
Recently I was speaking with a client whose heart was breaking open again over not being with a past love and life partner. Her heart had learned to brace against the pain it held, the pain of the missing, the pain of the memory left inside of their deep heart connection. And yet, in cycles this love/pain surfaces and her heart bursts open.
Now, for her, I know there was discomfort feeling all that sadness emerging. She described it as being “overwhelmed” by it. And yet. And yet. Suddenly the whole language of the heart was no longer silent, in fact it was singing loudly (yes, a mournful, wailing song) but IT WOULD NOT BE SILENCED.
What struck me most was not the pain but the love. In the depth of that pain, at the root of the pain, embedded in every expression of the pain was the power of her heart to love. The undeniable evidence of the vast capacity of her heart to love.
Along with the tenderness and vulnerability of her own heart connection was a longing for someone to receive her. In that moment, specifically her past partner. She could feel the warmth of how his heart received her. We sat together with this sensation as it arose and her heart and mine opened, opened to each other. My heart opened to my own pains as I was loving her. Her heart let the pain and the love flow out simultaneously.
There was no lack of being met, for either of us. And we were both being met by our own compassionate hearts. This is our true partner reflected in the partners and people who show up in our life. Our own hearts have the capacity to GIVE AND RECEIVE inside themselves.
The perfect partnership exists in the center of our hearts.
There is no denying an open heart. If another person is not there to receive it, then it receives itself. The pain from the heart is never alone, because it comes from the heart and so has love as the river in which the pain flows. So, strangely, pain does not exist without love in it.
And yet somehow we have learned that if there isn’t a person there to receive it then somehow we are alone, or broken, so we protect our hearts and keep them quiet. Like the true muscle they are, the heart can atrophy.
And here is where the greatest sadness lies. We stop daring to open our hearts over and over to others, thinking that somehow their receiving of it is what makes it possible to love.
In truth, we are the givers and the receivers of love, complete unto ourselves. And once we feel and trust this deeply, then the landscape changes completely and we can look for opportunities to “exercise” our heart muscle, letting it open and close, open and close until we truly know that there is only one heart beating in all of us — no separation, nothing to lose, nothing to need. Ever present LOVE.
The heart has nothing to lose.
So perhaps this holiday season you can begin to be a true partner to your own heart- noticing its contractions and expansions and daring to stay open as the pain and the love move through it.
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