What does it mean to open your heart to the best things in life? An open heart allows you to feel compassion, empathy, joy, love, and enjoyment. For these are truly the best things in life. In order to experience these things, you must internally have a full sense of deservingness.
We will outline what deserving means, signs your heart is closed, and a detailed step-by-step guide to allowing your heart to open.
According to the Oxford English dictionary, deserving is defined as, “ worthy of being treated in a particular way.” Most of the time deserving is used as being worthy of something positive or happy.
Feeling deserving is the expectation that goodness will be in your life. Not only that goodness will be in your life but that you are worthy of receiving that goodness. It is all encompassing of the positive people, situations, and relationships that you want in your life.
All humans are deserving of the following things:
- People who love us unconditionally
- A safe place to work and to live
- Employees and coworkers who support and respect us
The idea of feeling and being deserving seems a simple concept. But for those of us with a closed off heart, feeling deserving is simply impossible. Feeling undeserving causes you to miss out on the very best things this life has to offer you.
The sad reality is that many people trudge through life with a closed heart and a feeling of undeservingness. In order to change your experience and begin having a deserving soul and spirit, you must begin to live with an open heart.
Opening one’s heart is a particularly difficult task for someone who has operated with a closed heart for so long. We can close our hearts for a number of reasons, sometimes unconsciously so.
Our hearts can be closed to ourselves, new experiences, people, ideas, and thoughts. With having a closed heart for weeks, months, and sometimes even years, it can seem like a daunting and almost impossible task to open it. Opening your heart, however, is the most effective way to allow yourself to feel deserving and experience the very best things in life.
Signs Your Heart Is Closed
If you can relate to any of the below scenarios, you may have a closed heart. It’s perfectly okay if you connect with any of them, as currently having a closed heart does not mean you will always have a closed heart.
The first step in moving towards opening your heart for the best things in life is to recognize you have a closed heart. Elizabeth Hunter Diamond, Clairvoyant and Energy Healer, has established the following symptoms of having a closed heart.
- Pushing Others Away
- Repressing Emotions
- Your Needs Coming Last or Being Overlooked
- Holding Onto a Toxic or Past Relationship
Opening Your Heart
Once you’ve come to the realization that you have a closed heart, you need to establish a plan to open your heart and allow yourself to feel deserving.
Opening your heart to feeling deserving is not an overnight quick fix. It will take time, patience, and effort. In order to open your heart, follow the three step process which is outlined below :
Pin-Point The Problem
The first step in opening your heart to feeling deserving is to pin-point the actual problem.
a| Acknowledgement: The first part to pinpointing the problem is acknowledgement. It’s important to be completely honest with how you are feeling in the present. You may not consciously be aware that you are selling yourself short. If a thought enters your mind regarding how and what you should do to feel more deserving, some piece of you has already been living life with the impression that you are somehow undeserving.
Are you able to look at yourself in the mirror and say with absolute confidence that you are a deserving and worthwhile person? If not, a part of you is operating under the notion that you are undeserving and there lies the problem.
b| What Would Make You Undeserving: Next, you need to ask yourself what specific characteristics or qualities you have that make you feel undeserving. In all likelihood, though these may make you feel undeserving, these qualities more than likely do not actually make you undeserving. This is a classic case of being trapped in your own head. Be as honest as possible with yourself and write these qualities down.
c| What is the Root Cause of Your Belief: Once you have identified the traits that make you feel undeserving, you need to ask yourself why those traits make you feel that way. This will require a deep dive into your past. Usually situations and experiences from the past are directly tied to how we are feeling in the present. According to a 2019 study published by BMC Psychiatry, a link was found between unworthiness as an adult and childhood trauma.
You need to identify how long you’ve felt this way and then trace backwards until you’re able to identify the situation or experience from where those feelings originated.
For many of us our feelings of being undeserving comes from an external source. It could stem from pressures of society IE: school, grades, coaches, religion or it could stem from a specific person in your life and how they treated you or spoke to you.
d| Wash Away Past Regrets: The final part in pinpointing the problem and continuing on the path of opening your heart, is understanding and believing whole heartedly that the past is the past. You no longer live there. Any missed opportunities, mishaps, or mistakes are done and over with.
You cannot change the past, you can only move forward. As such, there is absolutely no reason for you to constantly allow the past to remain in the forefront of your mind. In order to move forward, you must let go of your guilt and regrets of the past. Allow yourself self-compassion, make amends, and look forward into the future.
Challenge The Problem
The second step in opening your heart to feeling deserving is to challenge the problem.
a| Take a Realistic Look Around: The first part of challenging the problem is locating people who have what you feel you are personally undeserving of. Ask yourself if those people are somehow more inherently deserving than you are.
The answer is no, they are not. Look at celebrities, rockstars, and politicians for example. Some of them have every single materialistic thing known to man yet they are cheaters, liars, and at their very core are not good people. If someone with clearly no moral standing can be happy and feel deserving, why should you feel undeserving of your own happiness?
b| Take an Outsider’s Perspective: The age old saying, “Walk in someone else’s shoes” couldn’t be more true. As humans, we tend to be our own worst enemy. We are much harder on ourselves than we are on other people. We hold ourselves to a much higher standard. Instead of taking this route, why not view yourself as you would a loved one or your best friend?
Think about how your very best friend would support you and help you move beyond the undeserving feelings you’re having. At the same time, think about how you would help your friend through a similar situation. How would you support them? Whatever thoughts and ideas you come up with in both scenarios, put into action in your current situation of feeling undeserving.
c| Comparisons No More: The next part of challenging the problem and continuing on your journey of opening your heart, is the understanding that no two people are the same. President Theodore Roosevelt said it best, “Comparison Is the thief of joy.” We come from different backgrounds and experience different things throughout our lives.
As such, no two people should be compared to each other. Stop competing with other people. The only person you should be focusing on is yourself. Look at what you have accomplished thus far and how far you have personally come. Compare yourself to yourself and not another individual.
d| Adjust Your Expectations: Next you need to evaluate your goals and expectations and determine if they are realistic. As humans, we like to set lofty and sometimes unattainable goals for ourselves and for those around us. No one is perfect. Look at the current expectations around you, including your own expectations for yourself and the expectations others have for you. Are they realistic? If not, adjust them.
e| Understand You Are Not Being Selfish: The final part of challenging the problem and continuing on your journey of opening your heart is understanding you are not being selfish.From time to time we all may find ourselves thinking, “Why should I be deserving of this if someone else may never have the same thing?”
You must recognize that personally feeling deserving has absolutely nothing to do with anyone except for yourself. It does not mean others do not deserve the exact same thing. If you so choose, once you feel you are internally deserving enough, you can use your energy to help the needs of others.
Forward Moving
The final step in opening your heart to feeling deserving is to keep forward movement.
a| Turn Your Frown Upside Down: The first part in keeping forward movement is to turn your frown upside down. No one can be 100% positive and upbeat all the time. Negative thoughts will enter your head. This is okay, as long as you take the necessary steps to change them. When a negative or degrading thought enters your mind, simply say, “Stop” and redirect your attention to something positive. This could be going for a walk, calling a friend, or reading a book. You can also turn the negative thought into a positive one and keep moving on with your day.
b| Self-Motivation: The next step is self-motivation. The ability to self-motivate yourself is extremely important on your journey to opening your heart to being more deserving. Self-motivation is the key to continuing to take each positive step forward one after the other.
Focus your energy on tasks you really want to complete. Engage in activities you actually enjoy doing. When tasks appear that you don’t want to complete or that you don’t enjoy, remind yourself of any and all positive benefits that will happen once that task is completed.
c| Be Grateful of Your Strengths: According to Harvard Health Publishing of Harvard Medical School, “gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.”
Make it a point each day to focus on 2-3 positive qualities you possess or 2-3 positive things you accomplished in the last 24 hours. These do not need to be massive characteristics or life altering changes. They can be as simple as remembering the elderly neighbor whose door you held open or hanging bird feeds for the local birds in the park. Focusing on a multitude of smaller positive qualities can have a greater impact on opening your heart than solely focusing on 1 major quality.
d| Always Do the Right Thing: Always doing the right thing will help your conscious stay at peace and will result in keeping the feelings of guilt away. Even if you’re alone, even if no one is watching you, even if no one else will ever find out, always force yourself to do the right thing. No matter how difficult the situation may be, always doing the right thing will help open your heart to being deserving.
e| Comfort Zone No More: The next step in your journey to opening your heart to deservingness is leaving your comfort zone. In order to grow or move forward, you must try new things. In order to try new things, we must leave our comfort zone. This can be very scary. Regardless of what new thing you try, make sure to focus your energy and effort on the actual experience of doing rather than focusing on the outcome.
According to motivational speaker Tony Robbins, “Getting out of your comfort zone will naturally build your confidence as your brain experiences new scenarios and creates new neural pathways.
Confident people don’t just get what they think they deserve – they go after things even if they don’t think they deserve them. They don’t tell themselves they’re not good enough or they’ll never make it. They take risks and have a deep, unstoppable belief in themselves. When you move through life with confidence, you naturally get what you deserve”
f| Fake it Till You Make It:
The final step in forward movement and opening your heart is to fake it till you make it. You must continue to make positive momentum onward even if you don’t fully believe in yourself. Even if you are still not feeling fully deserving. You must continue to press forward.
Continuing to act like you’re deserving even before feeling like it will allow yourself to become accustomed to deserving behavior. This will help automatically rewire you to feeling more deserving. Take it one small step at a time.
Buy yourself something nice just because you want it not because you need it. Take a day off from work because you want to explore a new park or town.
Final Thoughts
Opening your heart to the best things in life is the best gift you can give to yourself. Allowing yourself to feel deserving is an integral piece of being able to experience anything and everything you want out of this life.
Allow your heart to be open to feeling deserving by pinpointing your problem, challenging the problem, and moving forward. Making the change from a closed heart to an open heart is no easy feat but nothing else could be as worth the effort.
