Many of us mark the timeline of our lives through tragedy and loss. Reviewing our lives, we highlight the periods involving disappointment, crises, or betrayals. During these times of crisis, we cannot continue “business as usual” in our minds. They force us to re-evaluate the model of the world that we took for granted. Tragedies and difficult romantic breakups require us to orient ourselves entirely differently to the world as we knew it. Unfortunately, we don’t flow with new trajectories with ease and grace, which is why our hearts hurt so much.
When our heart’s energy center is open, we feel love and joy and are much quicker to laugh and smile. The Institute of Heartmath refers to this state as experiencing greater heart coherence. Heart coherence is a physiological state in the body where we are poised in our nervous system to be both relaxed and alert. We smile for no good reason because we feel at home in our hearts and bodies. We laugh easier and are more forgiving of others when we experience heart coherence. When we resist the changes required of us during difficult times, it is often because we are experiencing less heart coherence which diminishes our resources to cope. Our hearts shut down, and we start responding to the world in “economy mode.” Deep down, we are telling ourselves, “I know I am being asked to grow and change, but I don’t want to. I want everything to stay the same.” Essentially, we are saying, “Hell no! I won’t go!”
The emotional pain we experience with a broken heart is the fluctuation of opening and closing our hearts’ energy center. Our hearts want to open as they have in the past, but we don’t know how to open them without the trauma memories triggering them shut. Some people choose to shut down their heart centers permanently because this fluctuation is too painful. Unfortunately, it is common to people to choose to keep their hearts closed, which may the beginning of decades of less-than-adaptive life choices, including substance abuse.
As Consciousness Athletes, we know we have a question to answer during crises, “Are we going to become bitter or better?“ Are we going to keep our hearts shut down while ruminating about our losses, or will we keep our hearts open as we mine our heart’s terrain for clues to our rebirth? Our Consciousness Athlete training has taught us how good it feels to drink from our open heart’s sweet, loving nectar. So, we understand that no situation is worth depriving ourselves of this nourishing sustenance, including tragedy and loss. We quickly learn to recognize that when challenges emerge that break our hearts, instead of feeling the pain of contracting our heart’s center, we can use the challenge to expand our heart center open even larger than before our hearts were challenged.
We learn that love is infinite, and it will heal our wounds if we allow is to flow through our hearts instead of resisting it.
Keeping our hearts open during times of crisis takes repetitive practice, like lifting weights at the gym.
Through resistance training, our muscles become more robust. By resisting our hearts’ tendency to close during crises, our hearts build strength and stability in love. We benefit from the effervescent flowing of love’s nectar, and there is a quiet joy within us, even during emergencies. We recognize that tragedy is really just an opportunity to feel the sweetness of further expansion.
We learn that Love never ends. Love does not rely on any situation or person. It is a well we can drink from anytime and anywhere, regardless of circumstances. Crises invite us to break down the walls we had around our hearts so that more Love can flow through us unimpeded. Eventually, as we rely on the healing nourishment of love’s presence even through tragedy, we learn to trust Love and draw strength from its sustenance.
As Consciousness Athletes who practice maintaining loving states in our nervous systems, we feel gratitude as we look back at our lives with great appreciation for all the situations that broke our hearts…open. We know it was those difficulties that opened the door to experiencing a “love that surpasses understanding” A sweet love that we learned is literally under our noses, and yet very few people seem to know little about it.
But we know it is there because we have been training, like Athletes of the Heart, to keep our hearts open especially during crises.
Why experience anything else?
To learn more about how to open our hearts during heartbreak, try the meditations in my book – Become A Consciousness Athlete – A Step By Step Program To Heighten Consciousness for Daily Happiness.
