The final step in letting go and moving on is the most difficult.
I was stuck in the step for much too long, reading Vishnu’s blog and trying to do the letting go and moving on work.
Everything I read made sense from day one. I knew what I should be doing but I too was stuck in the last stage of letting go. Time made little difference either for moving on.
If you asked me what got me to finally move, I just got so sick of being stuck and things not changing in my life. I realized he hurt me then, but I was the one keeping myself stuck in it. He had moved on and I hadn’t. I came to understand that I was the only person who could change things.
I realized that I was so busy being stuck in the past and missing it, I hadn’t acknowledged that I actually didn’t want to be with him in the present, or the future. That was a big light bulb moment. I was ruminating and reminiscing in the past that I enjoyed but I fully came to accept that I didn’t want him now or in the future! That was what helped me finally in the letting go and moving on.
These are the final steps that helped me end this letting go and moving on journey.
The final step to letting go and moving on
1.Self Love.
Honestly, it had a lot to do with self-love.
I started with self-love because it felt hugely uncomfortable and that meant it needed addressing.
Because I’d read every self-help book going and nothing had shifted and I realized that while it was all great advice the real truth for me, and all of us, lies within, because we are all unique and we all know our own truth, we just have to listen to it.
Once I started loving and investing in myself, I knew that I deserved better. Better than someone who left me and also better than the life I was leading, where I was stuck and miserable and going nowhere. I got sick of living in that place.
I realized he hurt me at the time, but I was hurting myself now and I had a choice and only I had the power to make that stop.
So, I invested the love I had for him and our relationship, in myself.
I started to stop being horrible to myself and to treat myself as my own best friend and constantly asked myself if my thoughts and wallowing were helpful to me and the answer was always no.
2.Looking forward.
I realized that I hated the present as I was stuck in the past. I realized to change my present I had to start looking forwards instead of back at the past. I was stuck in old habits so I simply forced myself to stop whenever my head went back to the past.
I made my head visualize a ‘best’ future, instead of always going back to the past.
I got an app for positive affirmation reminders.
I wrote a closure letter with everything I wanted to say to him and burnt it and I also wrote about our relationship from a different perspective and without the rose-tinted glasses on.
3.Gratitude
I had been so stuck feeling I was lacking without him, that I didn’t see any of the reasons I had to be grateful. There was a lot and I made a conscious effort to notice and acknowledge them repeatedly.
I spent so long thinking that a life without him was a loss, my loss, but gratitude showed me a new way of thinking.
What if it was actually his loss and not mine? He’d lost someone loyal, committed and he’d lost me, the person I was beginning to recognize as worthy, from all that self-loving I’d begun.
The reality was I’d lost a man who walked away, who (wrongly) accused me of cheating, who disappeared and walked out on our long term relationship with barely a backward glance. That’s not a loss, that’s again, a lucky escape and the universe guiding me towards something better.
Another light-bulb moment, this wasn’t something to be sad about, it was something else to be grateful for and a huge factor in me finally letting go and moving on.
In tandem with the beginnings of feeling better about myself, I genuinely had no time for being stuck and miserable anymore. I had no desire to be with a man who left me and hurt me and feeling this meant it, finally, didn’t hurt so badly anymore.
I now want more for myself.
4. Finding your own happiness
I realized I hurt so very badly over our break up because I’d put all my happiness in his pocket.
Ultimately, our happiness has to be in our own pocket (a partner is lovely, but it’s an added bonus) and the only way we can achieve that is through self-love like I mentioned above.
When you cultivate self-love, it then breeds self-respect and boundaries and then you realize that you no longer want a person who caused you pain and turned their back on you and walked away.
Acknowledge that if you had to write a list of attributes you’d like, and you truly deserve, in a partner, your ex wouldn’t even make it to a date, let alone putting your life on hold for and being constantly miserable over.
All these things make you finally realize that you just have a small scar and not an open wound anymore 🙂
After cultivating self-love, gratitude, seeing the future, and finding my own happiness, I was able to let go. I’m here to tell you that letting go and moving on is possible and I say that as someone who was stuck for a long time and never believed it was actually possible for her.
My message to everyone reading is simply: take all the advice you can get from others (definitely read Vishnu’s blog) and take comfort in that you’re not alone, or weak, for how you feel, but also look within and trust that you already have all the answers you need.
Most importantly, even though it’s the last thing you feel like doing when your heart is broken, love and invest in yourself, and one day it will stop feeling ridiculous and become the reason you finally let go.
Katie is a long-time UK reader who has let go and moved on with her life. She is still single, but finally open to the possibility (but not necessity) of finding love again. She is currently thriving in a new career, which never would have been possible without either the heartbreak or taking that final step in letting go and moving on.
It’s not just because he’s regularly dropping truth bombs on his Instagram account but I’m calling this the most important account out there because of WHAT he’s talking about.
Mark’s teachings and message help us get more in touch with ourselves emotionally to heal the wounds within and love ourselves and others more.
There is no more important work than that today.
Follow this account and hey, while you’re there, follow his blog. It will change every aspect of your life, but most importantly the relationship you have with yourself.
15 Mark Groves quotes for self-love from the most important Instagram account on the Internet
1. “When we don’t ask for what we want, we don’t get it.” Mark Groves
2. “You are worthy of the kind of love you showed yourself by walking away.” Mark Groves
3. “When choosing a partner, choose based on something so much more than just attraction. Look for kindness. Look for respect. Look for willingness to be wrong. And then be those things yourself so they can find you too.” Mark Groves
4. “Don’t hold things that require a tight grip. Including thoughts, expectations and even people.” Mark Groves
5. “When you say no to people who don’t show up for you, you not only honor your value, you raise it.” Mark Groves
6. “I think the problem is we depend on lovers to love us the way we should love ourselves.”
7. “If it doesn’t open your door, it’s not your door.”
8. “Nothing meant to be in your life will ever require you to abandon yourself to keep it.”
9. “The choices you make are far more powerful than what you say you desire. Choice determines path, and path determines who you’ll meet. You must become what you seek.” Mark Groves
10. “Time only heals if we do something with that time.” Mark Groves
11. “Sometimes our growth takes us beyond certain people. Often the key to honoring that growth is to let them go.” Mark Groves
12. “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.” Mark Groves
13. “I’ve found that growing up means being honest. About what I want. What I need. What I feel. Who I am.”
14. “It’s in the space between the love we’ve lost and the love we hop to find, where we meet ourselves.” Mark Groves
15. “Sometimes it takes losing what we were settling for to remind us what we deserve.”
If you found these Mark Groves quotes inspiring, check out his Instagram account here, his Podcast here and his Youtube channel here.
After a serious and committed relationship ends, you begin to have weird thoughts swirling through your mind about the future.
First comes the hurt and the pain of having gone through a breakup.
Then comes the blame towards yourself, your ex and others that caused the breakup.
Finally, comes the sad and lonely thoughts about your future, along with your fears that you will never love again after a breakup.
I can personally attest to many of these common beliefs that came in and out of my life after my divorce.
I think the belief that I held about the future was that I would be alone again for the rest of my life and that no one would ever love me again.
It’s at points like that you begin to ask yourself what’s the point of living and what’s the point of life?
Thankfully, I’ve come a long way since then.
I realize that many of the beliefs that I developed post-breakup came from a place of grief yet it took me years to overcome them.
Our mind has a way of playing tricks on us and leading us to dramatic and untrue spaces of thought.
Here are some of the most common beliefs that went through my mind as I thought about finding love after a breakup.
These might be thoughts that are whirling around your mind too.
Please read, reflect and let me know which ones resonate the most with you.
All you have to do is hit reply to this email and fill me in.
Of course, if you’re not on the email list, please get on it!
10 Common Beliefs About Love After a Breakup
1. I will never find love again and be alone forever.
Just because one person ended the relationship with you, you believe that you won’t find someone and be alone the rest of your life.
You think love will pass you by and you’ll spend the rest of your life by yourself, withering away into oblivion and dying a peaceful death surrounded by loyal furry friends.
2. No one will like me or love me again.
Since your ex didn’t like you and fell out of love in you, you believe the other 7 billion people in the world are also going to dismiss you for the terrible person you are.
Love only happens once in your life. It happened. Now, it’s over and you will be living in solitude for several more decades.
You had your one shot at love and it didn’t work out.
3. No one will accept me once they see the real me.
You got to know someone, spend years with them and were in a relationship with them.
Since you believe that something is wrong with you and you scared your ex away, you believe that you will scare everyone else away too.
Once people get to know the real you, they will run for the hills.
There is something permanently damaged about you that no one can accept you for who you are once they get to know you.
4. I am permanently broken
Once again, your relationship ending with your ex will help you see that you have issues. Serious ones that you developed since a child or through other life trauma.
You’ll realize that you’re permanently broken or there is something so flawed with you that no one will want you ever again.
This is not a temporary condition. You were cursed from birth to be broken and unlovable.
Well…there’s always the next life.
5. There are no good people out there.
You take all your previous relationships and all of your recent bad dates to conclude there is absolutely no good people out there.
Everyone is a deadbeat, a dud or a deadbeat dud.
Why even bother dating when people are bad, unavailable, uninterested, boring, evil…
6. I will repeat the mistakes of the past.
You made many mistakes in this past relationship which you hold yourself solely responsible for.
You ruined a perfectly good relationship with a perfectly good person.
You feel like you’re an immature, unworthy, cruel person who causes massive pain and hurt to the people they love.
7. I will choose the wrong person again
You made a mistake in choosing your previous partner. You are pretty much guaranteed to pick someone just as bad the next time around.
Since you did such a poor choice of choosing someone compatible, you believe that you’re going to draw someone into your life who’s just as lousy and bad for you.
8. If I don’t know myself, how could I know what I want in a partner?
After the tsunami of a breakup, you have lost a sense of self, a sense of purpose and a sense of being.
You don’t even know who you are and what you want out of you life.
You’re so lost, how could you possibly be clear on who you’re looking for in a partner?
9. I don’t want go through heartbreak again.
You’ve been through it once and it was more unpleasant than a visit to the dentist.
You cried in bed for months, never went out in public and felt like digging a deep hole and hiding out in it for years.
You’ve experienced serious heartbreak and similar to heart attacks and getting your wisdom teeth pulled, once is enough.
10. I don’t want to feel unworthy again.
Your ex made you feel terrible about yourself.
They made you question your self-worth and your confidence.
You felt so terrible about yourself as a person that you would never let anyone do this to you again by having another love after a breakup.
So you’re going to have super-high walls around your heart and make sure that getting to your heart is going to be 80 times harder than getting tickets to the next Hamilton show.
You would rather push people away, hide from people and make people angry at you than allowing someone to get close enough to you to make you feel unworthy.
To find love after a breakup, pick up my book, Love After Heartbreak, here.
Which of these beliefs most resonate with you? I would like to hear from you via email about your own experiences, thoughts and beliefs after a breakup.
Wouldn’t it be easier if it was other people’s responsibility to accept us and love us?
We just coast through life being loved and appreciated by someone else.
It would be nice but not very realistic. More importantly, it would be putting the work of loving and accepting you in other people’s hands.
Watch more to learn Kajal’s take in this follow up video.
Kajal Pandey is a transformational life coach and truth teacher. She has an excellent meditation class you can pick up here. Learn more about her work on her website at www.kajalpandey.com and follow her on Instagram here.
“I think the problem is that we depend on our loves to love us the way we should love ourselves.” Unknown
You blame your ex.
You believe your ex may have been the devil incarnate.
You believe your ex ruined your life and treated you worse than the worst person you’ve met today.
Why couldn’t they have loved you the way you wanted to be loved!?!
Isn’t that a partner’s job?
To love you unconditionally, without judgment and without hurting you?
Is that so much to ask?
Not really, except it wasn’t your ex who did you like this for you to blame your ex.
It wasn’t your ex who treated you badly first.
It wasn’t your ex who loved you badly first.
It’s easy to blame everything on your ex and consider him to be the bogeyman.
However, more likely than not, it wasn’t your ex who did you wrong.
Let’s go back in time.
When I was growing up, the people who mistreated me more than I could have imagined were my parents.
I doubt they did this maliciously or intentionally but without question, the way my parents spoke to me, punished me and disciplined me had a lot to do with how I turned out.
Now, before you jump ahead here, the point of this story isn’t to blame our parents, as much as we’d like to do that.
Our parents and families set the standard of what love looks like but…they royally screwed it up for many of us.
Your parents create the terrible soil for you to grow in:
Your parents likely spoke badly to you.
They criticized you unfairly and held you to impossible standards.
They likely insulted your intelligence
Made you feel unworthy
They must have sinned in a previous life to have given life to you (hey Indian parents!).
If it wasn’t your parents, it was your family.
If it wasn’t your family, other influences in your life made you treat yourself badly.
So, you inherited this problem that showed up later in your marriage and your spouse didn’t help with it.
How do we forgive the people who hurt us and forgive the people who didn’t love us like we were supposed to have been loved?
How do we then learn to love ourselves the way we want to be loved?
Blaming your ex and others for not loving us correctly is easy. Taking responsibility for our healing and our loving is hard.
Yet this is without question the hardest work that we have to do, especially coming back from a breakup or divorce.
The greatest factor in changing the way we look at ourselves, treat ourselves and deal with ourselves is how much we care for and love ourselves.
I’ve discovered that all our interpersonal successes, all our emotional and physical successes, all our achievements and worldly successes come down to this one thing.
So, let’s stop putting the responsibility squarely on our exes.
Don’t blame your ex. Let’s not blame your family either. They carried their own wounds and hurts from generations before.
“If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?” Rumi
It was the holidays.
It was the New Year.
It was just Valentine’s day.
When do we ever start the diet?
I think of myself as relatively healthy and swim a couple times a week.
Unfortunately it’s the carbs (&*$%#@@!* Indian food) and sweets (pies, cakes and candy bars) that are my downfall.
No matter how much I tried to avoid these things, I feel they are a constant and comfortable presence in my life. They constantly contribute to the additional 10 pounds of weight that I can do without.
Now, how many of us survive the holidays and stuff ourselves with all delicacies and then find ourselves in the new year resolving to eat less and be healthier?
How many times do you look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself in a dramatic tone, “why ….why did you do this? Why did you indulge and wallop those savory gulab jamuns and sweet potato pies !!!”
How many times do you avoid looking at the mirror when you walk into the bathroom ?
How many times have you thought to yourself that you only want to look at yourself after you’re back to your ideal weight?
Maybe I’m oversharing here but the additional 10 pounds of weight – the “comfort pounds” as I’ll now start referring to them as are visibly more apparent when I look at myself in the mirror.
I wouldn’t usually notice this weight (trick here is to regularly buy oversized pants and shirts J so you’ll never notice when your weight creeps up by a few pounds here and there).
Anyway, where were we?
Oh yeah, looking at mirrors.
I wouldn’t notice this weight…except…
when looking at myself shaving or brushing my teeth, looking into the mirror.
I would notice my eating habits, my love for that cocaine like substance, sugar, and the additional comfort pounds that are now part of my life.
The Notorious B.I.G used to say “Mo money, mo problems” but let me venture to say…
More mirror, more problems.
Which now brings me to a topic that I touched on last week.
How to recognize our past blame at our ex’s and start shifting of responsibilities back to ourselves.
I talked about how to stop blaming our ex’s and taking responsibility for our lives if we wanted to move on.
While we do need to end the blame game, your ex was helpful in one way.
Your ex was the mirror to yourself.
Your ex helped show where the flaws and spider webs were.
Your ex helped show you what needed a fix-up, a touch-up or a complete make-over.
You likely hated every minute that you were shown these flaws because this space is uncomfortable and unpleasant.
Yet instead of looking at this as something to work on or improve, you likely got angry and frustrated with your ex.
You likely demonized them and wondered what was wrong with them.
You likely told all your friends and family that you were being tortured and couldn’t handle the nastiness of the relationship.
It was our flaws but we made the person in the mirror responsible, not realizing that we were ultimately the ones in the mirror.
No point beating up ourselves about this now.
You can’t change the past.
You can reflect on it.
You can inquire about what were the things you missed looking in the mirror.
You can take responsibility for it.
You can get to work on improving those things.
I’m going to share what one of the biggest shortcomings/flaws that our ex’s mirrored back to us next week.
In the meantime, what did your ex show you about yourself?
What did you need to work on?
What are your skeletons?
What did you see in the mirror?
Hit reply and let me know.
And of course, if you’re not on the V-team email list, get on it please 🙂
I help people overcome their devastating breakups and divorces and find love again. Instead of visiting the Himalayas, sign up below and join me. I am taking a writing break but will be back soon.
This guide is free. A ticket to the Himalayas is $2000. Your move.
