Receiving Love Again | A Meditation for the Heart
By Raquel Perez, Licensed Therapist | Everyday Therapy
Receiving love can be one of the most vulnerable experiences we face.
For many people, love isn’t something that feels nourishing or safe — even when it’s offered with sincerity. Instead, the body tightens. The chest braces. The nervous system goes on alert. You may notice yourself pulling away just as connection arrives, or feeling overwhelmed by care that a deeper part of you longs for.
If that experience resonates, you’re not broken — and you’re not alone.
This meditation, Receiving Love Again, was created for those moments when the heart wants to open, but the body still remembers a time when love wasn’t safe. It’s a gentle, therapy-informed practice designed to help you soften, ground, and begin reconnecting with love — not as something you have to earn or protect yourself from, but as something your body can slowly learn to receive.
Why Receiving Love Can Feel So Hard
From a therapeutic perspective, difficulty receiving love often has very little to do with desire — and everything to do with safety.
When love has been inconsistent, conditional, overwhelming, or paired with loss, betrayal, or abandonment, the nervous system adapts. It learns to brace. To freeze. To stay alert. These protective responses are not flaws; they are intelligent survival strategies shaped by lived experience.
Over time, though, these same protections can make intimacy feel confusing or exhausting. You might crave closeness but feel disconnected during it. You might want tenderness yet feel guarded when it appears. This tension — between longing and protection — often lives in the body long before it becomes conscious.
That’s why practices like meditation, grounding, and somatic awareness are so powerful. They meet the healing where it actually lives.
Creating Safety Before Opening the Heart
At the core of this meditation — and all of my work — is the belief that insight requires safety.
Before the heart can open, the body needs to feel anchored. Before love can be received, the nervous system needs reassurance that it’s okay to soften.
The meditation begins by inviting you into a position that feels nourishing and supportive. Through slow, intentional breathing and imagery rooted in the earth, you’re guided into a state of grounded presence. Imagining roots extending into the ground helps signal stability and support — reminding the body that it is held, supported, and not alone.
This grounding isn’t about forcing relaxation. It’s about allowing the body to release what it’s ready to let go of, at its own pace. Protection, tension, old stories — all are gently acknowledged without judgment.
This is the foundation of healing: meeting yourself with patience and compassion.
Opening to Love in the Body
As the meditation moves toward the heart, the focus shifts from grounding into receiving.
Rather than asking you to “open” or “let go,” the practice invites curiosity. You’re guided to notice warmth, softness, and subtle sensation — allowing love to be experienced physically, not just conceptually.
This distinction matters.
Many people understand love intellectually but struggle to feel it in their bodies. Trauma, relational wounds, and chronic stress can create a disconnect between knowing and feeling. By visualizing a warm, gentle light in the heart and letting it expand naturally, the body is given permission to experience love without pressure or performance.
Affirmations like “I am safe to receive” and “I am worthy of love” are introduced not as demands, but as invitations — offered slowly, with room for resistance or tenderness to arise.
Healing happens not when we override our defenses, but when we listen to them.
Integrating Softness Into Daily Life
One of the most important aspects of any healing practice is integration.
Rather than ending abruptly or leaving you feeling ungrounded, this meditation gently brings awareness back into the body. Movement, breath, and sensory awareness help anchor the experience so it can be carried forward — not as a fleeting moment, but as a felt memory the nervous system can return to.
This is especially important for people healing from relational trauma, anxiety, depression, or attachment wounds. The goal isn’t to stay open all the time — it’s to know that softness is available when you need it.
You can return to this feeling. You can build familiarity with it. And over time, your body begins to trust it.
How Therapy Can Support This Work
While meditation is a powerful tool, deeper healing often unfolds in relationship — especially when guided by a therapist trained in trauma-informed care.
In my private practice, Intima Couples and Sex Therapy, I work with individuals and couples navigating issues like emotional disconnection, difficulty with intimacy, anxiety, depression, and relational trauma. A core focus of my work is helping clients create internal and relational safety so insight and change can emerge naturally.
For some clients, this journey is further supported through ketamine-assisted therapy.
Ketamine therapy can help soften rigid patterns in the brain and nervous system, allowing clients to access emotions, perspectives, and self-compassion that may feel unreachable through talk therapy alone. When combined with preparation, integration, and ongoing therapeutic support, ketamine-assisted therapy can be a powerful pathway for healing attachment wounds and reconnecting with love — both for yourself and in relationship with others.
This work is always approached intentionally, ethically, and within a deeply supportive therapeutic container.
Continuing the Journey
If this meditation opened something tender within you, I invite you to continue nurturing that softness.
My free booklet, Sacred Spaces: Creating Safety for Insight, offers grounding practices, reflection prompts, and gentle nervous system tools designed to help you build emotional safety in everyday life. It’s a companion for those learning to receive love, trust themselves, and stay connected to their inner wisdom.
Healing doesn’t happen by force.
It happens through safety.
Through presence.
Through learning — slowly, gently — that love doesn’t have to hurt.
You are worthy of it.
And you are allowed to receive it.
