Getting down to the bare bones means diving into the nitty gritty of who you are, getting naked and being honest. The truth is that all there really is you opening and softening, or you are closing and hardening your heart. There is nothing else and anything else becomes a STORY- YOUR STORY!
When you are in a story you as awareness are closing and hardening your heart. And it does not matter or make any difference how right your story seems to be. When you are in your heart, you move as awareness the same way you did when you were a baby. When you are in your heart you move as a being. What matters is for that movement to be unconditional regardless of your story, thoughts, feelings, will, or emotions. The way that you move in your heart is then how you move in yourself. The truth of that is that it costs you your conditioning. Your conditioning such as beliefs, patterns and conditioning are told your stories. When your conditioning gets activated or triggered in yourself, you as awareness can relate to that conditioning and continue to move in your open and soft heart regardless of your conditioning and stories!
If you work with yourself because of the story in yourself, you strengthen the experience you are trying to change. There is only one way for you to be in yourself that is from within your heart any other way strengthens illusion. No story has any relationship to what you really are. It is always from the inside out it can seem that it can work from the outside in but that is delusional.