The Spiritual Benefit of a Broken Heart

Four Reasons to Keep Your Heart Breakable

I know, intimately, the pain of a broken heart. In my life, it’s been caused by many things: unrequited love, the death of family members, and letting go of friends that are near and dear to me.

Sometimes, it’s like a two-ton elephant is sitting on your chest; breathing feels impossible. Just pulling in air takes all the energy you have.

It’s like being weighed down, feet encased in cement; life somehow keeps moving forward around you, but you’re sinking into the depths of your grief, drowning.

And you think, “I can’t do this. I’m not strong enough,” and maybe even in your darkest moments you pray to whatever merciful God is up there that you don't have to anymore, that some benevolent being strikes you down out of grace instead of wrath, to spare you further pain.

“You have to break muscle down to build it back up stronger.” — The Science of Health

We will do just about anything to prevent ourselves from having to experience pain like that. Some things we can’t control: like aging, terminal illness, or freak accidents. But if we can control it, we attempt to with an iron will. Our egos work overtime to protect us from what we deem avoidable heartbreak.

This usually looks like being emotionally closed off and distant. We keep ourselves from being vulnerable. We pretend we don’t care. We shut our hearts down.

But the heart is a muscle.

And what are the qualities of muscles? Excitability, contractility, extensibility, and elasticity. That is, they respond to stimulus, contract, extend, and snap back to their original shape afterward.

Muscles become more flexible with stretching. They become more durable with strengthening. If left still and unused, muscles atrophy.

So too does the heart.

The heart, like all other muscles, must be trained — stretched and strengthened. It’s elastic, and though we often feel it will burst from stretching too far past its capacity, this is how expansion works.

During strength training, we create micro-tears in our muscles. We feel aches the next day, we rest, we recover, then that muscle rebuilds itself back stronger. We have to break muscle down to build it up.

The heart is the very same way. It breaks over and over only to grow more resilient.

I’ve found that being on an awakened path of spiritual growth brings more heartbreak, not less. But this is by design.

Every time the heart breaks, it reconstructs itself with greater ability than it had before. Here are just a few ways heartbreak can benefit you and your spiritual journey:

You realize you can do hard things.

Heartbreak teaches you that you’re stronger than you think you are. You can survive this. You can support yourself through this. When you find the strength to keep moving forward, you prove to yourself that your determination, your grit, is enough to get you through anything. You’re less afraid of whatever hardships might come your way.

You realize being soft is okay too.

Heartbreak also, somewhat paradoxically, helps you understand that it’s okay to be gentle with yourself. It fairly demands it. You learn that making room to feel, breathe, process, and heal is important. Giving yourself the time and space to grieve teaches you that building respite into your life is vital and valuable.

Your pain brings you closer to the Divine.

I talked about praying to God, earlier, and I wasn’t being dramatic. These moments of heartbreak can bring us to our knees. It’s a pain so raw that our egos are temporarily cowed and humbled.

All that’s left is the bare core of us, crying out for some kind of clarity or support. Being flayed open this way brings about a moment of true surrender. And that can bring us closer to whatever higher intelligence or higher aspect of self we believe in.

You expand your capacity to love unconditionally.

This one is likely to feel opaque to anyone who hasn’t experienced it personally. But I can attest that when your heart is broken open and allowed to remain open, rather than boarded up out of self-protection, that openness leads to a greater capacity to love others.

What do I mean? Well, you feel more connected to people. There’s a warmth at your heart center, endless compassion toward humanity. You’re more empathetic. You’re more likely to see the light in someone than you are to see all of the unhealed parts of them.

These are some of the qualities of an awakened heart. Oftentimes, this comes after a profound catalytic spiritual experience, such as an ego death or kundalini awakening.

I urge you, please, before you put up barriers around your heart remember two things.

The first is that when we do this, we don’t just block out pain, we also block out joy. The heart can’t have a semi-permeable barrier and only let in the good stuff.

It’s open or closed. And if it’s closed, then it’s closed to the full experience of love too.

Secondly, try to remember that your heart is made for this. It is not fragile. It’s incredibly elastic. Would you deny the heart its nature?

As the bloody, beating center of our circulatory and energetic systems — as the most important muscle in the body — the heart is made to respond.

It’s made to stretch and contract. To dance. To desire. To expand. To break and build itself back stronger again and again and again.

❤

If you’d like to talk more about awakening, feel free to drop a comment! I love chatting down there.

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