What Does a Heartbreak Feel Like?
Q: What Does a Heartbreak Feel Like?
A: With the waves crashing over my soul, the sun beating down on my flesh, I shed some tears in the ethereal presence of love. For years I have lived with a silent ring of protection around my heart, afraid to venture too far in any one direction despite my curiosities.
Recently my heart was invited to expand, to grow beyond my comfort and to experience the unknown edge of love, a divine frontier shapeshifting into every spectrum of emotion.
Love. I feel it, I really feel it and in love I experience a wholeness that is home in every way. This love is a gift, a nectar of life that pours through me without reservation. There is no controlling the flow, the power, the essence of this fluid and wild nature. My heart, “protected” by fear, gives way to the flood and I expand into feeling. Feeling alive, feeling grace, feeling newness and rejuvenation of self.
What have I found in the invitation of love? Shame…heaps of it. The light of love has illuminated shame, encrusted from a time past. Eyes of those I have loved are seen staring me down in the figments of my mind’s imagination. Those who have judged me or still see me in a certain construct perhaps created by false testimony look upon me with a weight I have carried in my lower back. I feel the aches, I feel the healing moving through me as I no longer need to carry what others think about me, whether true or false.
So where is the heartbreak in all of this? It surges through my memory, it surges through my present. Where have I given my heart into moments of unrequited love? In community, lovers, best friends and in hopes and dreams…? The current unknown continues to seduce me, alluring me into what, who knows? More expansive states of love? Loving regardless of the evidence that it is safe to do so? Invitations to be present with another and see myself in their light and shadows? Compassion in every direction? Perhaps God knows, and even so I have free will to make my own choices, shaping the life I create in my every thought, word, heartbeat, feeling and action. Every step a new path, every moment a new possibility.
And right now, in this breath, I am so thankful to feel into my heart, broken open before the great ocean’s mist.
