Do you need to live with more love?
How open-hearted are you?
I used to think that living in an open-hearted way was dangerous. My whole life presented me with many practical reasons to keep my deepest emotions to myself, express the on paper or in art, and not let the weakness that I perceived love to be actually disrupt my life. I had seen people get sick over love, lose their rational minds in toxic love and act in destructive ways all in the name of love.
Have you? Have you done any of the above?
The world may teach you that it’s wrong to be open-hearted. I mean, look at the times you trusted, you loved, you risked and you lost.
That’s enough to close down shop on anyone’s sense of love for life. Heartbreak is something we feel physically, hence it started being called “heart-break”:
“Pain is the way the mind responds to trouble inside the body,” says Alex Zautra, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University. “Emotion is the same way. Whether you feel love or sadness is also a response to something you feel outside the body. With pain it is a closer-in response, to something inside the body, but it is a response in an attempt to learn about and motivate recovery.” (science 2.0)
Today’s holistic greatness is all about becoming more open-hearted, no matter what life may have shown you in the past.
How open-hearted do you feel?
Contrary to the New Age-y philosophy that your ability to love flies open (my heart is open!) and then slams shut (my heart is closed now, suddenly!), being able to love is something we always have available to us as a primal birthright. It is part of how we actually survive, and it doesn’t come and go. We all always have the ability to choose love. Fear comes and goes. Anger comes and goes.
Without intimacy and love, you can’t survive as well.
This is science.
Dare to move out of your “comfort zone” and risk where it feels right to risk. Learning more of how simple love can be is a big revelation. THIS talk at Mind Body Green’s Revitalize by Dr. Sue Johnson will illuminate so many concept of love and how we relate to each other in these terms… it is simple and yet it is primitive and mind-blowing.
Watch THIS for 20 minutes and I dare you to say that you look at love the same. It is such brilliance I can’t even use words that express how happy it makes me to hear all of this!
Clearing the grief of past love that was lost can open up a brighter future.
I don’t know about you, but I have lost a whole lot of people I love in my life. And with each bit of grief, came a harder time letting go.
If you have lots of grief piled up- even from losing jobs, friends, actually experiencing deaths that are still un-grieved- you might have a harder time looking at life with openness. Its very hard to be in love with life or with people if you are scared to lose.
Alexis Smart, homeopathic guru (check her out HERE, you will be so glad you did!) loaded me up with a dose of something that changed me energetically in a huge way- Ignatia in 200c potency. Its a homeopathic grief remedy that unearths a whole lot of loss in a profound way. I sat on the beach after taking some recently and felt myself growing lighter by the second.
Forgiveness sets you free.
Forgive yourself. Forgive others. You will watch an amazing thing happen in forgiveness. Space opens up. Its easy to hate. It is easy to vilify. It is hard to forgive.
Forgive a thousand times if you have to, and a thousand more, and forgive until you feel spacious.
Write letters to people you loved and lost. Send them or don’t send them. Forgive people who died who you felt abandoned you even though they didn’t choose to do it. Forgive the people who didn’t know how to love you, even though they said they did.
Forgive, forgive and forgive.
Live with more love. Live with an open heart. There’s nothing quite as wonderful as feeling love, and at it’s essence, that means feeling connected to life.
xoxo Dana
P.S.: The Love Camp is coming in soon to kick off a season of LOVE, and the hour-long FREE video series packed with love-magnetic Feng Shui is starting HERE!
I can’t wait for you to experience these videos.
Sign on HERE to get started as soon as they arrive!
xoxo!!!
Namaste, much pure Love and deepest respect.
Great post as usual.
Thanks Dana!