Heartbreak in the Soul
Weekly Reading Topic for February 1, 2020: Heartbreak in the Soul
Well, good morning, love! I just opened a Reading for you, my newsletter subscribers and here’s what I heard in answer to the following:
What do my readers most need to hear this weekend? What is the most important message to send to my beloved readers?
The answer was: “heartbreak in the soul.”
What follows is your weekly reading, dear one. May it bring you strength and peace.
Weekly Reading │ Heartbreak in the Soul
Q: What do we need to know about “heartbreak in the soul?”
A: There’s a pain that cuts deep, right through the bone, and our angels/guides are calling it “heartbreak in the soul.”
This is the kind of pain that rises from the bowl of the pelvis, from the very joints of our hips, the kind that seems to come up from the ground and rush through our body, scraping our tissues as it rises in a groan and exits our mouth in that sighing, guttural gasp.
If you’ve seen a mother — or been a mother — keening for the loss of her child, you are familiar with this. This heartbreak occurs when something that we rely on as part of our identity turns out to be false, or fragile, or permanently altered, or gone, seemingly forever.
Our souls carry our deepest … blueprint, I think is the best English word. When we decided to come here and be We, we had intentions, and our souls remember those intentions, track our commitment and sense of purpose.
And when we look in the mirror and see that we have lost someone, or lost our way, or that we have torn up that blueprint, or ignored it while we built a different life, it hurts.
It hurts really, really badly.
Distractingly.
If this were a movie scene, it would be the one where the beautiful person sees their reflection in an unguarded moment and sees a monster underneath. Their shock and horror is terrifying, almost more than the reality they confront.
It’s brain-breaking.
Usually we think of this heartbreak as occurring on an individual level. Our neighbor loses his wife to that terrible cancer that reduced her to a puddle of swollen flesh. Our friend’s child commits suicide. Our dog dies, taking their joyful presence and unconditional positive regard with them. We grieve for our friends, for ourselves. We say “how can this be borne?” and “it’s not fair.”
We fear our own heartbreak coming to us someday, or we remember our previous heartbreaks, which feel like tender bone bruises reawakened.
Collective heartbreak in the soul is not really common, surprisingly. By which I mean it’s not often that a great many people experience this heartbreak at exactly the same time, or in the same way, for the same reasons. There just aren’t that many collective experiences that are large enough to affect us all. There are several we can point to, of course, all of which you are probably cataloging now as you read this. War, famine, plague. Cataclysmic weather events.
So why is this coming up this weekend? Because so, so, so many of us are feeling a heartbreak of the soul right now.
Today in almost every part of the globe, there is something happening that is so painful it feels as if it is breaking our brains, ripping up our identities, and making us question … everything. We’re all in some ways engaged in heartbreak of the soul. There is a fragile quality to our interesting times that we all feel. We are all affected by the seismic shifts. Even the planet is, as it wobbles farther on its axis than it has in millennia.
We feel unsteady inside, off-kilter, tilted. And this groaning pain keeps rising up in us, whether we pay attention to the news or not.
There isn’t a cure for this heartbreak, either. There’s never a cure for heartbreak. There is only relief from it.
To “heal” heartbreak is to go through it. So this week, when so many of us are suffering, let’s study how to grieve, how to manage the heartbreak of the soul. Because if you aren’t personally affected by this, someone you love almost certainly is.
First, you must acknowledge the reality of what’s happening. When you find out that something you relied upon is not true any longer, it SUCKS.
It is disorienting and painful and you want to run away, duck your head under the covers, numb out. You go over and over the situation, trying to figure out what went wrong, how it happened, why it happened, and usually, this is not because you actually need the answers to these questions … but rather because you think the answers (which are not likely to come) will let you GO BACK IN TIME AND FIX IT.
And that is impossible. Once the death has completed itself, there is no reconstruction.
The Japanese have a method of restoring pottery that has shattered. They use gold to mend the cracks. They don’t do this with everything, just with items that are particularly beautiful to begin with. The idea is that adding gold to the wounds will only make the beautiful piece even more so.
By highlighting the scars and making them precious, they honor the pain caused by the destruction.
They are also making the point that you cannot ever truly mend a piece. You can only put the pieces back together with a tough glue — and you might as well make it beautiful.
This is a type of resurrection, which is the only way to heal a heartbreak of the soul. Remember, in a resurrection story the person/deity comes back, but they are not the same. They are changed in a fundamental way.
Resurrection is a new way of life, always.
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Resurrection is not always calm and meditative like pottery mending must be. It can come in other forms, too. We can dive down, down, down, into our sadness, allowing ourselves to rest in total relaxation at the bottom of the deep well of pain, allowing the spasms of grief to take our bodies through whatever motions they need. We lay there, just allowing the grief to work its way through us, to shake us, moan us, cry, swell, snot us. To make wordless utterances and dancing wails.
We can do this, endlessly it always seems, until suddenly we are completely still, lying at the bottom of the well, staring up through the now-clear water at the night sky above, where a thin crescent moon shines like silver beads on a string. As we lie there, floating in our deep, we feel the peace of the complete surrender we’ve made to our heartbreak, to the shattering we’ve experienced. We lie there, soaking in the moon’s glitter gaze, and barely notice the slow movement of our body, resting but rising, as our first deep breath after the writhing gasps comes to us, filling our now-relaxed rib cage with oxygen.
We rise, and rise, and rise, until the moon is full over our head and we are floating on the top of the well, and we find that yes, we can right ourselves, and reach for the ladder rungs, and pull ourselves out of the well of our heartbreak, and take the towel that is offered, the hot tea, the delicious food.
Or we can muscle through it. We can delay the shaking, the crying, the patient threading of gold through the tiny shards. We can try to avoid it all, and use our mighty human wills to ignore the pain and try to Solve the Problem.
But if we do not grieve fully before deciding upon solutions, guess what happens?
More heartbreak. Guaranteed.
You cannot avoid the grieving. And even when you fall fully into your grief, allow yourself to feel it and let it push you around and change you, it may still return, later, although usually with less intensity. Grief is something we carry with us, especially soul grief. We grow around it, like a tree grows around an axe left buried in its trunk. It’s still there, no matter how much we grow, and it can still twinge, even years, even decades later.
If this Reading resonates with you; if you currently feel this sickening in your bloodstream, this queasiness in your bones, this distraction in your mind, recognize: you are heartsick. Your soul is heartbroken.
And you can try to go about your day as if you are fine, and well, and in control of your life … but you will not get out of the grieving.
Eventually, you will need to untangle your heartbreak, and you will need to honor yourself and the depth of your love (which is equal to the depth of your loss) with gold.
There truly is gold we can apply to the problems we face individually and collectively. But if we are still heartbroken — if we have not at least allowed ourselves to acknowledge that — our efforts will be too little, unconvincing.
This requires patience, mostly with ourselves. The kind of patience it takes to untangle a dozen knots, like the ones found in a tangle of necklaces, where knots nest within knots, and you must sit, following each thread, letting some dangle while you work on others, finding the places where there is give and letting the harder places wait until later.
So this weekend, have patience, and great love for yourself if you are feeling broken. And if you don’t feel that way, have patience and great love for others who do.
The only way the human race can cope with this planet that is tilting and shifting and wobbling is by staying centered and trusting our own inner balance. We can do this, but only when we stay fluid, recognize that we are truly underwater and that the water is what decides the direction. The currents are strong now, and fighting is futile. Allow yourself to relax and follow the riptide to where it will take you, and then swim parallel to shore until it drops you back on the sand.
This is not a test. This is the real thing. It’s time to take care of ourselves in ways we have never had to before, so we can care for each other with the same loving, patient intensity.
I am always here to serve in any way I can.
Much Love to You!
Molly
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