The dance of approval shackles our hearts

Many of us crave approval and fear rejection. It is understandable. After all we are social creatures and being accepted into a group can mean survival. Domestic abuse or neglect and bullying threatens life and well-being. In every day life, relationships are fraught with misunderstandings and assumptions and through playing it safe, we believe we will keep our vulnerable hearts from breaking. Furthermore, when reached approval can make us feel buoyant while rejection can leave us devastated. And so we enter the dance of trying to please or appease others. But in this dance we lose ourselves and can potentially get tossed from one partner and to the other until the music stops and we find ourselves flat on the floor and stepped upon, bruised and our confidence eroded.

Indeed in the instant that we give in to pleasing another or fearing a rejection, we effectively hand over our power to the other person. We become a victim because we allow them to influence how we act and feel. We lose our freedom, our hearts shackled.

When we learn to steer away from this dangerous dance, when we start to feel the exhilaration of being authentic, we slowly unbind our hearts. But we are not immune to falling back to the seduction of pleasing, when praise abounds, and fearing when we come up against rejection. It is constantly around us and integrated into our society. Facebook and its “likes”, promotion culture, fan clubs, etc. all take us back to wanting/needing to be approved and fearing the opposite. And so we slip back into the dance.

Yet, there will always be someone who approves and someone who rejects, just like our own thoughts will sometimes be approving or rejecting of ourselves. When we learn that both praise and rejection can teach us something valuable, when we don’t attach to either, we can start to free ourselves.

To be truly free, we need to learn to own and accept ourselves entirely. We are all deserving at our core no matter what we or anyone else might think or say. We are always doing the best we can in each moment, even when we believe otherwise because we wouldn’t be doing it otherwise.

And the beauty is that when we take back our power through owning and accepting, then we can soar unfettered to new heights.

Healing is making the choice to let our heart break – open.

Every so often we get a choice whether to listen to the same old story we tell ourselves, whether we want to follow that well beaten track. That story, that path can be anything that keeps us ultimately from facing life as it is now (e.g. for me the story is “I need to lose weight, I am fat”, the ensuing path for me is anorexia. For others the story and path may be needing a drink, it may be to harm, it may be blame or self-criticism, it may be anger, it may be perfectionism).

The call of that well beaten track is insistent, compelling and unseemingly necessary. Our minds tell us in no uncertain words of this need and our feelings back them up. Yet at that moment we have a choice. Faint in the background we hear a whispered shout from the heart: “don’t go down that path”.  Yet our heart feels like it will break if we do not follow that path. It seems unthinkable not to follow that road. But therein lays the hitch. Not following is unthinkable because the brain will constantly think about following it, tell us to follow it.

We need to go past thinking and into the heart. Our choice to heal, to be whole, is to let the heart break, to feel the pain, the frustration, the fear. It is the hard and courageous path. When we let our heart break, it breaks open. With openness comes healing, comes life.

The choice is ours at any moment. Follow the easy path or the hard path. I chose to let my heart break because I know that if I do not make that choice I will truly be broken – again.