Employing daily heartfulness techniques can help eliminate many of the most common symptoms of PTSD including paranoia, anxiety, worry, panic attacks and hypervigilance. These strategies can also ward off depression and seasonal affective disorder (SAD) which can exacerbate symptoms or coexist with PTSD and help one to feel more centered and in balance. Centering our thoughts on matters of the heart will help stabilize our emotional house.
So, how can you start engaging in healing through heartfulness?
One way is by focusing on the heart during daily meditation. Release your worries and racing thoughts and divert your attention from matters of the mind to those of the heart. Take refuge in this space only and focus your energy exclusively there. Focus on your heart beat — is it calm or racing? Is your emotional house stable or chaotic? Do you feel good about the people, places, and things in your life that you are giving your heart’s energy to?
Matters of the heart largely have to do with feels of love, hate, resentment, joy. We speak of being heartbroken when others do us wrong or things don’t turn out as expected. Our heart is full when we’re surrounded by love and the comfort of close friends and family. These are matters that are at our heart’s center, and it is important for us to check in periodically and ensure we are content with what is happening in this space.
If you feel there is a void, meditate on what can be done to fill it. What can be changed immediately? What can change gradually? How can you start to transition from a broken to a mended heart?
Often, doing so is as simple as focusing on releasing long held feelings of hatred and resentment.
These things only serve to weigh us down. Usually we carry ill-will for wrongdoers far longer than those who perpetrated it do. This means we keep ourselves trapped in an emotional prison long after we’ve escaped traumatic circumstances, or our physical environment has changed.
In doing so, we are only stagnating ourselves, disallowing the healing process to begin. What in your heart needs to be mended so you can effectively move forward? By summoning what’s at the center of our discontented feelings, we gain a better understanding of what we need to work on. And, as we begin to take action steps toward bettering our emotional house, slowly yet surely this discontentment will slip away.
Practice heartful meditation along with mindfulness techniques for total body healing, inside and out. Make time to center your thoughts on the negativity that needs to be removed and make a conscious effort to start stripping it away. We are the owner and operator of each facet of ourselves. As soon as you learn how to take your energy back in the post-trauma state, real healing can begin.
You always have a choice. Break the silence, break the cycle.