Falling In Love With Life

Guess what, everyone? I have great news.

I am falling in love again.

Except this time I am doing it right. Because the object of my affection is no object at all; not a human, nor an animal, nor a place or thing.

I am falling in love with, simply, everything.

All of it – the joy, the grief; the friendships and enemies; the growth, the stagnation; rises, falls, successes, failures; whatever end of the spectrum life puts me on, I am there, and I am loving every second of it.

My heart has been closed off for quite some time. Indeed, it is safe to say that most people’s hearts are not entirely open. Many of us pick and choose who or what to love. We welcome certain people or things into our proverbial arms with solidarity and acceptance, while others are viciously pushed away, either out of fear, ignorance, aversion, or hatred.

Yes, falling in romantic love is a momentous occasion, even if in the grand scheme of things that relationship does not work out. But romantic love, which puts all of your heart’s energy into one individual (often with many conditional expectations) is exclusionary in nature. It can isolate us from the needs of other individuals, and often separates us from ourselves. In the beginning of our journeys as lovers, we believe that this feeling of openness we experience as “love” is a direct result of the other person’s qualities, who they are at their core, and how they treat us; but in reality, this feeling was always within us, simply waiting to be triggered by some outside influence. The trick is not to associate it with a person, place, or thing — but rather to integrate it into the realm of our everyday experience. This takes self-awareness, something we have a limited amount of when new to romance; so we get attached to a person as the object of our love, and when that relationship inevitably changes or dies, we cannot stand it. Our hearts break.

My sister recently gave me a pointed crystal wand with seven stones representing the seven major chakras. In the middle is a cerulean green, representing the heart. Interestingly, the day she gifted it to me I dropped it; the wand broke in half, right in the middle of the green heart stone. Of course, I felt terrible, and super glued the wand back together; but some months later my roommate broke it again. Today, it exists in two pieces, yet it has lost none of its beauty nor perfection. Life continues to teach me that there is simply no such thing as a coincidence. This was a message of divine communication indeed.

If that wand is a reflection of my energy, then that broken heart is a part of me. Weak and fragile, even those who seem the most “put-together” are often a ticking time bomb. You can sing mantras of self-love and open-heartedness for years and only end up with a hollow, empty shell of a heart space. Speaking from personal experience, you can even experience relationship after relationship of deep learning, developing yourself all the while, growing out of attachment, letting go of self-cherishing pain and forgiving others for being imperfect. But if your heart was broken, and you simply try to fix it with super glue, mantras, or the like, you are completely missing the point.

Hearts are made to feel. They are made not only to embrace joy and happiness, but grief, sorrow, and anger. Hearts are emotional beacons which teach us the essence of cyclic existence. But most of us only want to feel the “good” stuff – the love, the comfort, the laughter, the peace. When shit hits the fan, when our friends betray us, or our parents neglect us; when we lose what we gained, or make mistakes, we feel immense pain and suffering. Whether we wallow in this pain, or push it away, it is rarely welcomed. We see it as weakness, and want nothing more but to move on into lighter territory as soon as possible. Without being with our pain, and feeling it, however, we accumulate emotional trauma in our cells and energy bodies. It does not simply go away, and some day it will come back to haunt us.

What if, instead of rejecting pain, we operated on the belief that our pain is okay?

At the core, there is absolutely nothing wrong with feeling our “negative” emotions. The problem lies in our society’s inability to offer support in such times of need. Our anger is seen as something to be eradicated; our depression is a burden; our grief is too intense. It seems, no matter how much we reach out, whether subtly or with great vigor, others cannot handle it — and no wonder, since they are equally heartbroken, lacking the exact same support we seek. So the cycle of neglect continues. Collectively we hold our emotions inside, allowing them to fester, trying with all of our might to forget that they exist. But the body remembers. The soul remembers. When the time is right, an event will trigger our weak points, and we will be forced to again face the pain with a new perspective. If we have done the necessary work of self-exploration up to this point, we may have developed a level of awareness and wisdom that allows us to deal with this uprising of suffering correctly: looking at it, accepting it, feeling it, letting it be what it is without trying to change it, and opening our hearts even wider than ever before. Conversely, we can try and plug the puncture wound with duct tape or super glue our heart pieces back together, shutting out the feeling, shaming it, rejecting it, hiding it, forgetting it, numbing our intuition and ultimately reinforcing disastrous behavior that further isolates us from the full essence of what it means to be alive.

A broken heart is a blessing. If it weren’t, then why would almost every single human being ever to walk this planet have experienced it, often more than once? There is something divine about the experience. It points to a deeper truth that humans have had trouble learning since time immemorial: love is not conditional. Love does not pick and choose. Love simply is. It exists in spite of itself, and some say it is indeed everything – this includes the positive and the negative emotions. It includes the heaven and hell of human existence. Love does not discriminate.

To heal our heavy hearts, we must do something radical. We must feel. We must experience the pain that our earth is carrying from the burden of human existence. We must acknowledge the mental health crisis that plagues society; the rising suicide rates; the for-profit prisons; the dying coral reefs; the war, the injustice, the hunger, the greed, the heartbreak. It must become a part of us as much as anything else, to the point that we break open and cry tears of absolute despair. Our hearts must break, otherwise we will remain right where we stand, unable to solve the problems of our time due to an inability to carry their sorrowful weight. Without accepting our heartbreak, we will continue to propagate violence and prejudice, anguish and despair, pushing them away only to become tangled in the hearts of others. To let our hearts become broken is a courageous act of defiance against the status quo. The willingness to let go of our armors, to become malleable and vulnerable, is an incomparable measure of strength, and a testament to our integrity as supportive human beings.

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In my short life, I have learned a few things. First, people are hurting – even the ones that you think are fine, the ones that you are intimidated by or look up to, and the ones that you dislike or hate. Everyone is heartbroken. So we should not shun anyone from receiving the support that they need to feel whole and happy. We should treat everyone’s pain as tenderly as we would our own, and set aside our differences to feel compassion and create a safe space for healing to occur. This is true love.

Second, life is simply not as enjoyable with a closed heart. Though I am still on the journey of opening up my heart, I have removed many a brick from my previously impenetrable fortress. The result has been a gradual development into the truest version of myself. I have become more tolerant, accepting, humble, patient, gentle, generous, grateful, forgiving, and courageous. My understanding of love has evolved beyond conditional give and take, and my ability to offer this love to others and to myself has increased exponentially. I feel pain more strongly, and sometimes get overwhelmed by it; but compared to numbness and depression, I would take the real experience of emotion any day. Opening my heart is an act of service, because without allowing myself to feel the pain of others, I limit my ability to support and to heal. This is true love.

Finally, pain, suffering, and loss are inescapable. No matter how much meditation you do, how much self-love you give yourself, how much generosity you offer the world, bad things will continue to happen, most often when you least expect it. Sadly, many people respond to this truth by shutting down their hearts once and for all, refusing to let love either in or out for fear of the “consequences.” In other words, people have given up. They have taken a fundamental truth of the universe too personally, allowing themselves to become powerless and hopeless as a result. We all know someone like this, and we can blatantly see the dissatisfaction and lack of vitality that results from such a path. Fortunately, there is a positive way to navigate the hard truth of suffering: acceptance.

If you cannot change something, what sense is there in worrying about it? Why let pain and suffering keep you from enjoying all of the positive experiences life has to offer? A quick glance at this question shows us that we are personally responsible for our happiness. Bad things happen to everyone, but the true source of suffering is in the mind. Attachment to the things we like, aversion from those we don’t; this polar attitude is a recipe for disaster. Taking a more neutral look at reality allows us to welcome life as it is given to us, for better or for worse. Acceptance generates resilience, which is the essence of self that allows us to find happiness even in the most troubling of times. Most importantly, acceptance allows us to keep our hearts open, despite the circumstances. This is true love.

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Yes, I am falling in love again. And yes, I am absolutely terrified. But without fear, what on Earth is worth fighting for? Human life is an ephemeral chance to embrace the entirety of reality. It is an opportunity to learn all that we can, to prepare us for that next phase which we cannot possibly understand until death inevitably takes us. This is only the beginning, and what a beautiful world we have been born into; where love and heartbreak, joy and sorrow, pain and bliss can coexist on a macro- and microscopic level. No one ever said love was easy, but neither is hatred, nor anger, nor hopelessness. If we are going to live courageously, we might as well live for the virtues that bring more healing than harm to the world. We might as well fall in love.