Take it Like a Champ.
{Photo via pinterest.com}
By Cora Ison
It is impossible to examine something unless you touch it, and run it over with your fingers until you can feel what it looks like, where the broken and beautiful parts are.
There is an intuitive awareness when this happens, you can feel it — this thing, this grief — is alive. It exists. Ignoring it does no good — because quite frankly, like a toddler, it then becomes louder and demands more attention. So you take your broken heart in your hands, and you move forward.
You know how deep heartache feels, right? Where your heart is aching from the ending of a relationship or even more from the ending of a friendship? That kind of hurt is a low, dull, hum in the heart. Not so painful to keep you from functioning any more, but alive enough for you to recognize its steady presence in your life.
No one asks to be cheated on. No one thinks the love of their life will be the perpetrator of this. No one thinks that the person who is supposed to love you more than anyone else, will end up hurting you more than anyone else ever has.
The nights are always the hardest — when your mind is tender and unguarded by the fortress of defense you use to protect it during the day, the things you use to keep it from remembering.
During the day, you have your wits about you and can be on the lookout for signs of slipping into a fit of remembrance. At night, you are defenseless. Lying there quietly, hoping the sweet release of sleep will come before you are racked by the haunting of love that has been lost.
Sometimes the grief — the pure, raw, grief of it all — arises from someplace deep inside, someplace momentarily forgotten. Like a strong gust, the wind will sometimes blow in just the right direction and suddenly you know something has been stirred. And then come the tears.
Easing into life after a breakup is… well, it is disorienting. It feels like you have been dumped in a foreign land with no map, with no way of distinguishing true North from completely lost, with no sense of direction.
The first few weeks, you are convinced that you will forever be a foreigner in this place. You will feel misplaced and adrift in an ocean of emotions that threatens to take you under with the tides. Unlike the sea though, those first few weeks will not be an undercurrent of emotion — it will be a raging hurricane of anger, denial, loss and sadness.
You will inevitably ask yourself, “How did I not know or sense that this was happening?”
If you are spiritual, you will wrestle with this demon. Your spiritual life will demand that you forgive them. How could you not? Loving someone implies forgiveness. Can spirituality demand you to do anything? Did you ever really love them, if you are struggling so hard to forgive?
What is forgiveness anyway, other than a lofty idea until you have to practice it? In those life-changing, gut-wrenching, utter betrayal moments, how do you remain spiritual? How do you practice spirituality when you are in the middle of an icky mess that a human being has created?
How can you be all Buddha on a mountain? And if you can’t, were you ever spiritual in the first place? Sure it’s easy to bestow peace and love on all you meet when life is easy — but what does true spirit ask you to do in moments like these?
If you are like me, it will look like this — very human, very messy, with a sprinkling of your higher self thrown in.
You might rage, you might scream, you might break those happy couple pictures in frames — slamming them against the floor of what once was a loving home. You might leave. You might come back, and then leave again. There will be moments and outbursts of uncontrolled fury.
Directed at him, directed at you, and directed at other loving beings who get in the way during those moments.
Like an axe that chops wood too hard and the blade flies off, disconnecting itself from its base, you might fly off the fucking handle, and if you do, you will feel a separation in yourself in those hours of rage, disconnected from your base.
In those days of blinding anger, there won’t be much to remember, except the feeling — the regret — those I shouldn’t have said that moments. This anger will be good in some ways. You will have days where you are fueled by nothing more than the intense desire to change everything.
You will want to make your life unrecognizable to you, because everything around you, including you, will remind you of him. Your whole life will suddenly seem to be a living memorial to your life with them and you will need that to change Now.
~ insert melancholy ~
Then come the dark days of sadness, where you will cry. You will cry until the word cry doesn’t even seem to do justice to describe what you are doing. You will weep, and sob. For the loss of them, the loss of you (where are you in the midst of all these twirling emotions?), for the loss of your beautiful, love-filled life together. So many losses. It will be devastating to your heart.
You will be sure it’s going to do you in. You will shed tears that weigh a million pounds, and feel like boulders coming from someplace deep. Sometimes it will last five minutes, other times an avalanche will bury you for days. You will want your mommy to make it all better. And she can try.
In those bleak, dark, grief-stricken days, you will pray for the anger to return. For anger is so much easier than sadness. With anger you are moved to respond, to get up, to do something. Sadness overwhelms and drowns. It’s paralyzing.
Your body wants to move, but the sadness brings everything to a screeching halt.
And then comes the Spring, full of hope, full of life starting over. Somewhere between the dark days of sadness and now, you will have stopped calling them. You won’t cry as much. The stirring of new life will be in the air and it will be infectious.
The desire to change now won’t come from a desperate escape from them, but from a desire to be a better you. You will start hearing the still small voice inside, telling you that you already have everything you need. That you are what you have been looking for.
That life is beginning anew, and that this story of your life does not begin and end with this chapter. This chapter was not about them. It was another lesson you needed to learn in your very short, very human life.
Looking back across the tattered shreds of a broken relationship, you will begin to see them weave into a beautiful tapestry. And you will realize that while you were busy worrying about handling your breakup like Buddha, the Divine was at work.
There was holiness in your tears, and your anger wasn’t an absence of peace, rather an incarnation of a part of spirit that needed to be expressed. And heard.
Do not look back at this time wondering how you could’ve been more spiritual, rather see clearly and succinctly how holy the experience was. How sacrosanct the time was. How everything was being circled together and rounded into an experience that transformed you.
Catch a glance in the rearview mirror and realize that you didn’t exchange or replace your spirituality in lieu of human emotion — rather, this time was a passage, a vessel… that made you intimately acquainted with your insides, with the stuff your soul is made of.
You are the champion, my friend.
*****
Cora Ison is a wanderer and wonderer. She likes to ponder, analyze and overthink things that most people would not even give a second thought to. She spends her days writing and spreading love, when she’s not entraced by a pond of self-reflection. She is a timid soul with a loud mouth, who fancies herself to be quite a groovy chick. She prefers pajamas to high heels, and alfredo-soaked pasta to vegetables. She can be found vagabonding around farmers markets, eating pickled asparagus and taking selfies with her retro sunglasses on.
#Roar
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