“Keep hanging out with yourself until you are you again” – Unknown

In many ways, it’s ironic that my name means “happy heart”. It is even more ironic that I was named after my aunt – who died when she was 24 years old in a plane crash on her maiden voyage as an air hostess. Such a happy story, right?

Then again, in many ways, my name was perfect for the journey I’m about to share.  It contains the totality of a destiny in one word. The map to empowerment was laid out in my own name.

At 17 years old I began smoking. My first act of smoking was a cheap strawberry cigar from 7-Eleven. I coughed, choked, & was disgusted by the taste and smell. Yet, I was hooked. In the next few days, for reasons even at the time I couldn’t explain, I forced myself to smoke a few more cigars and cigarettes.

Over the months my habit only got more intense. I lived to smoke. I enjoyed it. I couldn’t get enough of it. I would even smoke hookah a couple of times a week on top of cigarettes.

After 5 years of this, I quit smoking cigarettes. I was so proud of myself. Yet I still smoked hookah when I got the chance to. I even bought one for my home.

Then a few years later I picked up cigarette smoking again when my ex-boyfriend and I broke up.

It was like meeting an old friend. I loved smoking cigarettes all over again. Others around me made faces at me, cursed me, called the cigarettes “cancer sticks”, and insisted I was “addicted”. No surprise there – these reactions only made me cling to the cigarettes even more. I now know I reacted that way – it was because it further broke my already broken heart that felt chronically misunderstood by the world. And so, I would only cling harder to the thing that “never failed me” – cigarettes.

This whole time while I chain-smoked, I kept insisting and defending my stance that I wasn’t addicted. I was something – but not addicted. I knew I could live without cigarettes, but I just simply did not want to. To me, that meant I was something I could not explain. To others, it meant I was in denial about my addiction.

My first clue about what this something was, came in the form of a woman who did starseed readings (aka psychic readings based on a soul’s planet of origin). I only asked for reading for fun. Until she hit me with multiple truths that sounded like someone speaking the sound of my soul back to me. This made me feel comfortable enough to transcend my hesitation to talk about smoking.

So I asked her why I smoked. I asked her this question fully expecting her to give me a long diatribe of spiritual tools to help me quit. But she didn’t.

Instead, she said, “When you smoke, it’s like whiskey – smoking is the substitute sensation for warming your heart to give you the sense of divine love. This sense of divine love was one of your planets of origin – the planet of Hadar. And you don’t want to quit smoking because it serves you. And we don’t want to rip that away from you because that would really hurt your heart. Practice divine love until you don’t want to smoke anymore”.

This rang so true – it almost hurt to hear. For the first time in my life, someone saw me. What I didn’t tell her or anyone else in my life at that point was that since I was four years old I remembered being one with the one. I remembered the feeling of being in spirit form – one with those ones and The One around me. I remembered feeling hesitant and then outright devastated at being born. I remembered having an existential crisis at 4 years old while running through my kindergarten – my voice as an adult was talking to my voice in my head as a child telling me not to panic.

The rest of my life was colored by two polarizing forces in me – one force was this undercurrent of dismissal of everything around me, and the other force was an undercurrent of desperate searching for my true home in everything around me.

People talk about looking for love in all the wrong places. I felt like I was looking for love on the wrong planet.

From that session on I dove straight into this heart business – something I had previously only regarded as a global cliche.

It would be 5 years later that I stopped smoking. Just like that – with no effort or external aids.

What was interesting was everyone’s reactions around me – my good friends believed me. The people who judged me harshly for smoking refused to believe I quit. Normally this misunderstanding of my integrity would hurt my heart to devastating proportions and cause me to smoke 5 cigarettes in a row.   Something about people throwing filth on my carefully nurtured light used to make me want to just collapse. But this time I held my ground and defended myself. And that was when I knew I was never going to turn to cigarettes again.

I’d like to conclude with these insights from my heart healing. These are things I’ve never heard talked about in the context of the chakras, addiction, spirit, and emotions. They helped me to make sense of myself as I went along my heart-healing journey.

Here are 4 not-commonly-known insights into heart energy blockages that helped me heal the energy of my own heart. 

Being born or incarnating into a physical body can be a jarring experience

Something messed with your sense of being welcomed on this planet and caused the first heartbreak. It doesn’t matter how trivial or large this something was – what matters is how your heart interpreted it. This could have been experienced while you were conceived, while you were still in the womb, during birth, or right after birth. It could be physical, mental, or emotional. Your mother’s state of being during pregnancy also contributes to this. Going back to this soupy time of being born yet unborn can reveal some soul-stirring insights.

Strong heart energy needs to be put to practical use

A lot of people who describe themselves as empaths, sensitives, emotional, etc. have incredibly vast heart energy. Instead of using this energy to benefit others, they will often guard it or stuff it. This is because they are afraid of being taken advantage of, which in the past they have been. People like this don’t understand that their survival depends upon them giving their heart and putting it to some practical use. It is not an option. Being taken advantage of is something that they can prevent in the future by releasing old wounds and practicing self-efficacy.  But stuffing heart energy to guard it can cause heart palpitations, shallow breathing, emotional outbursts, and rage, among other things.

Consistent fear, harsh criticism, or judgment at an early age needs to be reframed

Being made to live in fear of someone or something for long periods can hamper a child’s ability or even desire to connect. So a child grows to see the connection as a threat. Too much “correction” (physical, verbal, or otherwise) early on in life leads to chronic shame and a feeling of being wrong all the time. I can guarantee you; most children don’t need any kind of harshness for any reason.  Transmuting this chronic holding of breath into easeful existence is a worthy undertaking.

There is a strong connection between the sacral and heart chakra

Sometimes going into the heart right off the bat can feel like too much. For these people, I recommend going into your sacral area first in whatever way resonates for you. Please remember that slow and gentle is the name of the game when it comes to the heart. I highly recommend yin yoga for the hips.

Remember this truth – healing doesn’t have to be difficult or complicated. Sometimes just the acknowledgment or awareness is the healing.

Much love to your heart on this journey, my friend!