“Our heart knows what our mind has forgotten — it knows the sacred that is within all that exists, and through a depth of feeling we can once again experience this connection, this belonging.” —Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

You need to give yourself credit if you are living with a broken heart. A broken heart testifies that you have taken the first steps on a pilgrimage to a deeper, more compassionate life. To be touched to the quick by losing your love, you must have taken the risk of caring. You must have opened your heart to cherish, trust and depend on another. You showed up enough in your tenderness and vulnerability so that losing that love could crack you all the way open.

Opening one’s heart in intimate relationship goes against the grain of our protective shells—it takes guts.  We must find the courage to trust that much before we can love . . . or before our heart can break. We must be willing to be changed by the alchemy of love, regardless of how that change comes.

The loving heart, I learned, has to break, in little everyday ways or with one big blow, to grow down into a more complex, tender intimacy with ourselves, with life, with both our human and our spiritual nature. As we are cracked open and fall into our depths, fragmented pieces of the heart nourish our dark places and magnetize the healing light of the Holy Spirit deep within.

When loving brings betrayal or loss, if we can find the patience, grace and faith to bear gently with the disintegration of our world, love’s alchemy continues its paradoxical work. It marinates you in a rage, fear, loneliness, grief and despair you think you can barely endure.  As we grown in kindness towards our brokenness, gradually love’s wounds transform. Compassion, strength and wisdom take root in the loamy ache we thought would never end.  One day, as if by a miracle, we wake to find our heart has grown into a fresh new sensuality, sensitivity and love for this confusing, beautiful life.

Throughout the long months and years of grieving the loss of my abandoning partner, I gradually reframed loving so deeply as an act of bravery and faith, not naïveté and delusion, as I originally believed. Of course, if I had known what was coming, I would never have signed up!  Yet, trusting enough to love him, though he proved to be a faithless partner, was the first step in awakening to a more vibrant, sturdy faith in the lush compassionate strength of my own mysterious heart.

Adapted from “Love and the Mystery of Betrayal: Recovering Your Faith and Trust after Trauma, Deception and Loss of Love” —now available!

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