by Danielle Fagan, Collective-Evolution
Have you ever felt as though you’re carrying around a heaviness throughout your day? Or had a difficulty letting go of the past? Or find it hard to connect with others because you’re burdened with emotional pain?
If so, the issue could be coming from your heart chakra. According to Eastern metaphysical theories of Ayurvedic Indian Medicine, there are seven major spiritual centers of the body. These are called the chakras, which are like wheels of energy that correspond with certain organs and glands, as well as mental, emotional, and physical states.
When a chakra is working properly, energy should move freely into it and freely out of it. It naturally takes in that which it needs and releases that which it does not. But sometimes traumas can cause the heart chakra to malfunction.
When the energy flow of the heart chakra is impeded, you may hang on to a lot of heavy emotions and have a difficult time moving forward. It can also be difficult to let new people into your life (as new people represent new energy) because you have not fully let go of the past (old energy that needs to be released).
Opening Our Hearts
We are born with pure hearts that give and receive love freely. Think of how deeply and unconditionally small children love. Think of how easily they make friends with other small kids. They don’t see difference until they are taught that others are dangerous or different from them.
If we are to open our hearts, we need to go back to the way we were as children and love freely and purely.
Moving Forward
When you first learned to walk, how many times did you fall? When you first learned to read, how many mistakes did you make? How many times did we scrape our knees as children and get right back up and continue afterward?
Traumas may be painful, but the only thing more painful than the original hurt that you endured is dwelling in it. It is painful and unnatural to stop moving forward just because we’ve been hurt. It goes against our nature to stop growing and doing so will often cause problems within the healing process.
The only way to truly heal is to learn from the experience, pick ourselves back up again, and move forward as a better version of ourselves.
In order to learn from your past painful experience you must get a better idea of what the root issue is. Here are some questions you can ask yourself (and please, take your time when answering them):
- “What caused me to close my heart?”
- “Is it serving me to hold on to my pain?”
- “What made me feel that it was unsafe for me to love another freely?”
- “What made me feel like it was unsafe for me to be loved freely?”
Once you’ve determined where your pain is coming from, ask yourself:
- “Was the problem that I loved too much?”
- “Did I get hurt because I allowed myself to be loved?”
- “What was the real reason I was hurt?”
These questions can stir up some emotion but this is a natural part of the healing process.
Properly Identifying the Root Cause
Through answering these questions, we’ll often find that giving and receiving love freely is rarely (if ever) the root cause of our pain. When we improperly identify the root cause of our pain, we get stuck.
For example, if a child rides a bike for the first time and falls down, she must recognize that it was not the bike that caused the fall but riding the bike incorrectly that caused the fall.
When she recognizes her error, she can hop up on the bike and continue as a better bike rider because she’s learned from her mistakes. If she blamed the bike for her fall, she would not get back up on it again and would miss out on all the joy she could have had from riding it correctly.
Zeroing in on the Issue
So if you have determined that it was not that you loved too deeply or that you allowed yourself to be loved which was the problem, then what was the real reason that you got hurt?
What behvaiour can you shift so that next time you can get better results?
What could you do better next time that would still enable you to be your authentic self and give and receive love freely?
Or using the above example, how can you ride the bike better next time?
Here are some things I’ve learned after getting hurt in relationships:
- How to let people go separate ways in life without blaming myself or feeling abandoned
- How to respect and love myself first before I enter new relationships/friendships
- How to uphold healthy boundaries with others
- How to allow others to be themselves without me trying to change who they are
- How to be myself no matter what others think of me
The lessons are by no means done or even mastered yet. But they are things that I’ve learned along the way and which help me to enjoy my relationships more and become the best possible version of myself.
When we decide how we can learn from our circumstances and put it into practice, we take back our power. We’re no longer victims of our pain but we see that pain is something that we can use as an opportunity to learn. In the moment when we learn from our errors, we grow and our heart chakra can once again operate healthily, powerfully, and freely, as it was meant to.
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