In Part V of this blog, we talked about curiosity. Now, let’s talk about the capacity to connect with others and ourselves through our hearts.
Often when people reach out for therapy, they aren’t sure whether it’s because of the current challenges they are experiencing in the world today, past challenges that are being triggered in their present-day lives, or a bit of both. How do we relate to ourselves when things are changing in our environment? Do we drop ourselves to be there for others because this is what we learned to do in our families growing up? Or do we become curious about what we want for ourselves as things change around us?
In therapy, when we connect with desire, it is all about connecting with our hearts. For some people it may not be easy to approach our desires in this way, to slow down and become curious about our desires and the barriers to them. Our capacity to be present in our hearts is not something cognitive or a behavioral exercise. It’s not a switch that goes from off to on or from closed to open. Being present in our hearts is a process, a capacity that may expand and contract over time. Our heart has a natural rhythm and flow and during the times when we are able to be with ourselves in this way, it can feel quite natural.
The capacity to feel connected to ourselves through our hearts
What does it mean to be ourselves? When we are ourselves, we are relaxed and fully in the present moment. We can see what feels authentic in the present moment rather than responding in a patterned way that comes from the past. We have more flexibility and freedom to notice our experiences. If we haven’t been fully ourselves up until now, being ourselves is going to feel quite new. As we move closer to being our full selves, we may notice feeling more relaxed, having more energy, feeling more flexibility, freedom, and aliveness. We can feel that we are in a flow with ourselves. There’s a sense of the different parts of ourselves being in alignment.
What does it mean to really open our hearts? Someone may say I need to be in a relationship with someone who is truly loving to open my heart in the world. That’s partially true. We learn more about loving ourselves and others through relationships with others, but it’s also about connecting with ourselves, listening and attuning to ourselves.
Opening Our Hearts
One of the ways we learn to open our hearts is through relationships with people we care about. As children, we might have felt loved by or connected to some family member, perhaps a grandmother, for example. Those moments in which we felt connected in our hearts to this person may be preserved, tucked away in our memories. Those moments of being in a state of loving connection with others are resources we can access in our adult lives.
They allow us periods of being in our hearts and feeling connected. In these past relationships we might have experienced feeling cared for by others. While sometimes people can be loving toward others, the challenge is to have the capacity to both give and receive love with other people, and to do so because in our hearts we authentically desire this kind of connection (not because we think we should). Getting in touch with our desires can mean getting in touch with a desire for mutual loving connection with others that comes from our hearts.
Key Takeaways
As we tap into the resource of our loving connections with others, we increase our capacity to be more loving with ourselves. One of the things we learn in relationships is how to hone in on what we want. Once we identify that, we can ask a partner for what we really want or desire. As we do this, we learn to attune to ourselves and our hearts. For some people it can be very vulnerable to ask for what we want and to share how we are feeling, but such vulnerability is a precursor to intimacy.
It is possible to ask for and receive love from other people. At the same time, we don’t always have to look outside of ourselves for love. Our own hearts are a resource too. We can turn inward to our own hearts and attune to what we feel and need. This doesn’t mean we cut ourselves off from other people in the world. It’s important we are able to find people we can trust and feel comfortable with, people we can be more of ourselves with. But at times when there isn’t somebody there to turn to, we can turn inward and have our own hearts as a resource.
We are not totally dependent on the environment to meet our needs for loving connection. It is also possible to attune to what we really need, to comfort ourselves, and to open our hearts to ourselves.
If you found this passage about connecting with ourselves and others through our hearts interesting, I recommend reading the previous parts of this blog as well!
