
Like plaque that clogs your arteries, pain from past relationships can clog up your love, preventing it from freely flowing to other people. On top of making your heart flow sluggish, lasting pain is energy around your heart that’s feeding your mind information like, “It’s too painful to be vulnerable or intimate with another person. Maybe I’m not likeable to other people. I’m still angry with him/her. I don’t deserve to be deeply happy. People are horrible!” This pain-fed information can trick you into believing that pain is permanent—your only reality. Unless you clear out this old, lurking residue, it can be hard to develop new healthy relationships. Underneath your pain, though, your heart is always ready to love—anyplace, anytime. It’s ready to build a bridge to another person’s heart and make lasting friendships and caring partnerships.
Allowing your heart to be free to do so involves continually clearing the pain that happens with the inevitable ups and downs of life. Even in healthy relationships, we can inadvertently hurt each other, and the more deeply you love someone, the deeper the wounds are that they can inflict. While pain can come in so easily, it can also go out. By maintaining this flow of energy through your heart, you can always be free and clear to create deep, loving, and sustainable relationships.
So how do you do it? First, remembering that emotional pain is not static, but something that can change helps you stop identifying with your pain. You are not your pain; your pain is yours, but it’s temporary. Second, remembering that pain is energy, just as everything is, allows you to use energy clearing exercises to remove past hurts.
You can use this meditation to remove painful energy from around your heart.
- Sit in a chair with your feet flat on the ground or sit anywhere in a half-lotus posture. Straighten your spine and neck by pulling up the top of your head.
- Breathe comfortably for a minute or two, letting your body and mind calm a little.
- Tap the center of your sternum. You can use your fingertips, your knuckles, or anything that feels comfortable for you. Feel the vibration your tapping makes in your chest.
- The vibration will stir up the energy in your chest. Release it by exhaling through your mouth again and again.
- While you’re tapping, bring to mind people who have hurt you. Feel and recognize the pain they caused you. Feeling the pain is the first step to healing it.
- Send that pain out with your breath, thinking, I forgive you, each time. If it feels better, say, “I forgive you,” out loud instead.
- Do this until you no longer feel pain associated with that person.
- Hurting others also hurts ourselves. When you finish with the people who have hurt you, visualize those you have hurt.
- With each exhale, release the pain of hurting them, thinking or saying, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” Continue until you have gone through everyone from whom you need to ask forgiveness.
After or instead of these exercises, use the first nine pictures in Healing Hearts: A Coloring Book for Letting Go and Starting Over to further clear the pain around your heart.
Coloring these pictures while practicing the suggested meditations that accompany each adds the powerful energy movers of body movement, focus, and color to this process of unclogging the energy around your heart. Choose the picture that resonates with you most at the time, and make this sequence of exercises an ongoing practice for emotional clearing.
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