3 Ways To Break Down Your Walls And Completely Open Up Your Heart

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” – Charles Bukowski

I’ve often wondered why, when I’m at the brink of creating something worthwhile with someone, I run away. I give just a little and never my all. Somewhat like how Julia Roberts escaped from her weddings in The Runaway Bride. Did the problem exist in the people that she chose to be with or with herself? I vouch for the latter.

I’ve spent countless nights choking on my own overflowing love, which had no direction. It flowed out of me and bounced right back inside. I was terrified of ‘bombarding’ another person with it.

My love felt like an entity which was independent from me. Connected yet disconnected — it was larger than life itself, and how could I, a tiny human being in a world so gigantic, handle something which reflected some sort of a cosmic explosion?

So I locked it up, taped it, nailed it shut, and put it aside in a corner of my existence that I didn’t want to confront. You see, I was not scared of getting hurt. I was scared of the power that this particular emotion held. I was not scared of loving, just scared of loving a little too much, to the point of absolute insanity.

It’s like waking up with a wide range of diamonds, but you don’t know what to do with it. If you show them to people, they might steal them, crush them, use them, exploit them, get scared or maybe take care of them and appreciate their beauty. You never know what the aftermath of your vulnerability will be. You don’t know if you and others will be able to handle it. So you stall it. And this stalling becomes a habit, a pattern that you enslave yourself to.

So when that imperfectly perfect person appears in front of you, it’s not easy for you to break out of this habit of hiding. These people choose to walk on the thin ice of your heart, thinking that they can handle what’s inside. They think their burning bodies can handle the ocean of frozen emotions within it, but as soon as the first crack appears and their toes get teased by the water, they retreat or drown in the vastness of it.

So if you’re enslaved to your self-built suppression, these are the three things that you can do to finally open up your love fountain.

1. Write down all of your fears and assumptions about love in a piece of paper and burn it.

How does this help? You put your heart out there on a piece of paper, and it becomes important to you, but even if it gets burnt in the end, you find peace in the fact that you at least let it out and let it go. But know that there will always be another paper that can be filled. As love is an energy which is forever expanding, you may think you will run out of it, but you won’t. The universe is good at replenishing souls. And it will never, ever bestow upon you emotions that you aren’t capable of managing.

2. Start out slow. Start out small.

Show affection and care to anything that you like — an inanimate object, a plant, your grandma, a dog, anything at all. You have to start somewhere, and the feeling of love is not exclusive to a romantic partner. Giving and not expecting anything in return is a road that leads to unconditional love, and unconditional love is freedom. It balances out your excessive emotions by distributing it amidst different aspects of your life.

3. Accept that the whole human experience is a mixture of unpredictability, vulnerability, suffering, and miracles.

You cannot ever know what the repercussions of your actions might be. If you send a message in a bottle to sea, you will not know who will receive it or what could possibly happen to it. But this is a part of life that one has to come to terms with. It is what it is. You cannot ever know. But not knowing does not mean that you stop exploring. It doesn’t mean that we should stop putting ourselves out there and stop voyaging into the mysteries of the world. Beautiful things may happen if you let yourself go completely wild.