How Do You Mend A Broken Heart?
Healthy Relationships for Past, Present and Future Lives
by Barbara Ann Strassman
The energies we emit from our auric field, and more specifically our emotional body, often are taken in by those closest to us, i.e., our children, siblings, parents and other loved ones. As children we tend to identify with one parent more than another. Children are very sensitive and open to subtle energies as well. If there is an emotional imbalance, or a trauma, the child may want to help the parent, trying to remove pain, heartache or sadness, and unintentionally he/she may attract those energies into their own auric field. In the healing world we may say “you took on your mother’s/father’s energies.” Our experiences shape our beliefs and how we react to others, and before we know it we are like Mom or Dad.
Sadly, we create exactly what we don’t want, as our focus is on exactly that: I am not going to raise my children the way I was raised! I am not going to fight the way my parents did, and so we strive to be different. Energy follows thought, so a key step in healing our relationships with ourselves and with others is to always focus only on what you desire to create.
By being sympathetic and/or empathetic, we connect with those we love and we feel for them. Unintentionally though, we may be taking on their emotions and this does not assist their personal healing. We feel as though we are helping them, but if we become too entrenched into their trauma it affects all of our energy bodies over time. Often we are not aware, but we may be feeling a heaviness, sadness, or helplessness and it is not even ours. The energy builds up over time and it affects the health of our energetic bodies.
I often find that it is well into the child’s adult years that they may finally start to realize the relationship has become unhealthy. The inability to help the other person to change or eliminate their pain becomes more apparent, more frustrating, and the fixer becomes upset. Around this time individuals will realize they have been ignoring their own needs and deep resentment arises.
These interactions, connections and energies are called “cords” in the world of energy healing. Our chakras emit energies and receive energies and the cords can attach to different chakras of the other person. Often people say they feel drained by another person, they feel the life being sucked out of them and they can identify the area of the body where they feel that. Those are energetic cords. The entanglement of these cords causes the unhealthy relationship.
The key to a healthy relationship is the understanding that you are you, and the other person is his or her own self. To know who you are, to stand in your truth, to not sabotage or give yourself away is very important. Often we sacrifice for those we love, meaning we give up a part of ourselves or we sell ourselves short. In cases where loved ones are ill and need energy from us to try and remain healthy and heal, they may feed off our energy body. However, we can become depleted if we are not re-energizing and balancing ourselves in other ways. The experience of losing a loved one may also cause us to give away part of our heart, and that too needs to be called back. A part of our own self may leave with the deceased, even though we may be unaware of this personal loss of self.
We have cords that need healing in these situations. Traditional therapy certainly helps with relationships on an intellectual level but it does not clear the energetic level — the feelings that rise within body, the visceral response, or the root cause of the unhealthy relationship. Learning about boundaries, healing the wounds of the inner child, and sending any unhealthy energies back to the other person are very important in any healing. Knowing you can change your response, knowing what is triggering you, and learning that you make the choices in every moment, changes your whole trajectory. You are free to become the limitless you. Because everything is energy, the healing of relationship cords can be done even if the other person is no longer part of your life or if the loved one has passed over — there are no limitations!
Barbara Ann Strassman is a multi-dimensional healer, empath and founder of the Heart and Soul Healing Center in N. Easton, MA. www.heartandsoulholistic.com
The Heart Wall
by Paul Callahan
What is it that really draws us to a potential mate? Is it purely physical attraction? Or is it personality? Or maybe unspoken chemistry? Perhaps it’s something we are completely unaware of, something unseen, like vibration. After all, we each possess a distinct vibration, and more often than not, we are attracted to those with a similar vibrational frequency.
My high school sweetheart was a cheerleader and I was on the football team. That sounds like the perfect superficial match, right? What I didn’t realize until years later is that the real reason we were so drawn to each other was due to a very familiar and shared pain. We were both children of alcoholic fathers. We lived a childhood of walking on eggshells, in constant fight or flight mode, and fearful of unpredictable fathers and never-ending chaos at home.
We also shared something else in common: a heart wall. A heart wall is built by the subconscious mind after you’ve been hurt in order to protect you from being hurt again. It is made from bits and pieces of negative energies from past, unhealed traumas, emotions trapped in your body, often hundreds of them.
Your subconscious uses these emotions as brick and mortar to construct that energetic force field around your heart. A heart wall can be responsible for pushing away the right partners and attracting the wrong ones over and over. Have you ever experienced that pattern and continue to have failed relationships? That’s not merely coincidental.
Often we subconsciously attract mates that we feel we deserve rather than those we consciously desire. The partner that you could find true love and happiness with could be perceived as a threat to your heart and therefore pushed aside for someone that is safe. This type of self-sabotage is exactly what happens when you have a heart wall. That fear of having your heart broken can prevent you from finding the true love you long for.
Most disturbing about the heart wall is that it prohibits the pure love in our hearts from being felt by those we love. Our feelings of love must pass through layers of negative emotions like anger, resentment, shame, sorrow, abandonment, and fear before they are felt by our loved ones. Picture a white horse crossing a muddy river. What will it look like when it reaches the other side?
A heart wall can also block success, prosperity, and personal opportunities in life. For many, it can cause or contribute to diseases or chronic conditions, and even prevent you from healing.
So, how can you get rid of a heart wall if you have one? The heart wall can be removed just the way it was formed, one trapped emotion at a time through various forms of energy healing. Once the heart wall is gone you can give and receive love freely. You’ll attract people that have a higher vibration and are better suited for you in your new light. You will be able to feel and express positive emotions better. Your love no longer has to pass through layers of negative energy to be felt by someone you love.
Paul Callahan is a holistic practitioner with over 25 years of experience specializing in intuitive energy healing. www.TheWellnessCodes.com
Turn Heartaches Into Healing
by Jennifer Blaine
Would you like to know how to use your challenges to move you closer to yourself, feel better, and go about the business of creating change? If you say yes, follow these four steps.
1. Start with recognizing how precious it is that you actually care. You wouldn’t be so disturbed by these things if you weren’t a sensitive, compassionate person. So first things first, deeply appreciate yourself for having the ability to be affected by things. You are wonderful.
2. Make the choice to express. In fact, there is a magic that comes out of finding the right balance between experiencing and expressing. If you don’t feel good, chances are you are doing too much experiencing without expressing or too much expressing without enough experiencing. If you are overwhelmed by circumstances, make time and space to express. Tell a friend how you feel. Get art supplies and draw a really bad picture. Put on music and make your “blah” dance or movement to match what you are experiencing. If you are talking and talking without noticing life around you, take time to tune in and listen. You will start to notice your own personal favorite balance of expression and experiencing things.
3. Examine if you are getting anything out of being stuck. If you are frustrated by things, it’s useful to realize that you are angry. Anger is present if there’s a fundamental injustice. Depending on what you are angry about, this may be a sane response. What if you are angry because you want things to be different? If so, how do you want them to change? What are you willing to do about it? The film “The Cove,” a documentary about the annual devastating slaughter of dolphins in a small Japanese cove, exposed how this cultural ritual was so entrenched that there was no support to change it. But due to awareness raised by the film, and a mass international effort, the practice of killing those dolphins has ended. Isn’t that incredible!? If you align yourself with actually making a big change, you will feel better, and perhaps even end up transforming what really disturbed you in the first place.
4. The filmmakers of “The Cove” took action. In the end we all need to do that, to transform ourselves and the world. For me, engaging in a creative act always brings more energy. If I feel drained by being alone when I am parenting, I make a movie of my daughter, Lily. As a result, I get energy because I am being creative in the way I want to be creative. And if I entertain others with my creativity, I am honored to have brought joy to someone’s day. For some, just choosing to be more loving is enough of an action to take. For others, saying an affirmation is powerful. For others still, starting to build stamina by exercising can give them the energy to tackle their goals. A goal need not be huge, but by making up your mind to actually choose something different and take action you will experience a shift.
In life, we always get to choose whether we are resigned to things as they are, or if we are willing to change and choose a healing path with ourselves and others. If we are willing to change, we get a burst of creativity, inspiration, an actual feeling of being alive. What could be better?
Jennifer Blaine has been a transformational coach since 1997. www.blainecoaching.com
Self Worth
by Debbie Ritter
A couple of weeks ago, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a pain along the front of my right shin. Not quite a charley horse, not a shin splint either. Still semi-conscious, my first thought was that if I exercised more it would not have happened. That somehow it was my fault. From there followed a stream of thoughts that were so mean-spirited that they jolted me fully awake. I watched those thoughts as if in slow motion as they mounted their attack on me. After a few moments the last thought curled back around itself, as if to say, “There, we’re done, now you can go back to sleep.”
But I didn’t. The pain in my leg had passed, but my attention was on the thoughts instead. Initially horrified, I became filled with gratitude. After years of stealthily tracking my attacks on myself I had finally been shown them in their full, boldfaced absurdity.
Normally these kinds of thoughts are much sneakier. Often they hide in one of my long running-patterns, or they masquerade as logic and truth. They like to lurk in dark corners and pop out when I’m overwhelmed and not in a position to fully notice or protest.
American-born spiritual teacher Adyashanti has said that our inner dialogue is often shockingly hateful and condemning. We say things to ourselves we would never dream of saying to anyone else. To counter that, we talk a lot about self-esteem, as if that is the remedy, and then look for ways to bolster our images of ourselves.
The idea that we can be unworthy comes directly from our ego, which is the least qualified part of ourselves to make that evaluation. The ego will tell us that to be worthy we have to do something, or change, or improve ourselves in some way. What it doesn’t tell us is that self-esteem and self-hatred can be two sides of the same coin. As soon as we think we’ve landed heads up, we immediately start worrying about how we can stay there, and at some point we are propelled back to tails. Life becomes something we have to win at, or we will lose, and losing at life means we have no value.
A Course in Miracles says our value is determined by our higher mind, which is perfect and knows who we really are. Nothing we think or say or do or even believe is connected in any way with our worth. We simply are. And simply being us is perfect and changeless. While we rarely connect with the full grace of what that feels like, just knowing it is true can help immensely when we fall prey to thoughts of unworthiness.
Life can seem to be all about setting goals and achieving them, of growing, and of trying to improve ourselves. And, through those efforts we get to know ourselves better and settle into ourselves, and over the decades maybe even achieve a measure of self-acceptance. And when the penny turns, as it always will, we don’t need a better image of ourselves, but a different relationship with our own humanity. At that level, we are imperfect. Rather than hating ourselves for that, or expecting that to be different, we can be kind to ourselves when our shortcomings cause us pain, and remind ourselves that we are much more than what the ego would have us think we are. Then, as happened to me that night, when the next attack arrives, we can see it clearly with the light of understanding and watch it dissolve back into the unreality it came from.
Debbie Ritter is a spiritual intuitive who reads and teaches the Akashic records and practices meditation. A former lawyer and expatriate, she currently lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state.
Three Rites of Passage Through Heartbreak
by Jacyntha Kamor
Loss and resulting heartbreak are excruciatingly painful. To a trained and perceptive eye, the heart chakra can actually appear to be energetically broken. That’s why our heart feels this way. And when our heart is broken, our mind feels disoriented, our identity is shaken, and pain dominates. It can even feel like we’re dying.
The feeling and fear of dying from grief actually has a physiological foundation to it. Clinical researcher and abandonment trauma recovery expert Dr. Susan Anderson explains why grief and loss are so intensely and viscerally painful and can often make us feel like we’re dying. Anderson describes how our early infant survival depended on bonding to our caretakers, and that this physiology continues to run in our adult lives. Rationally we know that as adults we can still physically survive the departure of a beloved, but parts of our brain and nervous system are thrown into a physical shock based upon the vulnerability we experienced in infancy.
Added to this emotional grief, the mental break in our worldview and identity along with spiritually unfulfilled hopes and dreams, can all feel overwhelming and devastating. A fresh wound can also reopen older unhealed traumas begging to be healed and integrated. When all of this is swirling in excruciating angst, how could such a debilitating experience ever become something remotely evolutionary?
There are stages to grieving. In the beginning of grief and loss, basic triage care and soothing are needed. First, we need to shore up the basic necessities of daily life, reach out for more help and support and get lots of extra rest.
But equally important, we need to engage in simple soothing practices that help the infant physiology that has temporarily hijacked us. Our whole system needs to feel deeply calmed and comforted. Try these practices for surprisingly and powerfully simple relief.
SPIRIT HOLDING. Lie in a fetal yoga position in bed or on any comfortable surface while swaddled in soft covers, breathing slowly and deeply. Imagine either a cocoon or egg of a soft, beautiful color surrounding you and/or a loving angel or your spirit guide with you, loving you, simply being with you in your grief, accepting you right where you are. Gradually and as best you can, begin to breathe in a feeling of being unconditionally held and loved.
SELF-LOVE MUDRA. Place the right hand on your chest over your heart chakra, and your left hand over the right. Close your eyes and bow your head forward slightly. Breathe slowly and deeply. Allow your hands, breathing, and awareness to send love and care into the pain. When ready and able, gradually deepen into the portal, which opens to your soul underneath the pain.
THE VOICE OF PAIN. Allow your pain to have a voice. Either through writing/journaling, speaking, sound and/or movement, let the pain express itself. The more this energy feels respected, attuned to and allowed expression, the deeper and more meaningfully it can begin healing to bring relief.
If we reject and resist the pain, it intensifies. But when we can embrace, respect and tend to the power of suffering when it arises, this deeply felt energy can later open us to extraordinary new dimensions of our soul, expand our human and spiritual awareness, and deepen our love and genuine compassion. As challenging and hurtful as a broken heart truly is, when well tended and trusted, suffering can become the beginning of a powerful path into a whole new and even more expansive, creative and love-filled life.
Jacyntha Kamor is a transformational life coach, spiritual counselor and core energy healer with over 30 years of experience in the healing arts. www.jacynthakamor.com
Do “Sad Songs Say So Much” or Do They Just Make us Sadder?
by Carrie Rowan
Our taste in music varies from person to person much like our taste for food. There are so many styles of music to experience and sample, yet we tend to choose the same things over and over. Our musical taste buds are flavored by variations in genre, tempo, volume, mood, and lyrical content, and they can also be influenced by our state of mind at the time of listening, as well as any past programming or memory associated with that music. With all our complex sensory, emotional and cognitive musical interactions, it begs the question: Are our habitual listening choices good medicine for us or do they make us feel worse than before we listened?
Research shows that it depends on whether you have a propensity for depression and rumination or not. Depressed people have been found to want to listen to sad music more often than their upbeat counterparts. Originally researchers concluded that this was because they wanted to maintain their low moods. However, a new study published in the journal Emotion, has flipped that implication on its head. Rather than maintain their mood, “the sad music may be calming to people with depression, even uplifting,” says Christian Jarrett in his article, “Why do people with depression like listening to sad music?”
Listening to sad music can make people feel like a supportive friend is there so they feel less alone. Much like reaching for a pint of ice cream, a glass of wine or meditation, we use music to soothe us. Here are five simple ways you can customize a musical remedy for your own healing.
1. Start by becoming aware of your own vibration. Which emotions are you living in right now? Since everything is energy, music carries its own vibrational frequency as well. We can learn to become more aware of our own emotional vibrations and how everything around us affects our vibration, including the music we listen to. As you experiment with this, you may find it annoying to run up to the top of the vibrational scale and listen to joyful music when you are feeling stuck in anger or grief. But listening to a song that has a heated vibration, like the Carrie Underwood song, “Before He Cheats,” can raise you above feeling depressed and fearful. Experiment with different songs and how they make you feel. If you feel better after listening, you are on the right track.
2. Keep in mind this is a no judgment zone. It’s fine if you are drawn to sad songs at this time; try and get the most out of them. We move in and out of emotions all the time. Sad songs can give us a good cry, which may be just what we need at this time. They also make us feel there is someone out there who feels the same way, and the singer stands in for a compassionate friend that is cradling you in a healing musical embrace. Use this time to feel the sadness in the music as a cathartic healing balm.
3. Find a theme song that empowers you and play it frequently. Pick something that makes you feel empowered like Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger” that reminds us “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” or Helen Reddy’s famous “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar.” You can even re-write the words to a famous melody you like, incorporating the things you want to feel in your own life. Try recording yourself singing it on your phone and listen to it when you need a reminder. There is power in hearing your own voice speak the things you most want, burrowing deep down into your subconscious to evoke change and speed up learning. Some other examples of good theme songs are:
“All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles
“Respect” by Aretha Franklin
“We Are The Champions” by Queen
“I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor
“Girl On Fire” by Alicia Keys
“Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen
“Brave” by Sara Bareilles
4. Ask yourself better questions. As easy as this next step sounds, don’t underestimate its power. Start to pay attention to the negative questions you are asking yourself so you can come up with contrasting positive ones. When you ask a question, your mind must give an answer. So instead of asking, “Why does this always happen to me?” and receiving a disempowering answer, you could rephrase it: “How can I attract more good things my way?” When we learn to ask better questions, we will get better answers. I attended the Evolution 2019 seminar with Bryna Haynes and one of the most compelling takeaways from the 3-day event was this question: “What else is possible here?” It stimulates your subconscious mind to find a positive answer. So before you decide to reach for the same piece of music try asking, “How will this song make me feel after I listen to it? Then ask the all-important question, “How do I want to feel?” Let that be your guide to choosing a more empowering song for yourself and see how well it works!
5. Try some classical music. Sometimes it’s just the thing you need when your mind cannot take any more words in. Just the calming effect of the instrumentation can quickly bring peace into your own head. Try Antonio Vivaldi’s Flute Concerto in C. When we can learn to appreciate a brand new tune, our hearts soar in harmonious waves of vibration that lift us up to explore the vastness of a new rainbow.
Carrie Rowan is an award winning singer/songwriter, author, mindset coach and edutainer, who educates while entertaining children and adults through music. www.carrierowan.com
See also:
The Place Where Angels Show Up
Five Core Practices For Meaningful Conversation
