuning forks of the same vibration will both sing if one of them is struck. The whole world is in communication with itself, and its language is vibration.
Defenses affect the vibration, or the signal that you're sending out into the world. That signal acts like a magnet. That means, if you've closed your heart, you'll attract more experiences of heartlessness. People may be cruel to you, betray you, or hurt you in a similar manner to the original event that caused you to close your heart in the first place. If you've closed your throat to self-expression, you'll repeatedly find yourself in situations where someone's telling you to be quiet. You'll be silenced or feel unheard, in a way that feels similar to what you felt as a child when you decided to close your throat and stop asking for your needs to be met. Instead of sending out the signal, “I am a beautiful child of God, full and complete, endlessly provided for and supported in all that I do, and with magnificent gifts to share,” your defensive signal may be sending out the message, “I believe the world is a battlefield, where you must fight and only the strong survive.” Or it may be sending out the message, “There’s not enough and I’m not enough. I expect to be abandoned or betrayed.”
And the world will respond to your vibrational communication, as it must, lovingly meeting you wherever you're at. This is both the challenge and the gift of your defenses. Defenses will keep challenging you to look at your own limiting beliefs by bringing you experiences similar to the original one that caused you to think that way in the first place. They'll keep drawing those experiences to you until you change your belief. Your defenses will keep attracting the pain you denied to you until you face it, accept it, and learn to love yourself through it. Your pain will keep being brought to your attention until you learn to love yourself better. Life is forever moving forward.
In this way, defenses don't just block pain, but lovingly hold it just out of your consciousness until the moment when you're ready to deal with it. Each time your defenses draw a challenging experience to you, you're being given another opportunity to decide differently. Remember that although you can never change what happened, you always have the choice to respond differently. You can choose in any challenging moment to let your defenses crumble, to allow your own life force to flow, to change how you think of yourself and life, and to love yourself better. Trust that your defenses will lovingly hold you in your constricted pattern until the pain of holding onto the constriction becomes greater than the pain of letting it go.
The breaking down of defenses is something that needs to be undertaken with deep love and care of self. When you begin to challenge your defenses, you will most certainly feel vulnerable. Remember, defenses block you from feeling whatever was painful. Softening defenses means looking at the thing that caused you pain. It means having the courage to face your fears. It means claiming your part in the initial event (i.e., your initial reaction and what that reaction resulted in). For support working with your defenses, you can book an appointment here.
