A few weeks ago my husband and I settled in for a Sunday afternoon of movie watching. I suggested A Star is Born and he looked at me like I suddenly had a unicorn tattooed across my forehead. I can only get him to watch a movie with me if it has fire and weapons in it. So when I flashed the red Netflix envelope with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper waiting inside, he surrendered by rolling his eyes and took one for the team.
If you haven’t seen the film yet, I won’t spoil anything for you, but if you have then you and I can commiserate on what an emotional rollercoaster it was to watch. We made the popcorn, poured a glass of wine and then “whammo!” waterworks for both of us 30 minutes in.
I can now say that A Star is Born is right up there on my go-to list of tearjerkers with Beaches and Dumbo, the latter of which I was completely traumatized by and haven’t been able to watch since I was 3.
Tearjerkers are not easy to watch, for obvious reasons. But they’re fantastic for clearing the heart chakra!
I’m going to be totally transparent with you. The past four months have not been an easy road. I moved my professional practice from the city, expanded into a new healing center, held two amazing, yet intensive Reiki trainings, maintained a full clientele, all while traversing some pretty gnarly terrain in the marriage department.
Gratefully, my husband and I reached the mountain pass and now on a much easier descent. But there’s really nothing more taxing than something weighing on your heart while trying to be in forward motion.
I know you’ve been there at some point. Whether it’s breakup, family problems, dismantling of a friendship, a health scare or even death of a loved one. These are just a few of life’s twists that can flatten you, contort your heart and thwart your momentum.
And while it may not be so hard for you to cry, it’s finding the “appropriate time” to do it that often holds you back. You often respond by saying, “I don’t have time for this.”
And forget it if someone asks you, “What’s wrong?” The two words that spiral you into hands fanning your face as if that’s going to keep the emotional deluge from flowing.
Often when one of my clients comes in for a healing session, something in our discussion triggers them to cry, followed by their embarrassment, “I don’t know why I’m crying.”
It’s easy, even fun for us to laugh, so why is it so hard to let ourselves cry?
A good cry is good for you
The truth is emotional tears are good for us. They release stress hormones and endorphins that reduce pain and improve our mood. It’s why the phrase, “having a good cry” exists.
In her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientists Personal Journey,’Dr Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, explains that it only takes 90 seconds for an emotion to flush through the physical body.
“When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90 second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.
Something happens in the external world and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body it takes less than 90 seconds.
This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away.
After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological response over and over again.”
Open the floodgates!
After watching the relationship perils of Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, a release valve opened within my heart. I continued to ugly-cry in the bathroom for 20 more minutes. Not so much because I was attaching to any internal story, but because for 4 months I’d been holding it all together.
I had packaged up any heartache I’d been feeling and it had been accumulating in my heart chakra, creating more and more clutter, (kind of like our laundry room), until I simply couldn’t contain it anymore.
And then something really magical happened after my ugly-cry. The defense mechanisms came down. My heart opened. I softened after holding so much hurt and anger for so many months. I saw my husband through a new lens and we were able to have a real, heartfelt conversation, reaching agreement that we needed to be more loving and present on both sides.
When a client comes in needing to release old emotional “yuck” in their heart chakra and asks, “How do I let it go?” My prescription is: Reiki, a rose quartz crystal, journaling and a knee-buckling good tearjerker!
Got some heartache to release? Come See Me