Spells for a broken heart

How to Magically Heal a Broken Heart

In this installment of Practical Magic, Lisa Stardust explains how to use magic to heal from a breakup. Always remember that magic is for believers, but this column can also simply serve as a guide to getting in touch with yourself — magically or not.

Love is exciting, glorious, and passionate… until it’s not. Unfortunately, we’ve all been there before. Anyone who has had to navigate the post-breakup blues can attest that heartbreak is one of the worst feelings ever, especially since it triggers so many different insecurities within ourselves.

The unavoidable side to being a human is that we love hard — which means that we can lose hard, as well. When it’s time to let go of a tough relationship, our hurting hearts can make the process that much more difficult. Luckily, there’s a magical cure to alleviate the pain.

When casting a spell to heal painful emotions, you have to really want to move on: no lurking IG, no checking in, no “you up” texts, no planning random encounters in which you “accidentally” bump into them at the local coffee shop. You have to want to move forward.

Here’s the magical instructions to mend a broken heart (make sure to follow them in order!):

First, it's best to do this spell during a Full Moon, which is a magical time of healing and letting go.

Clear out and get rid of your ex’s belongings. Don’t arrange a meetup with them — keep your boundaries strong by mailing it all to them. By holding on to their clothes, coffee mugs, or books, you are energetically keeping the relationship alive.

Those sheets that you slept on together in bed? Throw them in the spin cycle until you can no longer feel your ex-partner’s presence on them.

While being sure to practice fire safety, burn lavender and open a window to release the grief and trauma of the breakup. Fresh air can also help you find solace in your post-relationship emotions, pull you out of your funk, and bring you a wave of calm.

Next, try visualization. Imagine a bunch of cords tethered in a knot placed between you and your ex. Using mindful meditation, separate the cords that are stuck together. Identify which ones are the unhealthy ones, and which aren’t. Then imagine the cords dissipating, and try cutting them out of your energetic field. This is a way to remove toxic people and situations from your life for good, as you are giving them no energy to feed off of.

Tie two pieces of black thread together (one piece of thread representing you and the other representing your ex) and cut it in half. Practicing fire safety, light a black candle to rid yourself of their energetic hold on your heart. This will sever the emotional ties that you’re holding onto from the relationship, and will help you move on.

This should be followed with a cleansing bath with Epsom salt to cleanse your auric field, pink quartz crystals to heal the heart chakra, and Florida Water for purification.

A Witch’s Guide To Getting Over Heartbreak

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Your heart feels like it has been squeezed into a bloody pulp. The thought of food makes you nauseous. You can’t imagine how you will face the day ahead.

If this sounds like you, honey, you’ve either had your relationship end… Or you’ve spent some time watching the news! But if, as I suspect, you’ve closed out your love’s last chapter, then you need some advice from a witch who has been there.

Sometimes getting input from your friends can feel like the blind leading the blind, but as someone who has led hundreds of babes through my Love Rehab program, I can say with authority that these tips will actually help you.

Let the dream die

One of the reasons that break-ups are so hard is because we have to let go of the unrealized dream we had for the relationship. We are in mourning for what could have been, and we find ourselves watching our fantasy dissolve. The dream that we had for the relationship becomes such a crucial piece of our identity that is almost as if we are saying goodbye to a part of ourselves too. Give yourself time to allow this realization to move through you. And be patient, it can take some time.

Consider that the universe only trades up

If you’ve recently said goodbye to a lover, you are probably feeling completely out of sorts. Know that this is normal, but also know that as painful as things may be right now, remember that you have experienced heartbreak before. When you look back, don’t those supposed soulmates you once cried over now seem like someone you wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole? I mean, thank goddess. I think back on many of my break-ups as having dodged a bullet. As you grow and your vibration rises, so do the people you meet and attract. Don’t sweat it: whoever comes next will be even more incredible. I promise.

Write it out

Allow yourself to sit with your journal for an hour and spill your guts on what really happened within your relationship. Write down what you loved about them, what you hated about them, what you will miss and what you won’t miss. This sounds like such a simple exercise but it can bring enormous clarity. Through this process, many people discover that their now ex-partner wasn’t really a great fit—just a comfortable or convenient one. This can bring so much relief.

Block and delete

Unless you are working out the details of a divorce or child custody, there is absolutely no reason for you to stay in contact with your ex. I am also willing to go on record and say that being “friends” straight after a break-up never works. It will only make you obsessive and increase the difficulty level when it comes to truly letting go. My suggestion: delete their number from your phone, and block them on Instagram. Think of it like ripping off a BandAid.

Don’t feel that you need to jump straight back into dating

While some people advise that the best way to get over someone is to get under someone new, I suggest that you learn to embrace this time. So many of us are serial monogamists, hopping from one relationship to another, and while that can be fun, it also robs us of the discovery of how much fun we can have on our own. There is no better feeling than learning to enjoy your own company, and to stop relying on others to make us happy or keep us entertained. In fact, I would go so far as to say that learning how to love being single is an essential part of being a strong, powerful woman.

Have a ritual cord-cutting bath

When you feel truly ready to cut emotional ties with your ex, draw yourself a ritual bath. This ritual is so powerful and will help you feel a sense of closure around your relationship. Fill it with Epsom salts, a few drops of an essential oil of your choice, and white rose petals. Before you get in, spend some time re-reading the page(s) you wrote about the relationship.

Allow yourself to dive deep into your emotions and let yourself feel everything that comes up. Spend some time relaxing in the tub, and then when you feel ready to cut the cord for good, close your eyes and visualize your ex in front of you. Between the two of you, see some cords. These cords might look thin and wispy like cobwebs, or they could be like rope, whatever comes up for you is perfect. Now, in your mind’s eye, pick up a big pair of golden scissors and use them to cut the cords. Snip them as many times as you need to.

See the cords fall to the ground and disintegrate, and watch your ex drift further and further away, out into the universe, like gravity has released its grip on them, until you no longer see them. You can open your eyes when you feel ready, and then wash your body from head to toe. As you do this, visualize washing away their influence, the things they said to you, and the very last of their grip on you. Remove the plug and watch the water swirl down the drain, taking the end of the relationship with it. Thank the universe, or yourself, for taking the time to let you heal and for protecting you always.

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Broken Heart Syndrome: a disease "out of the head" from which you can die

March 5, 2019

Image copyright, Getty Images

Your heart can suffer after some unfortunate event, and your brain is most likely responsible for your "heartbreak", experts say.

Swiss scientists are conducting a study on the so-called "broken heart syndrome".

Psychological stress can cause acute transient left ventricular dysfunction. The syndrome is manifested by the sudden development of heart failure or chest pain, combined with ECG changes characteristic of myocardial infarction of the anterior wall of the left ventricle.

Scientists have found out how stress causes heart disease

Most often, this syndrome develops against the background of stressful situations that cause strong, often sharply negative, emotions. Such events can be the death of a loved one or separation.

Scientists do not yet have complete clarity on how this happens. In the publication of scientists in the medical journal European Heart Journal, it is suggested that the syndrome is provoked by the brain's response to stress.

The "broken heart syndrome" was first described by the Japanese scientist Hikaru Sato in 1990 and was named "takotsubo cardiomyopathy" (from the Japanese "takotsubo" - a ceramic pot with a round base and a narrow neck).

Image copyright Getty Images

This is different from a "normal" heart attack, when blood flow to the heart muscle is blocked. Blockage of blood flow to the heart occurs when there is a blood clot in the coronary arteries.

However, the symptoms of broken heart syndrome and heart attack are similar in many ways, most notably difficulty breathing and chest pain.

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Often some sad event is a kind of trigger that provokes the onset of the syndrome. However, joyful events that cause strong emotions can also lead to the development of broken heart syndrome. For example, getting married or getting a new job.

Broken heart syndrome can be temporary, in which case the heart muscle will recover in a few days, weeks or months, and in some cases the syndrome can be fatal.

In Britain, about 2500 patients are diagnosed with broken heart syndrome each year.

Image copyright Christian Templin, University Hospital Zurich

Image caption

X-ray of the heart of a person diagnosed with takotsubo syndrome

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The exact cause of broken heart syndrome is unknown to scientists. However, it is suggested that this syndrome may be associated with an increase in the level of stress hormones - for example, adrenaline.

Elena Gadri from the University Hospital Zurich, together with her colleagues, studied the brain activity of 15 patients diagnosed with broken heart syndrome.

Imaging data showed significant differences in the brain activity of these patients from that observed in 39 participants in the control group, who were healthy.

Much less communication has been noted between the areas of the brain responsible for controlling emotions and the body's unconscious (automatic) responses (such as the heartbeat).

"Emotions are formed in the brain, so it is quite possible that the disease is formed in the brain. And then the brain sends the appropriate signals to the heart," says Gadry.

Further research is needed to understand the mechanism of the syndrome.

The Swiss scientists who conducted the study had no CT scans of the patients before they were diagnosed with broken heart syndrome. Therefore, researchers cannot claim that the reduction in connections between different parts of the brain was a consequence of the development of the syndrome, or that the syndrome developed due to the reduction in connections.

"This is a very important part of the study, it will help us better understand the nature of this syndrome, which is often overlooked, and it continues to be a mystery to us," says Joel Rose, head of the British organization Cardiomyopathy.

"These studies will help us understand what role the brain plays in the syndrome and why some people are affected and others are not," says Joel Rose.

"These observations confirm our long-standing assumption about the special role of the connection between the brain and heart in the formation of takotsubo cardiomyopathy," says researcher Dana Dawson from the British Heart Foundation.

Heartbreak Path - Buddha in the City

This is box title

…It happens like this –
Burns with fire
Dormant volcano,
Immersed in sleep.
After all, it happened like this,
That gardens bloomed
In the middle of an empty,
Scorched earth.
And when the sunset
Blazes in the sky,
With black red
Goes hand in hand...
Don't leave me,
Don't leave me…

-Jacques Brel . Don't leave me.

Explosions, explosions, explosions… now in Brussels.

Someone, having heard the echo of these explosions thousands of kilometers away, is crying.

Someone panics.

Someone feels helpless rage.

Someone says: they are to blame - they are tolerant.

Or: they themselves are to blame - colonists, exploiters, snickering bourgeois.

Or why didn't you cry when we were blown up?

Or: don't throw a tantrum, it always has been and always will be.

Or: what are you talking about, the number of terrorist attacks in Europe is decreasing every year.

...spells, spells, spells.

I also cast my spells.

I feel sorrow - from impotence, from anger, from rage at human stupidity.

On your own stupidity.

And I'm very sorry for all of us - wandering lost in the dark, stumbling into each other and with a swing beating on the head of those whom they stumbled upon. They beat because it's scary in the dark.

Everyone wants warmth, they want closeness. I want to be with someone. But the Other is so scary precisely because he is different and completely different from you.

Now that I hear about the explosions in Brussels, I listen to the song Ne me quitte pas (Don't leave me).

This is box title

. ..It happens like this
– Scorch with fire
A dormant volcano…

I listen and listen on repeat to the song of the Belgian Jacques Brel. A song about love. Song of a broken heart.

There are some lame thoughts floating around in my head.

To still turn them into real thoughts, I write them down.

Now I'm thinking about our relationship: my rich inner world and no less rich and no less than my outer world.

What happens to the outside?

I see that he is striving to unite, he wants to become one global village.

This unification takes place with a terrifying roar of the crumbling walls of the old world, where many people perish under the rubble and many destinies are broken.

This is history. Turning her millstones takes my breath away and dilates my pupils.

But in this big story there is my little human heart that reacts to specific events.

The heart has its own hearing, its own speech and its own history.

Therefore, my heart, nurtured by a very specific family, a specific culture, a specific life story, does not respond in the same way to similar events that have happened in different parts of the world.

And no matter how much my mind tells my heart that the terrorist attack in the Congo is no less tragic than the terrorist attack in Brussels, it (the heart), while agreeing that this is true, nevertheless, shrinks much more in response to the terrorist attack in Brussels . For it so happened that the city of Brussels is closer to my heart than the city of Beni in the Republic of the Congo.

No matter how much my mind convinces my heart that, statistically, an order of magnitude more people die in car accidents than in air, the heart still reacts more strongly to the latter.

It is simply necessary to recognize that the heart is an emotional organ and its laws are different from those of the intellect. It speaks its own language.

And if we want to stay alive, we need to respect the life of the heart. His way of listening to the world and his way of speaking to the world.

One must learn to respect the conditioning and limitations of the heart.

One must give the heart time to respond. Do not chatter him with details about the incident, but leave him alone for a while.

One must let sadness sink to the bottom, let tears flow.

This heart needs to be supported – through silence, through ritual, art, meditation.

If I learn to respect the life of the heart, if I learn to respect its limitations, then I will give it a chance to grow up.

I will give him a chance to overcome his limitations, his division of the world into friends and foes.

If I give my heart a time and a place, it will be able to contain the whole world with its pain and joy.

But you have to be patient, you can't rush your heart.

So now I'm sitting and listening to a song about a broken heart, feeling my heart, crying inside, slowly heal and open up.

And someone else might need to go to church, and someone else might need to take a walk in the park.

One thing is important - to get out of the hustle and bustle and stop talking.

Stop throwing rubbish at your heart.

Although it is a very big temptation to throw information rubbish at the heart in order not to feel pain.

The media is now doing polar work. One side of this work carries a plus charge, the other a minus charge.

With a positive charge, they work for the very unification of the world, which I wrote about above.

After all, now, sitting at home in Slovenia, I instantly find out what is happening in Brussels, Donetsk, Istanbul, Syria, Congo ...

neighboring house.

Through the window of modern media, I am gradually crawling out of the shell of my tribal identity and becoming a man of the world.

But with one difference.

If in a village, when I see a fire, I can immediately jump up and, grabbing a bucket and a hook, rush to extinguish it, then, sitting at my computer, I can only worry, and worry, and worry.

And just then the same “charge minus” is turned on, the conductor of which is the media.

Because empathy without compassion is often destructive.

If I truly empathize with someone, I feel almost the same pain that he does.

And if no active action, external or internal, is included in my empathy, then this pain begins to corrode my heart.

Looking for a way to deal with pain, I either begin to rationalize, trying to shield myself from it with “correct” concepts about the statistics of human deaths, that the special services miscalculated, and other blah blah blah.

Either I turn my pain into hatred for some enemy that has successfully turned up in my head.

Either I inflame the pain more and more by exaggerating the details of the event.

Comprehension and rational digestion of tragic events is certainly important, but in order not to dry our hearts, we must first give ourselves time for emotional digestion.

So, back to the difference between empathy and compassion.

Empathy is when I simply respond to someone else's pain with my own.

This is the resonance of feelings between people, as natural as the resonance of the strings of one guitar. This is a simple scheme: pain - pain .

Compassion is always active.

A new important component appears in the scheme:
pain - pain - healing .

Even if right now, in a particular situation, you do not have the opportunity to heal or alleviate someone else's pain, and now your pain with specific actions, you need to perform specific actions inside.

There are special practices for this, but in principle any symbolic ritual that you can think of for yourself will do.
Whatever helps you, do it. It helps to read poetry - read them, it helps to listen to the songs of a broken heart - listen, it helps to walk along the edge of the sea - take a walk, it helps to write a diary - write, but write from the heart.

It is important to find this channel through which feelings can flow.

Because if you don't translate your empathic pain into art, or active compassion, or create some other channel for it to flow, it will destroy you, causing you to feel powerless and lost. It will burn you from the inside.

In general, if you are extremely sensitive to the suffering of other beings, I see two ways out of the situation of "your suffering about their suffering. "

The first is to build yourself a tower and lock yourself in it. That is, try to avoid meeting the suffering of others. Close and protect yourself from them in every possible way.

But it was difficult to do before, and in today's global world it is impossible in principle.

If you do not want to go into a Himalayan cave, but, on the contrary, want to actively participate in social life, you will not be able to close yourself off from the suffering of others without killing the living heart in yourself.

Second way - go through suffering. And for this you need to find your ways of expressing feelings and your ways of serving the world, your ways of supporting others, your ways of active compassion.

It is to seek, not to find. Because it's a never ending process. You cannot once find a universal way and extend it to all occasions.

If the heart is alive, then with its movement it responds to the movement of life. After all, life is continuous change. Life is eternally new, and therefore a living heart is eternally new.

But what about the media?

Personally, I am not a supporter of their complete exclusion from my life, as I have already said about the plus that they bring into it.

I appreciate this plus. I am grateful to the Internet, just as I am grateful to the house in which I live.

It is important for me not to praise the media and not to scold them, but to be aware of what they are doing to me. It is important to go through the middle Buddhist path - not to indulge in news debauchery, but also not to overdry yourself with news asceticism.

I live in the world and want to live in it, I want to listen to the world and talk to it.

And for a leisurely ride along the middle way, I consider contemplative practices that develop in me the ability to introspect, to realize and understand my reactions, the best transport.

Reactions coming from different parts of me - from the mind, from the heart, from the stomach, from the knees.

After all, what do terrorists do?

They are bombarding my mind - that's what.

It is important to them that the explosion is as loud as possible and reaches my ears.

To make my knees shake with fear and my heart to tremble.

For them, it is important not only to kill a lot of people, but to strike at the mind of their enemy.

Since (in a particular case) Islamists consider the generalized West as an enemy, they choose goals that are deeply symbolic for the West: New York as a center of international trade, Paris as a cultural symbol of European civilization, Brussels as the headquarters of the European Union.

And the media, probably unwittingly, intensify this explosion many times over, exaggerating the details, winding up more and more feelings and opinions of omniscient “experts” on events.

The media talks and talks and talks about feelings.

This method of “talking pain”, of course, helps to reduce it, otherwise no one would use it, but it does not contribute to its healing, because for healing it is necessary to go through the pain. Anyway, that's how it is for me.

Thus, while maintaining their plus of expanding my identity to a citizen of the world, the media add a minus, helping terrorists bomb my mind.

And terrorists here, by the way, can be very broadly defined.

Terrorists are not only ISIS banned everywhere on a stick, but it is also state propaganda allowed by us (substitute the desired state depending on your political orientation).

Accordingly, for me personally, the conclusion is simple: do not completely abandon the media, do not close your Facebook page, but use them as a mind simulator, carefully observing what exactly all this information does to me - with the mind, with the body, with heart.

And respond in time to terrorist attacks on my mind.

Having received a blow to the heart, it is necessary to block information channels for some time, prohibit propaganda in one's individual head and pay attention to it - the heart.

As you know, wolves live in the heart: one is black, the other is white.

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