So what comes after the addiction and the detox I wrote about in my last blogs? Shockingly, I found out; the heartbreak. My heart broke this last weekend. Now you may find that a sentimental statement, but I am one of those people that can -the same as with falling in love- identify the exact moment, minute even, it happens. And all of us who have lived long enough to have their hearts broken one way or another know that it’s just the biggest, most vast sadness that our hearts can hold. Actually, this sadness is so great that our hearts cannot hold it, so they break. Voila.

I had the strange luck to participate in a meditation program right after my heartbreak, so I had the painful opportunity of watching my bleeding heart from REALLY UNCOMFORTABLY close by. At one point, I was sitting across a beautiful arrangement of flowers that included a branch with spring blossoms. The pure sight of it caused me to helplessly cry for a full morning because it made me so unexplainably sad; having something to do with the contrast of promise and new life when something inside of me was only busy dying. Needless to say, spring is an awful time for heartbreak.

So what the hell do we do with our broken heart? With all the strength we can muster, we surrender and freefall to the bottoms of our human heart, where there seems to be so much sadness awaiting us, and we touch it. Now this might seem poetic, but believe me, nobody, including myself, wants to go there. In fact we give anything not to go there. But to the extent that we are willing to touch and smell our messed up, snotty, bleeding broken hearts, we are connected to our humanity because to be alive means to have a broken heart a lot of the time. It is a natural and appropriate reaction to being alive.

But like warriors that are brave enough to touch even our broken hearts, we can develop strength to freefall. Touching a broken heart is not to be taken lightly and takes strength. This strength comes not from hardening ourselves, from telling ourselves to toughen up, but it comes from developing confidence; the confidence that we are completely and utterly able to be exactly who we are, where we are. By developing this kind of confidence, we become individuals that are not afraid to reach down and touch the immense sadness that too is life. More to come on ways to build up this confidence these next week (I hopefully promise myself and you) while my broken heart sings a sad song that I suspect to be older than humanity.