There are few experiences in life that we make more significant than relationships. It’s hard to imagine someone who has not gone through a painful heartbreak at some point. Ending a relationship usually leaves one person feeling worthless and rejected. There is nothing like the sting of someone you adore breaking up with you, and no matter how many times we are told not to take it personally, we usually take breakups personally.
When we move onto new romances, those feelings of heartbreak can follow us into our next relationships, and get in our way because we hold onto our reference points of the past. How often do we worry that we will just end up hurt and alone? Heartbreak can lead us to choosing whatever it takes to never be hurt again, and we decide to put up walls or barriers to protect ourselves from that raw emotional pain.
Do you notice that you keep barriers up or is it easy for you to be vulnerable and relaxed in your relationships? Barriers are energetic, you might notice them coming up in your body, like when you feel someone staring you down or a guy who approaches you on the street, or when you get a big bill in the mail, etc; do you put barriers up to avoid someone or something and protect yourself? If we keep our barriers up based on past experiences, we are also cutting ourselves off having something new or someone greater showing up.
To begin to clear some of the pain of past heartbreak and make room for someone new to show up in your life, you can say: “barriers down, barriers down, barriers down, barriers down.” And relax…
You can also keep your barriers up when it works for you, but if you notice yourself putting up those walls out of fear, you can ask yourself, “what would it take to be vulnerable here? Barriers down, barriers down barriers down.”
Being vulnerable can sound like bad advice at first, isn’t being vulnerable what got us into this heartbreak mess in the first place? If you are looking at your past relationships and you regret being vulnerable because you got hurt, have you concluded that because you were hurt, the relationship was a mistake?
First of all, what if getting hurt was a part of every relationship? Whether or not you stay together forever or break-up? If hurt feelings were not a sign of something wrong, and maybe even a sign of a great relationship, how would that change your current or future relationships, and even give you a different perspective on the past heartbreak?
Just like in business, there is no success without failure in relationships. So will you let go of everywhere you have decided that your heartbreak meant that the relationship failed, everywhere you turned against vulnerability, and all of the barriers that come up when it comes to relationships?
Have you been hurt multiple times and decided you must be bad at relationships?
Are you judging yourself as wrong, bad, or worthless because your relationship ended? Judgment. There is nothing that stops us faster. The feeling of wrongness sets in, and as soon as we judge ourselves as right or wrong, we are stuck in that judgment, everything we look at goes through the point of view that we are wrong (or right) or if we judge our past relationships, we are not allowing ourselves to receive everything those relationships gifted us.
We also limit what we can have in a new relationship because our new relationship might come with some of the things we have decided we do not like about that past relationship, but if we are stuck in the judgments, which are complete LIES, we stay stuck and never move forward.
And on top of all of the destruction that judgements create for our own lives, when we judge ourselves in relationships, we are also stopping our lovers from receiving and acknowledging the gift we are in their lives. Even past relationships can change when we acknowledge the gift we were and the gift our partners were to us.
So, first, we have to be honest with where we are judging ourselves.
This is another step that requires us to be vulnerable. Looking at self judgment might make your barriers go up again, in fact I wonder if barriers exist solely because of judgment, but relax and breathe, you do not need to share your judgments with anyone else, or post them on facebook, just for you.
When you look at some of the judgments that come up, you can ask: Truth, is this judgment mine? Who does this belong to? What is this judgment creating? Am I ready to let this go now?
And right now, how many judgments of you in past relationships and your judgments of your heartbreak are you ready to let go of?
How many judgments of your past or current partners are you ready to let go of? And if you look at those judgments, how many of them are actually about you? We only judge in others what we do not like about ourselves. This is how twisted judgment is and how destructive it can be to our relationships with others and ourselves.
Another way to change your point of view of a relationship gone wrong is ask, what’s right about this I am not getting? Or what is right about him/her/me I am not acknowledging? This question can completely shift your perspective on past heartbreak, or current relationships. What part of the relationship was great? Look at those moments that were fun, joyful, pleasureful, romantic, etc… and will you allow yourself to receive everything that relationship gifted to you now?
Following with gratitude. What would it take to be grateful for your past relationships and lovers, and grateful even for the heartbreak? If you look at what makes a breakup so painful, how much of the pain is missing the fun you had together, and all of the things you like about them, and the possibility you once were… what if, even if it comes with tears, you could still choose to be grateful for it all?
Not only does this help heal past heartbreak because you are looking at it from the point of view of gratitude, and no longer have to avoid your past, but when you are grateful for those relationships, and actually acknowledge the gift they were, you are also acknowledging what you would like to have more of in your future relationships.
Does each relationship prepare us for the next one? Every relationship gives us clarity of what we truly desire if we are willing not to judge it.
We have to look at where we learned about relationships because we actually take on our parents, Hollywood’s, our friends, and others’ stories, and ideas about relationships, and try to make them our own. And then when we don’t have the relationships we see other people having, we feel like failures or we must be with the wrong person if we don’t feel happy in a relationship that we never desired in the first place. How many of us are competing with other women instead of ourselves? Does that make their choices, lives, and relationships more significant than our own? Or are we trying to live their life?
