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by: Margaret Paul, Ph.D.
Prayer is a powerful way to open the heart
when you are stuck in anger, fear, self-judgment, resistance or depression.
When you can sincerely pray for spiritual help in opening your heart and taking
responsibility for your own feelings and needs, help is there. Spirit will find
some way to support you when you really desire the help. Spiritual help may
come through words that pop into your mind, through images, feelings, dreams,
or through other people - but it will come.
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However, what if you are too stuck to pray? What if you are
in resistance to opening to spiritual help, or what if you don’t
believe in prayer or in God?
There are many other ways of opening the heart, but none
of them will work unless your intent - your deepest desire - is to learn about
what is loving to you and take action in your own behalf.
There are only two intentions we can choose in any given moment:
To protect against pain and avoid responsibility
for our own feelings with some form of controlling or addictive behavior - anger,
compliance, resistance, withdrawal, alcohol, drugs, TV, gambling, food, and
so on.
To learn about loving ourselves and others
and to be willing to take loving action in our own highest good.
When our intention is to protect against pain, then even prayer
can be another way to avoid responsibility for ourselves. Prayers with
the intent to control rather than learn will not be answered.
When our deepest desire is to take responsibility for our own
well-being, then many things, including prayer, will help.
If you want to move out of your stuck place and prayer just
isn’t your thing or you just can’t get yourself there, you
may be able to open your heart if you:
Think about what you are grateful for
Find a way to help someone else
Listen to music
Take a walk
Spend time in nature
Open up to a friend
Read personal growth books or spiritual literature
Journal
Do a creative activity
Dance
Do yoga
Attend a Twelve-Step or other support-group meeting
Play with a child or a pet
Get held by a loving person
Let yourself cry and lovingly hold a doll or stuffed animal
that represents the sad part of you
Release anger by yelling and pounding
A powerful way of moving beyond being stuck is to do the following
three-part anger process:
Let yourself get really angry at someone in the present
(without that person being there - you do this alone). Yell and pound, letting
yourself blame this person in detail for all your misery.
Who does this person remind you of from the past - mother,
father, grandparent, sibling? Let yourself yell and pound, letting out
all your past anger and resentment.
Finally - and this is the most important part - let
the angry child in you yell at the adult in you for how you are not
taking care of yourself, for how you are like the people in the present and
past you yelled at, how you are creating your own misery by not standing up
for yourself, not taking loving action for yourself, and so on. This brings
you to personal responsibility and takes you out of seeing yourself as a victim
of others’ choices or of the past.
Once you understand how you are causing your own unhappiness
by not taking care of yourself, then you need to open to learning about
what is the loving action toward yourself. By sincerely asking, “What
is the loving action? What is in my highest good?”, answers will pop into
your mind. Then, of course, you need to take the loving action you are being
guided to take. Without loving action in your own behalf, nothing will change.
Think of the sad, depressed, resistant, or angry part of you
as a little child who is needing love. If you wait for someone else to love
that child, you may wait forever. It is only when we are infants and toddlers
that others may attend to what we need. As adults, it is our job to
take care of our own feelings and needs. If you think of yourself as
the parent of this child within - the feeling part of you - it may make it easier
to take responsibility for yourself.
Happiness, peace and joy are the result of loving ourselves
and others, rather than from being loved. When you really understand
this and take action based on this truth, you will find your joy.
Other articles you may find interesting:
Inner Bonding: Relationship Help, Relationship Advice, Spiritual
Growth, Parenting Advice
Learn the transformational Inner Bonding healing process and find help with
relationships, addictions, parenting issues, aloneness, spiritual connection,
anxiety and depression. FREE course. Books, workshops, retreats, and phone sessions
for individuals and couples. www.innerbonding.com
*The articles published on this site undergo our review process. We found
the information in this article to be very useful and informative. The source
website does not necessarily reflect our website. We have linked to them for
your information only.
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