BREAK YOUR HEART BETTER
“You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.”
– Rumi
Rumi, the Sufi poet and mystic, not only thinks broken hearts are good medicine but he encourages us to break our hearts as often as possible! Or at least until we open up inside. Either Rumi is a whacked-out sadist with no real idea how awful grief and heartbreak is, or he is saying something revolutionary..
We don’t normally think suffering leads to open-heartedness in the same way we don’t automatically think failure leads to success. And yet the most successful among us are those willing to learn from their mistakes and “fail better next time.” Likewise, Rumi gently suggests we break our hearts better next time.
If you so desire, you can turn your broken-heartedness into open-heartedness. That’s the natural progress of grief when we honour our pain. When we respect and make room for sorrow, our humanity flourishes with a humble, open acceptance. We let down our guard. We open the border. We let in the world and let out our lamentation. We learn that sharing rather than protecting our brokenness is the key to healing and the pathway to love.
There are many people, therapists and grief professionals who promote the idea that grief has no silver lining. They insist that grief is nothing but a bleak empty pit of suffering and that your job is to accept the meaninglessness of the experience. While I do accept that grief has bleak, meaningless, hopeless times, and that these must be fully embraced, I have yet to see a negative human experience that cannot be converted into wisdom, self-compassion and power for living.
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl writes: “When a man finds it is his destiny to suffer… his unique opportunity lies in the way he bears his burden.” It is easy to resign ourselves to brokenness. It is sublime to learn to break your heart better…
Breaking our hearts better is not an act of self-harm. He isn’t asking us to smash our hearts against a brick wall until they bleed. We can get really caught up in the hurt and the damage that we experience when someone dies. Especially if the death was traumatic or sudden. We can get lost in the awfulness and the injustice of the event until there is nothing else for us to feel. This is how we become stuck. Instead of this, Rumi points us toward something that is essential in the process of suffering after a loss. Rumi asks us to remember that as we break, we open. And in that opening there is opportunity and space.
But more importantly, Rumi is saying that breaking is how we heal! During grief we are called to deepen our understanding of death and love and how they mix. Until we can hold love and death at the same time we will flee one toward the other. Ultimately, love must contend with loss. Love’s job during grief is to make a place for itself within the house of death. And death must open its doors to love. Until love can embrace death, we remain only broken and rarely open. The broken heart of grief must open to death, must open and embrace it even as it shudders at what has been lost. Eventually, our hearts remain open to our grief, to the reality and finality of death. We come to understand the naturalness of death. Everything dies. Everything we love will die. We will die. The broken heart of grief helps us remember and come to terms with this great human truth—that love and a shared life with people is special because they are fleeting.
And so as we break, we open. As we open, we accept and heal. If you can, if you dare, break your heart better today. Then break it better tomorrow, too. With time and attention, a broken heart becomes an open heart, and an open heart can expand infinitely, holding our deceased in the wide open embrace of unfettered love.