Why Being a Bleeding Heart May Be Keeping You From Your Purpose
I’ve always been a bleeding heart. When I was young I struggled feeling so much about what was going on in the world- I would cycle through all of the emotions grief, anger, sadness. It felt like it was too much to bear at times.
Being a bleeding heart often made me feel isolated — it made me feel like people out there didn’t feel the way I felt. That this world was very painful and people were just mindlessly doing harmful things to others and the planet and didn’t care.
So when new things happen — people have a conversation where their opinions can create harm to others, a new terrible thing happens in the world, we are often actually not only reacting to the present moment but to our experience as bleeding hearts.
Maybe our bleeding hearts make it so we feel the weight of the world of what our family has gone through, of the oppression of our ancestors and our loved ones, maybe we feel the pain of feeling like no one else cares the way we do.
We must process these feelings and separate them from the current moment. We cannot let our bleeding heart experience paralyze us or have us keep reacting from our unprocessed baggage.
It is the same in individual healing-if you’re in a romantic relationship and your partner is triggering your abandonment wounds, you want to be able to take time to pause. You want to analyze and separate out what is our reaction to the current moment and what is the reaction that is unprocessed painful experiences from my relationship with my father, for example. We want to feel the unfelt feelings about our relationship with our father so we may be able to be more present with our partner more often. Often when we cannot separate the two, our actions are not reacting to the present moment- so maybe we are more harsh, we may feel more like a victim.
We want to do this separation with our experiences as bleeding hearts. We need to heal the things that have broken our hearts so we may be able to show up with courageous hearts- ready to build create change by embodying compassion and maturity.
And when we are able to access that, access freedom from the weight of the world — or at least a little space to not let it cloud our perspective entirely- we have more power to create the world we want. We can do more meaningful work. We, bleeding hearts, can change the world.
