Healing From the Pain of a Heartbreak

Learning to give and receive love

Life begins with love. As soon as a healthy baby is born, joy spreads in the family like a blooming flower. All love is directed to it, sometimes more than it has ever asked for, and sometimes not enough. Childhood becomes the most crucial stage when it has to build a foundation for its existence. It also becomes a period when the seeds of most of its traumas are implanted, which may emerge in later phases of life. Modern-day psychology also attributes the ability to live a quality life to the kind and amount of love received in childhood. 

Life and love both evolve in time with their twists and turns. As long as the equation stays linear, the vehicle called life runs smoothly. No need arises to think beyond the regular transactions of our relationships. Just like in our childhood, the momentum of receiving love from our parents drives the relationship with them, in our adulthood such a natural momentum of receiving love also navigates our relationships. Our minds are being continuously trained to feel good when loved. Constantly surrounded by people who give love to us, we are getting habituated to feel our worth around them.

In this association, it can’t happen that we are only the recipients of love for the entire time unless we are in a desperate needy relationship. We also give love. Based on our personality, we either give more affection or receive more of it. We certainly don’t bestow our love on the other person because we must. It comes naturally with a good feeling from within. The weightage of giving or receiving love has low importance in this phase. Both of them feel equally good and are emotionally empowering. Each person’s need is fulfilled by the other. The feeling of being satiated and the rewarding sensation of being able to satisfy helps to maintain balance in the game.

Beginning of the pain from heartbreak

Unfortunately, relationships don’t stay linear forever. Traumas, unfulfillment, crisis, etc. sooner or later kick in. At this juncture, the importance of weightage between giving and receiving love creeps into the equation. The unwholesome feelings of anger, jealousy, lust, and pride start to dominate the mental space and drive the next rough miles of the relationship. Some gracefully navigate through this ride and some succumb. Heartbreak is not a new phenomenon and perhaps existed since the beginning of society. The excruciating pain from the withdrawal of the wonderful feelings of being together and constantly wanting to experience it again is almost as unavoidable as breath. 

Motivational books, friendly talks, videos, etc. can offer a short-lived solution, primarily driven by feel-good hormonal release. However, it takes its natural course to recover. When our body gets wounded, the most effective method is allowing it to rest and shut off for some time. However, if you continuously scrape the wound, it invites much more complexity. Unlike our bodies, most of our minds have an extremely low capability to resist the urge to scratch off their wounds. Therapies and other spiritual techniques aid the recovery process by building up the ability to resist this urge. But at first, the mind has to let go of the control over itself and surrender for others to help.

Discovering the hidden side of the mind

The process of healing not only helps one recover from the pain of heartbreak and suffering but also opens up new avenues to explore the unexplored. So far the unexplored mind has comprehended the definition of love as it has experienced; to be fair, it hasn’t experienced much beyond the desires. It holds love as an emotion that arises out of fulfillment or unfulfillment of physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual needs. When there was fulfillment it felt pleasant love, when there was unfulfillment it experienced painful love. It has no practical knowledge beyond the transactions of receiving or giving and their accompanied feelings.

Giving love and compassion has also been experienced within the boundaries of pleasant feelings. The mind has been habituated to undergo pleasantness by the release of happy hormones. Unconsciously, the mechanism of hormones has been driving our behavior to render love. Allow yourself to self-reflect on this point by considering a situation. You cooked some delicious surprise dinner for your partner out of love in two different situations. In one situation your partner relished it and in the other, your partner didn’t turn up and went outside with friends. If your mind is free from the pleasantness feelings driven by hormones then it should react with the same serenity in both scenarios. 

Healing up your way to pure consciousness

The beautiful process of healing from the pain of a heartbreak empowered by a spiritual journey helps one to relieve the mind from the strongholds of pleasantness and unpleasantness. Unconsciously our minds have been surrounded by the tall walls of our strong feelings driven by the hormonal system. This has been the default setting since birth and therefore do not know of any other alternatives. Just like the frog in a deep well, it doesn’t know the existence of a world outside. Healing encourages this frog to gather power and jump beyond the tall walls. It brings forth freedom from the impositions laid by ignorance of the mind on itself.

However strong may be, the thoughts, feelings, and emotions constitute change with minute changes in the external and internal conditions. Every change holds the power to throw one up or down along with it. During the spiritual process, one gets an opportunity to realize this fact about their existence. A deeper understanding dawns that lets one realize the superficiality and evanescence nature of feelings, thoughts, and emotions. A deeper understanding dawns that he/she is beyond just body and mind. An encounter with one’s deeper consciousness gets facilitated that has never occurred otherwise. The strong association of one’s identity with these upper layers gives way to wholesome bonds with the deeper core of one’s existence i.e. pure consciousness. More about consciousness can be read here.

Recovering from the Pain of Heartbreak By Giving love with absolute freedom

Pure consciousness is unaffected by the faculties enabling strong feelings and emotions. It witnesses them but is not under their grasp to react to every change. Cravings and aversions, pleasantness, and unpleasantness happen at the level of mind and consciousness observe these phenomena with the freedom of not having to react. Pure consciousness is also an all-encompassing entity connecting every animate and inanimate object with its cosmic thread. Spiritual healing establishes one’s existence closer to pure consciousness and brings one’s mind under control. One learns to respond to every situation with equipoise and calmness. Also one no longer sees himself/herself as a separate being from others, but rather as a connecting link of the continuum.

With this realization, the pain of wanting love inevitably gets transformed into the bliss of giving love. The cravings from the past episodes of the relationship hold the space of mind but not your consciousness. When you have lifted yourself from the mind alone to find a vast universe of unexplored realms, the pain is bound to disappear. You realize that love has to be given and not wanted and learn not to give love anymore just because of the habitual pleasantness of mind. You learn to give love with absolute freedom because there is no alternative. Beyond all cravings, aversions, pleasantness, and unpleasantness, the real nature of existence is nothing but love.