We’ve all had experiences of heartbreak.

There are a lot of different ways to look at this issue, and they’re all worth exploring.

I started offering pop-up healings when I lost my cat of 19 years. We had a beautiful life, but we had to put him down and it broke my heart. I just was telling people, and I got all this love and support, especially from people who've had pets.

And so many people, when they started offering their support and comfort, would start sharing about how they were still processing a particular heartbreak. The loss of a pet perhaps from childhood. I decided to do a healing for anyone who was feeling what I was feeling. So I offered a free healing, posted it on Facebook.

It was so popular, so I figured this would be just a nice thing to do periodically. I did one for the loss of an animal companion around the holidays. I did one around loneliness. Then there was a spot on my calendar in February and it was the next available date. And I said, “Ooh, that's right around Valentine's day. What kind of healing should I offer?” It was my friend Maya, who helps me with social media, who used the word heartbreak. And as soon as she said that, it took me into my own experience of heartbreak from when I was a teenager.

Heartbreak can be paralyzing.

It's loss, hurt, rejection, and anger. You're hit with something that is overwhelming. And in trying to process all of it, the heart breaks. It can't handle it. It's just too much and you end up heartbroken.

In that my experience, you can manage that overwhelm by turning it back out. You can blame the other person. You can say, “they were awful and they broke my heart.”

And your best friend is going to tell you, “Yes. He was a cad.” And he probably was, but it's sort of shifting focus off yourself, which I think is something that's natural to do because it hurts so much. The reflexive response is to shift the focus off yourself.

I shifted it back in. Instead of blaming this particular person, I blamed myself, and then that colored me. Going forward, it became low self-worth, the feeling that I wasn’t good enough. It was my fault, and I just couldn't be what he wanted. It created a kind of guardedness because it played on issues I already had.

With issues, it's never just one.

My story wasn't so big or so interesting. I was 18, I fell in love and he just didn't love me back. It's not like he did something awful or cheated on me or anything.

It just wasn’t the right connection. So I wanted to blame him and get mad, but I really couldn't. He didn't do anything wrong except not love me. It actually would have been easier if he had.

I turned it back in on myself. It was my first experience of coming to the belief that I had to guard and protect myself by portraying. An image of someone better.

We remained friends and I wanted to show him that it wasn’t a big deal to me. I thought if I could be casual about the breakup, and show him that I was easy going, that he might change his mind and come back.

Of course, it didn't work because I was kidding myself. But I did this for years, sort of staying in the social circle and just trying to be someone that he might want to come back. It takes a lot of energy, trying to be someone you're not.

I didn't let go for a long time. I dated other people, but there was always this hope that this one would work out, and of course it never did. It was years later that I really looked back at the pattern of self-protection, guardedness, and a kind of wound, and started to really bring love to that. If you're going to deal with heartbreak on any level, you need to deal with the self-love.

Our issues don't just sit on an emotional level or a psychological level. All of our issues express throughout the body, in the system. That's what makes them so hard to work on. That's why you need a healing modality that's going to address the consciousness level as well as the physical level.

Heartbreak is overwhelming and you just can't process it all at once.

It's exhausting. There can be benefit from exhaustion. Exhaustion can be a spiritual practice— when you just can't do it anymore. You have to surrender into the fact that something can't keep happening the way it is. It has to be different going forward because you can't go on as you are.

There's an opportunity in that. Self-love is not just something you do for yourself. It's not just taking action to make yourself being feel better. Self-love is really more of a state of being exactly in the place where you are whole and in integrity.

That's why we do our work. That's where VortexHealing® brings us. It's almost a lifelong journey. It’s a process. It's learning how to deal with the issue in a positive way and learning how to love yourself.

If you love openly, you're probably going to get your heart broken.

That's just sort of the nature of life. So long as we're in form, we're going to have issues to work on. That's part of the process of being in a body and interacting with people.

If we love openly, we're going to get hurt, but that's where it's valuable to take a look at this. And this is where our work really shows. Are we going to take that as an opportunity to shut down? Or are we going to take that as an opportunity to re-open? I’m happily married, and the fact that I have had heartbreak and that my husband has had heartbreak too… the fact that we both have been through this process has brought us closer together.

I love him more for his experience, and he loves me more for my experience. It's part of who we are now. Having the courage to come through that is something we admire in people. It takes courage and the self-love to look at yourself and say, “okay, I'm who I'm living with. I need to find peace in this for myself going forward. Let's take a look at what's really going on here.”

And that's where you find your VortexHealing® work, friends who support and love you, and you find whatever tools you bring to the table. That's the first step is recognizing that the issue is in you. The challenge is where you really meet it and look at it.

Put the judgements down about it. It doesn't make you a bad person because you're having to bring love to it. Right. Take that as an opportunity to be willing to be open and vulnerable again.

When we're talking about the heart, you know, it hurts so much. It's just another expression of living. It will know pain, but it will keep moving. It will keep loving, because that's what hearts do.