Does Meditation Help With Breakups?

One of the worst feelings we can experience is having our hearts broken. I still think so to this day, even if any hardships I’ve been presented by have been aided by meditation. 

If you asked me back in the day, I would’ve rather been punched in the face than have my heart broken. But in relationships, we tend to forget the most important variables – ourselves, and how we shouldn’t base our happiness on someone else. 

You’d think it’d be common sense by now but the heart can’t help but fall in love at times, and it’s something to allow, without being attached to the outcome. You are capable of loving someone deeper once you love yourself first. 

Poor treatment towards yourself can be reflected in your relationships and emit an expelling force, rather than a magnetic one. However, at times, it’s too late to save a relationship. And going back wouldn’t do us any good necessarily. 

Once a relationship is done, it’s usually done for good. At times, and while many times it’s accompanied by regret, it’s also accompanied by growth. 

Of course, there are obvious signs of when a relationship is better off that aren’t as obvious to us, such as when the partner is abusive or exert toxic traits. 

At least, they become obvious once they’re examined through a third-person lens. But they aren’t as obvious to someone that’s emotionally invested in a relationship. 

For this occasion, we explore how meditation can help you better cope with breakups and move on stronger. Of course, you’re unlikely to heal overnight but you can speed up your recovery process. 

No Longer Attempting To Fill A Void

When we lose someone beloved to us in our life, many tend to fill their life with people that don’t necessarily have their best emotional interest at heart, by rushing into another relationship. 

But you need to allow yourself to feel the grief, as unattractive as the idea sounds. Grief will bring pain, but that pain can either be used as a stepping stone for strength or something to weaken us. 

In the beginning, you are likely to feel weakened by grief and denial. The thinking that we’ll never find a person that’s like that person we were just with is common, but at the same time, it’s the point. 

Even if you consider yourself the culprit of the relationship ending for whichever incompatibility reason there was, you can still use it as a learning experience and carry on the compassionate qualities you get from meditation and apply it to your next relationship. 

At which point, you’d be better equipped emotionally to appreciate such love and reciprocate it to a higher degree than you did in your previous relationship. 

The love of your life will sometimes come after the mistake of your life. I used to think I found the one almost 7 years ago, only to find myself surprised later on over the relationships life has brought in my life that better resonated with who I was. 

No breakup is easy. But meditation helps you be more mindful about your emotional decisions, making you less likely to rush into the next relationship without having fully healed from your recent breakup. 

It can be tempting if you’re presented with the opportunity, but solid relationships take time to build. I’m more of a believer that the love of our lives isn’t found but built when we make a relationship work. 

Of course, in no way am I denying the existence of personal chemistry that has a significant role in deciding whether a relationship will work or not. 

But understanding your needs and wants is key in finding out which relationship will bring you more fulfillment over the long haul and not repeat the same mistakes. 

You get a better understanding by spending quality time with yourself, and when you’re meditating, it’s an optimal occasion for that. 

Of course, this is not to say that you shouldn’t reach out to others for help during your recovery phase, as that can also help with the recovery process, but be mindful of who you trust, with such a sensitive situation, as some will use someone else’s perceived weakness for their own gain. 

Fortunately, meditation makes it easier to identify who is genuine and who isn’t, mostly based on intuition.

Reevaluating Your Relationships Through Meditation

So you’ve just been through a breakup and you’re grieving over the breakup. That’s normal. But you can closely reexamine your thoughts in complete silence with an objective view. 

Keep in mind that when you meditate, you get to experience your truest self, which provides a bonus opportunity for tackling qualities of yourself you may not agree with that might’ve led to the breakup. 

But that’s not the point here, the point is examining whether that relationship was bringing any value into your life. 

We let go of our critical thinking when we fall in love and don’t consider many of the red flags in the previous significant other, which, upon adding up all the cons and pros, the breakup may logically have been the best outcome. Not for the short-term but for the long-term. 

We aren’t naturally wired to think of the long-term, unless we adopt the habit of meditation, even if meditation as a whole brings our attention to the now, our better decision making does not lead us down the path of emotionally based decisions. 

In fact, it’s usually months if not years after the recovery phase that we start considering the negative qualities of the relationship once we start looking into it. But meditation speeds up this whole process and helps us move on with such adversity quicker. 

With meditation, we detach from what doesn’t serve us a purpose. And such a breakup might’ve been a blessing in disguise that we only get to find out later on upon laying extra thought on it. 

But it shouldn’t be our main thinking, but instead, a great way to go is to become a better version of ourselves by following our purpose. 

Purpose can be found outside relationships without carrying the risk of breaking your trust and heart, such as following your ambitions. 

Something you might not have had the time to cultivate within the relationship but now that you can dedicate a high amount of time to yourself you can consider. 

Dating Yourself

Have you ever considered dating yourself? Maybe you feel a certain way about that. And if it’s too much, try being your best friend. This is something meditation helps you with, as you will naturally cultivate self-love. 

Learn to cultivate love for yourself and strive to climb to the places you want to be at. The point of dating yourself is for you to get an idea of whether you would be in a relationship with yourself, from the lens of a third-person point of view. 

If the answer is a yes, it’s a sign you’re growing, and if you’re content with where you’re at, assuming you don’t hurt someone else in the process but just focus on your own internal happiness, and even then, the relationship ended. It probably was a good sign. 

When you start dating yourself, you can even become happier than people in unsatisfied marriages. You’re in a better position than those who regret their choices and now have to coexist with someone that takes away value from their lives. 

When you date yourself, there are always attributes in yourself you can change to become more appealing to yourself. 

If you had a good experience while dating yourself, you can apply those same principles to your new significant other. It will also be easier to love them without getting emotionally attached to them, and thus, get hurt to the same degree when the relationship ends. 

Of course, if you love someone, it will always hurt when things don’t work out between the two. 

But having a lot of emotional hardships under your belt, it becomes easier to bear. But as a rule of thumb, when you learn to enjoy your own company, while you can enjoy the company of others, you become less dependent on them for happiness.

Meditation Over Quick Fixes

Meditation is a solution to short-term problems, which at times, can be long-term. And because breakups can be so volatile in the recovery timespan, it’s better to be careful with how you approach breakups. 

Some turn into mindless drinking or binge eating, but that may provide a temporary relief while trying to drown the grief, which, if not expressed or dealt with, is more likely to build up into resentment. 

This would only walk you down a path of self-destructive behavior and could even create an addiction, whereas meditation is a long-term fix and can even be a permanent fix. 

Meditation will extract your thoughts in their rawest form, and over time, by mastering meditation, you’re able to gravitate to thoughts that better suit you. 

Bad habits are a common response to unfavorable situations and are easy to adopt, and many that are controlled by negative habits are characterized for lacking mental strength, whereas, with meditation, it’s going against the grain and reclaiming this control, over letting something external get the best of you. We don’t always control whether a breakup will happen. 

But you can’t go wrong by picking meditation as a response to a breakup. Resilience is something your future self will thank you for, and something you’ll look up to yourself in admiration upon successful adoption as a result of consistent meditation. 

It may even help you to go monk-mode during the breakup period where you get better control of your lust, something many rely on their partners for.