The Heart Cannot be Broken

A friend on facebook wrote me the following;

The pain I feel is not going to go anywhere anyway..so why not to write to you. It might change nothing, yet it won't do any harm. Moreover, I am always happy to write to you, because you are so warm, gentle and kind.

The thing is now I am completely sure, now I know that my friend, of whom I wrote to you a few months ago, does not love me. This one line may sound so superficial, so silly to you, yet I felt a part of me has died.

Again as it always happens, I feel calm writing you. But these last days, whatever I tried ---looking for the sufferer, or not looking, trying to impose absolute hopelessness on me, repeating always in mind "who am I?"---nothing could ease the enormous pain in my chest. I felt like jumping out of my body, out of that all.

And this is my response:

Loss is like that. It just hurts. Even when there is nothing you can do to relieve the pain, you still might want to explore the experience you are having. Specifically, I would invite you to explore the part of you that feels like it has died. What is that like? If for just a moment, you completely allow it to feel dead, is it actually a bad sensation, or just a dead sensation? Our suffering always comes from our movement away from our sensations, not from the sensations themselves, even the most intense and enormous feelings. 

It can help to allow the pain to be bigger than your body. There is no need to contain it within your chest. Just let it be as big as it needs to be.

And then you can maybe also be curious. What is the pain like? Where exactly do you feel it? How big is it? What else is present besides the pain? If there is a feeling of deadness or emptiness, what is that like? What is present in the empty space? What is here inside the deadness?

The point of these questions is not really to get rid of the pain. It is to help you discover that it is OK to feel pain. The deepest healing is always to find out that there is nothing here that needs to be healed. Pain is natural and normal after a loss, and yet you do not need to suffer from it. Just let it be here, and you may find you are OK even if your heart is broken. Your heart can be broken wide open without actually damaging anything, because your true Heart cannot be broken. It is big enough to hold all of the pain and loss.

I hope this helps.