Unlocking Enduring Love: A Path to Sustainable Relationships

What is your capacity to love?
What is the impact on those you care about?
Is it even possible to love unconditionally?

I believe that not only is a higher and unconditional way of loving possible – the journey to accessing this higher love is the greatest, and most profound legacy we can ever pass on.

This noble and sacred journey begins with remembering who we truly are.

So, who do you believe yourself to be?

I will offer you reflection questions as opportunities to engage with to discover more about yourself. I encourage you to allow yourself to pause in these moments and answer the questions silently, out loud, or through the journal promt you can download at the bottom of the page. When you to put pen to paper with these questions and write out your thoughts, pause, and write more for a few minutes, you will create space for new thoughts and ideas to emerge.

Please answer:

I am . . . . . .

As you reflect on your answer, did you notice what you believe defines who you are?

Did you refer to what you do professionally, the roles or titles you hold, your accomplishments, family, education, level of material success, appearance, how many people know or like or follow you, political or religious affiliation, marital status, sexual orientation, gender, or how you identify?

Did your answer include how others have described you, what you have done, or what you have survived?

I believe this is simply a human perspective of who you are. You are so much more.

Forgetting who we are

For as long as I can remember, people I have met all over the world have invited me into the deepest and often most painful aspects of their lives. These profound experiences showed me that although the details of our lives are unique, we have a shared human experience. . .

When we are born into a human body with a human brain and a human heart, raised and surrounded by people who see us through their human eyes (beginning at young ages when we are impressionable), WE ALL have painful emotional experiences that influence our view of ourselves, and cause us to feel in our own unique way… not good enough.

When we allow people or experiences to influence who we believe ourselves to be, we separate from and even forget our Divine Identity, and our priceless inherent worth.

The disconnection from who we are at a soul level is Spiritual Fragmentation.

Spiritual Fragmentation is self-abandonment.

Spiritual Fragmentation is the hidden root cause of our internal turmoil and loneliness, the disconnection we feel in our relationships, and why we love conditionally. Forgetting our Divine Identity is a shared human experience.

So…

What caused you to forget?

In my work, I look for the earliest experience of this because it is the core wounding which then has a domino effect.

When I was compelled to examine my life, I remembered the first time I felt something break inside of me.

As I share my personal experience with you, perhaps you can relate?

I was 7 years old- laying in the fetal position in the dark on our cold, hard floor. I had just been beaten again by my mother. At this point, I no longer cried when she beat me. It felt like each time she did this a part of me died . . . like a darkness or hardness replaced my innocence.

This was the first time I noticed something other than my body hurting.

I felt pain inside of me, and my mind began to race . . . trying to understand.

“Why do my friends have moms that love them and I don’t?”

“Why does MY mom seem to feel better, after she hurts me?”

This is Step 1 in fragmentation: consult the human brain (in this case, my 7 year old brain) for understanding and interpretation. My human interpretation was:

My 7 year old brain decided that I must be… unlovable.

Step 2 in fragmentation: the brain assigns meaning to the experience, and creates a new belief about who we are in comparison to others.

I remember feeling embarrassed and ashamed. I didn’t want my friends to see what my mom saw. If they saw it too, I worried they wouldn’t want to be my friends. I felt something break inside of me.

Step 3 in fragmentation: feel the need to hide or disown certain aspects of ourselves, and internalize and store these big emotions too painful to know what to do with in our body.

I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me. I wished to never have been born. I had clung to the hope that someone would come and save me, and in this moment, I realized no one was coming.

I felt completely alone, like no one saw me, or cared.

Step 4 in fragmentation: go into the energy of blame, and assign meaning to others from the frequency of fear. I now believed that people would only hurt or abandon me.

What came later was Step 5 in fragmentation: close off the heart in self-preservation. Identify coping skills and defense mechanisms for survival. My human response was walling off and numbing out.

Can you relate?

Loneliness & human disconnection

How does our view of ourselves impact our relationships and our capacity to love?

In the emotionally painful moments that fragment us, our human survival instincts kick in to try to help us move forward and try to protect us from having to experience the same pain again.

However, the coping skills and defense mechanisms our survival instincts design to protect our human hearts sabotage our relationships.

This is only a glimpse of how:

With Steps 1 and 2, when we forget who we are, we begin to see through human eyes. We become critical and look for what is wrong with ourselves and others.

Step 3 creates a boxed view of what we now deem as acceptable or not, which births intolerance.

This is why differences divide us when we see through human eyes.

Additionally, if we aren’t willing to feel certain emotions, we become emotionally unaccessible or unable to relate to others who may try to share those emotions with us.

With Step 4, when we go into the energy of blame, we are no longer on the same team. We turn on eachother and trigger each other’s defense mechanisms, and around and around we go.

We find what we are looking for, and we draw to us what we believe we deserve.

If we believe people will only hurt or abandon us (or whatever belief you created), we will either continue to magnetize to us the same painful patterns (this is repetition compulsion), or we will look for evidence of that thing that hurt us in the past in our current relationships through confirmation bias.

We learn how to love conditionally through Step 5.

The result . . . Human Disconnection.

Spiritual Fragmentation is at the heart of it because our fragmentation creates loneliness through the sensation that something……… is missing. It can feel like a void or an emptiness within you.

Our natural human response is to look outside of ourselves. . . hoping or expecting something or someone else will fill the loneliness or emptiness we feel.

Then, when that doesn’t work, we blame the person or the relationship, or loose hope.

Have you experienced this?

Until about 5 years ago, this had been the story of my life, and almost ended my marriage.

Our capacity to love

My personal journey of discovering a higher love came out of a challenging time.

I had been married for about 15 years, and in my quiet moments of reflection, realized I wasn’t sure I even knew what love really was. I felt like I loved my husband because I didn’t want to go through life without him, but I seemed to have an ability to flip a switch when I was upset with him, which seemed to erase all feelings of love, so my commitment to choose to love him was what I held onto.

To survive my upbringing, I built a fortress around my heart to protect myself from ever getting hurt again. I had a reason for each person in my life why I couldn’t trust them not to hurt me, so it didn’t feel safe to bring anyone into my internal world. This left me feeling emotionally disconnected in our marriage.

The walls I built for protection had now become my prison.

It was during this time that I was invited over to a new friend’s house. We sat on the floor across from each other in her living room, when she smiled and asked “How is your heart?”. I tried to deflect as I typically did when people asked personal questions, but she repeated the question and sat smiling at me waiting for an answer.

I realized I had avoided looking at my heart because I didn’t want to see the wreckage that may be there after experiences in my life where I could feel my heart breaking, then shattering, then pulverized into dust . . . beyond repair.

I now ask you the same question. How is your heart?

Please answer:

My heart is…

As I looked within for what felt like the first time in my life, I realized the condition of my heart. I saw a shrivelled up raisin-like thing with a thousand puncture wounds that felt dead… without any capacity to feel… let alone love. Instantly, I thought of my husband and my sweet children, and the impact I must have had on them that I had been completely blind to.

I had believed I was strong in burying the painful experiences from my past so they could not affect my life or those I cared about. I thought I was a great mom because I had broken the cycle of abuse. I was convinced that I felt disconnected from my husband because HE was emotionally unaccessible.

In examining the condition of my heart, I realized that numbing out had blocked my ability to feel even the emotions I deeply desired to feel, and my ability to receive love.

What we do to protect our hearts (or to avoid feeling emotional pain) actually prevents us from the one thing we all crave . . . the ability to give and receive unconditional love.

How has this shown up for you in your life?

Please answer:

Because I believe ______ about myself, in my relationships with others, I _______.

Please describe the way you protect your heart, and the impact this has had and is having on your relationships.

Remembering

Spiritual Fragmentation keeps us operating at the human level, and so does our avoidance of emotional pain.

In this moment with my friend Joy, I realized that to find true freedom, I needed to have the courage to feel again. I could feel a gravitational pull to dive deeper within myself to discover newly who I truly am outside of what I have been through and any external feedback.

It felt as though somehow the painful experiences of my past I was avoiding would lead me to true liberation, deeper connections, and the ability to love in a higher way.

The moments that fragmented us were painful emotional experiences. What have you done with the painful experiences of your past?

Contrary to popular opinion (and what I believed to be true), these experiences are not to be ashamed of, to avoid under the pretense of being “strong”, and they are NOT JUST something to heal.

Emotional pain and Spiritual Fragmentations are invitations to turn inwards.

They become portals into:

Our soul’s wisdom and distinct spiritual gifts,
True liberation resulting in profound internal peace,
The purest essence of love, and
The power to create intoxicatingly deep and transcendent relationships.

When I finally faced the pain of my past, and surrendered to allowing myself to feel each emotion to its fullest, I no longer had to avoid the emotion, nor did it hold power over me. Instead, I discovered the wisdom hidden in the pain and was left with deeper compassion for myself and others.

I realized that when my human body felt broken and violated, my human heart pulvarized beyond repair, and my human brain was telling me to give up and that I didn’t deserve to live, there was something else within me that seemed unfazed… even unbreakable.

Beyond the human part of me that was suffering, there was a space within me that was calm, peaceful, and wise. In these quiet painful moments when I surrendered to being taught, I remembered who I truly am at a soul level, what I am made of, and why I am here. I discovered that my soul knew how to transmute pain into expansion and purpose, and a true ability to make a real difference in our world.

I believe each of us have this within us. So, who are you really?

I know this to be true:

You are a beloved Divine Intelligence with immeasurable inherent worth and value far beyond the riches of the world.

You were created intentionally with the highest attention to detail, endowed with unique abilities and talents, and reserved for this exact moment in history on purpose.

Within you is an inner knowing that surpasses human understanding, and is better than any advice, therapist, guru, coach, Dr, and chat GBT because the knowing within you knows who you are from an eternal perspective, what your higher purpose is, and exactly where you are on your journey.

You have direct access to our Creator who (if you choose it), will partner with you to make a profound difference for others.

This is who WE ALL truly are.

Our human protective hearts fall in and out of love, and love conditionally. Yet, the Divinity within us loves purely and unconditionally.

Our human eyes and ears see and hear others through biased and judgmental filters. Yet, when we are connected to the Divinity within ourselves, we will see the Divinity within others.

Why does this matter especially now?

BECAUSE THE NEXT GENERATION IS THE GREATEST CASUALTY OF OUR SPIRITUAL FRAGMENTATION.

It is our responsibility as adults and leaders to RISE to our higher nature so we can HEAL the disconnection first within ourselves, then in our homes, organizations, and the world FOR THEM.

Our ability to RISE won’t come from trying to protect or heal our human hearts… Rather from surrendering…

To allow the human heart to completely break, to shatter, to melt away through the refiner’s fire… for our higher nature to emerge.

To heal the disconnection within us and between us, it is time to go beyond mental health to an individual and collective remembering of who we truly are at a cellular and spiritual level. As we turn inwards and remember who we truly are, we will access a higher way of of loving, which will heal human disconnection.

What difference would it make in your life and in the lives of those you care about if you could access the higher love within you in a sustainable way?

Much love,
Carie Bailey