Throughout our lives, we’ll all experience heartbreak. There’ll be times we’ll lose romantic partners, friends, or lose touch with people we care about. Heartbreak is a natural occurrence in the human story. As difficult as it may be for us to lose people from our life story, new people will emerge to teach us how big our hearts can grow in the face of adversity. No matter how hard heartbreak can be, it’s still possible for a heart to grow stronger with time.
What Is Meditation for Heartbreak?
A meditation for heartbreak is a practice in mindfulness when we lose someone we care about. Often, when we go through heartbreak, our thoughts become unmanageable. We might start obsessing over our ex or replaying painful memories trying to figure out what went wrong. Feeling lost in thought becomes our whole existence causing us to miss out on so much beauty and love still out there in the world for us. A guided meditation for heartbreak will help us untangle our thoughts to get us back into the present moment. That way, we’ll be able to open our hearts to new people. And we’ll realize that no matter how hard it can be to lose love, you can always create more of it for yourself and the people around you.
Guided Meditations for Heartbreak
Find more practices like this one in our free guided meditation app Declutter The Mind.
How Meditation Reduces Heartbreak Pain
1. Helps you focus on yourself
Meditation reduces heartbreak pain by getting you to stop obsessing over the person who hurt you to prioritize yourself. When you go through a breakup, thoughts about your ex will surface in your mind non-stop. You’ll think about how much you miss them, how you want to fix things, and try to understand where it all went wrong. Heartbreak doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. Sometimes, two people don’t fit. But that doesn’t mean you won’t fit with anyone. Those who practice meditation can reduce heartbreak by removing those unhelpful and toxic thoughts from their mind.
2. Helps you live in the present instead of the past
Meditation helps people live in the present moment. A meditation for heartbreak will help you live in the present tense instead of reliving the past. Wanting to time travel to the past is common when relationships end, but that’s how you wind up feeling stuck instead of moving forward. A life without someone may seem impossible, but it’s not. It’s necessary to learn to let go of people. Everything in life is temporary. Appreciate moments and people while they’re here. And be open to new moments with new people as they come into your life.
3. Teaches you self-compassion
Meditation reduces heartbreak pain by teaching you self-compassion. You can do a meditation for heartbreak or you can try a loving-kindness meditation to practice showing love, kindness, and compassion to yourself. When you lose someone you love, that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it. You need love to thrive. The love you show to yourself and the love you give to others around you is highly valuable. You don’t need love from every single person on the planet to open your heart to yourself.
The Benefits of Heartbreak Meditation
1. Helps you regulate your thoughts
A heartbreak meditation can help you manage your thoughts. Heartbreak can lead to negative thinking, obsessive thoughts, and rumination. Those who actively meditate will be able to manage their thoughts because they’ll learn that they are not their thoughts and that thoughts do pass when you don’t give them your full attention.
2. Helps you understand breakups aren’t personal
A heartbreak meditation can also help you experience mindfulness. You’ll realize that even if a breakup seems personal, there are so many factors that lead to the breakdown of a relationship. Sometimes, you can give someone all the love they need but if they’d rather have that love from someone else, they won’t appreciate it. Understanding that you could do your best and still fail is a hard but important life lesson to learn.
3. Helps you reduce your fear of the next chapter
Active meditators have better control over their fight or flight response. They’ll experience less fear than an average person, which will give them more control to resolve a situation effectively. When you reduce your fear of the future post-breakup it opens you up to finding a genuine love you can enjoy with someone new and possibly more compatible with you. Instead of fearing what’s to come, enjoy living in the present.
How to Meditate for Heartbreak
Heartbreak can make it difficult for us to get out of bed. So, if you’re currently lying down in one, no worries. You can meditate for heartbreak there. Alternatively, if you’d prefer to sit in a comfortable chair, ensure you’re wearing loose fitting clothes that are comfortable. You can also sit cross legged on a mat or a cushion.
As you meditate for heartbreak, you may find yourself crying. This is likely a sign that you’re thinking negatively. We’re trying to stop that through this practice. But grief is complicated and it can sometimes be a long journey to recovery. Notice your emotions, but don’t hold onto them.
Open your Declutter The Mind app to find a meditation for heartbreak.
Over the course of your meditation practice, focus on your breathing. As you notice negative thoughts or emotions coming up, don’t give them more energy. Let them flow through your mind. They don’t deserve additional weight or attention.
Keep your attention on your breathing. Notice as your chest rises up and collapses downward.
If you notice a tendency to want to think a thought through, don’t allow yourself to do it. The fantasy of a thought like that will leave you feeling stuck. Let those thoughts pass. After you’ve completed your meditation, notice how you feel. If you’re still feeling upset, sad, or emotional pain, consider trying another meditation, such as a loving-kindness meditation. If you’re feeling a bit better, consider taking some time to write down some negative thoughts that came up in your practice and replacing them with positive and more constructive thoughts.
A meditation practice with some thought management exercises will help ensure you recover from heartbreak in a healthy and productive manner.
Then, once you’ve found that quiet spot. You’ll want to sit in a chair, crossed legged on the floor, or lying down on your back depending on where you are. Choose a position that feels comfortable to you as you won’t want to be squirming around during your practice.
You’ll want to open your Declutter The Mind app and choose a meditation for mental health to listen to. You can choose from a general one, an anxiety one, one for depression, or one for being more compassionate to yourself and others.
As you listen to the soothing voice, notice your thoughts float on by. Let go of thoughts leaving you stuck, frustrated, or sad. It’s okay if your mental health isn’t at its best today. We all have days like that. But build the confidence to let thoughts go instead of following them down the rabbit hole. Don’t ruminate on them.
Feel your breathing get deeper as you take in more oxygen. Shallow breathing isn’t as helpful as deep breathing when meditating. But you don’t need to exaggerate your breathing. Breathe comfortably.
As you continue meditating, notice when thoughts start to go off in all directions again. Instead, let them exit your mind. Don’t give them more energy than they need.
As you start feeling a bit better, you can end your meditation for mental health. However, if you find you need an extra five or ten minutes of meditation, you can try a different meditation or a longer one to help you manage the thoughts you’re overthinking and the emotions you’re feeling.
The Breakup Dilemma
We all live our lives with only full context for our own lives. We see everything that happens to us, but we lack context in everything that happens in everyone else’s life. Naturally, this lack of context gives us a skewed view on how much we matter and how much someone else matters.
Most of us want the best for ourselves. But we sometimes forget that what is best for us, may not be what’s best for someone else. When a breakup happens, it’s important to understand that there’s multiple factors for the breakdown of a relationship. Sometimes, that breakdown has more to do with someone else’s needs rather than a reflection of who we are as a person.
Understanding that factors like compatibility, our emotional capacity at the time of the relationship, our values, our needs, and our temptations can all cause shifts that lead to a relationship ending.
A breakup doesn’t mean that you’re not worthwhile. And when you break up with someone, avoid telling others they’re not good enough because that’s not true either.
Learning to love people takes a lifetime of practice. And some people will feel easier to love than others. Still, all people are deserving of love. Yes, even the ones you find hard to love.
While a breakup may be the best choice you or someone else makes at the time, the true life lesson is learning to love people no matter what stage in their love journey they are.
People can experience mental illness at varying points in their life. About half of people will experience it by the time they’re 40. Life factors such as death of a family member, work stress, job loss, divorce, severe stress, trauma, loneliness, and more can worsen a person’s mental health.
Other Ways to Manage Heartbreak
1. Find support from friends and family
Heartbreak can be hard to cope with, especially if you’re not used to it. Sometimes, we can find words of wisdom from family or friends who’ve been through similar experiences. Find someone who has experience going through heartbreak and overcoming it to get the best advice. If someone has little experience with heartbreak or if their last breakup was decades ago, they may give you some toxic positivity instead of ground and level-headed advice. Someone who’s recently gone through a breakup and overcomes it will be able to provide empathy and a new angle to approach your next chapter from.
2. Develop new hobbies
After a relationship ends, we desperately want to get into our next one to move on before our ex does. But honestly, that usually doesn’t end well. Instead, take some time out to develop some hobbies or interests to learn a new skill, meet people, and grow as an individual. You might join a volunteer group if you’d like to learn how to be more helpful or kind to others. Or join a self-defense class if you’d like to be better at standing up for yourself. You might take up knitting if you’re looking to learn how to slow down instead of going go, go, go.
3. Meet new people
Post-heartbreak, you’ll eventually want to meet new people. This doesn’t necessarily mean meeting people to replace the people you’ve lost. You don’t need to dive into your next soulmate hunt. Just open yourself up to getting to know people, help people, and uplift others. Gain practice from learning how to better interact with others, improve your social skills, and learn what type of personality traits link up well with you and which ones don’t. The better you become at all types of relationships, the easier it will be for you in your next one.
4. Join a gym
There’s a lot of unpleasant emotions that flow through you when you experience heartbreak. Alongside a meditation for heartbreak, consider joining a gym to release the negativity from your body. You can release stress from going on long runs. Or you can pump iron and lift weights to become stronger. The goal is to combine the elimination of negative thinking from your meditation from heartbreak alongside with physical activity to truly help you get rid of the negativity in your life.
5. Avoid contact with the ex
The grass is always greener on the other side. By following your ex on social media or asking friends how they’re doing, you’re always going to assume they’re doing better without you or that you need to beat them. This is unhelpful. Avoid fantasy thinking. Allow your ex to move on with their life. And move on with your life at an appropriate pace. Don’t dive into a toxic relationship because you’re scared. Take the time to get to know people slowly to build trust, love, and friendship. There’s no need to keep tabs on people’s lives except your own.
6. Replace negative thoughts with positive ones
When thinking about heartbreak, you’ll find your thoughts will be mostly negative. You may start to think about something obsessively. Your mind may go down, deep and dark rabbit holes. When negative thoughts arise in your mind, write down a more positive thought instead. For example, “I can’t live without them” becomes “I have lived without them before and I will continue to learn to love myself and others. I am capable of having a happy life without them.”
7. Show yourself some kindness
Heartbreak can cause us to boost up the people who hurt us more than ourselves. We might exaggerate someone else’s importance and minimize our own. This isn’t helpful. Showing yourself kindness and compassion is crucial and you don’t just deserve it, you need to love yourself enough for your own sake. You are your own worst enemy sometimes. And you should really strive to become your own best friend.
8. Compile a list of values and needs
When you experience heartbreak, it’s crucial to evaluate what you’ll need from future relationships. A guided meditation for heartbreak can ease your mind to allow you to think honestly about what your relationship values are and what basic needs you’ll need from your next relationship. Keep your list of values tight to only the absolute essentials, with about 3-4 listed. And when it comes to basic needs, think about 2-3 things you’ll need from your next partner.
9. Look for meaning in life instead of your breakup
After heartbreak, most people try to understand what the meaning behind the breakup is. Why did it happen? What went wrong? Instead look for meaning in life. Try to understand how you can learn to better love others. Challenge yourself to love people without expectation. Strive to become a more loving person overall instead of a more loving person to only specific types of people.
10. Share your heart with the world
When heartbreak happens, opening your heart to the world can provide you with so much healing. Every day, strive to do acts of kindness to coworkers, strangers, family members, friends, and more. In every interaction, aim to make someone else’s day a bit brighter. By doing this, you’ll find that your broken heart is still quite big. And you’ll realize how fun it is to love others.
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