Although healing the heart can have complicated aspects to it, the process should lead us to simple and practical experiences that restore our hearts and strengthen who we are. In a nutshell, healing to the heart does not have to be high level science. It’s an engagement with God, where you experience His loving nature that fills empty and wounded places of your heart in real and personal ways.
If you are aware that areas of your heart need healing with an experience of God’s loving nature, all you need is a desire and humility to welcome God’s healing. With that in mind, here are some practical tips that can help you engage heart healing to the fullest.
1. Slow Down
The number one coping mechanism that people fall into is chronic busyness and unending activity. If you feel completely empty and useless unless you are accomplishing something every minute of the day, something’s off.
It’s easy to diagnose if busyness is a problem. Get still. Sit down and get still for more than 15 minutes. If it drives you nuts, it’s a sign that stillness, quiet and a slower rhythm are much needed foundation in your life.
If you’re anything like me, your RPMs can easily intensify into the red zone without even realizing it. For many, the high intensity is the daily norm, so slowing down is torture. But there is a new “slow” your heart needs to hear God’s voice, heal and live fruitfully.
If this seems overwhelming, take heart, because this tension is a modern day plague. Give yourself time and routine to slow yourself down to a more “emotionally heart healthy” rhythm. Start with five minute pauses at the beginning and end of the day to get still, get grateful and lean into peace.
But please note, this is not just about a couple soaking sessions or a couple naps. This requires a movement into learning a new rhythm.
2. Become More Aware of God’s Goodness
Heart healing is pointless unless we learn to engage God for who He truly is.
God is not looking at you with condescending eyes, regarding your brokenness. He is full of mercy and loving kindness towards you.
Many are taught a very condemning and accusatory lens of God, so even the subject of dealing with brokenness and heart healing is challenging. They hear it all through a lens that puts them down. If someone views God as someone who comes down on their flaws, sins and weaknesses, then this whole subject can be perceived as a grueling, never ending, painful experience that leaves you in a pile of constant tears.
Heart Healing is Beautiful
Heart healing with God can actually be a very positive experience, especially if it is based on God’s goodness towards you. He wants healing for you. It’s in His nature as a Good Father to lead you into restoration experiences.
When we receive healing from God, it’s often relieving. It takes burdens off our shoulders, stress away from our minds and dispels anger from consuming us. His healing to the heart brings the solution to our addictions and resolve to our hectic minds.
So let that become a primary learning experience; that your heart may be led into a greater awareness that He is good and He has goodness to extend towards you. What is your lens of God that you bring to this subject that need enhancement and empowerment?
3. Become More “Heart-Aware”
Too many are blinded to the broken areas of their life. It infects their relationships and keeps them from many possibilities, but the problem is, they are unaware.
We usually don’t see the influence that certain areas have on our heart until further down the road, when we are manifesting mental breakdowns, relationship rifts, addictions or certain anger and anxiety symptoms that don’t stop.
So a key to experiencing heart healing is becoming more aware of your need to walk in greater “heart awareness.”
Quite often, this can lead to the subject of self-awareness. But I often like to call it “heart awareness,” which comes down to a couple important keys for a believer:
- I am aware of the overall emotional state of my life.
- I am allowing God to have full access to my thought and emotions.
- I recognize there are broken areas in my life that God is continually healing and maturing in my life with His love and truth.
- I am allowing God to get to the root motives and core areas of the heart that influence the rest of my life.
- I am aware of the current themes that God is working on in my heart.
- I am learning to grow in how I come across relationally and enhancing my relationship interactions.
These are some of statements that your time of quiet, solitude, Bible reading and journaling can help you discover.
4. Learn to Value Vulnerability
A great step towards healing your heart is becoming ok with the fact that you have broken areas of your life that need tending to and maturing.
Many Christians resist the subject of heart healing. Some see it as too much focus on the past, sin consciousness or making people feel condemned. Heart healing should never include those extremes.
Heart healing can only be accomplished in the atmosphere of love and grace. Guilt, shame and accusation cannot be present. When the atmosphere of God is present, there is a light that shines brightly, but it is a light of love that invites you towards transformation.
The light of God calls us into authentic and vulnerable postures. It challenges area of pride, self-defensiveness and self-preservation that keep us from experiencing heart transformation.
I find the most practical way to experience heart healing is to humble myself and give God access to my heart in a way that I can experience His healing power.
Don’t wait for an intense breaking point to recognize your need for continual heart healing. I am also not promoting that you sulk in brokenness or live as a victim. It is very refreshing to be in a posture of humble vulnerability while continually rejoicing in the new life that God offers your heart.
5. Be Kind to Yourself
God is kind towards us, even in our most deepest of struggle. Yet we often don’t receive that and give it to ourselves.
Many of you have attempted to experience healing to your heart, but kindness was not there, so you ended up beating on yourself. You came into agreement with statements like:
- Something must be wrong with me that I cannot experience healing.
- I must not have enough faith.
- I must not be spiritual enough.
- I’m not doing enough things right.
- I need to hurry up and get over this.
- I am not allowed to feel these broken or negative emotions.
Those statements are filled with self-contempt and condemnation, therefore, love is not allowed to have its work. Without the loving kindness of God saturating the subject, we will see every struggle as an indictment against ourselves.
The greatest is love. it must be the highest priority. And love works through a manifestation of kindness.
I’ve attempted to experience growth without being kind to myself, and it led me into constant spirals of pressure filled effort that went nowhere.
Why do we keep doing this? Most of it comes down to the fact that very few have been trained to walk through their transformational journey with kindness. We default to performance driven lifestyles and perfectionistic pressures to dominate our motives. Our hearts were not trained on allowing the goodness and kindness of God to lead us to powerful turnarounds.
If you can relate to this problem, your first step may be to become more aware of your “self-talk,” and learn the language of kindness towards yourself. I talk a lot about this in my book, “God Loves Me and I Love Myself!”
Kindness has a tone and cadence that refreshes our hearts and energizes us. Become aware of how your self-talk is filled with more animosity and self-hate than kindness. Give yourself room and space to process out the life of your heart. Be kind when days don’t turn out well or you feel like you are having setbacks. Loving kindness is the difference maker in the most challenging of situations.
6. Learn to Bring Your Pain and Emptiness to God
Practical heart healing takes place occurs when we recognize a broken or empty area of the heart, but we don’t fall into our faulty coping patterns. We learn to bring it to God in a way that is effective.
You’re in the middle of a stressful day. Things starts to hit you. Your mind is struggling or your circumstances are warring over you. What is your first response? Is it checking out to the latest streaming show, staying longer at work, eating that comfort food or leaning on that drink to soothe your heart?
Before you jump to that, would you first invite God to fill that place in your heart?
Don’t beat yourself up, as we all have certain “go to” habits we dive into to avoid pain and feel comfort.
But true heart healing begins when we learn to engage God first with our pain and learn to allow Him to fill our emptiness.
Facing pain is uncomfortable. Our modern does everything possible to avoid pain. We want comfort all the time, but this pattern conditions us to live with weak hearts that don’t experience the deeper work of God that is available.
If you want to experience transformation, you’ll have to make a decision that you’ll face pain if you need to. I’ve watched many people back away from what was possible, simply because they felt the pain was too great.
Fear Magnifies the Pain
What they didn’t realize was that the experience which lay before them was not as painful as they thought. Fear magnified the potential pain to the point they were apprehensive to ever take the first step.
So if you were to look at the heart healing that is available to you, I would most likely say that fear stands in the way.
When I was in pastoral ministry, I would use the song “Healing Rain,” as a reminder of how fear wants to steal the experience your heart longs for.
Healing rain is falling down.
Healing rain is falling down.
I’m not afraid.
I’m not afraid.
Where can you take a step past fear and move into a greater experience of healing to your heart?
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