Your
days pass like rainbows, like a flash of lightning, like a star at dawn. Your
life is short. How can you quarrel?”~Buddha
In
the Jewish mystical tradition, one great Rabbi taught his disciples to memorize
and contemplate the teachings and place the prayers and holy words on their
heart. One day a student asked the Rabbi why he always used the phrase “on your
heart” and not “in your heart,” and the master replied, “Only time and grace
can put the essence of these stories in your heart. Here we recite and learn
them and put them on our hearts hoping that some day when our heart breaks they
will fall in.”
But
when our heart breaks—in love, in friendship, in partnership—it is always a
very difficult experience. Modern neuroscience has even discovered that the
emotional suffering we experience registers in the same areas of the brain as
physical pain. So when we’re feeling abandoned and rejected, we don’t want to
eat, we can’t sleep, we have difficulty breathing, our bodies feel as if we
have the flu or we’ve been run over by a truck.
So,
what can we do when we have to accept the loss of a friend, a lover, or a loved
one? What truth can we find beyond the stories we tell ourselves about how
they’re wrong and we’re right, or that we’re wrong and they’re right? What can
we do besides spending fruitless hours trying decipher everything they said or
did? Can we do something more useful than justifying to ourselves what we said
or did, or wishing that we had said or done something else? And what can we do
when the story spreads to nearly drown us in despair over feelings that there’s
something wrong with us, that we’re unlovable, that we’re the reason things didn’t
work out?
Like a sandcastle, all is
temporary.
Build it, tend it, enjoy it.
And when the time comes
let it go.
The
first thing you need to do when you’ve suffered loss or betrayal is to find a
way to regain your wise heart so that you can let it hold the aching of your
heart. The Zen teacher Karlfried Von Durckheim speaks of the importance of the
need to go through our difficulties in a conscious and clear way.
The
person who, already being on the way, falls upon hard times in the world, will
not as a consequence turn to those friends who offered them refuge and comfort
and encourage their old self to survive. Rather, they will seek out someone who
will faithfully and inexorably help them to risk themselves, so they may endure
the difficulty and pass courageously through it. Only to the extent that a
person exposes themselves over and over again to annihilation and loss can that
which is indestructible be found within them. In this daring lie dignity and
the spirit of true awakening.
Sometimes
suffering the losses and the unexpected betrayals and break-ups that befall
each of us becomes the places where we grow deepest in our capacity to lead an
authentic and free life. Here is where the heart grows in dignity and care. By
grieving honorably and tenderly and working our way through our difficulties,
our ability to love and feel compassion for ourselves and others deepens, along
with the trust that will help us through similar problems in the future.
Breathe.
Remember, there are countless others who have suffered in this way and gotten
through it. We are not alone. Learning how to survive our present difficulties
is one of the few things that will help us to know the right things to say and
do when others whom we love suffer as well.
- Jack Kornfield
Please go here for the original essay: https://jackkornfield.com/zen-aching-heart/
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