Reclaming Your Heart in ONE Easy Step

Only one step! You, too, can do it now!

 

Everyone's blog has some article in it about getting over a past love. If you google it, you will find a bazillion other people who have something to say about it. Usually lists. 1. Throw away the pictures. 2. Throw away your full bottle of Xanax. You see where I'm going. But, it's all such trite crap. Do and don't do this, do and don't do that. Most people who feel broken want someone, somehow, to see inside their hearts and souls and somehow validate their experience. And if possible, help them make sense of it and assist them in seeing a future that doesn't include a gaping, almost physical hole in their psyches. People want someone to tell them it is going to be okay.

Okay is relative. Okay is existing, breathing in and out, taking care of business. Okay is functioning. People want something better than okay. People want some sense of peace. Something that allows them to relax. To stop running toward a future or a person that no longer exists. People want to quit thinking about those fragments of human experience--that, with a loved one, are truly imprinted and conscious. It is hard to push them down, and maybe it isn't even good to push them down. Maybe those tiny fragments of past bliss bubble up forever. What people really need and want out of a "how to heal your broken heart" article is something spiritually true and something tangible. The magic key that makes everything better than okay.

Some people are better than others at letting go of those fragments of stored bliss, those tiny bits of consciousness and shared experiences. So many things can form a memory--moments of intensity and connection, moments of spiritually connected and shared space. Some people, through iron wills or superhuman discipline, push their memories down, down, down, and they forget. It seems to me if something was truly full of bliss it's worth remembering. No Jim Carrey's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for this girl, no. But the tricky thing about intense memories is while recalled there is only a memory, but there is also the resulting feelings and thoughts that surround it.

For example: Let's take a man who had a lover. This lover was someone he believed to be the love of his life; that one person who transcended time and space and was somehow with him since the beginning of time. That was who this man believed his lover to be. Over time, as happens with many lovers, they go away. Sometimes they die, but often they just change. In the case of this man, he watched his lover change to him over time. He watched his lover turn against him, bit by bit. He listened as his lover explained why she was no longer a good fit for him and how she wanted her space. He tried to be who she needed him to be. But to no avail. It simply wasn't possible. He couldn't be the person she wanted him to be, because at the end of the day, he was still himself.

Why did she change? Why did she move from perceiving him as the love of her life to viewing him as someone of zero worth? Well, if popular psychology or anyone's best friend is correct, she changed because she found someone else. She was otherwise engaged and a coward. She didn't have the courage to tell the horrible truth to this man. And even if this was an act of mercy in her mind, there is a axiom of human relationships that I believe will always matter first and foremost. EVERYONE deserves the total truth. Because we always know. Sure, people manage to pull up their drawbridges and stock their moats with alligators, but the truth is always there underneath the surface like an ugly boil. This woman might have destroyed him with the truth of her other love interest, but at the same time she probably would have instantly freed him. At the very least she would have given him the respect of giving him the whole truth.

But at this point he will never have the truth. He will only and forevermore have conjecture. He will look for clues and find paths that lead to doors, he will turn handles to find them bolted shut. He will do it again and again until he is old and tired. Or he will give himself his own truth. And this is the truth that is missing in every "heal your broken heart" article I have ever read. If you insist on having a number, let's call it the number one thing to do in a list of one thing.

1. REALIZE:

If someone discards you it is God's greatest blessing. It is the universe freeing you from a person who treats you poorly, who doesn't see the magical, amazing, lovely, brilliant, funny, adorable person you are. Period. You must never weep and wail over someone who doesn't see you and adore you. Weep and wail over the loss of people who adore you and run into buses, or who adore you and die in battle. Weep and wail over the right people. The sadness many people feel at the end of being dumped is the incredible put down they received. They are reeling because their lover said they are worthless. Most people get stuck in misdirected pain. They want that person back assuring them that they are loveable. They want to make it right. They want to reclaim a past that possibly was only smoke and mirrors. You should take your walking papers and kiss them ecstatically while singing "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" if you can remember the words of that old Elton John tune. And then step back from the cliff, take a deep breath and walk the other way, knowing you were saved.

And the memories? The undeniable moments of connection and bliss? Let then float around you like butterflies. Pretty, lovely even, but not something you need to chase or put into a jar. The world is full of moments of connection and bliss. Far better to have a real, true moment of bliss, now or in the future, than to hold an old one under glass, examine carefully upon a fingertip, and replace with caution and put away.

Real bliss is strong and hearty. It is in abundance. It is available. It is yours in a summer's sunset or the eyes of a baby or an amazing piece of music. It is yours in the arms of a person you haven't met yet. Believe in the possibility of an abundant universe with more. There is always more. Choose what you will have more of--and go find it.

And a note to my friends who are suffering: Everything I said here is true. But only if you give yourself a chance to believe it.

The Wound

When someone wounds you, what do you do? Do you retaliate? Do you obsess about the circumstances of the incidents surrounding the great personal injury you suffered? Or do you let it go? Like a butterfly, wings gently propelling the memories and the circumstances away from your psyche until you find peace?

Technology makes letting go a complicated process. We are all so hooked in. We are notified if anyone we knows makes a move, bakes a cake, has an issue with their boss, their husband, or their neighbors. We see it in living color. Sometimes too graphic. And there it is. We simply cannot get away from the everyday ramblings of anyone we know--or have known.

There is incredible discipline involved in healing a wound. We have all had that tiny scab in an inconvenient place that, no matter how much we know better, we pick at. I have done it. Scratching a mosquito bite never ends well, if I can trivialize this for a moment. But it's not trivial. It's instantly possible to track the whereabouts and daily musings of anyone with whom we have ever had a connection. Even our arch enemies. Blocking aside. Blocking is only as good as your willingness not to outsmart the block you or another has set in place. Really, with all of the various ways to circumvent a block in most social media, a block is simply a digital "fuck you." Something in place so that the very first time (or tenth time) that person you used to know checks to see if that block remains, you can once again send a technological Hallmark of rejection. I block you. I block you. You can't come to my birthday party. You can't play with my toys. Anyone and anything but you is preferable to you. And so on.

It's a dirty business, perhaps even more so in the clinical sterility of it all. It's not the same as the classic playground scuffle--everyone angry, everyone running home--maybe even a fistfight. A fight on a playground involves real people in real interactions in a real place, engaged. Technology makes it far easier. It allows us to remove a person, a loved-one, a family member, a colleague, even a lover with a simple press of a button. The email "Dear John" letter has become a simple setting in a myriad of social networking applications. The very hollowness and inhumanness of it all makes it wound all the more.

You can be rendered a nonperson with the touch of a button. Click. You never existed.

And that is what has happened to interacting with fellow humans in 2015.

Think of the ramifications of this. Life becomes one big role play game. If you don't like the players, turn the game off, and walk away. You don't have to concern yourself with their feelings or souls or anything at all. You can erase them. Delete, delete, delete.

There's a popular song that says it well. "Somebody That I Used to Know" by Gotye. In the official music video a naked man stands against a wall describing his pain. As he sings, the wall is painted like a huge geometric puzzle, and as he continues to lay out the circumstances of his relationship-strife, he, too, is painted like the wall and eventually disappears. He becomes the wall. Later a similarly painted woman turns to deliver some sort of harsh judgment and basically it's clear to the viewer that everyone naked and painted geometrically is having a very horrible day.

But there is some glaring reality in this song. Something that made it a huge hit. It's starkly real. (Even though it quaintly refers to his lover collecting her record collection. Circa 1984.) But that odd reference, presumably because "CD collection" is a shitty rhyme whereas "record" falls trippingly off the tongue, there is some kernel of incredible pain here. It is the pain of being rendered nonexistent by the person who was so terribly meaningful to you. It's the click death of social media. You are blocked. You cease to exist. He goes on to lament, "You didn't have to cut me off...act like we were nothing." Therein lies the rub: People want to exist. It's a natural human urge--we are wired to it. We especially want to be remembered (even with scorn) by someone with whom we shared a great emotional attachment.

You know there are those old movies where a patriarch of a family says with harshness and an unmistakable sense of forever, "He is dead to me. I have no son." This father, in all his infinite evil, knows that there is no better way to destroy his son in absentia. He deletes him. It would be healthier for the son if his father raged against him. Hell, even went after him with a baseball bat. But deleting someone who loves you will always be the quickest way to leave your mark. You are never forgotten in your heartless, evil, and everlasting cruelty. If only the son in this scenario could wash his hands of "Pop" too and go blithely on his way. But it doesn't work that way. The first person to delete the other person wins some subliminal war of sadism. It is the antithesis of honoring our connections with other humans, even the ones that have died a natural death.

So I choose to honor those who have fallen away from me today. I honor their memories. I honor the time spent. I honor the love I felt and the time and energy I gave. I honor the energy and love and time I received from another human being. And in the cases where someone left my life a misery, I appreciate that relationship is a two way street--even the worst of them. We all participate. It's just too bad we can't all come to peace.

However, maybe there is peace in the realization that we are not actually deleted. No one is deleted. We are not blocked from life. We are not erased. We don't even have to stand naked against a geometric wall slowly blending into it, eventually disappearing, like some horrifying Fellini film. We can embrace ourselves. We can realize (even if we don't believe in God or fate) that there is usually some order to things. People come and go. Even Billy Joel knew it.

"So many people in and out of my life, some will last, some will just be now and then."

He was optimistic. He was pre-digital. He knew that reality meant that he might just run into a person again. And hopefully when he did, he was healthy, wealthy and wise. 

I wish you peace in all your relationships,

Beauty <3