Open Things— Hearts
Open things are the most beautiful—open flowers, open eyes, open hearts, open minds
What do you do when your heart has been broken? Is it difficult for you to receive love? Have you wondered what might be keeping you from a more abundant life? In this third entry in the Open Things series, I share how opening your heart can finally free love and the helpful things of the universe to begin flowing to you rather than away from you. Love, joy, abundance—they all flow where they are welcome. They are attracted to availability.
Our heart is our emotional center, the place where our passion lives. Because it houses our emotions, and emotions are often unstable at best, a heart can be a very hurt place to be.
Hearts can be broken and I don’t know of one that never fractured at some point.
The pain of a broken heart can be some of the most painful there is. Our heart is so central to our identity. Pain can’t go any deeper inside us than our center.
The natural tendency when a heart experiences that kind of pain is to protect it while it heals.
Protecting the Pain
I can remember the weeks after a surgery to repair a hernia in my abdomen. Those muscles are so central to the operation of our body—the standing up, the moving around, the sitting down. Before every major move, I would very deliberately hold my arms to my gut to “hold it together” while I went about whatever it was I was doing. Protecting my injury was at the forefront of my mind.
Sometimes the process of healing can take us a long time. When it comes to our hearts, sometimes that healing can take a lifetime.
If the pain is enough we never want to feel it again. We protect the heart so fiercely that we shield it from any possible influence. Like an armadillo, it closes up and shuts everything out—even the people and things that are good and trying to help it.
Closing out everyone and everything else ultimately hurts us more. Sure, the pain might not be so immediately unbearable but it will hurt us nonetheless.
It’s ironic, isn’t it, that shielding our hearts from pain eventually brings more?
The Great Irony
Closed hearts can’t receive love. The blessings of God, the love from others who care about us, the fulfillment our connection with the universe would otherwise bring—it all just bounces off.
All those trying to love us soon realize that the love isn’t sticking. And what’s the natural tendency when someone doesn’t want what you are offering? You stop offering.
You stop offering because there is no attraction anymore. The attraction has been broken because a wall has been erected that the attraction can’t penetrate. Or, to look at it another way, the beauty has been concealed. Attraction lost.
People expert, Vanessa Van Edwards, in an article at www.scienceofpeople.com shares that,
“Research shows that a person’s most attractive trait is their availability.”
Availability here doesn’t just mean that someone is free tonight to go on a date. It refers to their emotional availability and how they communicate that.
Have you experienced the uncomfortable feeling you get when you meet someone who is emotionally distant? They don’t show the slightest vulnerability and it drains all your energy just trying to pry out what they are really feeling.
A closed heart is unavailable and it reduces our attractiveness, I believe, not just to other people but to the universe.
The universe is a causal dimension and it repeats—and often amplifies—our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. It’s not so hard to believe—positive people have things go their way, people who exhibit strong faith work miracles, and people who spread love receive more love back.
Wouldn’t you agree that joyful people have awesome lives? They aren’t joyful because their lives are awesome, their lives are awesome because they are joyful.
Opening A Wounded Heart
Open hearts can receive these things. And open hearts are always attractive. God, other people, the universe—they all think open hearts are beautiful. But closed hearts aren’t quite so much.
Nobody wants to be rejected even if it is was meant to be nothing personal. Most of us truly want to be kind and extend warmth to others. But when it bounces off, boy does it feel like rejection.
So, how do you change that? How do you change so that you can become more receptive to the good things coming your way that are meant to heal you and shape your life for the better? How do you open your heart when it has been wounded and you’re just trying to protect it?
The way to open your heart and keep it open is to begin offering love again, yourself.
I know, that’s a shock to the system.
That’s not what a hurting heart wants to hear. Yes, it requires vulnerability, perhaps more than you ever dreamed of giving again.
But it’s just like how opening your hand to give a gift finally lets you receive one back. The act of giving allows you to receive. The act of giving opens you up. As Taisen Deshimaru says:
“To receive everything, one must open one’s hands and give.”
Have you noticed how much better an open hand feels than a clenched fist? The act of opening releases the strain and stress. It saves all that wasted energy.
The good news is you don’t have to burn all that energy keeping your heart clenched tight either. You can let that go and feel the burden in you lifted.
The Universal Flow
But some of you may believe that you don’t deserve to receive good things or even to feel better.
I know that was often the case for me. I hated myself. I didn’t want to be better. My way of getting back at myself was to reject the good that could help me. But, in my blindness, I couldn’t see how that attitude impacted more than just me.
Being a part of this universe requires exchange. You have to give to others, others have to give to you. You have to receive from others, others have to receive from you. Water only stays fresh when it flows and energy is only useful when it’s transferred. Stagnation is death.
The very reason you feel like crap is because of death. The reason you feel like your life is ugly is because of death. The reason you think you don’t deserve love is because of death. Everything is dying inside your very core, your heart, because YOU have chosen to close it down and shut off the flow. Death, my friends, is not beautiful and that is exactly what you are feeling if you have closed your heart to the love others have to give to you.
When we are engaging in love we are living as we were designed to be. That flower in the first entry of this series? It’s beautiful when it’s engaging in its purpose and it’s pretty much not when the bud is shut tight.
In a similar way your heart is beautiful when it’s open. It’s by being open that it really begins to fulfill one of our basic purposes in life—to give and to receive and to be a conduit for love.
Don’t let your heart be a dam—open the floodgates. Let God’s love, the love of others, the divine energy in this universe—all of it—flow in you and through you. It is all here for YOU, to make you a more complete human. You were never meant to be whole on your own.
Yes, open yourself up. Take a gigantic risk. More love will come than you are capable of comprehending all because your heart has become truly beautiful. Why? Because an open heart is one of the most beautiful things in this universe.
This is the third entry of a four-part series, “Open Things Are The Most Beautiful.”
Aaron Force is a blogger from Seattle, Washington. He writes to educate others about the nature of an expanded consciousness to evolve humanity. Aaron unexpectedly experienced his own profound awakening and ego transcendence in 2015 and soon understood that the qualities of his own experience (a greater expansion and evolution in his life) could be applied to mankind collectively.