Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something or someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready to let go of the way we are holding things, and preparation perhaps for the last letting go of all.

Heartbreak is more than just a particularly hard form of disappointment or failure. It hurts in an entirely different way because heartbreak is always connected to love and belonging. Over time, the more I’ve thought about heartbreak and love, the more clearly I’ve realized how vulnerable we are when we love anyone. The brokenhearted are the bravest among us — they dared to love.

That, right there, is the magic of heartbreak: it forces you to be a different person. Unless you want to mourn forever, you have to change. And if you do it right, you’ll work on becoming the person you always wanted to be. You’ll look back on this moment as the pinnacle, the turning point, the unanswered prayer that was the answer itself. It will be the greatest thing that ever happened to you because instead of a lukewarm relationship that wasn’t working anyway, you got the life of your dreams… and you were the one who gave it to yourself.

What matters most at the moment of heartbreak is the meaning we ascribe to our pain. We may feel devastated because we believe we’ve just lost our soul mate. And that’s often what we do feel in that moment. When we are deep in heartbreak we feel like we have lost the only person in the world for whom we are capable of feeling this level of emotion. We can’t imagine ever loving anyone else. If we invest in this belief, not only will it increase our suffering, it will also make it more difficult for anyone else to come into our life, because we feel like we’ve already lost The One. Nothing else seems to matter. We lose our drive, our ambition, and our ability to take even baby steps forward.

Heartbreak delivers your purpose. If you are brave enough to accept that delivery and seek out the people doing that particular world-changing work, you find your people. There is no bond like the bond that is forged among people who are united in the same world-healing work.

Despair says, "The heartbreak is too overwhelming. I am too sad and too small, and the world is too big. I cannot do it all, so I will do nothing.

Courage says, "I will not let the fact that I cannot do everything keep me from doing what I can.

We all want purpose and connection.

Tell me what breaks your heart, and I'll point you toward both.

Oh yes, for sure, there will be heartbreak! And you will learn to get out of your head and into your immediate embodied experience, coming out of mental stories and conclusions, and contacting the raw energy of the here and now, directly feeling the devastation of your dreams rather than intellectualizing everything away, letting the grief, anger, and sorrow of millennia surge through your pores, rather than dismissing it all as an “illusion,” or distracting yourself with fresh dreams.

What is it that affects you so deeply that whenever you encounter it, you feel the need to look away? Look there. Where is the pain in the world that you just cannot stand? Stand there. The thing that breaks your heart is the very thing you were born to help heal. Every world changer's work begins with a broken heart.

to allow our hearts to break, to soften them, to sink deeply into the knowing that everything will fall, everything will pass, everything will crumble, can be the great portal to awakening. We simply stop taking everything for granted. We stop living in “tomorrow” and turn toward the living day. We stop seeking our happiness in the future, clinging to the promises of others, and begin to break open into a bigger happiness that is rooted in presence, and truth, that allows for the coming but also the going of things, that accepts the little deaths as they happen each day, the disappointments, the losses, the shattered expectations, the good-byes. The Unexpected becomes our friend, a constant companion. We break open into bitter-sweetness, into fragility and utter vulnerability, into the gift of every moment, of every encounter with a friend, a lover, a stranger.

Heartsick, heartbroken — To know love is to know pain.
What could be more common?
Even so, each broken heart is so singular
That with it we probe the divine.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

We find that, all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had experienced the actual heartbreak of the journey.

Perhaps our dreams are there to be broken, and our plans are there to crumble, and our tomorrows are there to dissolve into todays, and perhaps all of this is all a giant invitation to wake up from the dream of separation, to awaken from the mirage of control, and embrace whole-heartedly what is present. Perhaps it is all a call to compassion, to a deep embrace of this universe in all its bliss and pain and bitter-sweet glory. Perhaps we were never really in control of our lives, and perhaps we are constantly invited to remember this, since we constantly forget it. Perhaps suffering is not the enemy at all, and at its core, there is a first-hand, real-time lesson we must all learn, if we are to be truly human, and truly divine. Perhaps breakdown always contains breakthrough. Perhaps suffering is simply a right of passage, not a test or a punishment, nor a signpost to something in the future or past, but a direct pointer to the mystery of existence itself, here and now. Perhaps life cannot go 'wrong' at all.

Everything we love goes. So to be able to grieve that loss, to let go, to have that grief be absolutely full, is the only way to have our heart be full and open. If we’re not open to losing, we’re not open to loving.

If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.