Whispered Truths, Courage to Be

The art of “being” is one of practice one that calls for constant awareness, compassion, and gentle persistence. Healing is not a single event; it’s a lifelong dialogue with the self. Even the wounds that have long since closed still whisper their old stories. They murmur, You can’t do that. You’re not enough. You don’t deserve this. You have to earn love, earn rest, earn belonging.

Those voices don’t roar anymore, but they still echo faintly in the spaces between my breaths.

I marvel sometimes at how loyal those old fears can be how they rise up, protective yet misplaced, each time I dare to expand. They mean to keep me safe, but safety at the expense of growth becomes its own kind of cage.

I have healed so much, and yet, I still find myself needing to tend to that inner voice the one trauma once taught to shrink and doubt and retreat. It’s the voice that keeps watch, afraid I’ll reach too high and fall, afraid that love will leave, that joy will dissolve, that success will demand a cost too steep to bear.

But now, I speak back to her with gentleness.

I remind her that I am not who I was when she first learned to protect me.

I am enough.

I can do this.

I deserve the goodness life has to offer not because I’ve earned it, but because I exist, and that is reason enough.

Each time I listen with love instead of judgment, I take back a little more power from the past. I loosen the grip of old narratives that say I must prove my worth to be seen, or harden my heart to avoid disappointment.

If I allow the voice of yesterday to rule today, I limit my own becoming. I shrink when life is asking me to rise. I close off when love is trying to find its way in.

So I practice, being.

Being open.

Being willing.

Being enough.

Being loving to all of “Me” including the old voice attempting to protect me.

It’s not perfection I’m after, but presence the quiet courage to meet myself again and again, and to answer each echo of doubt with truth:

You are allowed to receive. You are allowed to be loved. You are allowed to be free.