What Is Heartbreak?

What breaks our hearts open? What happens if we don’t break all the way open and pour forth the nectar of grief fully and lavishly?

         Feeling, being with these questions may bring up memories, sweet and bittersweet, pain, joy, happiness at having had these opportunities to love or they may bring regret, awareness of unhealed heartbreaks, even bitterness, or a sense of incompletion. Whom or what have you loved? Whom or what has broken your heart? What has come of each of your heartbreaks—healing, a more open heart, fear, or shutdown?  These are deep inquiries and we could write on each one for hours, probably, but you could try just ten minutes without picking up your pen, and see what pours forth.

           What is the mystical union of love and heartbreak? We all know what love is--or at least we think we do, and we surely know heartbreak, as both are the woof and warp of our humanity. What do we know of mystical union, and in particular, the mystical union of love and heartbreak?  This is to be inquired into, explored, re-membered.

            I write from my own experience as a 65-year-old woman who has had a very rich life in which I have experienced love beyond words and deep, devastating heartbreak. And so have you.  If we didn't love, if our essential nature was not love itself, if we did not know the lack of love, the loss of love, we would not know heartbreak. As someone who has worked with women and men for more than thirty years, I have heard others say--and at times felt myself--that they feared loving, resisted opening their heart, for fear of more heartbreak. The memory of it was still so traumatic and they felt so utterly vulnerable with an open heart, that they held back their loving, and shielded themselves from receiving love as well. Life being LIFE, we can count on more heartbreak. It will happen again, so how are we going to be with it? How do you want to meet it the next time it comes around? 

            I have also come to know the experience of my heart breaking open, which for me is the next unfolding of the curled in, shut-down contraction and shock of heartbreak.  If we don't resist or cling to the story or get stuck in identification with the pain, love will continue to flow and healing will happen in ways beyond imagining. All of our experiences of heartbreak are lessons in loving. When we can come to experience love and heartbreak the same thing, we will have found a jewel of great value which allows us to be with whatever is as it is, no matter what it is.