Recently I was with a friend of mine who had over the last year, put so much of his soul into a relationship with a woman only to have her break-up with him. Two weeks after she broke up with him he saw her walking down the street hand in hand with another man. He was deeply in love with her and ended up devastated and absolutely heart-broken.
We’ve all been there.
Some of us have invested so much of our energy into a relationship, family, career or project only to have it all fall apart, in spite of our most conscious and noble efforts. The pain can be overwhelming. We can go into shock and say its all okay or pretend we’re fine …”just water under the bridge, I’ll cope.”
In those times it can feel like something incredibly cold, hard and unyielding is up against the soft porosity of hearts. Nothing we’ve read or heard in the self-help books, the workshops, the inspirational tele-seminars and Cd’s on the shelf takes away the pain. All the success claims about how “you can have it all” just seem like bullshit when we stare blankly into our bowl of organic oatmeal and quinoa cereal in the morning and just can’t eat.
Sometimes we get the aphorisms from people, “there’s a blessing in all of this, you’ll find it”, “Time will heal your wounds” “This too shall pass”. We know they mean well but we can see they probably feel helpless to give any advice to cool the burning inside.
But the fact of the matter is there is no self-improvement method of getting over or getting through our deepest pain. We can’t technique it with mantra or manipulate it with positive thinking. Neither is there any wise process inspired by the ancients of getting under it or by it.
There is only one way ….just getting it.
Just getting it the way it is…the thing we most resist. But like the Borg, resistance is futile. We open to the terrible overwhelming intensity of it… like a raging flood that comes at us. The only thing we can do is surrender to it. It hits us and we hit the bottom. It has its way with us and throws us on the shore. And then just as we catch our breath it hits us again and we hit the bottom once more. And then the whole cycle begins again.
When we feel we can take no more the bottom falls out of it all and the sides and top too. We are broken open and tossed on the shore one last time. And as we crawl up on the bank we see the pieces of the shell we have been trapped in, scattered all around us…the storm had actually come from within us and in an odd way we feel a vague expanse as if our broken heart has been broken open.
The grass seems a bit greener, the sky a bit bluer. We feel more of the breeze on our skin. Our awareness is enhanced almost as if we are gazing through crystal. We are more present.
Somehow we know there is something deep and pure emerging in all of this. This is life and we have met it …truly met it with the fullness of ourselves.
We have become more real.
Far more real than all those theories and aphorism about life we have been entertaining in our heads. They are nothing compared to our reality. And as the pain subsides we notice something that always been there… oddly its joy…the joy of releasing ourselves into our experience.
We’ve gotten through this storm and maybe we can face the next one straight on next time.
We feel stronger … more resilient… more solidly authentic. There’s an insight that maybe this is what life is about…about being present in our suffering and in so doing we awake up to more of who we really are.
We breathe out knowing we’ve let go.
but there is something we have gained:
There is far more life now…
in our living.
Russell Scott