I Let My Heart Break

Awareness will not solve the world’s problems, says Ronna Bloom, but it’s an important first step.

In the early days of a crisis that is killing people and shows no sign of ending, I wrote, “to be alive is to carry survivor guilt.” It’s what I feel often, not just about war, but about violence, illnesses, and disasters everywhere, yet this was the first time I named the connection I feel between living and feeling guilt. I realized I didn’t want to get stuck in guilt—or grief, rage, sadness, or despair. Feel them, yes, but not get lost in their absolutism and reactivity, because if I’m lost, then the possibility that I might be part of any solution is also lost. What to do?

As a poet, I go to poetry for company and sometimes relief. When I was a poet-in-residence at a Toronto hospital, I prescribed poems for the sick, the vulnerable, doctors, staff, patients—anyone who wanted one. Two male physicians told me on separate occasions that when their spouses died, nothing could touch their grief except poetry. 

Last year, I visited a friend in palliative care. When she woke up and looked at me, she put her finger to her mouth and requested, “Poem?” I said: 

It was a poem by the Persian poet Hafiz. My friend’s face softened. Her head rested back. I recited that same poem to Valama, her nurse. Valama touched her thin chest beneath the blue scrubs.

But sometimes I have no poetry, or poetry is not enough. When I walk down the street and the man has his cup out, when people are perishing, when loss feels constant and endlessly terrifying, then what? How do I live with suffering—mine, everyone’s? How?

I asked my teacher, a Dzogchen practitioner I’ve known for thirty years, how she works with the world’s pain. “I do two things,” she said. “I let my heart break, and I raise my awareness to the highest level possible.” 

I decided that those would be my practices. I thought, I know how to let my heart break. But thinking isn’t doing. And mostly, when I feel the breaking, suddenly I’m in another room making dinner because something in me wants to flee. There’s no avoiding pain, though.

Everyone hurts whether they say so or not. Suffering is near and far. It’s like a sustain pedal on an electric keyboard; the sound will only get louder. Can I let myself hear it? Let it blast and break me? 

A friend took me to a Neil Young concert once. I went cynically. Cynicism is how I’ve protected myself from feeling too much. Yet because I’m a feeler, it has never worked. It’s like trying to prevent my hair from being brown. I can cover it, but it’s there underneath. 

“When the heart opens and awareness is lit up on high, clarity and compassion are possible.”

On a huge video screen, Young showed footage of soldiers returning from war. (The Iraq war? Another war?) Then he sang, “Only love can break your heart.” I steeled myself. “Only love can break your heart. Try to be true right from the start.”

Over and over he sang that line until he broke through to me, and I let go. I wailed in relief. To be love—to feel love—will melt you, and to be melted, even in pain, is a lot better, softer, more of a relief than the rigidity of holding on, especially when there is nothing to hold on to. 

So, now, if I have enough awareness to notice I’m trying to hold my heart together, something says, let it break. These words come, not harshly, but as an unexpected kindness to myself. And then, there’s a rushing in of everyone’s suffering. Suddenly I’m in an unplanned tonglen: taking in the pain of the world and sending back love. It hurts, but it hurts right.

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, people said to each other, “Stay safe.” It drove me crazy. It’s impossible to remain safe in this world. I wanted a new salutation. Instead I’d say, “I salute your beating heart.” Today’s version is “I’m so sorry you are suffering.” I don’t yet say it out loud or in emails. But here now: I’m so sorry you are suffering.

Because I live where the sky was blue this morning and full of geese honking as they flew south, I also say, “Thank you.”

My cousin who has a deep meditation practice and to whom I wrote for wisdom after the war broke out, responded: “I have no wisdom to share. I feel a terrible heartbreak and clinically cold view that this will only get worse…. I just remain compelled to feel the hurt and denounce the violence but resist the impulse to hatred.”

Then a few days later, she wrote: “It’s SO hard and awful and a precious challenge to meet things as they are.” She also sent some pictures of bright purple mushrooms in the woods and added: “These wonders still pop up in the forest.”

The second practice is to raise awareness to the highest level. I have to return to this repeatedly. Any stability gained from awareness can easily be upended by some fresh shock. If I look online for one minute, I end up with so much feeling choked back that when I talk, it’s like coughing up a hairball. 

So, I put my attention in that place not identified with whatever shock or rage or grief or fear I’m feeling. That place that has no face but speaks; it’s wide, steady, and free. Somehow, with focus and a bit of courage to keep going, awareness sometimes pops me into pure spaciousness, bringing a stillness that defuses the bomb of pain and releases it in the love of seeing. We are not alone. How could we be? Awareness sees and carries us, like poetry does, but more so, because no words are involved.

Awareness won’t bring anyone back. It won’t prevent illness, fights, or an extinction. It won’t solve anything, just as Jane Hirshfield says poetry doesn’t solve anything. But, she goes on, “it can act as a solvent, a WD-40 for the soul.” When the heart opens and awareness is lit up on high, clarity and compassion are possible. And connection. I’m so sorry you are suffering.

For a minute, I am with what’s here: the photo my cousin sent of purple mushrooms, yellow leaves in the wind, a boy on the radio crying in anguish, “We didn’t do anything!” Blue sky, blue sky, geese. In awareness, the heart breaks open. There’s a radical acceptance of fear and the possibility of opening up in the middle of it. I’m shaky at the threshold. How long can I stay here without fleeing?

— © Lion’s Roar, by Ronna Bloom, September 2024