6 Questions To Ask Yourself After A Breakup So You Can Let Go & Move On
Get some much-needed clarity after your breakup and learn how to let go.
unsplash / Arun Clarke If you're struggling to figure out how to get over a breakup, you're not alone.
Learning how to move on from an ex you might even still love and dealing with the stages of a breakup — particularly if it was a difficult one — might leave you with a lot of questions about how you could have done things differently.
But just going back and forth over wondering if you could have gotten more from the relationship or if it was time to end it can get frustrating, which is why you need to know which questions to ask yourself in order to gain insight and start the healing process.
Letting go is probably the most difficult journey any human being can undertake.
We are in a constant state of releasing it seems.
The fact is, you will go through many cycles of life, death, and rebirth in one lifetime — many sequences of growth. This gives you an almost unlimited amount of opportunities to level up, spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually if you so choose.
Life is not constant progress. It is a growth spurt, a win, a challenge mastered, and then a dip, a perceived failure. Later, another win, another span of time where everything has lost its wrinkles and you have it all under control. Then, the cycle repeats itself.
It's not you, it's the nature of things. On this planet, you are a creature of seasons and change.
Breakups are part of the death (transformation) cycle, just as love is part of the re-birthing and life cycle. You will notice that nature is quite adept at this, and humans are not separate from this phenomenon.
Just as trees drop their leaves, you shed layers of your heart. You go inward, rest, heal, and when the time is right, turn your face to the sun once more.
The magic is in what happens between death and life. That "between" space is where the soul finds its wings. Dormancy is actually quite a dynamic process. What happens during the dark night of the soul is pure alchemy.
When it comes to the broken heart, there are intuitive ways in which you can help yourself navigate the quagmire. You can be completely blind to how you participate in elevating your own anguish and grief while in the depths of it.
It's perfectly natural to lose perspective. In fact, when you do, you offer yourself an opportunity to work out some unhealthy patterns.
Every relationship reveals a different part of your psyche and emotional state. The willingness to peer with true curiosity at all these parts becomes the ground for surrender to what is.
Perspective usually leaves the room when a love relationship ends. Suddenly, you fall down a deep rabbit-hole of emotions, and in that downward spiral, wisdom takes a terrible tumble.
Perhaps, in the moments of silence that ensue at the bottom of that hole, you can muddle over what is real, not imagined.
Here are 6 questions you can ask yourself after a breakup to get insights into how to make your future relationships better:
1. "Was I present in my relationship?"
Presence is the lifeblood of any relationship. I doubt that anyone is one hundred percent present to anything at all times, but for the most part, ask yourself: did I practice mindfulness and presence?
And what if you didn't?
That is the opportunity for introspection. It's part of the cycle of growth. Each experience brings us closer to how we want to show up for ourselves and others. In the long run, this kind of inner search is what turns the tide from pain to moments of peace.
2. "Did I take responsibility for my share of the problems?"
I don't know about you, but understanding that I'm not responsible for it all drops me into some serious relief. How can you create shifts in how you receive and practice love if you're concerned with what's not yours?
You can only be present to what's yours if you take your focus off what's outside your realm of knowing. Oh, you may have some well-cooked ideas about what's going on for the person whose love you're still grieving, but you don’t know much, really, about what's in their soul.
You have to respect the fact that their heart has many spaces belonging only to them. It's not about you in those places. It's their own sacred journey. Now, you can focus on your responsibility toward yourself and your own healing.
3. "Did I honor my heart?"
This is where you dig deep into your authenticity. How did you give of your heart — was it honest?
Did you honor your heart in the relationship or give it to your lover at the cost of your own well-being? Were you protective of it during arguments and the decision to end things? Or did you leave it out there to be trampled without a scrap of a safety net?
No matter how you answer those questions, the key is awareness. Without awareness, you'll make the same mistakes over and over. Be kind to yourself, especially if you realize that you've been following unhealthy patterns.
Love is a practice. The more you understand yourself and your motivations, the closer you come to the best love affair of all: The love of "self."
4. "Was everything as it should be?"
A hard one to accept, I agree. "What if" is a beguiling question. However, if it was meant to be, it simply would be, because you would have manifested it!
Everything that is, exists through the power of your thoughts and the action you take as a result of those thoughts. Therefore, the reality and moment before you are exactly where your soul seeks to be, even if it makes little sense.
Once you find acceptance of what is, you can let go. In the letting go lies a beautiful gift: Clarity. A clarity that's not governed by pain, but by wisdom.
5. "What can I do with my 'now?'"
"Now" offers so much scope for joy, gratitude, and hope. This moment is real, the past and future are either memory or imagination. Pain arises not only from being lost in other dimensions but from the soul's knowing that it's not alive in the present.
There is innate grief for the moment you're missing. The first time I realized that my soul was grieving the moment it was missing, I understood how precious a gift "now" is.
This moment, where everything is possible, according to your thoughts and intentions, is the miracle. Choose the miracle of now. Everything else is an illusion.
6. "How can I keep my heart from hardening?"
When the very instinctual impulse hits you to harden your heart, to shelter it from the tenderness of love and loss, you stand at a very delicate precipice. It's a choice between feeling it all or feeling only what seems supportive.
The dichotomy of that is: Love and loss are the best teaching ground of what truly is supportive. To stay soft is to know the very depths of the heart. People are empathic creatures; you must feel in order to make sense of your environment.
The heart is a sensory organ, and more so, it is an energetic center (chakra) that guides your trajectory through life. A calcified heart affects the energetic centers next to it, the throat (self-expression, communication) and the solar plexus, your power center.
The solar plexus is where you draw confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth from. Each of these centers, though separate, operate holistically, and that is why hardening the heart leads to a form of self-aggression.
In conflict with yourself, you attract more relationships that reflect this inner conflict. Keeping it soft and open supports your self-empowerment and ability to take your full place in the world; to speak your truth and desire.
In the end, two things remain. It does not matter whose fault it was, the blame is irrelevant if you're to rise up empowered. Secondly, we can choose to take one hundred percent responsibility for our relationships. Free from agonizing over minute details of where things derailed, we can focus on what is most important, self-care and moving on.
When the heart, mind, and ego are absorbed in grief over lost love, support them with every act of loving-kindness you can imagine.
This mindfulness practice will lay the groundwork for your healing. Every time.
Monika Carless is an author, mystic, and intuitive coach, as well as the creator of the Healing Mother Wound Through Divine Feminine Wisdom virtual workshop. For more information on how she can help you embrace happiness and authenticity, reach her at her website.