When Leo Searle’s fiance died, he knew he had to break out of his grief. This is what he learned.
It’s common parlance in the world to say that someone has a “broken heart” when they feel the painful emotions that come when a loved one dies or a relationship ends.
When Jenny, my fiancée, died, who was in every sense of the word other than legally, my wife, something in me also died. For some months I had no idea what it was. Looking back on that time, I can see now that I felt a bit like one of those departed souls who don’t know they’ve died and thus come back to haunt the places where they used to live.
The best analogy I’ve got to describe the utter devastation that followed Jenny’s death is that of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In an instant, vast tracts of my conditioned mind simply vaporised, never to return. And in the 16 months since that fateful day, the fallout has killed off much more.
But amid the desolate, flattened inner landscape of my mind, some aspect of who I am remained untouched.
|
But although the pain of her passing was more awful than anything I’d previously known, in a life that has been full of pain, my Heart, the essence of who I am, did not break. It cannot. It is impossible for the true spiritual Heart to break.
What were smashed were my dreams of the life Jenny and I wanted to live together. And we had a lot. We had everything planned out. We knew where we wanted to live. We knew exactly what we wanted to do with our lives together. We planned to be legally married amid the red rocks of Sedona, a place we both adored. Broken were all those dreams, broken was my future, broken was my will to live, or even exist, in a way I’d never imagined possible.
All this I believe is what the world calls a “broken heart.” But amid the desolate, flattened inner landscape of my mind, some aspect of who I am remained untouched, remained alive like the seed of a flower buried so deep in the ground that even a nuclear bomb could not harm it.
♦◊♦
Resurrection
Despite the benefit of a lifetime of meditation and many awakenings to spiritual reality, it was still hard at first for me to locate this untouched essence I call “the Heart”. For what seemed the longest time I just wanted to die, to leave this world behind and be with my beloved again.
These are words I never knew the truth, the reality, of until Jenny died. Oh, I had read of people feeling this way. But nothing in my life to that point had prepared me for the shock of the reality, the overwhelming desire to leave this life.
Don’t get me wrong. I was not suicidal. I know that place. And this was not that. No, it was simply a yearning to leave this corner of the universe to be with her. It could be compared perhaps to the way someone may feel if their beloved had gone to live on the other side of the planet, leaving them with the deepest yearning to make the journey to join them.
Fortunately, through the darkness a glimmer of light gradually grew stronger and brighter. And as this light grew, so the pain began to lessen. Not all at once. No. Gradually, day after day after day through practicing all I had written about in my book, Break Out of Your Mind, an inner life began to return.
It felt as if that deeply buried seed began sprouting green shoots of new life, pushing it’s way to the surface, to the light, just as I imagine must have happened amid the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I began to feel a renewed hope for the future, similar perhaps to the way new plant growth may have given hope to the people of Japan that even a nuclear holocaust had not destroyed the essence of life.
♦◊♦
The Way
The painful emotions, called by the world a “broken heart”, dissolved by my taking four simple steps to come into conscious relationship with the pain.
You may like to test these simple steps, which are beyond mere mind techniques, for yourself:
- Acknowledge your pain – tell yourself the truth and bring awareness to your experience
- Accept your pain the way it is – simply let it be exactly the way it is, as best you can
- Forgive whomever or whatever you have blamed for causing your pain – including yourself
- Give thanks for your pain – express gratitude for your entire experience
How it works:
Step 1. Telling yourself the truth and fully acknowledging your pain brings the intelligent power of awareness to your painful experience. Once it’s exposed to the light of awareness, your pain cannot impact your life the way it once did. This one step can be deeply transformative, even if you do nothing else.
As Jesus said, “The truth will make you free”. In the case of a “broken heart” the truth can set you free from your pain.
It’s similar to the way the truth will expose someone who has been telling lies. Once a lie is exposed by the truth, it will never again be believed. The lie in this case is that your heart has been broken.
Step 2. What we resist, persists, as the great psychologist Carl Jung said. When you do anything other than let your pain simply be as it is – by judging it as wrong and then attempting to change it, fix it, or suppress it for example – you are resisting your pain.
These actions seem reasonable to the rational mind. Of course you want the pain gone! But unfortunately doing anything with your pain has the effect of perpetuating the pain. It’s a catch-22 situation: you want the pain gone but all attempts to get rid of the pain only lead to it continuing.
Your rational mind will not be able to make any sense of this. It’s counter-intuitive to the n’th degree. And please don’t settle on believing or disbelieving me. Give it a try and see what happens in the practical world. Then you will know through your own experience.
The Beatles sang of this profound truth so many year ago in Sir Paul McCartney’s classic song, inspired by a dream in which his mother, Mary, came to him and spoke these now immortal words: Let it be. “Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be, let it be. Whisper words of wisdom, let it be …”
Step 3. When a relationship breaks up, for whatever reason, we can easily slip into judgements of the one we are no longer with. “They should have …” They shouldn’t have …” And so on, and so on.
Even though I loved her totally, when Jenny died judgements about her and her family arose in me because there were aspects of her death that I found extremely hurtful. Fortunately I was able to see my judgements for what they really were – only thoughts playing out on the cinema screen of my mind.
The paradox of forgiveness is that the one who forgives benefits more than the one who is forgiven. When we hold on to our judgements we create our own pain. And when we forgive, and let go of those contracted, painful thoughts. We stop hurting ourselves.
It’s only a choice. Whatever or whomever you see as the cause of your pain, you can continue to judge them. And thus you will continue to suffer. Or you can let your judgements go, forgive those you have judged, and enjoy the peace that naturally takes the place of the pain.
Step 4. Giving thanks for your pain is perhaps the hardest of all to make sense of. After all, who in their right mind wants to feel pain? Who want to go around feeling that their world has broken apart? What’s to give thanks for in all that?
I have no rational argument with which to persuade you of the immense power of gratitude. It’s easy to be grateful for all the good things in life: our relationship, our car, our home, our money, our health, and so on.
But it’s not so easy to give thanks for our pain. And yet, in my experience at least, when we do, a miracle happens and the pain dissolves.
I believe this is because when we give thanks, not for any particular reason, just giving thanks, our attention goes to the quality of gratitude. At the same time our attention tends to drop away from our pain.
Then, as what we give our attention to tends to grow, to become greater, the quality of gratitude gradually takes the place of our pain. We feel warmer, kinder, vaster in ways that truly only the great poets have been able to capture in words.
I suggest you try giving thanks for everything in your life. Give thanks for the sunshine and the rain. Give thanks for the good times and the bad. Give thanks for your pleasure and for your pain. See what happens. After all, what have you got to lose, except your pain?
♦◊♦
What I’ve written about here fully came home to me only when Jenny died. I knew most of these principles at a certain level before, but moving through the pain of her death took me deeper than I previously knew was possible.
A subtle level of selfishness died in me that previously I was unaware even existed. We could call it ego, for want of a better word. It was a subtle feeling of being separate from others and even from life itself. And so I can only be grateful that through her death my beloved drew the veil of illusory separation from my eyes. Her death opened a portal to a depth of aliveness and love that is a true blessing, a real everyday miracle.
Love has not changed. Love has not died. Love has not been broken …
|
It feels as if I’ve “broken out” of the eggshell of ego. The shell cracked open and daily I’m discovering what it is to be truly alive, born again into this world free of false identification with all objects and experience.
What I’ve learned is that what survives death, without any doubt whatever, is love. No event in this world can damage true love. Not even death can so much as scratch the surface of love.
Love is immortal because it does not live in time and space but in another realm that we can only catch glimpses of during our sojourn in this world of mortality.
Maybe Jenny knows this other realm more fully now. There is no way I can know for sure. All I do know, and of this I am certain, is that whenever I think of her my Heart is as full of love and light and life as ever it was when she was alive in body.
I see no evidence that my Heart, which in my view is the center of Love, has in any way been broken or damaged even through the immense pain of this last 16 months.
Love has not changed. Love has not died. Love has not been broken …
—
This post is republished on Medium.
***
The Good Men Project gives people the insights, tools, and skills to survive, prosper and thrive in today’s changing world. A world that is changing faster than most people can keep up with that change. A world where jobs are changing, gender roles are changing, and stereotypes are being upended. A world that is growing more diverse and inclusive. A world where working towards equality will become a core competence. We’ve built a community of millions of people from around the globe who believe in this path forward. Thanks for joining The Good Men Project.
Support us on Patreon and we will support you and your writing! Tools to improve your writing and platform-building skills, a community to get you connected, and access to our editors and publisher. Your support will help us build a better, more inclusive world for all.
***
Photo credit: iStock
The whole idea of a “broken heart” has long seemed like something cliched out of a Mills and Boon romance novel to me( never mind the idea that you could actually die from it)- not until I looked up the phrase on Wikipedia did I realize that it could actually come true( see Wikipedia entry for “Takutsobo”). “You broke my heart once- this time you missed!” Mina Harker deadpans as she stabs her former paramour and pins him to the wall in the 2003 film “The League Of Extraodirnary Gentleme” before forcing him to look at his aged and hideous… Read more »
Thank you Leo, it’s exactly the article I need right now
“it’s been more a case of pig-headed persistence and determination to discover the truth of real and lasting healing.” Sounds familiar, guess there is hope for me….
On reflection I thought to add this comment, just in case there are any cynics lurking around who think I’m living in a fantasy world around the full and complete healing from grief, which Cruse – the UK charity for bereavement care – tell me is impossible. They promote a terrible message that “you cannot heal from grief but can only learn to live with it” – and pump this into the minds of extremely vulnerable people. My experience of death includes both my parents, both my brothers (I have no sisters), all my aunts and uncles, a friend who… Read more »
Thank you for sharing your 4 simple steps to mending a broken heart; acknowledge, accept, forgive and be grateful. In a society that negates the necessity for grieving, your approach is sound and allows one to move through the experience with a plan while addressing the pain. Thank you so much for sharing your brilliance!
Thank you Charlon. I’m not sure about my brilliance however! 🙂 it’s been more a case of pig-headed persistence and determination to discover the truth of real and lasting healing. As I suspect you may already have perceived, all four steps are founded upon, and are differing expressions of, unconditional love – the one true healer. I should perhaps have mentioned that at the first step it is important to fully – consciously – feel the pain, and allow it to flow through us. I wrote about this in another of my articles. Always tricky to know what to put… Read more »