Abiding Love: Heart Protection and Healing the Healer’s Wounded Heart
This two-day workshop is an intimate lab exploring abiding love as a developing nervous system capacity. Abiding refers to a quality of heart presence that can quietly kindle and tend affective warmth from within. It is an alive, steady presence that does not depend on immediate mirroring or reciprocity from others-an especially vital capacity for practitioners who hold space for so many other hearts.
Heart protection, by contrast, is an intelligent survival response. When early or relational experiences include inconsistency, withdrawal, intrusion, shame, or loss, the nervous system learns that opening the heart carries risk. Constriction or freeze emerges to shield the heart from further wounding. While protective in origin, when heart protection remains unrepaired, it can gradually become its own form of confinement.
Through two live demonstrations, experiential practice, and collective inquiry, we will explore how heart protection arises moment by moment, and how abiding presence supports softening and repair. The focus is on learning to nourish a growing inner flame of warmth and steadiness-both within our own hearts and in our capacity to support this process in our clients.