By Cynthia Belmer — Written on Aug 06, 2014
Going through bad relationships is part of life and part of our growth. Yet, the hurt that remains seem to create a hole in our hearts and affect our trust and faith in finding true and lasting relationships.
The question that I'd love to invite you to reflect on is: What have been the consequences of what you believe about your past relationships, yourself and life? If we look around, we will see that many people have probably suffered more than we have. It may not be in relationships but it different forms. Pain is universal and heartache is the same no matter what form it takes.
I am not saying this to devalue our pain or our experiences. I am saying this because human beings do suffer, but they often suffer more as a result of their thoughts and the stories they tell themselves than from what actually happened to them. When we dwell on the past and when allow our fear of being hurt again, rejected and abandoned to control our lives, we sabotage every possible opportunity we have towards love and finding a beautiful relationships.
Sometimes, we use our bad experiences to protect ourselves from leaving our comfort zone or to feed our human need for love, connection, wholeness, certainty, and significance. As humans, our mind conditions us to believe that we must fix our past and be perfect to be happy; we can only earn this happiness when have the validation and certainty that we will never be hurt again. This is something I was very familiar with throughout my journey in life and I discuss it in a very vulnerable manner in my book "Meeting Freedom".
However, I came to learn that pain can’t be avoided. The more we push it away, the more we attract it and experience it because we’re fighting against our reality. But, it is not what happens to us that shapes our relationships; it is what we do about what happens and the way we perceive it. There is a difference between feeling like a victim as of life and fighting to get love versus allowing love to come through us and towards us and finding the silver lining behind our experiences. It’s all about perception and the question here: are we brave enough to sit with this pain, look through it and come back to our source which is "love?"
Love is the source to life and it is available to each one of us. It doesn’t have a barrier except for the stories that we create. It is right here ready to welcome us back into a beautiful relationship when we’re ready to take the risk of shattering old patterns that have kept it from speaking through us and coming towards us. I believe that true love is much closer to us than our own breath. The key to attracting a long lasting relationship is to change our beliefs and stories about our past and about ourselves. Do you deserve true love? Of course you do. We all do.
Stop protecting yourself from pain and decide to reveal the love that you are regardless of what’s in store for you. Trust that your past experience is bringing you one step closer to being with someone who deserves you and that a higher power above is guiding you way.