Criticizing the Heart
It's come to my attention today that for many years, I’ve left my heart behind. More accurately, I have pushed my heart and everything it requires to the back of my mind. I threw it over my shoulder and into the rearview mirror saying “I’ll get to you eventually” knowing full well I never would.
I thrust my heart into the second tier of importance because I thought showing up for others was more important than showing up for myself. I also assumed that someone else would come along and take care of my heart for me. This notion of someone “saving” my heart had been ingrained in me long before I even knew about the concept of love simply due to the princess movies I watched growing up. In the past I would say, I love myself, but there would always be the slight catch. The catch would be: “I love myself” but I’m still waiting for someone to show up and show me love. So really, I put off loving myself because I was always in the space of waiting for someone else to do it for me.
As I waited year after year, I learned how to disregard my heart. This habit created an intricate cycle of acknowledging my heart when it was loud enough and then promptly abandoning it when I realized how difficult it was to love myself first. This cycle would happen as effortlessly as I breathe. My heart would ache for attention and I would glance over my shoulder at it. I’d pretend to care about it but the moment someone else caught my attention, off I would go abandoning it once again. I would desperately try to give it away to anyone who was willing to hold it for me. Now reflecting back I understanding how poorly I treated my own heart because I taught it that I didn’t care for it as much as someone else could. I had taught my heart that in order for it to be loved, it needed to be loved by someone, anyone else.
This dynamic of giving my heart away was countered by the handful of times when someone would look at me and glance over my shoulder and go “I see you” and my heart would light up. As though by magic, my heart would come alive once again. It would beat more furiously demanding that it continue to receive all of the care it possibly could from this one person because after so much time of being deprived, the desperation it would feel at the risk of losing this source of love was almost too much to handle.
When our hearts are deprived, we stop asking if the person who shows up to care for our hearts is worthy of doing so in the first place. When hearts ache for attention, it begin to learn how to take any form of it. Anyone who sees past the façade it’s owner puts on gets a special place in the heart simply because they bothered to look past what is put out into the world. It’s as though the moment someone says “Hey, I see the real you” the heart shines doubly bright for the recognition of being seen after so many years of being ignored.
The heart is naturally inclined to seek love and it will open when it feels the hint of a vibration of love within its reach. But this is where we must continue to be the guardians of our hearts because the heart is boundary-less. To love as expansively as one heart can, is a gift beyond measure. But that gift does not deserve to be used haphazardly by others. When a potential partner shows up, it’s natural to want to give our hearts away but what if our approach was to grant our partner permission to enter our heart’s space? To offer them the opportunity to come in as opposed to us giving away? When we grant someone permission to our heart we are setting the standard that we will continue to watch over their care of our hearts until trust, intimacy, loyalty and care are established to a level where we feel safe, held and grounded- until we reach unconditional love.
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