Conscious Breakups: Moving on without the Baggage

By Joanna Shakti / Conscious Soulmate - Conscious Relating, Preparing for Love and Relationship /

Conscious breakups start the process of healing and preparing for your next relationship. Not every romantic relationship can, or is even meant to, last forever. By definition, not every person that you date or get into a relationship with is going to be Mr. or Mrs. Right. So learning how to break up well matters.

Breakups aren’t failures. Breakups are actually a form of love because trying to force a relationship between two people whose souls and lives haven’t found true alignment only creates pain and suffering for both people.

Recognizing that releasing a relationship that’s not working for one or both people is compassionate, kind, and yes, loving opens the door to a completely different breakup experience, a conscious breakup. In that, you’ll have the chance to end a relationship without so many hard feelings and without carrying a bunch of weight in the form of hurt, resentment, abandonment, anger, judgment, and the like, into your future.

Conscious uncoupling makes everything better

You might ask yourself “why are breakups so hard?” and that would be a good question. When we ask why something is hard, that question, if we’re willing to be curious, can show us a way to make what was hard easier. With that, even when it’s easier, rarely does any breakup feel good. Yet choosing to have a conscious breakup will, without a doubt, make the breaking up less painful.

Now, even though we might want a conscious breakup experience, not everyone is committed to a conscious ending. Not everyone is capable of conscious uncoupling. No matter how much you might want your soon to be ex to participate in the conscious breakup process with you, they may choose not to. That’s ok.

The only person that needs to choose to have a conscious breakup is you. You do your part of the break up consciously and your life will be better. Your heart will start to heal much more quickly and you will not have any heavy baggage to drag along into your next dating and relationship experience.

To say that again, your ex does not have to participate in order for you to have a conscious breakup. You can do this fully and completely on your own (or with the help of a facilitator.) It doesn’t matter how you do it. Just do it. Do it for you. Complete for you… and your future relationship.

It’s also worth mentioning that while you’ll ideally have your conscious endings experience near to the time of the actual breakup, those who have embarked on the Path of Soul Love have learned to do conscious endings at any time. They discovered they could turn messy breakups from even decades earlier into conscious breakups. Yes, let’s say that again. We can turn unconscious breakups into conscious ones, even years later. That’s part of how we release the baggage we’ve been carrying.

Five key steps to a conscious breakup

As we said, almost no breakup ever feels truly easy, at least not for both people. Even with mutual breakups where both people know in their hearts that breaking up is best for both people, still those breakups hurt.

Conscious breakups start first with being honest with yourself that yes it does truly hurt. It’s important not to deny that hurt.

Conscious breakups also start with accepting the truth that either you want the breakup or your partner does. Either way, facing and admitting that truth, versus resisting it, not only makes the breakup easier, it, every once in a while, leads to a reunion.

Yes, conscious breakups sometimes lead to conscious reunions but that typically only happens when you allow the break up process to unfold naturally. If you do that, and the two of you weren’t really meant to end the relationship, you’ll find yourselves back together again. It’s often soulmate breakups that unfold consciously that turn into healing experiences, rather than actual breakups. That in turn brings the two people into a deeper bond and union.

Or, when you truly aren’t meant to be together, the natural breakup process will let you both begin to heal almost immediately.

If you want to know how to have a conscious breakup, follow these five key steps… .

Be compassionately real. You don’t have to be mean or hurtful to be honest and real. Don’t hide the truth from you or your soon-to-be ex.
Own your feelings. You don’t have to share them all with your soon-to-be ex, but you can’t stuff them if you want to move on completely and cleanly. You have to feel what you feel and let it go. (That doesn’t mean distracting yourself until you numb yourself out or forget the challenging feelings, because that only leaves them stuck until they pop-up in your next relationship.)
Acknowledge your contribution to the challenges. It’s never all their fault. It takes two to tango, as they say. It might be hard to hear, and the truth is, you both contributed to everything great about the relationship. You also both contributed to everything not so great about the relationship.
Acknowledge and honor the best in your ex. No matter what we might do or say, we are all good at our core. We’re all good in soul and we’re doing the best that we can all the time. Your ego may not think so, but it’s absolutely true. Find what’s great and acknowledge it about your ex.
Do a Conscious Endings ritual. While Ecstatic Intimacy clients learn a very specific process for this ritual, you can create any ritual that allows you to let go of old hurts between you so that you don’t carry them forward into your next relationship. When you do your ritual, be sure to include gratitudes, blessings, and forgivenesses for both you and your ex.

Again remember, your ex does not need to participate in this conscious breakup process for it to be successful for you.

If you’re seeking a lifetime partnership with a true soul connection you will likely date several people in that discovery process. You will inevitably date people and get into relationships with people who are not your soulmate. That’s not a problem. That is not a failure. The very reason we date and get into relationships is to discover and decide whether or not this truly is a soulmate, if this is someone you truly want to spend, in some cases, the rest of your life with. Conscious dating and conscious relationships go hand in hand with conscious breakups.

While we must be open to heartache and even breakup in dating and relationships, we don’t need to set ourselves up to experience any more heartbreak than necessary. If you want to reduce your risk of heartache and the need for conscious breakups, you might review the Definitive Guide to Conscious Dating before you start seeking your next relationship.

Since 2006, highly conscious men and women, with a commitment to extraordinary relationships, have chosen Ecstatic Intimacy to find and cultivate Soul Partnerships from their bedrooms to their boardrooms. Ecstatic Intimacy believes in coveted relationships, for all.

You too, are invited…

*At Ecstatic Intimacy, an all-inclusive website for singles and couples, we welcome all sexual orientation(s), gender(s) and relationship expressions. In this article we utilize the pronouns he/she/him/her.