How to Become More Open-hearted

Most people spend a lot of time trying to hide what goes on inside of them from others, but they also hide it from themselves. I was reading a book the other day that talked about a woman’s breakdown and how she found a mindfulness therapist. She described the session in which the therapist helped her to see how cruel she was to herself, which was surprising news to her. She had been so totally caught in her mind that she wasn’t aware of the stream of self-cruelty that moved through her mind all day long.

If you had a little door on your forehead that you could open and watch the thoughts running through your mind every day, you would see how much fear and judgment are there. Mostly they are little fears such as your hair doesn’t look good (and thus you will not be seen the way you want to be seen) or you’re going to be late for an appointment. When life doesn’t show up the way you want it to, the fear inside of you can grow to enormous proportions. Then, when you try to control it, if you are honest with yourself, you will see that your mind oftentimes judges and attacks others. And when that doesn’t bring you the peace you long for, you turn that attack on yourself. If we are under attack from ourselves, there is no way for us to live with an open heart, which we all long for.

Can you feel the heartache of finally recognizing how much you struggle with life? This struggling mind that most of us live in most of the time keeps us disconnected from life and from our heart.

Psychologists say that the foundations of this self-image were laid down in the first six years of your life. So most of what goes through your head all day long has its roots in your childhood.

How do you unhook from your addiction to struggle? How do you learn to use your mind as the wonderful tool it is rather than being lost in it? How do you discover the joy of using your mind to connect with life rather than always trying to control it? One of the most important steps is kindness – kindness with the storyteller in your head who, at its core, is very scared.

I call my storyteller ‘little one’, which allows me to not get lost in judgment around what she is saying. Even though there is much that is unkind in your mind, both with yourself and with others, you don’t need to be unkind to it. Instead, the invitation is to touch it with your heart.

The more I have discovered how to be kind with this very neurotic storyteller in my head, the more I have come home to my heart. The more my heart is open, the easier it becomes to meet people with my aware, inclusive heart rather than my struggling mind.

This is one of the reasons I love going to the grocery store. Yes, I am there to shop, but more importantly, I am there to connect. Most people in the grocery store are caught in their minds, cut off from life. When I show up with a smile or a kind word, people bloom. So be willing to acknowledge how much you live in struggle. And the more you can touch your struggling mind with kindness, the more you will recognize how caught everybody else is in their minds, and the more you will fall in love with yourself and the world.

If you’d like to delve deeper into self-love, I invite you to listen to my upcoming radio show on Dreamvisions 7 Radio: Your Amazing, Wonderful Healing Heart. It will air on Thursday, June 6th at 5am and 5pm HERE. After the 6th, it will be available on demand, along with every other radio show I’ve ever done HERE. Please feel free to explore my catalog and listen to topics that call to you.

Offerings:

If this resonates with you, I invite you to join us for the next Free Live Call: Shortcuts to Peace and Ease on June 25th from 5:30pm to 7:00pm PDT!

We all long for the deep peace that comes when we are no longer struggling with life. Join Mary in exploring some powerful tools to cut through struggle so you can know the joy, the ease, and the peace of being fully alive. Don’t forget you can still participate even if you can’t make it on the day.

I hope to see you there! Click HERE to learn more and register.