Relationships and friendships come and go.  Sometimes we feel we put everything into it, but for some reason it is not working out.  We drift apart, and our hearts are broken.  Or are they?  Relationships and friendships might not work out, but our hearts keep beating.  They are strong and keep us alive.  Sure, they might hurt for awhile, if we let it.  We might start guarding our hearts by putting up the wall.  We think, “I’ll never get married again,” “I don’t want to get into relationship again,” “I will never trust anybody again.”  So, we lock our hearts away, put a huge protective wall and stop taking chances.  We tell ourselves, “We need time to ourselves,” or “We need time to heal.”  For some of us, it might take a short time, but for some of us it might take years to open up again.

So, when we think that our heart is broken, we carry with us our past hurts, a fear to be open again, a fear to be vulnerable.  Certainly, our hearts hurt because we carry with us all this baggage filled with hurtful memories, regrets, pain, anger, fears, what ifs, hopes, failed expectations.  Can you imagine life without all this heaviness?  Can you imagine heart feeling light?  It is possible.  It’s not easy, if we let our minds to control what we feel.  It is only possible if we get rid of all the past negativity through:

1) Forgiveness and letting it all go;

2) Letting our heart to feel what it wants to feel without mind interference;

3) Learning to love ourselves and focus on new possibilities.

Forgiveness…  Oh, I can now hear the protests, “But he or she did so and so!” Do you know that by carrying grudge, anger, or sadness and reliving painful moments, we only hurt ourselves?  It does not affect the person that hurt us.  It only affects us and our hearts.  So why torture ourselves with that?  The next thought:  What if that person who hurt us did not know any better given their own life experiences, or lack of?  There is no way this is an excuse, but from their point of view and circumstances, they thought they are right, they needed to be in control, or they might not be aware that they hurt us.  We are not in their shoes.  Therefore, we can not understand them where they were coming from at the time.  We all deal with stuff in our own ways.  Forgiveness is not for the sake of other person and does not excuse for the way they wronged us.  Forgiveness is a strength.  It is letting go what happened in the past, and not letting to affect us and our decisions in the now.  Can you imagine your heart free?  That’s the way to go.  Let it all be left in the past and not the present and the future.

Once we got rid of the past headaches, we will feel our hearts filled with so much love:  love for family, friends, animals, nature, LIFE.  The key is not to let our minds to control what we feel.  If the mind remind us about being hurt and if we concentrate on that hurt, it might bring the same situation we been before.  Now, if we trust our hearts and let it feel, it might lead us into a new love.

By opening our hearts to life, we open ourselves to new possibilities, new ways to experience things.  Our hearts never wrong us if we only really listen to them closely.  We are born with a “hunch,” with “inner knowing.”  Sometimes all we need is to quiet our minds, to hear it.

The third way how to heal our hearts is to learn to love ourselves, to accept ourselves the way we are.  I do not say to be conceited, like “Look who I am.”  To love ourselves means to know what we want in life and go for it, to be the best we can be and share our passions and talents with the world, to establish who we are regardless of others’ expectations.  Once we learn to love ourselves, we will attract love and respect of others.  We will be strong to recognize environment and people who are harmful to us.  Therefore, we will not get into bad situations.  Once our heart is filled with love, we’ll concentrate on just that.  That’s how we will attract love to ourselves by giving love and care to others.