If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.
—Andrew Harvey
Perhaps you’ve heard it said that the only heart worth having is a broken heart. How can this be?
So much of Western culture mitigates against heartbreak, as if it were the worst thing that could befall any human being. We strategize and design our romantic encounters with, frequently, inordinate caution in order to avoid heartbreak. We are terrified of hurting or being hurt.
Yet Andrew Harvey says that one purpose of the heart is to break, so that it can open—over and over—in order to hold more wonders. In a culture that invariably hardens the heart and usurps our humanity, heartbreak is required if we are to become compassionate, caring human beings. We develop empathy not by avoiding suffering but by passing through it repeatedly.
It is no accident that, in the culture of industrial civilization, heart disease is among the top causes of death. Our hearts are “congested” and “fail” us, and we attempt to “bypass” them so as to avoid their being “attacked.” The metaphors we use in the treatment of heart disease are very telling; they could only occur in a culture of hardened hearts. Many more people die of heartbreak than our statistics reveal. Yet if heartbreak is normal, why do people die from it?
I believe that heartbreak is only fatal when we resist it. When we can open to it and allow our grief to gush forth from the chest and solar plexus, heartbreak becomes a sacred rite of passage—a spiritual initiation. Moreover, allowing visceral energy to flow in the body rather than constricting it can only contribute to our wholeness and well-being.
In a collapsing world, our hearts will probably be broken more times than we can imagine. In fact, the magnitude of heartbreak could become overwhelming, and therefore, it may be necessary to protect our hearts at times—though not by hardening them—in order to care for ourselves and prudently channel our life-force energy. The body and soul will signal their warnings. Our work is to listen.