Spam Filter for Your Brain - Episode 11 Transcript
It's that time of year when everyone's talking about relationships, and the capitalist machine that Valentine's Day has become, is in full swing. And it feels like an appropriate time to share one of my most significant learnings about healing a broken heart. And many of us, even if we're not in heartbreak at this particular moment, can probably all think back to someone or something that has happened to us that has bruised. There may still some bits just about hanging together when they used to be entirely cemented. That's that image I have of a little shattered heart.
One of the most amazing moments I had in my journey with heartbreak, was realising that I can choose to love someone irrespective of my interactions or contact with them. So for me, this revelation came about many years after the end of a relationship where I struggled to make peace with in my heart. And I was still mourning the loss of that person. And it made a massive difference to me when I realised that my ability to love this person has nothing to do with them, and it has nothing to do with the amount of communication with them. And wherever this person is in the world, whatever they're doing, however much I interact with them or don't, I can love them with all of my heart for a place of complete sincerity when I don't need anything back. And that needing something back is needing the kind of interaction or the validation or the response from them. But that there is so much liberty in just deciding to love for my benefit. And because I'm the person who gets to feel that amount of joy and connection and magic in the world when I open my heart that much.
We're taught and encouraged to cut people off, close our hearts, or walk away from someone. And I realised that a lot of the pain and suffering that I'd had about the end of this relationship was actually in the closing off of my heart and trying to force myself not to love somebody that I still did.
And, when I realised I could love them anyway, I didn't need anything back from them. I can be over here with my open heart doing my thing. I'm the one who gets to benefit from that, and I'm the one who gets to feel all of that love. And, maybe somewhere out in the universe, depending on your feelings on energy, spirituality, or whatever you believe, perhaps that person can feel some of that, too. But also they don't have to. That's not why I'm doing it. I'm doing it because I don't choose to close my heart. And I don't decide to close off from people just because I'm not in contact with them. And, of course, even if you disagree that this is possible or sounds a little bit more hippie and fluffy than you are willing to accept from this podcast or from me, this is how we love people who've died. This is how we can still care about people who are no longer with us. And we do this anyway. So if we are doing it, why don't we apply it to the people who are around the people who are still alive or us?
It's so liberating and has given me so much oxygen to realise that I can choose to feel how I think about people; they don't necessarily need to know about it. And I don't need to tell them, and I certainly don't need anything back from them. It just gives me my power back and enables me to continue to think and feel and behave in the way that I choose to without balancing this all on a need for someone else to either reciprocate or respond or to even know about it. And that has allowed me to widen my heart so much more.
So if there are any particular relationships you can think of that would be helpful, I hope that it serves as some salve to add a bit more healing into where you want to be with someone and the feelings you want to have towards them.
And also to remove some of the guilt and shame we might have about not being in connection with someone anymore, whether we were by our choice or not. But to know that we can still choose our feelings about things and always choose love. It's always an opportunity out there for us to decide that we're going to love more and love louder and more strongly. And no one needs to know about that other than us if we don't want it to. And we benefit from it.
I hope that's useful and wish you many opportunities to garden, heal, and mend your broken hearts.
We wish you a happy Valentine's Day.
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