S1 EP51 – How to Open Your Heart to Love
Episode Summary
Do you believe that others or circumstances are responsible for whether you keep your heart open? Loving is about learning to keep your heart open. Do you cultivate your open heart enough to have love to share with others? Discover the secrets to keeping your heart open, and to discerning whether another person has an open or closed heart.
Transcript
Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the inner bonding podcast. And today I want to talk about how to open your heart and keep your heart open to love. You know, sometimes we find ourselves down in the dumps and stuck in a dark place. We might do our inner bonding process and maybe it helps somewhat yet. We still feel like something is missing. Maybe we pray. We feel a little better, but we can’t seem to find our joy, that wonderful state of grace, where we’re filled with a feeling of light and peace and love.
During one of these times, I asked Erica the co-creator of inner bonding and my inner Bonnie buddy, what she does to move herself into joy. Erica is often very joyful. One of the most joyful people I’ve ever known, even with her abusive background and the many challenges she’s had with her health gratitude. She answered, I find the many things I can be thankful for my friends, my home, my wonderful animals, a great meal, a funny joke, my warm bed, magnificent views and our loving friendship.
As soon as I move into gratitude, my heart lightens as usual, Eric is right. I’ve discovered that choosing gratitude instantly opens my heart and fills me with love and peace and joy. There’s so many big and little things to be grateful for yet. Many of us fill our time thinking about what we don’t have and what is not going right. If only I had this or that, then I’d be happy if only I were richer or thinner. If only I had a different job, if only I could find my soulmate and on and on. How often are you thankful for the sacred privilege of life on this planet, the sacred privilege of having the opportunity to evolve your soul through your challenges here, how often are you thankful for your body, the house of your soul?
How often are you thankful for the many opportunities, many opportunities that come your way to challenge you in your soul’s journey on the planet with the pandemic and with mass shootings in the U S and the murder of George Floyd and the glaring underlying issue of white supremacy and the effects of climate change and all the other problems on our planet. This has been extremely challenging year. For many of us, we’ve been deeply challenged on our soul’s journey. Do we evolve in our ability to love?
All of us are called to take this journey. Yet few people actually choose it. Most people are focused on externals and what they have, or don’t have rather than on the journey of the soul life. Here is a great gift in the spiritual realm. We don’t come up against darkness to challenge us in staying in our light only by coming up against our own and others woundedness. Can we discover how to heal it only by facing our fears? Can we discover love?
God has given us this gift of life on the planet so we can recreate ourselves each moment as we evolve in our journey toward oneness, with love oneness with God, which is love often the very things that we feel victimized by or the opportunities spirit has presented us for our support in our soul’s growth. If we looked at all the challenges in our life as opportunities to evolve our soul, rather than as bad things happening to us, we would respond completely differently to them.
If we moved into gratitude rather than into anger and fear, we would have totally different experiences of our lives. Life is giving many of us, very big challenges right now, and opening our hearts to love is what will light the way to healing. And the only way you’re going to know that this is true is if you’re willing to try it next time, something challenging happens. If you can find the lesson in it and move into gratitude for the lesson next time, excuse me, next time you’re down in the dumps and nothing seems to work to get you out of it.
Think of all the things there are for you to be grateful for the more you practice this, the more it becomes natural until one day. You find yourself thankful all day for the many blessings that come your way, as you know, your thoughts, create many of your feelings. And when your thoughts are of gratitude, instead of a fear and lack, you’re going to feel the love, peace, and the joy that you seek as your thoughts of gratitude radiate out into the world. Your peaceful, loving energy will have a positive effect on others.
We all love being around people who radiate a loving and peaceful energy. You’re going to be doing your part in creating peace in the world by creating peace within yourself. One of the gifts I’m consistently grateful for is beauty. I really liked this quote, which is spoken by an Irish spirit in the book. The boy who saw truth by an anonymous offer author duty on your earth is a shadow of the beauty of our heaven. And it’s a bitter thing to have a blindness for beauty on earth for it makes a longer teaching.
You see the beauty, the beauties of heaven. I’ve always appreciated the beauty since I was a small child, I’ve collected beautiful things, shells and rocks and wood. My home is filled with these as well as with works of art and beautiful plants. There’s nowhere in my environment, where there is not something beautiful to look at both inside and outside in nature. When I walked through my home and the land around it, my heart fills with all and love as I appreciate the beauty around me. I’ve done this so automatically throughout my life, that it never occurred to me that many people do not open to beauty, nor do they create beauty around them and working with some of my clients struggling to keep their heart open.
I’ve mentioned focusing on an object of beauty, and I’ve often been surprised to find that many of them have not created beauty around them. No plants, no flowers, no works of art or objects of nature. When they look around, they see walls, appliances, computers, or other buildings out their window, their left brain functions just fine in this environment. But what about the right brain? The creative, intuitive, spiritually connected aspect of the brain. I can sometimes see in Skype or zoom sessions that the walls are bare. No beauty to look at on the walls.
I want to encourage everyone to consider feeding your soul with beauty. There’s nothing like all and gratitude for something beautiful to open the heart, to love and appreciation. If you can love the intricate design in the bark of a tree or the vibrancy of a flower or the balance of a beautifully thrown piece of pottery that might lead you into loving and appreciating the beauty beauty of you, of your own soul. And the beauty of all of our souls might open you to feeling for your life and the sacred privilege of experiencing your journey on this planet.
Try this little experiment, find something of beauty. It can be as simple as a leaf, a flower, a photograph, a cloud, a work of art or the top of a tree at your window can be a beloved child laughing and playing, or it can be a cherish. Now let yourself completely open to the thing of the thing or the being of a beauty. Let yourself feel the beauty resonating within your body resonating within your heart, your solar plexus, your stomach, your arms and legs within your forehead.
Your head, let the beauty in, live in your body, fill it with vitality, breathe in the beauty and feel your body’s response to it. Open to gratitude, thanking the universe for this experience of beauty. There’s the peace and joy. It gives you to be in this moment with this being or object of beauty, what would life be like if you spent more moments like this being fully present with beauty and with gratitude for your blessings, how much of your waking of your waking time is actually spent in this way?
Do you have any in gratitude or foods for the soul when you choose to open to them, you extend an invitation to the love and the peace and the joy that is spirit. And when you extend that invitation that love and peace and joy fills you, this raises your frequency and opens the door to your spiritual guidance. To knowing that your guidance is always here for you, helping you on your soul’s journey, opening to beauty and gratitude, as well as practicing in her bonding with a deep intention to learn about what’s loving to you and others opens your heart, feeds your soul and connects you with your spiritual guidance.
I encourage you to cultivate love in your heart. The Dalai Lama said the goal is to cultivate in our hearts. The concern a dedicated mother feels for her child and then focus it more and more on people and living beings. This is a heartfelt, powerful of such feelings. Give us a true understanding of human rights. That is not grounded, just in legal terms, but rooted deeply in the heart and the Dalai Lama radiates more love than anyone I’ve ever seen.
What a wonderful world we would have. If we all cultivated in our hearts, the love most of us feel for our children or, or others’ children, but we also need to take this same love we have for our own and others’ children and bring it down into the child. Within us. My experience is that if we take that love and focus it more and more on others and not also on ourselves, then we become needy of others, giving us what we’re not giving to ourselves. I love what the Dalai Lama says here, but too often, religious and spiritual people forget that giving to others without filling ourselves with love.
First can create many problems when we ignore our own feelings and needs, and instead focus on giving to others. We may have a big empty hole inside that poles on others for love. When this is the case, the people we’re giving to don’t often feel loved. They feel pulled on instead. Wondering why is it that many people feel they know how to love an actual child, but they often ask me, how do I love myself? The real issue is not so much. Wow, but intention, if it’s very important to you to be a loving parent to your child, you probably won’t do a perfect job, whatever that is.
But your intent to be loving will motivate you to continue to learn about being a loving parent. You will learn from your mistakes, you know, likely not give up and give your actual child away for adoption. You might read about the how and keep practicing so that you feel better and better about your parenting skills. It’s actually exactly the same for inner parents. Okay? When we first start, we don’t know much about what we’re doing, but if we’re to cultivate our open heart and reach a place within where we can give our heartfelt, powerful love to others, we need to take that same depth of parental love of which we’re all capable and bring it within.
There’s truly nothing more fulfilling than offering others, our heartfelt or heartfelt, powerful love to have that quality of love. We need to open to learning about loving ourselves with our guidance and learn to take loving actions for ourselves. This is what opens the heart to the powerful love that we can then offer to others. When I feel like I don’t have that love to give to others, it’s always because I’m abandoning myself in some way. For me, it’s usually about having too many irons in the fire and not having enough downtime. I don’t turn to self judgment. Like I used to or other addictions like I used to.
And I don’t anymore make others responsible for me, but I have so much, I want to do that. Sometimes. I forget that I’m an introverted, introverted type who needs downtime and solitude. When I don’t get this, then I feel depleted and I don’t have enough love within to offer to others. What’s the issue for you? How do you abandon yourself that leads to not having an open heart and not having enough love to share with others? My clients, Robin and Dennis, who had been together for three years, but weren’t married, consulted with me because they couldn’t seem to connect with each other.
They couldn’t share love with each other. They loved each other, but Dennis felt that Robin had a wall up that stopped them from getting close. When Dennis stated that he experienced Robin having a wall up and he wanted to understand why her response was that they both had a wall up. Dennis sent, he felt open. Dennis said he felt open to Robin and really wanted to connect with her. And then he wasn’t aware of a, of a wall was evident to me that this was true. I experienced Dennis as open-hearted and Robin as closed as often happens with many people.
Robin was projecting her close heart onto Dennis Robin. There must be a good reason. You’re close to Dennis. Would you be willing to talk about this? I asked he has to be accountable for the ways he’s hurt me. And he never is Robin. And I said, are you saying that whether or not he’s accountable is responsible for your close heart, that he’s responsible for you closing your heart? No, I’m not saying that I’m saying that I don’t want to open my heart until he’s accountable. Dennis, how do you feel about this? I asked, we’ve tried over and over to talk about things and for each of us to take accountability for our hurtful behavior, he said, but the problem is that when she tells me what I did, that hurt her either.
I can’t remember, or I see it very differently than she does. And the same thing happens when I tell her what she’s done, that has hurt me. We don’t get anywhere. And we ended up hurting each other even more when we have these accountability talks. So just a couple months ago, I decided to let all that go and fur and focus on keeping my heart open. I decided to forgive her for hurting me. And that’s been a big help in keeping my heart open. Robin. I love you. And I want to connect to you. I hope you’re going to open your heart and forgive me.
Like I’ve forgiven you for whatever I’ve done to hurt you because I’ve never done anything on purpose to hurt you. Robin looked miffed. So in order to connect, we have to do it your way. Is that right? Well, Dennis said, okay, I’ve been trying to do it your way. And it isn’t working. Are you saying that you’ll open your heart? Only if we do it your way, I just can’t open my heart and have a clean slate the way you want me to. She stated Robin, I said, sounds like it’s more important to you for Dennis to do things your way than it is to connect with him.
Is that right? No. I want to open my heart and connect with him, but I can’t until he’s accountable for his hurtful behavior, you can’t, or you won’t. I asked Robin was unwilling to be accountable for the fact that she was making Dennis responsible for whether or not she opened her heart. She was unwilling to take her eyes off him and put them on herself and her own intention to protect and control. I could see the sadness in Dennis’s eyes, Dennis, you looked so sad. I said, yes, I am.
He said, I know that. Unless Robin decides to open her heart, we’re not going to make it as a couple. I feel too lonely with her to continue in this relationship. I don’t want to be with her. If she’s making me responsible for her close hearts, I felt sad too. I knew that these two would not make it as a couple of Robin continues to keep her heart closed. I could see just how unloving it was to her to keep her wall up. But she was not even open to knowing that keeping her heart closed was a hundred percent her own choice. She was not open to seeing that she was not only being unloving to Dennis.
She was also being unloving to herself. As long as she was blaming her closed heart on Dennis’s lack of accountability. She was stuck being disconnected from both herself and from Dennis, whether or not we open our heart has nothing to do with anyone else. It’s entirely our own choice. The more you learn to keep your heart open, the easier it becomes to discern when some is harder, when someone’s heart is open or closed, and who generally operates with an open heart and who doesn’t, how often have you had the experience of connecting with someone, a friend, or a potential partner who turns out to be an uncaring person at first, you think this is a really loving person.
And then down the line, you discover that the person is self-centered or narcissistic angry or uncaring. You wonder how you could be so wrong and what can you do differently? Next time, I’ve discovered in my, my many years of working with people that people seem to decide very early in their lives, whether or not they want to have an open heart and care about and have compassion for others. People have different levels of willingness to feel other’s feelings and care about them. Some of us deeply feel others, pain and joy while others don’t. Some people can recall caring about other’s pain and joy from a very young age while other people remember being concerned, mostly with their own feelings and needs.
As I’ve often spoken about the people who have chosen the deeper level of compassion are often the ones who become the caretakers while the less compassionate people become the takers. Caretakers are people who have learned to take responsibility for other’s feelings and wellbeing. While takers are people who expect others to take responsibility for their feelings and wellbeing, and often blame others. When they don’t take on this responsibility, if you’re a compassionate person who easily feels other’s feelings, you might find yourself drawn to people who are in pain. Your compassionate heart naturally wants to help those people who are in pain, not only out of your true caring, but also because their pain is painful to you.
The problem is that this person might not care about your feelings as much as you care about his or hers. So how do you become discerning of who has a loving, caring, open, and compassionate heart? The first step is to focus on developing as much compassion for your own feelings as you have for others. Often very caring, peeling, a feeling often, very caring people leave themselves out, caring about others far more than they care about themselves.
This leaves them vulnerable to becoming the caretakers for someone who just wants someone else to take care of them. If you develop compassion for yourself through the practice of inner bonding, you’re going to start to discern much more quickly when someone’s heart is closed and not really caring about you. If you’re just focused on others’ feelings, you’re not going to notice what you feel and it’s your own feelings that allow you to discern between an O open or closed heart. Okay? It’s very important to understand and accept that. No matter how loving and caring you are with others, you have no control.
Roll over how loving and caring others are with you. Yeah, you cannot make someone be open-hearted. You cannot make people will open their heart. The morning you learn to take responsibility for keeping your own heart open. The more another’s closed heart becomes evident to you. The more you’re able to stay tuned into yourself and trust your own perceptions. The quicker you’re going to discern a lack of open-heartedness caring in others. The more you accept your lack of control over getting others to be open and caring the quicker you’re going to let go of people who are intent on getting love, but not much concerned with giving it and sharing it really doesn’t take long to discern the open heart.
Once you have compassion for yourself, once you trust your own perceptions, you’re hen. And once you accept your lack of control over others, people betray their intention to either give love or to get it or to give, to get with everything they say. And do we all do whenever our intention is to control, to avoid, to protect against pain. Other people will pick it up if they’re too . So you need to remember that you and other people, we betray our intention all the time with practice.
You can learn to discern the loving heart very early in a relationship. If you want to stop recreating the same relationships over and over then practice inner bonding. Learn to love yourself, learn to connect with your higher guidance, which will help you to develop your power of discernment by Lea, by learning to keep your own heart open. This is what happens when you establish a consistent inner bonding practice. And for those of you that are not practicing in her bonding, I encourage you to take our free course@innerbonding.com.
I encourage you to take my 30 day. Home-study love yourself course, which will teach you inner bonding. I encourage you to get self quest, which is a very powerful way of learning inner bonding. And I encourage you to take the 30 day course. My 30 day course, wildly, deeply joyously and love to learn so much more, not only about loving yourself, but about what it’s like to share love in relation ship with others is, is such a powerful relationship. Course. I send you my love and my blessings.
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