Every fracture is a doorway, if you’re willing to go through it.
The Echoes We Carry
How do we heal a broken heart? That’s not an easy question, but here’s what I think.
The heart is always reflecting back to us something of our past. What we consider to be a broken heart from our current situation – if we look deeper at it, if we trace it back to its potential origins, to the first time we ever experienced a similar feeling – it will take us to a place, a time and space, when there was originally some kind of fracture.
Some pain. Some moment of fear that left a little imprint on the cellular walls of who we are.
Like the rings inside a tree, every experience leaves its imprint. Some seasons nourish us. Others split us open. And sometimes what appears to be today’s wound is simply an older one asking, once again, to be seen in the light.
The heart doesn’t break in the present. It remembers something much older. And the breaking is the invitation to finally go there.
Meeting Our Full Spectrum
Where there is pain, where there is a broken heart, there’s a multitude of reactions and coping mechanisms that fire. Some destructive. Some non-destructive. And then all the ones in between – the whole gorgeous, messy, very human spectrum.
The way I look at it is that we actually heal a broken heart by getting to know our full spectrum. By getting to know the coping mechanisms that can be destructive, that can sometimes pull us further away from our own self-understanding.
By becoming curious about the parts of us that act out when we feel abandoned, unseen, afraid or broken, we allow them to teach us something. Because even our defense mechanisms carry wisdom. Our survival strategies were, at some point, expressions of love, trying to protect us.
Time Is Part of the Medicine
To heal a broken heart we need time to explore all the layers. We need time. And that’s wisdom. It’s real. It takes time. But ultimately- what do we do with that time?
I can sit around and drink tea and cry. Or I can practice yoga. Or I can talk to my friends. Or I can journal. Or I can punch a pillow.
All of it has its place. All of it is part of the spectrum. And all of it, if approached with even a drop of consciousness, begins to reveal something. About the pattern. About the original imprint. About the particular frequency of pain that this broken heart is carrying – and where it was first learned.
Healing unfolds in seasons, much like everything else in nature. No flower blooms because it was rushed. No forest grows overnight. The earth never apologizes for taking the time it needs to regenerate after a fire.
Going to the Roots
To explore all of the different layers that come up to the surface when we feel hurt – all of those layers teach us something about ourselves.
If we do so consciously, we start to navigate back to the origins of the original pain. The deeper layers. So that we’re not just trying to heal the superficial wound. Not band-aiding, but descending gently into the places beneath it. Not putting a sweet coating over something that needs to be fully felt, fully seen, fully metabolized.
And what I’ve found, every single time, is that what’s actually going on is older than this situation. Older than this relationship. Older than this version of you. It’s something that has been waiting, very patiently, in the body- for exactly this moment of breaking to finally be seen.
Perhaps this is what healing really is. Not making the pain disappear, but becoming someone who can sit beside every fractured part of themselves with enough presence that it no longer has to carry its story alone.
And maybe, little by little, that is how the heart remembers that it has never lost its capacity to love.
With so much love,
Meghan