If You have a Broken Heart, Hold On

"When we protect ourselves so we won’t feel pain, that protection becomes like armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of the heart." Pema Chodron

I wish I was compelled to write about joy and productivity and all the happy things. I know about these things and experience them, yet it seems that seeking to understand pain and its’ meaning is where my mind drifts most often. It’s my life work and my forte to sit with pain. When I am drinking my first coffee each day my subconscious often pops up a theme or memory that carries me for a few days. This is what my brain has given me right now, to describe a broken heart.

If you are a human, and you live long enough, you will sustain a broken heart, a pain great enough to make you gasp and freeze in time, maybe even doubt life is worth it. It’s almost inevitable that we will have a free fall of our hopes, or will lose a beloved person or dear pet and if we know this and are and able to be with people who have been there before we may have a small comfort, however the deep sadness we must face is for us alone.

All wisdom traditions tell us that emotions rise and fall, our connections strengthen and wane. Our lives bend and straighten, our expectations and our desires create deeper disapointments at times and pave the way to freedom and creativity as well. Buddhism tells us to observe all and engage in all but to not ‘attach’ to or ‘grasp’ onto any experience, idea or emotion. So if I am feeling deep sadness I can experience it and not “grasp” my brokeness as a permanent state. This is really important, and I think especially hard to do if we are young. My deep sadness felt like a life sentence when I was 19 and my close friend died, now at 61 I know very deeply that it will pass and awaken a softness in me that feels like true love. Its impossible for me to give you this knowing, I can only offer that you borrow my faith and hold on.

Its also possible to avoid the growth available after a broken heart. We must use compulsions and anger for this avoidance to get any traction. We can stay stuck on resentments or a storyline of being victimized to attempt to avoid the ascention of a broken heart, (our culture right now seems to be especially fond on this riff) The heart and fuel of addiction is the tangled attempt to flee from grief. We can follow this path to avoid, but we can never outrun the pain fully, and still, the path of surrender is still available.

I have found that a broken heart rewrites the script of what our lives are, or how we move through time. A loss of a person we deeply love or the loss of our own health and current “idea” of well being must be experienced and can’t be rushed. My own ‘broken heart’ experiences of losing a dear friend to suicide when I was young, to losing hope for my “idea” of a relationship with loved ones who suffer with serious mental illness, of betrayals of people I truly loved all blew my heart open. I lived to feel healed and more open and loving simply because I didn’t give up and held on. I followed wise teachers, both ancient and in my own life who promised me the seeming platitude of “you will survive and be well again.” I fell through clouds of illusion to a new life afterwards. The fall was terrifying, the faith was faked at first, the understanding of the lessons right in front of me were out of focus and the warmth of hope came slowly.

I know you will find your own healing from your broken heart as well. If you don’t give up on loving yourself or on life itself you will find a new way to love and believe. If you dont seek revenge or retaliation you will find lessons in every betrayal and relationship that ended in pain. Only the breaking of our hearts can destroy the armor we may have built to survive past suffering. Hold on, please hold on, hope is on her way.