Releasing Your Broken Heart To Heal

You already know the searing pain, that keeps shredding  every fibre of your heart, until you feel so broken, you really do not know how much more you can endure.  You talked about it to your friends, till you are fearful they don’t want to hear anymore.

Maybe you have thought about getting help from a therapist or signing up for weekend retreats practically guaranteed to heal a broken heart.  Yet, there you stand paralysed with grief and beaten down by the painful truth.

Despite your best efforts or none at all, the pain is still there, as raw as ever.  You thought you didn’t have any more blood to  bleed, but it is obviously still trickling out, one drop at a time.

Maybe you have read every book you could get your hands on, and googled way past midnight in search of some help.  There are loads of quick fixes out there.

You know how it goes.  Ten ways to heal a broken heart.  Fifteen sure fire ways to forget your ex.  Some may offer good practical advice to follow, but leaving it totally up to you to heal yourself is rather difficult.

After you have tried it all and somehow you still find yourself in the same pain you started with in the first place, where do your go?  Even worse, you start to wonder, why even care anymore?

Dark thoughts start to creep in such as : give up you fool!  No one cares about your pain.  After all, those “other folks” have their own pain to deal with, so just get over it !

You have already felt stupid for even getting yourself involved with him/her in the first place.  You may have heard from some righteous ones: you made your bed, so lie in it my dear, till you either  rot away or learn your lesson once and for all.

Trashing yourself with belittling words you somehow feel you deserve, are only  echoes from a critical parent or others in the past.  Do you really want to keep punishing yourself?

Sure, why not! Who  cares?  I am nothing more than discarded flesh left on the roadside for the vultures to take pleasure in devouring whatever rests of my pitiful life.

You may feel some have it and some don’t and I am obviously not one of the lucky ones. Beaten up and bleeding, you end up retreating even more deeply into a dark void of no return.

When no more effort can come forth, and when only you realise how  broken you really are, can you give up trying to figure it all out.  There is no figuring it out in the first place!

Reaching the bottom of the barrel where only the dredges of souls ever reach, initially feels like the end, drowning in their own pain and misery.   Broken and beat, you feel defeated, yet pain sometimes has to empty you out in order to make room for healing.

If any of you have been rejected or abandoned by someone you love, or broken by life’s many trials, certainly you can identify with the above desperation and pain, because you know  these feelings all to well.  Loss of someone you loved is a death without the coffin.

This serves to just accentuate the pain;  knowing they are alive and well but have no desire of being with you anymore, especially if they have already taken up with someone else.

Acceptance is a hard bitter pill to swallow, but we have zero ability to change another person, so there isn’t another way to deal with this pain other than releasing our hearts and pain to a higher power.

This higher dimension belongs to the Divine One, I choose to call God, the All Knowing. The one that creates all life, the universal energy that births stars and galaxies infinitum.

Listen closely, as I am about to share something rather radical to your ears.  The Love you have carried in your heart for this person, never stemmed from you in the first place.  Pure love doesn’t come from you!

No, this love came from a higher source where only pure love exists.  This love does not have any need to be returned, nor has any expectations tied to it, because it is the purest energy of the Divine One and it is freely given to all.

When we love someone, we have only borrowed that love from the forever realm of divine love that is constantly swirling around in that other dimension that only our soul remembers, but our human mind can’t comprehend.

In that way the love you feel and have felt can never be lost, but only returns to the universal pool to await for you to share it with another, but only after you have first filled your own heart to heal.

You see, your own heart is a pitcher waiting to be filled to the brim with this Divine Love for yourself and all humanity, because we may look separate, but we are not.   Pain and despair scourges out that which limits you, creating more room for love to enter.

A heart can be filled with this divine love, but can’t really give pure love, if human will is always trying to fill their own empty heart to fix their lives,  rather than pour forth freely what they already have within themselves.. 

So if this love didn’t initially come from you, and now is being resisted, then it is time to give it back to the Divine Love Source.   After all, love is mysterious in the way it even connected you to that  person in the first place.

When the bonds of that relationship are weak and become severed, there is a reason, even if we can’t understand why.  There may be fundamental differences. that may or may not be known to you, that would not be able to sustain the relationship for long.

It could be the timing is not right, or that there is another person waiting in the wings of your life that wants to come in and will provide a much more fulfilling relationship.    Sometimes the Master Gardener weeds out those who would have only brought you even more pain than you now feel losing them. 

That other person may have come in your life as one your teachers, albeit a painful one. Surviving pain and despair can change the way we come to see life, orient us to the real priorities of being here, and opens us up to making needed changes in our life, if we don’t allow ourselves to become bitter, angry and hardened.

Acceptance is hard, but it can be the path of freedom to things we can not change.  Giving in and surrendering allows us time to heal, when our hearts are battered and weary.

We can give up our broken hearts to God, even though we can’t understand His ways. Even if you are agnostic or atheist, certainly you can posit that there is a higher power, energy or consciousness greater than your own human mind.

I would like to propose some rituals that have helped me and patients who have suffered the same pain as you have now.  They only require a will to do them.  They work in the spiritual realms, beyond our complete human understanding of how.

Mentally, try to picture all the love in your heart that you had for that person tied to a balloon .  Now, mentally imagine letting go of the strings of that balloon and see it slowly drifting toward the horizon, till it disappears from sight.  A mantra to accompany this and be repeated as often as needed would be “I release you (name of person) in the name of love. ”

Another mental imagery is to visualize using shears that cuts the bond between you and your lost love, saying the above mantra over and over.   Healing takes time!

This is for those who feel comfortable using a more pronounced ritual.  Take a white and green candle. First light the white one, as white is the color of purification and say the above releasing mantra.  Then light the green candle for yourself, as green is the color of healing and say “With this light I pray that my broken heart heals.”  Amen.

Even more concretely, you can also write words of your love on a piece of paper and tie them to a helium balloon and then go to a field of flowers, a lake, river or ocean, a park or your backyard and say your releasing mantra, as you let go of the balloon.

I might add an even more powerful spiritual gesture of releasing is called tonglen, from the Buddhist tradition.  It is basically connecting with the suffering of others by taking on the hurts and pains of others who are suffering around the world with the very same pain your feel and releasing it for them.

This is a beautiful and powerful conveyor of compassion for yourself and others. Compassion must start within your own heart for your own pain, before it can be fully given to others.

You can visualise gathering up all the broken hearts in the world, along with your own and doing the same mental or formal rituals or releasing with your breath.  All are powerful rituals that work in releasing pain, because,  they work in the spiritual realm, where healing comes from in the first place.

You are never alone in your pain, even if you feel that way.  I may never meet you, but I care about your suffering.  That is why I felt compelled to start this blog and to write this particular post.

Broken hearts can heal over time, and in doing so, become healthier hearts to hold love for someone else who is coming to you.   That person will be more in line with your soul energy and your soul’s path.

Acceptance, surrendering and releasing are ways for you to cleanse your heart and invite healing to come into your life.   Remember, you came into this world to learn about loving yourself and others.  You will love again!