How is your heart?
How is your heart?
A seemingly straightforward question to ask, especially as we end this month where the tradition is to celebrate Love. But the answer to what our hearts are holding can be elusive and bring up a sense of warmth and friendliness or discomfort and agitation. Whatever arises for you, I invite you to stay with the answer. How is your heart?
Honestly, my heart is broken and overwhelmed. The isolation and anxiety of Covid continues on and on, filling my heart with sadness and grief. So lately, my practice has been to turn toward my heart, even more so because it is broken.
Staying with our broken hearts is the very path to opening them up. It sounds, and often feels, counter-intuitive. But we stay right there, in the muck and mess of painful loss, grief, uncertainty and anger. We don’t abandon our hearts. When our hearts tremble and our stomachs churn, we stay close by and allow those difficult experiences to be as they are. And somehow, being with what is true opens a space inside us where the light can come in.
The alternative to being with what is true, is to resist. I've tried this too! Resistance only brings more suffering. We want anything but pain, broken-heartedness and uncertainty. But guess what shows up in our lives without fail? Yep- pain, broken-heartedness and uncertainty.
The pandemic has shown us all too tragically the ways life doesn’t turn out like we’d imagined. On some level, every person on the planet may be dealing with a broken heart right now. The brokenness felt from a loss of a loved one, from the fear of getting Covid at a job that can’t be quit, from not having the answers we want, from seeing our kids try to cope. There’s a too-long list of ways we are broken right now.
Yet these moments of struggle are the very same moments when resilience and bravery come alive. Pema Chodron says, “Those times, when you absolutely cannot get it back together, are the most rich and powerful times in our lives.”
This is where transformation happens.
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, emphasizing the fractures instead of hiding them. These gorgeous pieces of pottery are fused together with ribbons of gold, making a map of all the cracks and giving the pottery a second life. The piece becoming more beautiful because it has been broken.
I have my own roadmap of heartbreak. It’s only since practicing meditation, mindfulness and self-compassion that the roadmap leads me more and more to grace and compassion, a destination where I accept more and resist less.
As the pandemic stretches onward with many challenges yet to overcome but many welcome signs of an end in sight, my wish for you is that you turn toward your own heart. Be generous with love and compassion for yourself. Open yourself to the possibility of transformation- a second life beyond this brokenhearted time. I think something beautiful awaits each and every one of us.
With Love, and Peace,
Leanna