By MEA’s Head of Mindfulness and Movement, Teddi Dean
In a world filled with sadness and suffering, it can be tempting to build walls around our hearts to protect them from the pain that comes with loss, disappointment, and change – whether it’s our own or someone else’s.
But if you want to experience this life in its fullest, I invite you to consider this daily practice: let your heart break once a day.
Take a moment each day and bear witness to something that tugs tenderly at your heart. This doesn’t have to be the obvious sufferings of the world, such as wars and natural disasters, but can be something more subtle.
It could be watching an elderly person shuffling themselves across the street as you wait at a stoplight, or observing the person across from you at the doctor’s office with an expression of dread on their face, or suddenly realizing while sitting in traffic that all the other people stuck in traffic with you are also just trying to make their way through this life the best way they know how.
When we have the courage to let our hearts break, it allows us to experience this life outside of our own story. This is truly the way compassion works.
If we are to love, we must learn to grieve, since everything we hold close and dear to our hearts will someday leave us. Love cannot exist without grief. This is just part of the bargain.
It is a gift to allow yourself to feel heartbreak on an embodied level, knowing that the heart is a very deep well that is perfectly capable of feeling everything that comes with our human experience.
And it’s only by letting your heart break that you discover your own inner resilience and what you’re actually capable of surviving.
A heart that knows how to break regularly and to be open to grief repeatedly is one that can weather any storm and embrace the fullness of life with all its infinite joys and sorrows.