Often it isn’t a good feeling, when we start to open up the heart.

It can be a feeling of elation and a type of love for the world that erases out all memories of evil and fills us with love for all of our neighbors big and small.

But more often, it is raw and edgy.

It is a feeling that is thick and real and makes us wonder why we put the effort forward to try to heal.

In our culture, we can get stuck on the idea of romantic love. Love between two adults or love between a parent and a child. However, I think it is important not to downplay the importance of global love, of opening our own hearts for the benefit of the entire planet.

If opening to global love is what we are doing when we lay over a bolster, chest faced up, setting an intention for our own damaged heart to heal, then what do we expect it to feel like?

Maybe we don’t expect anything, but when the pain and discomfort hit we are often very surprised.

The worst paradox of the healing experience is that we need to feel our pain so that we can heal our pain.

And we need to feel it—not just so that we can check it off our to do list and ta-da we are healed. But we need to be strong and courageous which actually looks like being weak and bawling and breaking down in order to break through.

We need to come face-to-face with our own feelings of being stuck, crazed, confused and hurt, so that we can move it out of our energetic systems and come in to the appropriate realignment for today.

I feel that all of us recognizing this paradox might make it a little easier to heal as a global community.

Of course feeling old pain and letting the woundedness of the heart come to the surface and be felt, be healed and be seen, won’t hurt less if we as a community of healers recognize this truth, but maybe we will understand more. And this is an understanding that opening the heart is not smelling the roses but sitting in the shit as it composts. Somehow we need to know this isn’t a bad thing. We aren’t in need of curing when we are in the pain of a healing heart. From the richness of this knowledge we can treat each other appropriately.

When we come to this awareness that the pain from healing is okay, then we will see the tears and the shaking. But we will also notice all the good healing work going on, and know that we have been there ourselves, and others will go there too, and it will hurt, but it will pass and that together, planetary healing is getting accomplished.

Opening the heart does look like becoming more generous, more authentic, more empathetic and more willing to stand in our own goodness and truth. But it also looks like staying in bed while holding our aching chest and asking why me as the raw, vulnerable feelings flood our system.

And if this is you, if right now your hands are firmly gripped over your heart wondering if you can bare it one more minute, I hope you will hear me when I tell you that you are doing a good job. And I thank you for clearing some pain, and healing some wounds because I know on the other side of that painful healing your beautiful, glowing heart will shine through and more people then you can imagine will see it and be touched by it.

I know it hurts and I know it feels raw. But I thank you for your good, healing work.

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Relephant: 

What Open-Heartedness Actually Feels Like.

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Author: Ruth Lera

Editor: Caitlin Oriel

Image: Charlotte Astrid/Flickr