Start a meditation practice, I said. Meditation for heartbreak!! Yeah right! was her response.
I was sitting in the office a few years back and I saw a fellow colleague of mine enter the room in her usual chirpy demeanor.
She greeted in an exciting tone and sat down to work but I felt something was amiss. This was when I had just completed my yoga course and got back to my job. I saw a cloud of deep sadness looming around her.
I asked her if she was ok and within seconds she burst into tears. We had a very deep conversation about her life for the next hour and a half.
She was on an emotional roller coaster and she was losing her mind. She was going through a divorce while her father was battling with cancer.
She is a single child and had to take the financial responsibility of her family. She wanted to leave this job and run away forever. She felt like she was locked inside a jail for years and couldn’t find a way out.
She had tried everything- therapy, medication, traveling, journaling, writing a note and flushing it, praying, morning runs and what not.
But there was no respite.
When I suggested her meditation, she was 100% skeptical but decided to give it a shot anyway. She said, “ I am already a mess, what more can happen”.
I gave her a regime, she gave me a haughty look, shrugged a bit and agreed to follow it. The first day she sat down to meditate, she couldn’t even sit for a minute without losing her mind. The memories came flooding and she cried her eyes out.
She came to work agitated for the first time ever and said “ Listen, I appreciate that you are trying to help but I don’t think its working. I can barely sit there for a minute and stopping the thoughts seems impossible. Isn’t thinking a natural process anyway. I don’t want to do it.”
I realized that she has got it all wrong. In my yoga course, I learnt a very important lesson, “Never try to force someone into Yoga or Meditation. Let them have a slight taste first and sooner or later they will come back looking for it.”
Few weeks later, she called me in the middle of the night and asked if I am willing to help her again and this time she promised to commit to the practice. She said “ The first time she sat down for a minute, she came out more annoyed and agitated.
But the next day, I felt like I am at peace when I woke up. I don’t know how to describe it in word but it felt good. It felt like I am not insane.”
I asked her to come over to my place the next day. By then I had quit my job and was teaching yoga and meditation full-time. I gave her a few specific instructions for the practice and there she was knocking at my door the next morning.
Fast forward two years, she is now one of the most balanced and stable woman I know today. She moved to Sydney and is now working for a Fortune 100 company as the Vice president. She lives in a small apartment and recently started dating someone who respects and adores her.
She took her parents along and her father is doing well too. What changed that day? Did she find a magic potion to change her life over-night? Did she achieve some kind of an enlightenment? Or probably you are thinking this is all too good to believe.
But this is a real story of change, a story of courage and a story worth telling. I am going to maintain her anonymity in the post as requested.
What changed that day?
The day she knocked at my gate was the day she was her most vulnerable self. She was willing to give up all her possessions to be sane again. She was ready to surrender and that made all the difference.
I took her inside and consoled her for a while and assessed her condition. I realized that she is carrying a load of emotions in her body and her heart. I realized that there is so much grief and pain waiting to come out.
Her skin was lifeless and dull suggesting the fears she had been carrying inside. The fear of falling in love, the fear of losing someone, the fear of trusting someone again and the fear of facing the world.
I understood that using words like zen meditation or mantra meditation will not make her world better. So I changed my approach a little and told her that we are going to do a series of meditations for emotional healing and heartbreak. I started with catharsis (didn’t use the word though).
In the first few sessions, we shook our bodies, we danced, we shouted, we cried, we laughed together. She found this relaxing and loved this “meditation for heartbreak”. I remember she said “ I am sorry. The first time I was shocked to hear that meditation for heartbreak exists. I thought this is all a sham.”
If I knew meditation can be this much fun, I would have done this way earlier.”I also taught her a small series of yoga asanas which were to be performed daily in the morning or evening before the meditation practice.
She cried her eyes out after most of these sessions. Even her parents grew concerned because of her incessant crying. But she said that she can feel the healing inside and all these tears were the tears waiting to come out. With every tear shed, her world inside got quieter.
She had bouts of insomnia after a few sessions, some days she was scared other days she started getting happier. Some days she was agitated and would get irritated even at the pettiest thing, other days she was a complete Buddha.
But the changes were evident, from the time when every day was a mess, she progressed to a time when only 30% of her days were. This happened within weeks.
When I saw that she had trespassed most of the emotional blocks, I started teaching her Concentration meditation or Trataka. We started with an object outside and slowly moved to an internal object of concentration- our breath.
I taught her for 3 months and could see a considerable difference in her as a human being. Although she was still grappling with some fears, she was constantly working on them.
Along with the practice, she grew more health conscious and started eating better, sleeping better and waking up early in the morning.
After 3 months, she went for an anxiety test yet again and she realized how drastically her life has changed. She started getting compliments on her clearer skin and how calm she looked.
People started looking at her with utmost trust and even at work, she was chosen to handle the difficult of tasks. It happened because of the subtle changes that took place in her personality while healing herself through Yoga and meditation.
Her progress is commendable and she still continues to do her daily practice before starting with her daily grind. She is one of the most loving and compassionate leaders today and I am sure she will achieve much more in life. She helped some of her other colleagues facing similar emotional blocks by asking me to provide one-to-one online coaching to them.
Yes, meditation for heartbreak exists if you are ready to be healed. No, Yoga and meditation did not change her magically. They proved to be the elixir that gave her the courage to get up and face the world. She is the hero of her own story, meditation was her shield.
The story is about me, you and everyone else around who is searching for some answers on Google, where all you have to do is look inside and ask the questions. If you want to read more such stories, subscribe to my blog below.
Chakshu is a US alliance certified yoga teacher, a biotechnologist and an Ayurveda evangelist. Her passion is to help people live a toxic-free life, emotionally and chemically. She loves reading self-help books. When she is not writing, she is busy thinking about life.
