When My Marriage Ended I Learnt That Grief is Fear

Heartbreak is the cloud crying like a grieving man.

The thunder moaning like a lover with a broken heart.

The heart talking in a foreign dialect to the mind.

Nothing makes sense. The compass is off. An understanding can’t be reached. Heartbreak is the pain of sudden and irrevocable disconnection; feels like the death of love and hopes and dreams.

But I want you to take a deep breath because you're here and that means you're going to heal your heartbreak. This is the logic. No poetry. No wailing. No thunder. Today you are accepting responsibility for your heartbreak and taking steps to transform your relationship to your loss. Whether it’s the ending of a relationship, the loss of custody, or a family member no longer talking to you — if you perceive a loss as painful and have unexpressed feelings about that loss then you will be dealing with grief.

And let's face it — whilst poetry helps describe the terror and longing (or the numbness and pain) that you're feeling, poetry doesn't give you practical steps forward through the brutal, apocalyptic landscape of grief and back into the land of the loved where you belong.

So I’m going to tell you right now. You’re here, you’ll be okay. Heartbreak is something everyone can experience and come out a better, happier, more vibrant person.

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” …

….C. S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed, his account of the months after his wife’s death. Indeed, heartbreak could be described as a slow-motion battle with fear — the fear that you are alone, unloved, damaged and forgotten.

Grief, like fear, bears all the same biological hallmarks of a stress reaction: the stress hormone cortisol spikes, insomnia features, and immunity wanes.

The heart is a wilderness and—when you’re grieving—it’s trying to burst through the broken, crumbling stones in your foundations. Your heart wants you to learn its dialect, love — but first, you must work through and let go of the fast language of fear that has been your operating system so far.

Choosing to heal

When you choose to mend your broken heart, the very act of tending to yourself in this way is in itself a healing. You are declaring yourself lovable and deciding not to give into the easy rhetoric of fear that we learned all the way back in late childhhood and adolescence. You are choosing a path of heart awakening — and as with any path of awakening, there are always rewards to be had (you might also end up losing weight but that’s for another day).

The Buddha wrote, “you yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” When we operate from a place of self-love we open the pathways to flow in our lives. When we are in universal flow we are able to live the most magical lives available to us, co-creating with the universe and expanding into miracles of joy and abundance.

Okay, so let's not get ahead of ourselves.

You feel like shit. You’re drowning. Or perhaps you feel resigned to a second-best existence of numbness, lost hopes and sad-lady dreams. The lotus is a big symbol of renewal in Vedic culture because it represents the beauty that can be born from ugliness and decay. The soil the lotus grows in may be dirty and dank, but it will continue to grow into magnificent brilliance.

So right now, think of yourself as a lotus.

Life is a shit sandwich but it won’t always be this way.

Nevertheless, she persisted. Right?

Yes, she absolutely did.

Tending to your broken heart is a choice you make and therefore embarking on this deep, introspective journey of healing you aren’t just feeling your heart — you’re also engaging your will. Sister, they may have messed with your heart, but they are not going to go anywhere near your will. The two used together can shift enormous blocks.

When you engage your will, you commit wholeheartedly no matter how much you may be tempted to resist. When you engage your will you walk with badass goddesses like Durga, the Hindu deity who is known for riding a tiger. That's right, Durga was born totally gorgeous with ten arms holding ten weapons to banish darkness and ignorance. Seen as a supreme power, Durga the Great Mother ensures the destruction of evil forces in the universe.

And did I mention the lady rides a tiger?

—

When I first broke up with my ex-husband I remember going to a bar in New York and havng a really strong martini. I wasn't usually one to drink martinis but it had been a challenging week and I felt a little sense of celebration. “I am single. I live in New York,” I remembered thinking optimistically to myself in an attempt to find the bright side of the disaster that was unfolding in my life.

Yes, I'd just broken up with my husband of ten years at a tiny therapist’s office in the West Village but a part of me wanted to celebrate that life was happening, that this was a milestone, that life doesn’t end when a marriage does.

In other words, I was trying to be Durga.

I came back home after sitting alone at the bar with that strong gin martini and started to notice how empty and cold the apartment was. This is the first night alone without him, I thought again and again as I sat in front of the window that looked out over the darkness that was Fort Greene park. And then I fell into the most intense fit of crying and despair I have ever known. The tears drenched my shirt, my chest heaved violently with gusts of sadness and confusion — I was literally unable to sit up. Falling, sinking, melting into a hot, dark, terrifying pit of grief.

I felt my heart beating so fast, and my throat gurgling with such free-flowing emotions, that I wondered at one point if this was a heart attack. If I hadn't done years of healing on myself and others I would have thought that I was losing my mind. I clearly need to let the emotions come up, the wise voice within kept saying. Practice what you preach. Practice what you preach. All those healing sessions you’ve done on your friends and right now it’s you lying on the floor needing the healing. I needed to exit fear and ride the wave of grief and desolation overcoming me. The more the waves of grief come crashing over me, the more I gave myself over to this brutal eruption of heartbreak. It lasted for about two hours.

I was forever changed.

Heartbreak feels terrible. Frightening. Wild. Primal. Deep. Chaotic.

But don’t be afraid of it. Go like Durga into the sludgey, atomic mess of your darkness and hold steady. You got this. Often it's a fear of a certain emotion that makes that specific emotion so much worse. Like a child at night fearing the darkness, that fear only ever serves to give the darkness more power. So stop reacting to the emotions of loss, grief and sadness and start working with the waves of feeling that will wash the pain from your tender, bruised heart.

Primary emotions — fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust and joy — are very healthy. Secondary emotions, those emotions that you feel in reaction to the primary emotion — irritation, angst and panic — often lead to shutdown or neurosis. Interestingly, secondary emotions are learned emotions that we inherit from others growing up. Since we inherit the way we deal with grief from our caregivers and community, you can see how tempting it is to give into conditioning during our experience of dealing with loss.

The Heart is Designed to Grieve

I once heard someone say that the heart is designed to grieve and this was so very liberating to hear. There is nothing wrong with you, even though our overly productive, homogenous don't-complain-at-any-cost culture may have you feeling otherwise. The simple truth is: we love and we lose and we grieve. To grieve consciously and feel the heart is to not succumb to fear, pain and darkness.

Our heart’s blessing is its power to love and grieve.

When we tend to our family and friends with full, caring hearts — bowing down to the divine calling of our hearts — we enjoy our lives with a level of trust and faith that is deeply affirming. That’s why grief — and love — can create kinship in a world that celebrates division and destruction.

So please stop worrying about whether you're mentally sound, or going crazy. You're going through heartbreak. Think of the goddesses slaying the demons. You've got this. The deeper you go into your grief, the closer you will return to a place called love. This is your heart’s blessing.