When hearts seem to break, they're mendable.
A lot of us know what a broken heart feels like. There are degrees of brokenness, of course, but we know the general feeling.
While I was feeling a bit broken myself one day, and worrying about some of my friends who had told me their hearts had been broken, the thought appeared, “But the heart is a muscle, not a bone.”
Now that may seem very anatomical for something like a broken heart, but having been a dancer much of my early life, I knew that muscles can be torn, sprained, and tweaked, but not broken. There are degrees to muscle damage, but the main thing is almost all damage can heal, in fact, the body is set up for the muscles to mend and come back to their normal function.
Just so the heart can feel broken, I thought, but it can grow back. Can heal.
How, I wondered. Maybe it's in the same way the muscles are repaired; patience, care, and a return to healthy, normal action.
Most coaches will tell you not to exercise a badly strained muscle. A muscle that feels broken. Not to willfully try to make it better. Patience is needed to mend, and that’s ok since it allows space for reflection and prayer, for a higher view that allows the vague outlines of hope and healing to come into focus; to be re-solved.
If we are recovering from an injury of any kind, it’s important to care for ourselves, to rest when we need to, to make wise choices, to put self will aside.
So with the heart. We need to be kind and thoughtful not only to ourselves, but to the other part of the broken heart, the other one involved, in order for both of us to heal.
And heal we can.
The third step, a return to normal action, may be the hardest of all since it demands trust and courage and faith. It can be a tough choice, -- to return to the often cold and choppy waters of human relationships, —of trusting others with our love. But, if we don’t go back into those waters we will never use the muscles the way they are meant to be used, — fully, in all directions, with endurance and strength and flexibility.
Why? So we can express what we were put here to express. Do what we need to do to be of use. And be able to improve and expand our lives on this earth.
The heart can’t be broken because it’s not made of breakable materials. It’s meant to mend and to recover and to get back to the business of freely giving, fearlessly loving, of stretching with grace and assurance. To return to its original wholeness.
Everyone’s original wholeness.
