Living With An Open Heart, Even When Fear Shows Up
We are all beings made up of energy and we have an endless supply of it if we know how to tap into it.
By opening your heart you allow energy to flow freely through you and at the highest level. I’m not just referring to opening your heart to loving someone, but to everything and everyone around you.
The way you act, speak, and think about every single thing in your daily life is based on how open your heart is.
Think about how much better you feel when you’re smiling, having a great day, saying hi to those you walk by or listening to music, and just being happy. You feel more alive and energised, as opposed to when you are angry, sad, or hurt and feel sluggish and blah.
That’s because you’re opening your heart and allowing the energy inside to be released and not trapped. It’s human nature to interact with each other and when we do, it lights us up. It charges us up, like a battery. If you truly live a life of love and choose to find the positive in everything that’s presented to you, there’s never anything worth closing your heart over.
I say that knowing how hard it can be sometimes to keep an open heart. Many of us don’t even realise we’re doing it. I know I’ve definitely been guilty of closing off my heart, not wanting to get hurt, but ultimately you’re hurting yourself by living this way. It’s stopping you from truly engaging in life.
Even when we’ve been hurt and our nervous system is trying to protect us by closing our heart from more pain, it’s still our choice. So allow yourself to wallow for a while if you need to, then make the conscious effort to fully open your heart again. Because it’s only through keeping our hearts open and forgiving that we can transmute the pain into a lesson to help us grow and love even more than before.
So remember, the only person you will hurt by closing your heart with anger and sadness is yourself.
Don't lock yourself inside yourself, let yourself be free and open to the joy of life around you.
HOW TO HEAL AND LIVE WITH AN OPEN HEART
Healing isn’t possible within denial and fear.
It’s only possible within openness and honesty, within our willingness to look at the truth of our reality, past and present, and to accept it for what it is without letting it define who we are right now.
We are not our struggles or our heartbreak.
We are not the actions we’ve taken or the assaults we’ve endured.
Yes, our experiences influence how we grow and who we grow into.
But ultimately, who we are is who we decide to be, because of, and despite everything we’ve been through.
Our power lives in choice. We can choose to face our pain without judgment, without letting it shut us down from our growth.
If we decide to.
We can commit to loving ourselves through it all. As much as possible, no matter what.
Love and self-love transform us.
This is how we create a safe place inside ourselves, to heal.
Healing requires a direct and honest confrontation with pain.
We can’t honestly address what we can’t honestly face.
And at the core of our denial is fear.
Fear of facing the truth.
Fear that we can’t survive it.
Fear that it might destroy us.
But we are stronger than we realise.
When pain or any emotion that scares us comes up, allow it, don’t deny it and bury it. It will let go of us when we stop holding on to it.
LOVING COURAGEOUSLY THROUGH OUR FEAR
Love invites us to see fear differently, as we fully embody fear with kindness and compassion we’re capable of transmuting it.
Love is where we find our deepest meaning and our greatest joy. Love is what drives us to express ourselves the most authentically, and to connect with others the most openly, more than money, power, and popularity ever could.
Change will always be scary, but we can be afraid and still make courageous choices.
Courage doesn’t exist without an element of fear, so embrace the fear to help you recognise that you’re stepping out of your comfort zone and growing.
Embrace whatever response to your fear works best for you, as long as it keeps you moving forward, making the courageous choices you know you need to make for yourself and for your life.
Fear is an aspect of the human experience. It serves its purpose, by allowing courage to exist, because courage wouldn’t make sense without fear.
See fear and acknowledge it for what it is.
See it as a friend, rather than as an enemy.
Instead of denying it, embrace it.
We can choose to un-become everything we’ve been told to be, or not to be so that we can become everything we already are.
Falling in love teaches us about the real essence of a successful life, a life of meaning and joy, a life of love.
Love transforms what we view as our failures into lessons and growth, which ultimately allows us to view our so-called failures as success stories.
Authenticity = Freedom = LOVE
The truer we are to ourselves, the freer we become, and the bigger capacity we hold for love.
We often think authenticity is hard. But is it really? It should be the easiest thing in the world, to be ourselves and to love the truest expression of who we are.
This begs the question, how can we love ourselves if we are not willing to be ourselves?
We struggle with self-love because we struggle with the ‘self’ aspect.
Imagine how much effort we put into trying to be someone that we’re not, rather than who we are.
It’s so much easier to just be yourself.
That’s when we are at our happiest.
Love is easy when we are being ourselves because that is who and what we are – love.
SEEING OUR CRACKS AS GIFTS INSTEAD OF FLAWS
We are all human. When we understand that, and we’re willing to see ourselves in others, and others in ourselves, through the lens of love, we walk the paths of empathy and compassion, both of which lead to a greater possibility for forgiveness.
When we recognise who we truly are is Love, we recognise what we need to do is Forgive.
When love is our being, forgiveness becomes our doing.
Love compels us to forgive, no matter what.
No conditions, no excuses, no exceptions.
Does it mean we condone what has been done? Of course not. But we understand that forgiveness has nothing to do with the actions.
We can separate the doing from the being.
When we forgive others, we need to understand that what may have happened was actually a direct result of something that had been done to them and stemmed from their underlying pain and suffering.
This is the painful price we pay for repressing ourselves.
Being open and true to our feelings is the only way to remove repressed anger from our bodies.
Empathy and compassion are direct paths to forgiveness. Put yourself in the shoes of the other person and realise the suffering they must have felt, to justify doing what they did.
Forgiveness is our biggest teacher in learning to love. It teaches us that what we can’t forgive in others are parts of us that we haven’t forgiven yet.
They are the wounded parts of ourselves that need healing to make us whole.
So we can hide ourselves because of our perceived flaws, or we can embrace the flaws.
We can choose to see the ways in which our cracks, and those of others, add beauty to the world around us and the ways in which they enhance our own lives.
We can choose to recognise that whatever makes us who we are is something to celebrate, not suppress.
Without needing them to define us, we can begin to let our cracks give us more definition.
Then, like a flower, we’re bound to inspire, and we can finally, fully bloom.
We all have cracks, we need to see them not as a flaw, but rather as a gift, because our cracks can lead others to their gifts too.
So open yourself up to the possibility that your perceived flaws might actually be adding beauty to the world.
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