A Broken Heart, An Open Heart
Imagine that you want to break open a coconut. Whether you break it open by lovingly knocking it over your knee, or with one forceful swipe of a machete, either way you look at it, the coconut is broken; the coconut is open. This is how my heart feels after my relationship of four and a half years ended not two weeks ago. Before you offer pity, pass judgment, cast blame, please don’t. Luckily, it ended with love, care, and respect. It was a beautiful relationship with a beautiful ending. This blog post is not to talk about and analyze the relationship, but rather to share my experience of moving through this difficult time with a broken, and open, heart.
(Writer’s note: By “open”, I don’t mean “Open for Business”, so please, no “nudge nudge wink wink”s.)
Some of you may be saying to yourself, “What a way to start the month of love – talking about losing it!” This post is, by no means, meant to put a damper on the sea of red presently in pharmacies, department stores, book stores, and Hallmark shops that you may adore. Really, I feel like it’s appropriate… Yes, some may consider February to be the month of love, so what better time to open yourself to the love around you?
After my break up, I felt so fragile, so raw, and as a result, more sensitive. My suffering kept me in the present moment like no other experience (other than meditation). From experience, I knew staying stuck in the past wouldn’t be helpful, nor hanging on to future false hopes, and of course, creating stories or replaying past experiences are also really not productive, so I almost welcomed how my pain kept me in the moment. Walking, holding this pain, letting it flow through me, forced me to slow down, and as a result, I became a tourist in my own city. In a beautifully painful way, I saw the sun in a new way, felt the cold air on my skin in a new way as I walked for hours outside (something I almost never do, unless it’s at least 25 above), and had become more sensitive to other people’s stories and situations.
Although I teach from where I am in my life and practice at that moment, I don’t often share intimate details about my life in class. I teach using general dharma terms. Never (or not in a while, anyway), had I received so much positive feedback, how students felt I was speaking to them specifically, and how it was helpful for exactly what they were living in that moment. This made me realize that love and suffering are universal concepts that everyone experiences. Everyone has felt love (or longs for it) and everyone has suffered (or is suffering).
One thing I feel is worthy to note is that love and suffering are relative. Whether you’re 6 years old, 30 years old, or 60 years old, it is still suffering, and can still be traumatic, regardless of your age. And as much as these universal concepts of love and suffering unite us, no-one really truly knows the dynamic of your relationship.
Given that, I had friends ask me, “How can you not be angry?” Although I must agree that it is often easier to fixate on the negative and be angry, I was grateful that I wasn’t. I spent this past weekend on a silent meditation retreat and Matt Flickstein used a beautiful image of bungee jumping – even if we go into deep states of meditation (jumping off the high ledge), resentment and anger can pull us back to exactly where we began (the boing of the bungee cord). I’d rather take the 5 years of meditation and almost 100 nights in silent retreat that I’ve so far invested and put them to good use!
Staying with the discomfort of painful feelings, in my opinion, takes courage. Most people tend to push their suffering away because they feel it is or will be overwhelming. Although I’m right in the thick of it and I can’t say for sure, I do know that opening to the suffering is a lot less scary than I expected. We tend to take relationships, especially sexual and romantic relationships, very personal but as soon as you realize that you “simply” (another relative term) got caught in your partner’s suffering, you can be freed. Oddly enough, I find comfort in the “It’s not you, it’s me” phrase.
Also noteworthy is that being vulnerable is not a negative in any way, rather, it is a courageous act. I can only guess based on how I feel now that once you survive an extremely vulnerable experience, it becomes empowering. As one of my very good and supportive friends told me: “Sadness reminds us of our capacity to feel, and every feeling we have serves a purpose.”
