The Medicine of Heart Break & Loss: Embodying Resilience

As we shut the eyes down,

Let the muscles in the forehead,

Muscles in the face,

Surrounding the jaw,

Let everything relax.

Relax the shoulders,

Relax the belly,

Let the hips feel heavy,

Supported on the chair or the ground or wherever it is that you may sit or lie.

And come into breath,

So equal inhalations and exhalations through your nostrils,

Really softening into presence.

So no matter where you've come from or where you're going after this,

Fully choosing in this moment to show up right here.

We have the opportunity behind closed eyes to take ourselves into these hypnagogic,

Or we can call them hypnobiogic states,

By really focusing on each breath.

And maybe it's through visualization,

Maybe through mantra,

Maybe through repetition.

But what I invite for you today is if the mind begins to wander,

That as you inhale internally count to one,

And as you exhale,

Two.

And as you inhale,

One,

And as you exhale,

Two,

Two,

One,

Two.

Continue to really focus on the breath moving in and out of the body,

Taking yourself into that place of deep stillness.

Maybe it's the visualization.

Maybe you imagine white light moving in on the inhalation,

That white light moving out on the exhalation through the nostrils.

And maybe that turns into a cycle.

Whatever it may be that works for you,

Just allowing yourself to drop deeper and deeper in every exhalation to your body.

When it comes to dealing with heartbreak,

When it comes to dealing with grief and loss,

So many of us in the aftermath of these challenging life experiences,

It's almost as if we climb a ladder into the mind and we stay there.

Somehow the body gets left behind,

The breath becomes shallow.

And maybe for some of us it may even look as if the body is where we seek refuge and we begin to over-focus on the body,

Over-focusing on what we eat,

Or our exercise,

Or our yoga practice.

But the intention,

The intention is so important.

So when the mind gets stuck in those loops of limiting beliefs,

When we come into heartbreak or loss,

When we ask why me,

Or when we think to ourselves,

I am not worthy,

I am not lovable,

This always happens,

These kind of damaging words can play on repeat in the mind.

And the effect moves into the body through a calcification of a movement.

You can also come into a hyper-extension,

So there's both extremes.

But just notice as these words are said how your body responds to them.

Is there truth?

Is there rejection?

Is there surrender?

It is so important when dealing with grief and loss and heartache that we remember that no matter who walks away or how or what things walk away or how,

That it doesn't take away the abundance of possibility,

The abundance of love,

The abundance of spaciousness.

For all of life,

All of nature,

Our connection to the air that we breathe,

The earth that we stand on,

That goes nowhere.

And while that might feel like an airy concept in the moments of deep,

Deep wailing grief when we're in that just pointed grief that feels like it is overtaking the body and it feels like the only thing that exists in that moment or in any moment is pain,

Those are the moments that it's so important to do exactly what we're doing now when all we want to do is scream and run away,

To sit down,

To focus on the breath.

And again,

On the inhalation,

One,

The exhalation,

Two,

Or the mantra in the mind,

Breathing in,

I am aware that I am breathing in.

Breathing out,

I am aware that I am breathing out.

Or again,

That white light cycling through the inhalation through the nostrils,

The white light moving out of the nostrils on the exhalation,

Taking ourselves into those hypnagogic states where the mind,

The spirit,

Or however you want to see and how you know the essence of what you are outside of just this human body,

But the mind,

That essence,

The true,

And the physical meet in that intentional breathing,

That intentional patterning,

That intentional witnessing of the breath moving in and out.

Heartbreak is one of the deepest medicines that we've been gifted in this life.

There is no other more potent battlefield to really win the war of self than the battlefield of loss when it comes to the heart.

When we experience that deep grief,

That pain,

That loss,

Whether it's our choice or not,

No matter that there being 8 billion people in the world,

Those moments,

We can feel so uniquely alone,

So uniquely at loss,

So uniquely in pain and grief that we can completely wash the world away,

All the good that exists as well.

Hachamama,

Mother Earth beneath us holding us in that moment,

Father Sky,

The air coming into our lungs and giving us life continuously asking nothing in return.

Life is unconditional in these aspects.

We are given so much.

So in those moments of deep grief when we get lost in the story and we're going down those corridors of the mind and we begin to tell the stories,

Again,

We breathe deeply,

We sit stillly,

We find silence of the mind,

The body,

The heart.

No amount of distracting ourselves is going to do the work of that emotional resiliency to be able to say goodbye.

We're not taught how to say goodbye.

We're not taught how to leave in grace.

A lot of times we leave collaborations,

Relationships,

Situations by completely numbing out to the situation or blowing things up.

And that might look less and less dynamic as we get older with more experience and grace to leave,

But we have to ask ourselves when we leave,

Is it truly graceful?

Because am I doing it with love?

Can I leave with love just as I entered with love?

Can I leave with love?

Can I leave with love for this person,

This situation,

This experience?

Can I still give love in a way when I'm not getting what it is that I want?

Can I be patient?

Can I be understanding?

Can I be kind when I'm not getting what I want?

Again,

Breathing deeply as you sit here and let the words wash over and counting on the inhale one,

Counting on the exhale two or the mantra breathing in.

I am aware that I am breathing in,

Breathing out.

I am aware that I am breathing out,

Coming into that hypnagogic,

That hypnayogic state.

This is the medicine because loss is not going to stop happening.

Heartbreak is not going to stop happening.

You can't meditate yourself out of experiencing life's most painful situations.

But what you can do is find the tools to face them with grace,

To face them with respect,

And to face them with deep care.

There is so much growth and so much love that can actually come from leaving situations,

From letting things go,

From leaving things behind.

And this is a part of the human experience.

We're given and we give.

That is the natural cycle of life.

We are moving in circles each day.

So how can we become more graceful?

So again,

As we stay in this space of stillness,

If at any moment there needs to be a sigh or a hum or a sounding on the exhalation,

I invite you to do as you see fit and letting your body release.

And make sure that as you sit,

If you are sitting upright,

That the spine is long,

But not rigid.

The goal isn't to be the perfect yogic meditator.

It's to simply exist in your human body in the level of comfort with discomfort that you can when we're talking about difficult things.

A poem came through for me around this subject a few weeks ago.

And I'm going to read this to you now.

So again,

Just staying in that state of softness with yourself and receive the words and the ones that are for you,

That are seeds for you,

Allow them to settle in the soils of your experience,

Your internal world,

And the ones that are not for you,

Allow them to move by.

As a small child with our hands out,

We reach for mother and father in hopes that our love will be met with love.

Our needs met with fulfillment and our fear met with solace.

The small one in us craves shelter,

Containment,

Warmth,

The effervescent nature of the maternal,

The anchoring lighthouse of the paternal.

As experience has its way with us,

The years pass and the mind begins to play tricks on us.

What we have not been given before and for what we crave the most seems to hide and crawl away from the bellies of our desire,

Somewhere along the way we lose sight of the nature of our sustenance for we are supported always.

Breathe deeply,

Dear child,

Breathe deep,

Dear one.

You are always held in the arms of nature.

Feel the solidity of the earth beneath your bones.

Settle in and allow your breath to travel deeply into your core.

Rise tall through your spine and feel your connection to the sky just above,

Like a golden thread traveling from the top of your head to the bottom of your tailbone.

Lengthen and settle.

Release tension,

Contraction,

Fear,

Illusion.

Settle deeply,

Sweetly.

You are held in this moment as you allow the world to fall away and simply presence with the energetic field that you are.

Tune into your vibration,

To the pulsation of life that subtly moves through and from you.

You are a rhythm,

A song,

A melody.

Breathe deeply into the belly.

Allow the chest to rise and fall in ease.

Trust,

Surrender.

You are safe behind closed eyes.

Travel somewhere deeply within to your soul's home,

To the sanctuary untouched by the external,

To the place that has always beckoned you forward.

Find the wellspring of love that pours from you.

Sit at the water's edge of your own cascading waterfall and drink from the never-ending tap of your own doing.

As your energy ascends the spine,

Descend into your blood and bones and become the tree that has grown roots from you.

You are supporter and support.

You are home and anchor.

You are the arms and the embrace.

You are the song and you are the dance.

Softly settle into the sweet skin of your enclosing.

You are wrapped in a warm blanket of sensation.

You are feeling and willing to be open,

To be free of the lack,

The illusion of lack.

You have everything and nothing.

You need nothing and have access to everything.

Breathe deeply,

Tenderly and subtly.

Life is asking you to remember that just because a person walks away,

They do not take from you the love that has opened within you.

When challenge comes to you,

It is not because you are bad or unlucky,

But that you are being welcomed to an initiation.

Life is wanting to remind you of exactly what you are made of.

You are stronger than you know and you have more than you can see.

Love is in the water,

In the air,

In the earth beneath your feet.

It is the rhythm of your heartbeat.

You are a song birthing into life.

You are expression birthing through form.

You are experience expressing through sensation.

The pain you feel,

The lack,

The rejection from life is an indicator of just how much love you can feel for all of it.

I beg you,

Do not turn your back on your own heart.

Do not calcify your love in stone.

Do not forget how much life is rooting for you.

To see exactly what it is you are a part of.

Breathe sweet being,

Breathe and settle and feel because you can.

Do not close yourself to life for the cards you have been dealt.

Write a new story.

Leave behind what no longer or has never served you and trust that as you fall,

You will be lifted.

Deep breath in,

Soft breath out.

Take the right hand to the left shoulder,

Left hand to the right shoulder.

Just a hug and embrace the softness of the human body,

This wonderful tool that sometimes can feel not to be our ally.

It keeps us here in the material plane that we sometimes associate with pain and challenge but in our most beautiful of moments that reminds us of love and intimacy and joy and taste and sound and movement.

May we do our best to climb down the stairs of the mind in our moments of deep pain and back into the body,

Into the breath and remind ourselves that we are supported,

That we are abundant and that when things move away from us or we walk away or things are taken,

That there still is so much abundance,

So much joy,

So much love,

So much melancholy,

Poetry,

Potency in the shadows,

The darker aspects of our human experience.

And may we bring them into the light so that they too can become a part.

You can stay with the hands on the knees,

Eyes closed or if you want to come back into the space and gently just orient yourself to the space that you're in looking around.

I need some appreciation for where you currently sit.

Just tuning it into if you feel warm or cold,

If you feel rested or tired,

Any sounds that are near and far.

This topic is so incredibly important because it's not a topic,

It's life.

Life is not easy.

But my belief is that we didn't come here to be comfortable.

We came here to be alive.

We came here to live the human experience and the spectrum of that has so many opportunities for exploring our mind and our bodies and our breath during joyous moments of ecstasy and despairing moments of grief and loss.

We have to start talking about the hard things at the beginning when we have relationships or collaborations or projects that we're doing with communities,

Communicating about how do we leave this?

How do we come out of this with grace?

How do we let this go?

Because this is the thing that will always happen.

You will say goodbye or goodbye will be said to you or it will just happen.

In the Buddhist perspective here,

This is the one thing that you speak of in the Four Noble Truths and when we speak of life does mean suffering.

To live does mean suffering and when that goodbye comes,

How can we again choose this and give love?

How can we too choose this and give love?

Because everybody that we love and everything that we love at some point will be taken away or we ourselves will leave this world and we will leave it all behind.

Our relationships will end naturally or we'll stay together for our remaining lives and we will leave when we leave the earth plane.

But either way,

The one thing that we all have to experience is detachment and letting go and we don't talk about it because there's a fear and some of us do and we talk about it in this,

It's possible but it's not going to happen to me.

I'm going to do everything to stay and do all the right things and sometimes you can do all the right things and still you will experience heartbreak,

Still you will experience loss and grief and it can be a beautiful relationship if you allow it to be a transition,

An initiation,

An initiation to just how deeply you can love and let go and remain open because so many of us when we experience heartbreak and grief,

We close off,

We build walls around ourselves,

We put those moors that line the castle with water in front of us so that it's more and more challenging for people to get to our hearts and we put up tests,

There are tests for people to come into our lives and it is smart to become more discerning most definitely.

It is wise to become more discerning with who you allow in,

This is naturally true but to hold your love in a cage is to imprison one of the most beautiful experience that life gives to you and so let yourself love and let yourself experience loss because as you know when we experience loss,

Love still comes and even if it's the most profound of losses it still comes,

It comes in the morning when the sun rises or when the birds chirp in the trees or the meeting of a stranger that becomes a familiar,

It comes in a new love,

It comes in our children,

It comes in so many different ways that floating in the sea or taking a walk in the forest or petting your dog or your cat,

Whatever it may be,

Love is constant,

Life's wellspring of love never runs dry and so no matter how bad it gets in the world,

No matter how much disharmony comes in,

How much loss,

Grief,

Crime,

War that we experience in this world and disharmony on a collective level,

Love is never leaving,

It stays there with us till our last breath and I do believe that it helps us transition into letting go even in that most challenging of moments when we have to let go of the thing that we love the most which is in some ways the body,

Our sense of self,

Our minds,

What we've learned,

What we've experienced,

The memory bank of our human life,

That will be the most difficult thing that we have to let go of and we're not prepared for it most of us and we don't talk about it.

So these are the things that we need to start focusing on,

Living each life and we hear this,

We see it on bumper stickers but again it becomes a gimmick and it doesn't become an embodied practice of living each day as if the next day is not coming.

Who would you tell that you loved,

What would you say today if you knew that tomorrow was not going to come,

How much more joyous would you be to experience whatever weather it is,

Whether it's rainy or cloudy or whether you're in the city or in the forest,

Would you find beauty in that day?

I'm sure that you would.

You would enjoy the food that you tasted,

The sounds that you hear would become more crisp,

The people that you connected to would become more interesting,

You'd be more invested in your day.

So it's not just about learning to let go of love in this intimate sense,

It's learning to let go of it all because when we truly learn to let go of it all,

Life becomes so much more vibrant,

It becomes so much more brilliant and radiant,

Our breath becomes deeper because we do realize and not from an intellectual perspective but from a full spiritual perspective that this is temporary,

This isn't promise,

This is a gift I've been given and everything that is able to be experienced through this is a gift.

So the pain,

The loss,

The grief,

This is a gift.

So these tougher aspects of the human experience,

It's time that we start to give them space in our day and it's not about going into the paranoia that at any moment anything could happen but the beauty of that,

Just how precious life is,

The lottery of life.

You can be the smartest,

The most beautiful,

The most surrounded by company and that can all change in one moment.

There is no assurance for any of us,

There is no power hierarchy,

We're all in this together and so we can protect ourselves with these walls or with money or with distractions,

With material things but this doesn't protect us.

Our essence,

Our truth,

Our hearts,

Those are all the same.

We can all experience heartbreak,

We're all going to experience loss,

There's nothing that you can do to safeguard yourself from that.

So instead we open the doors and we welcome that in.

We allow our pain and our grief and our loss and our fear to sit at the table with us and to drink tea and to eat cookies and to have a meal and we ask them questions and we become friends and allies.

So thank you for showing up today and for showing up for yourselves and I wish for you each day to do your best to be human.

We live in an age where our humans are becoming more robotic and our robots are becoming more human and this rawness,

This ability to deeply feel is what makes you human.

It doesn't make you weak,

It doesn't make you too sensitive or too needy,

It makes you human and it's precious and you've been given such a precious gift.

So dance more and sing more and play more because each day is not promised and so putting yourself into the cog and just looping and looping with what feels comfortable.

Really ask yourself,

Did you come here to be comfortable or did you come to experience life and life is messy and uncomfortable and sometimes very painful?

But how many of us have had the most profound growth and initiation in our deepest of grief at the loss of our first loved one through death or sickness,

Through losing our deepest intimate love?

Who were you on the other side of that when you chose to really experience it?

Because that is gold,

That is the medicine of life.

So if we can find deeper appreciation for those initiatory parts of life instead of ooh,

That was the worst time in my life,

Instead we change that language to that was an incredibly painful time in my life.

That taught me,

That showed me,

That gave me this new perspective.