Heartbreak As Spiritual Practice

Thirty years ago or more, and I remember still...A two~lane road in New England, wide open fields stretching away on both sides. A car in front of us hits a small bird in flight, knocking it to the tarmac. My husband brakes, comes to a stop. We get out. He kneels, carefully scoops into his gentle hands the brilliantly~colored, broken and shuddering goldfinch. Walking several steps into the field, he places the tiny being on the grass where it will soon take its last breath. We step back.

And all the while, the keening of this bird’s mate as she circles erratically, frenetically, a few feet above our heads. Our hearts break at the heartbreak we hear and see and feel.

Suffering is ever~present in the world we inhabit, though often we attempt to avoid it. No surprise there. Brains wired for survival do this. Yet from a spiritual perspective, our avoidance comes at a cost. It’s not that we can’t experience joy without opening to loss. We can, though likely not as deeply. To avoid a condition that is part of life on the planet, though, we must close down. We then feel less, become less. We hardened~~a bit or significantly~~toward ourselves, others and life itself. 

Efforts to avoid pain are also simply not sustainable. Pierced again we shall be. Sooner or later, a loved one will be snatched from flight and hurled to the ground. Or some other misfortune, small or large, will strike. Or another’s pain will burst into our awareness. Pain is a given. Better to embrace it and work skillfully with it. 

Perhaps a way to begin is by opening to heartbreak in all its varieties. Open hearts are pierced many times a day, and not just by suffering. Beauty also pierces. On my walk this morning, my heart broke at the white of a nighthawk’s wing bars flashing in the pre~dawn dark, and by the rosy blush of clouds stacked heavily in the eastern sky, reflecting fuchsia in the waters of the lake below.

Hearts are made to break, deeply and often. In fact, it is the heart’s function to ache and to break. For it is by breaking again and again that hearts become larger, deeper vessels for Love. While it does take skill to allow that breaking to open rather than weaken us, we really have no choice. Our hearts WILL break. It is what they do. 

The only viable approach is to open to the exquisite anguish and beauty of our world and learn to dance with heartbreak. Let everything break your heart. Let hate and loss and cruelty break your heart. And let each act of kindness and every expression of beauty and love break your heart as well.

Heartbreak and heartache, dear friends on the path to a full, rich and open~hearted experience of life. 

💓  💘  💔  💖 

Leia 

Okay, so here's a wee bit of symbolism of the synchronistic variety. Notice those heart emojis above. The beating heart begins small, becomes slightly larger when it is pierced, larger still when it cracks open, remaining the same size as it dances with stars. These wee emojis may be telling a true tale. Perhaps we notice our hearts most acutely when they are pierced. They grow larger in our awareness then, and still larger when they seem to crack in two. And if we manage our crisis well, our hearts remain that larger size forevermore...and better able to touch the stars in the heavens. And they grow even larger and more star~touched still with next heartache and heartbreak...and so on.

I don't intend to minimize pain or glorify a process that can be excruciating. Anguish is simply a part of life, so it seems best that we learn to work with it skillfully and find~~or even create~~redeeming value from it.

And I promise you, I did not tamper with the image sizes. It's just the way blogspot created the emojis.

Happy Autumn...and much 💖 !