From The Wisdom of a Broken Heart by Susan Piver
For many people, the devastating, obsessive nature of a broken heart is a complete surprise. You have a sense of having been physically shattered, right in the middle of your chest. Discomfort takes over your body, making it feel heavy and dull or oddly light, like something that has been burned to a crisp and now floats in the air like ash. Most noticeably, heartbreak puts your own mind outside of your control. You fixate on certain thoughts or events, torment yourself with unanswerable questions such as “what if?” and “how come?” and are susceptible to shocking waves of grief that flood you without any warning whatsoever, even while asleep. You can no longer count on yourself to make it through a business meeting or the checkout line at the supermarket without having to stifle tears.
Everyone and everything you encounter becomes a part of your heartbreak by reminding you of your loss, sadness, and shame. A colleague’s morning greeting feels like a snooty taunt; missing the bus is testimony to your having been born under a bad sign; and every single couple in every single song, movie, and television show points out either the impossible beauty of love (if they’re happy) or the inevitability of it blowing up in your face (if they’re not). The whole planet mirrors your sorrow and there is nowhere to hide. You once thought of daily events as sometimes having to do with you and sometimes not, but now that the wall between your inner life and the outer world has come down, everything becomes extremely personal and intimate. It feels like the world has turned upside down. It has.
As it turns out, you will see that this is all excellent news.
I’m speaking from first-hand knowledge. Although I’ve had my share of relationships and varying degrees of sadness when they ended, I’ve only had my heart truly broken once and it abides in memory as one of the pivotal events of my life. Although I have now happily moved on, I still breathe in the consequences of this incredibly difficult event every day—but with gratitude, not despair.
When this particular relationship ended, I realized that the aches and pains I’d experienced in the past had been like a summer rain compared to a tsunami. They were not the same thing at all. When other relationships ended, sure, I had cried, hated him, hated myself and lost 10 pounds—the usual. But when this one ended I didn’t just cry, mope, and lose my appetite—my entire world also fell apart. I didn’t know who I was anymore or what my life meant, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever recover.
...Then in my readings, I happened to pick up a book that said this:
" …this experience of sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness. Conventionally, being fearless means that you are not afraid or that, if someone hits you, you will hit him back… (But) real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world… If a person does not feel alone and sad, he cannot be a (spiritual) warrior at all..."
Oh.
Here was a path that led you, not away from strong emotion, but directly toward it, one that applauded the ability to feel deeply, not for its dramatic qualities, but for its vividness and intelligence...
What I learned from this book, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by a Buddhist teacher called Chögyam Trungpa, and from other books and teachers I found, was that a brilliant life is not about being untouched by sorrow, but has more to do with a relaxing and allowing the world to touch you. It’s way braver to open yourself to the world than to wall yourself off from it. I had never before heard such a definition of courage. And I had never heard of a spiritual path that celebrated and invited strong emotion and actually explained how to work with it, not by arguing against it, but by liberating it. Instead of trying to toughen up, I could appreciate my softness. Instead of trying to stem the tears, I could dive into them and let the current carry me. In fact, the more I was able to own and proclaim my tenderness, the more of a bad-ass I would be. After some thought, I realized it made perfect sense. After all, if you try to prevent strong emotion, you’re always on the defensive. If you never put up your guard in the first place, you have nothing to defend and therefore nothing to worry about.
For more than a decade I’ve explored in my own life this notion of the tender-hearted warrior, of being open to all emotions and becoming strong in the broken places. I’ve had many opportunities to test and apply the teachings on warriorship. I’m always astonished at how wise, accurate, and practical they are, even for dealing with the most grievously broken heart, and I want to share them with you.
