The Beauty of Broken Hearts: Learning to Love and Heal Your Inner Wounds

Feeling broken-hearted is a relatable experience -- I don’t believe anyone has ever escaped the sorrow of a heart in hurt. We may deny it as a way of shielding ourselves because there may be some small comfort in the shadow of negation.

But in truth, we experience some level of heartbreak on a daily basis, even though we may not recognize it as such. Our hearts break for other people’s pain as much as our own and for the grief we inwardly feel yet find so hard to express. 

A heartache many of us are accustomed to is one of a love lost or unrequited. Love often hurts. And pain is something that bonds us to another with the same intensity as love -- both emotions are deeply profound and immense. We all have inner wounds that scream from the deepest recesses of our soul, and they only call to be heard and healed.

The Beauty of Broken Hearts: Learning to Love and Heal your Inner Wounds 

I know what it's like to have a broken heart. I know what it's like to feel pain. There are a million ways to break a heart. I can relate 

- Diane Warren

As human beings we have the primal power to decimate hearts as much as we have the force to love them. We may not seek to harm another -- yet we often do.

Vulnerability asks that we tear away our foundations of perceived safety so that we connect to each other with open hearts; and when we do so, pain too is a card on the table because this is what it means to love. Love is a beautiful odyssey that comes with risk.

We shout love from the roof tops and bury pain in a forsaken grave. We keep grief concealed and cover sadness in a blanket of denial because we just don’t want to feel pain. When we perpetuate that cycle -- we never actually heal. We have become too good at foolishly protecting our pain.

The marriage of love and pain

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

― Jalaluddin Rumi

Love and pain are two sides of the same coin. We are transformed and metamorphosed by the power of them both. In pain we descend into what feels like an abyss of melancholy and in love we find redemption to ascend to great heights. How can we be fully exposed to appreciate love’s light without first being brave enough to chance pain’s darkness?

We should not fear pain. It is an intrinsic part of our story and a natural vessel to the fullness of living. If we fear pain, then we essentially leave love at that same door. Pain and sorrow have the capacity to break our hearts open so that we expand our understanding and awareness of love’s infinity. Grief may tarnish our heart but love will brush it on a canvas of faith to create a greater beauty from the sorrow.

Finding the beauty in broken hearts

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

― D.H Lawrence

Our inner wounds and despair always serve our evolutionary gain. We can govern them with grace and dress them in love’s essence to find some beauty in the affliction. If we fail to find some valuable lesson then we remain tightly knit in that purgatory.

We are more likely to hurt another soul if we deny the howls of our own pain that seek to be absorbed, understood, and directed for a supreme purpose. There is a reason for everything, including every shadow of heartache that sits within us.

We must remember that we are not our wounds. Pain is never meant to insulate our hearts or enhance a fearful existence. The signature of what hurts us is underlined with a mark to embrace the glory of acceptance and instill fearlessness. If we allow our anguish to cushion or curb every decision we make then we have already lost the worthiness of that experience. Love does not live well or feel nourished in the oblivion of fear.

Harnessing love to heal

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility.
- Khalil Gibran

We are never given any experience or circumstance without having the innate capacity to overcome it. Time is not our healer -- we are our own soul medics. Our times spent in the depth of heartbreak provide us with wisdom, humility, and the ability to penetrate our inherent truth. We synthesize ourselves through a higher love and understanding and forgo the bitterness that hurt can impel. Bitterness has nothing to offer us but further bewilderment and anxiety.

When we harness love to heal, we stir our soul into a sense of harmony and consonance. Love is found in forgiveness, acceptance, and in the bounty of hope that nestles so warmly inside our heart. This love lights our way through the darkness so we can galvanize strength and compassion for ourselves and others. We can create enlightened cycles rather than remain in historic ones that are locked into harrowing repeat.

When we mend, we are stronger

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

— Neil Gaiman

Our mind serves to protect us from pain; our heart seeks to heal it and be stronger through it. We should not sacrifice the wisdom that pain can impart by rejecting our inner calls to heal our sense of a broken heart.

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