Are you stuck in heartbreak?

When a relationship ends for any reason it’s totally normal to feel a whole range of emotions from sadness, anger to grief, even if you are the one who ended the relationship. But if you find yourself totally knocked for six, or further down the line find that you cannot shift those feelings and that they are as strong as ever, it might be worth looking at what you might need to reclaim within yourself.

In the beginning, when people fall in love, they can project loads of desired qualities on to their partner that they then feel they don’t possess in comparison. For example, they might see their partner as being fun, brilliant, charismatic, smart, sexy and outgoing. At the end of the relationship, it can seem as though all of those lovely qualities have gone with the person.

Alongside that, in relationships people can fall into a kind of division of roles or attributes between both people involved. One person might end up taking care of all of the practical things, whilst the other person does all the fun and spontaneous stuff. It can be as simple as one person handles all of the finances whilst the other takes care of all of the domestic tasks. Again, when the relationship ends, people can feel bereft of all of whatever elements the other person appeared to own.

The truth is, we all have everything within us. We are all amazingly deep, capable, fabulous and complete beings. At the point where we’d like to move on but feel stuck, we may need to look at ways of reclaiming those parts of our whole selves that we have projected or given away.

I’ll never forget the amazing story I heard a very famous relationship expert tell on the radio. She told how she met this wonderful man and they embarked on this incredible relationship. He wrote her the most beautiful love letters, he was spiritually aware, really in tune and took hours to make love to her. He told her that they were soulmates. As you can imagine, she was utterly blissed-out and blown away. She’d never felt anything like that in her life.

But after just six weeks, she came home to find a note from him saying that he was sorry but he’d met someone else and had left. She was absolutely devastated and thought, but how can this happen to me? I’m a relationship teacher!

Then, to add insult to injury, she found out that he’d been seeing a number of other women and had written exactly the same letters that he’d written to her to each of them. So she meditated and challenged herself to go beyond the upset and shame to reveal the spiritual teaching of her experience. Suddenly enlightenment struck as she realised that all of the love and the intensity that she had felt came from her. It was within her, not him. That experience allowed her to see the depth of love she carried that was actually nothing to do with the man at all.

At that point, she realised that the man who had devastated her had essentially given her the gift of being able to understand that her love came from within her. It fundamentally changed the way she related as she understood that she needed something that was more grounded and based in reality. She also realised that nothing could hurt her because she was essentially a loving being.

If at a point where you really want to move on after heartbreak and find you can’t, you might think about what it is that you really miss in your life that you can and need to claim back for yourself. It might be something practical, like learning how to read a map so you can find your own way, or you might want to build some passion and spontaneity into your life. Whatever it is, you already have everything you could possibly need to be complete.

Loads of love,

Michele x