Broken Hearted?

Have you ever experienced heartbreak? When you were a child, did you lose your favourite toy or were you hurt by your best friend? As you got older, maybe you were hurt by your first love or felt misunderstood by your parents? More recently, maybe you have experienced the loss of someone close to you or experienced rejection. When a relationship ends for whatever reason or we experience sadness or pain, we describe it as a ‘broken heart’.  Well, here is something interesting to think about…what if it isn't really your heart that breaks? What if the thing that you break is in fact, your ego?

Our ‘open-heart’ or our authenticity is a state where we feel everything – happiness AND sadness, gain AND loss, strength AND weakness. These feelings are a normal state of being. As we grow through experiences, we build strong resistance around our open-heart, to protect ourselves from pain, from things we decide we do not like to feel. This resistance is called Ego; it is what keeps us in the comfort zone, keeps us protected and keeps us safe. The ego has strong weapons attached to it - fear, anger, hatred, anxiety and discomfort.  When the walls of the ego are threatened, these weapons will start firing; one at a time or sometimes, all at once.

Experiences and the convictions of stories strengthen these weapons and it becomes harder and harder to enter an open-heart state. For example, you might find it risky to open your heart to a new love, because of the pain you had experienced in a previous relationship. So you beef up your resistance, to make sure you are ready for the threat should it become real. The resistance is activated even in the presence of potential happiness but you start firing anyway. Discomfort first, anxiety follows, fear sets in then anger erupts and eventually hatred grows. The resistance causes a lot of pain, a lot more than if the ego just breaks and allows the open-heart to simply feel all emotions, equally.  

When we experience sadness, the reality is, that is an authentic feeling. It is felt by the open-heart, because it is genuine. Similarly, feeling happiness is also by the open-heart, because it is genuine. We cannot truly feel one without the other, they come as a package deal…they also leave as a package deal.

So if your ego is already broken to feel genuine love, then it cannot re-break when you feel genuine pain. All you feel is pain. All you feel is love. They are only states of being. They do not become all of you. Just as a single water drop can never be the entire river, one single emotion is never all of your being. So, break your resistance and feel it all. Let them come and let them go and see where the river takes you.