Conscious Choice: Only the Broken Heart is Whole

June 2005 | Body & Mind Health

Only the Broken Heart is Whole

by Julia Mossbridge

If I told you I had discovered a healing modality that could bring you to the present moment, center yourself in a sense of delight in the universe and dissolve your ego, would you try it? What if you knew the healing would take only a few moments, and the results could last anywhere from one month to a year. What would you think? The final sell would be the lack of negative side effects, unless you think of experiencing your life to the fullest extent as an unhappy circumstance.

I stumbled on this modality by entering into relentless pursuit of what I wanted. Without restraint, fear of failure, or concern about its impact on others, I kept pushing for a relationship with someone who had already told me he wasn’t available. It became a compulsion: Could I do without this person? Some part of me actually said “No” and believed it.

Mythology scholar Joseph Campbell and others have reminded us that the work of the hero is to push on, despite all odds. The success or failure of the venture is not supposed to matter. It does, just not in the way we think it should. The healing comes with failure, not success.

My failure was predictable. I pushed the relationship too far and he cut it off. I was conscious of what I was doing when I sent the final e-mail that angered him. I pressed “send” on the desktop computer, knowing that I was sending him a message that practically begged for him to help me fail in my quest.

When he gave me the gift of his rejection, I was hurt and furious. Somewhere in my head, I exploded in indignation, fear and self-righteous pain. But my heart knew better … it felt warm, torn but fluid … opened. It was an experience with a memory. I had felt this before, several times:

In high school, when I received a rejection letter from the one university I thought I needed (yes, needed ) to attend. In college, when my first love told me he was seeing someone else. In graduate school, when my favorite work was seen as unimportant by the person who should have most appreciated it. When, last year, I realized that the marriage I’d worked so long to uphold was finally over. And now, just this spring, when everything is blooming, I have faced another heart-rending rejection.

All these experiences have several things in common. In all of them, I pushed against the flow of what I knew to be true. Each time, some part of me knew that something was a bit off, even before the rejection. I was trying too hard, the universe wasn’t helping out. I put too much of the effort on my own shoulders. Each experience was preceded by a foreshadowing of the heartbreak.

But my ego, my mind, some part of me that didn’t listen, still pushed on. Each experience seems like a mistake as I recount it, and I’ve certainly read and written about this kind of striving as some kind of spiritual misstep. Yet, I am beginning to believe that this kind of pattern — effort despite all signals contrary to your goal, followed by failure or rejection — is actually a profound healing modality.

When I realized that I had finally been cut short in my efforts, I saw my imagined future with this man flash before my eyes. After I spent weeks grieving the loss of these fantastic images, I started to realize that each image of the future that I lost placed me that much more in the present. When I had finally grieved my imagined future, I started on the past memories. I retraced those steps until they were no longer interesting. Again I was sitting even more resolutely in the present.

However, being in the present was not a delight at first. It forced me to experience the reality of my life: the divorce, the time away from my son, my slowness of my research. I started to get angry at my situation, beginning a tirade at God. Wasn’t I following my heart? Didn’t I try to find exactly what my heart was seeking? Yes and yes, came the answers. But, there was no apology. In the space where I felt that apology should have been, I instead felt loved. I began to appreciate my God-given mystery of success, failure and effort; I began to see the wisdom in this curious planned or unplanned universe.

Still, my ego was bruised. Wasn’t I good enough to be loved and cherished? I knew the brightness of my love; couldn’t he see it? Yes and yes, but no. These were the wrong questions. After much casting about, it occured to me that the failure of my efforts had nothing to do with the worthiness of my goal. It had to do with there being a goal in the first place. My ego had to learn, again, that it does not own or create my value. It won’t succeed at going out and forcing people or situations to appreciate itself, but it could begin to serve a different purpose, once it has been deflated. A wounded ego can act as a pointer, reminding us where to look for our worth. My ego is slowly, painfully, delightfully, turning into a mirror for my heart, showing me that, without effort, I am already loveable.

A notably morose rabbi once said, “Only the broken heart is whole.” As our hearts break, the fantasy of our desires is replaced by the reality of our spiritual needs: appreciating the present moment, becoming closer to God and losing the energy that drives our egos. When we fail after unflagging effort based on the desire of the ego, we are set, albeit painfully, right down where we need to be.

Julia Mossbridge, a Chicago-based writer, is a mother, cognitive neuroscientist, and author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work (New World Library),
www.unfolding.org.

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