Break Your Heart. Break It Open.

I’m going to tell you about the most defining moment of my life. A moment of profound awakening. My relationship to love, and my relationship to heartbreak, were utterly remade. It was a complete metamorphosis in just a matter of minutes. 

I’ve lived most of my life with a guarded heart. I was extremely careful and cautious with my love. It wasn’t until I was almost 30 years old that I finally allowed myself to care deeply enough for someone such that I could truly say that I was “in love”. We wove our lives together, expanded each other’s worlds, and dreamt about building a family. We surfed the waves of ecstasy together, transporting us to divine realms of timeless bliss. And, about 2.5 years into our relationship, it became clear that we were not actually evolving in the same direction. This created incredible tension and pain in the relationship. 

My heart began to ache. And when I say ache, I mean quite physically. It felt like there was a cold heavy stone relentlessly squashing my heart. This pain lasted months. I even started to wonder if I had a cardiac issue.

One fateful evening, in the dead of night, sitting on the couch at home in complete darkness, the weight of sorrow crushing me, mounting angst reaching the point of volatility… I finally broke. 

A silent scream ripped through my being. Piercingly vibrating me. Shattering the stoic shell I’d armored myself with. Vulnerably exposing the tender part of me that was in utter and complete protest against the loss of love. I felt a very young part of me, perhaps just an infant, or even a toddler, reaching out from my chest in desperate longing. Its legs kicking and flailing, as my belly curled into a knot of tension. I let the tantrum wreak havoc within me. My body contorted itself as my despairing inner child thrashed. 

The cold heavy stone in my chest had been replaced by sharp piercing fiery daggers. My heart was screaming from excruciating pain. A scream that reverberated into the cosmos. A scream that echoed the scream of humanity. That brought me into direct contact with the heartbreak of humanity. That plugged me straight into the yearning heart of humanity. 

Then, suddenly, a stroke of insight. A timeless moment of awe. 

This devastating pain, this belligerent protest, this boundless scream… IS my love. 

It all points to the incredible depth of my capacity to love. 

And holy shit, MY LOVE IS EPIC.

Rather than fixating on losing the object of my love, I became enthralled by my love itself. I was awestruck by its enormous power and beauty. I saw that love is not something “out there”, conditional upon how a given person relates to me. Love is an innate and unconditional aspect of my being. Love is something I experience and create from within. And it’s not tied to any specific person in my life. It’s my true nature. It’s me!

This was my first Satori moment.

Pleasure began exploding me. Fireworks of bliss bursting through my being. Bliss beyond what I had ever experienced before.

I was struck with spectacular confusion. The pain had become pleasurable. And the pleasure itself was overwhelming and painful. 

Wow. 

Epic Love.

Stunningly painful. 

Excruciatingly beautiful. 

Heartbreak… this thing I had feared and avoided my whole life… turned out to be the most beautiful thing I’d ever experienced. It had delivered me to ecstatic bliss. It woke me up to the love that is wholly without conditions or expectations. The love that is inherent within me, beyond any particular object that inspires it. 

My mind was blown. Leading to another stunning realization… I don’t need to avoid heartbreak anymore. In fact, I welcome heartbreak!

With that, a dam broke. It gave way to a flood of love; my first taste of unconditional, boundless, cosmic love. 

This love was vibrating with freedom – I felt no more need to tiptoe in fear, no more need to defend my heart. It was also vibrating with empowerment – the embodied knowing that I cannot be destroyed by emotional pain, it simply breaks me open. 

This coalescence of Love, Freedom, and Empowerment is what I call EPIC LOVE. 

EPIC LOVE is what now guides my life. 

And that pain in my chest, the pain that had plagued me for months… it disappeared instantly. Gone. 

With that, I woke up to an important realization — what we commonly call “heartbreak” is actually our resistance to heartbreak.

I spent months resisting the actual breaking of my heart, instead trying to manage it, avoid the pain, numb myself, etc. As a result my heart relentlessly ached. The moment I surrendered to the heartbreak, allowing the annihilation, embracing the destruction, my heart finally broke. It broke open. 

From this Satori moment, I learned:

True “heartbreak” is the breaking open of our hearts. It frees us. It empowers us. It expands our capacity to love.

And it happens in moments. Whereas the resistance to heartbreak keeps us stuck and bitter for months, years, even decades. 

Even more remarkably, the resentment that had been festering in me towards my partner had instantly melted away. Any notion of wanting or needing him to be any different than he was had disappeared. All forms of judgment and blame I was directing towards him, or myself, had vanished. I came to recognize all of these things as forms of resistance. When I was resisting feeling the heartbreak, I was resisting what was, I was resisting reality, and instead creating all sorts of critical stories about how reality should be different, including how my partner should be different.

All resistance was replaced by the simplicity of boundless love. The heartbreak had delivered me to my first true experience of unconditional love, and produced an MDMA-like euphoria throughout my being. I was basking in love for myself exactly as I was, love for my partner exactly as he was, love for the relationship we had shared exactly as it was, and love for our uncoupling exactly as it was. 

The anxiously attached part of me that had been chasing love had completely relaxed. The chase felt silly in the context of the boundless love I was beaming from my core. And for the first time, I felt utter peace and clarity around ending the relationship. I guided us through ending it in the most loving and honoring way. We completed our relationship as an expression of Epic Love. 

So, dear reader, I lovingly implore you — BREAK YOUR HEART. BREAK IT OPEN!

The beautiful thing is that… it’s already breaking. You probably know it. Just allow it. Allow the breaking to happen. Let go of resisting it. Allow it to take you all the way though…

Since we have a lifetime of conditioning to resist it, it’s a powerful choice to allow it. 

It’s a choice of freedom.

It’s a choice of empowerment.

It’s a choice of love.