Is your heart open or is it masked with armor? Protected with spikes? Hidden in some deep realm never to be touched? Or leaking its wounds and tainting every relationship you’re in?
If you are human, you likely have a wounded heart; if one risks to love, one experiences wounds. It’s the way we learn. We make mistakes; they make mistakes; we all learn… a little or a lot. It’s a process.
The psyche’s response to heart wounding is often complex and unless one invokes some methods of deep healing to transform those heart wounds into wisdom, one will never gain the clarity and wisdom required to reject the Sisyphus repeating the scenario all over again, again and again; just with different actors on the stage with you. The relationships could be the lover, the friend, the co-worker, the playmate….or all of them.
Review your relationship failure scenarios; there are countless permutations. You make some bad choices that destroy the trust in a relationship (or they do); someone rejects you because they find someone ‘better’, or you do; you/they continually feel unappreciated. Do your failed relationship stories have a repetitive theme? Or do you have a variety pack of failures that seem to fit no particular pattern?
It matters somewhat, in that recognizing the similarities of heartbreak stories, helps you unravel the pattern, and consciously create new habits of engagement. This is where counseling/psychotherapy can help the mind recognize and work to alter behavior patterns.
But to heal the heart is another matter… and to establish new ways of embracing relationship requires the heart and nervous system to be deeply enmeshed in the process.
You must care enough to claim your contributions to the failures, and cultivate the desire to shift, and explore some methods to change the internal landing pad (remove the armor; learn to ride the feelings…), and then practice new approaches. The good news is that you naturally relate differently when the wounds heal, and you learn to simple be with the experience.
So here is a simple, yet profound practice that teaches you to ride the wave of feelings that arise when circumstances trigger old wounds of the heart. This method of staying present with feelings & thoughts, simultaneously heals old wounds and teaches you to keep an open heart when difficult circumstances arise in the future.
The practice involves a Mudra: ‘Purna Hridaya’ – gesture of the Open Heart. Use this hand gesture along with a guided meditation that retrains your psychological (mental-emotional) self to watch and be with the experience. You’ll learn to be generous, open-hearted and compassionate. You’ll feel refreshed and uplifted, and notice over time, that your relationships improve substantially.
Here’s the Mudra:
Interlace the fingertips at the first joint, with the right index finger in front. Stretch the thumbs down and touch their tips. You’ll see the heart shape in the space the fingers/thumbs make. Rest your hands by the heart if lying down, on your lap if sitting.
And here is the 9.5 minute guided meditation.
I’d recommend doing this daily, until it becomes a daily habitual response to challenging relationship situations. Please let me know if this is helpful…. And what you notice.