How we deal with heartbreak is how we grow. Do we close ourselves off by creating barriers and “protecting” ourselves? Or do we choose to let the experience deepen our capacity to be vulnerable and open? This option is terrifying, but the alternative is self-defeating.
When my heart has been the most broken – experiencing betrayal in my marriage, losing a loved one to cancer, ending a long-term romantic relationship and blindsiding my partner, growing up in a volatile addict household – I had a very clear choice. I saw that to love is to trust and to trust can lead to great pain. I also saw that choosing to be brave by doing the harder thing, the scarier thing, is ultimately, always worth it.
What was the scary thing? Forgiving. Opening my heart to love after divorce. Wounding someone else to be true to me. Being with the parts of myself that were exiled by trauma. Confronting the distance I felt from my own body as a result of abuse and coming home to her through healing work.
I came to realize that all the heartbreak I had experienced could be perceived as a gift. As an opportunity to expand my ability to love more deeply, accept more openly, hold space with compassion, and radiate more fully. The heart is a wild, powerful thing and love is simply to beautiful to refuse. Maybe all the times we are cracked open we are being invited to become truer, wiser, kinder, braver.
May every heartbreak take you deeper into yourself, into the places that need you to be with them the most. And may this place be filled with such great love that you discover the breaking is really all about becoming.
SHE JOURNEYS 