Wide Open

Let your heart break.
Let it break wide open.
You have lost all interest in
trying to keep all the pieces
together anymore.
Your soul wants out.
Your soul wants freedom.

You have been longing to
stop pushing down the
lump in your throat.
Let your truth be spoken.
Let it be breathed.
Let it flow through your body
as dance, tears or sweat
without reason, analysis or
control.

Let your heart beak.
Let it break wide open.
Let it sift out what no longer
serves you.
Let it pull the veils off.
Finally.

What is here is clarity.
Truth. Integrity.
Raw and messy.
But real.

Lisa McCrohan

I always tear up at mass.  It could be while I’m listening to one of my children signing along with the music.  It could be the boy in front of me leaning into his dad, and his dad putting his arm around his son.  It could be the older gentleman patiently helping his wife out of her wheelchair and to stand up.  But pretty much every mass, I feel some tears coming.

I tend to hold them back.  I tend to stop myself from crying, which I know is overriding the innate response of my body to something beautiful and emotionally evocative.  I don’t want to feel too much.  And I don’t want to LOOK like I’m feeling too much.  And, if I’m being honest, it’s because I’m afraid that if I let myself cry, I’ll never stop.

There are times when we sense an ache within us.  Maybe it comes at 2 a.m. when you wake and can’t get back to sleep.  Maybe it comes on Monday morning when you go back into your usual routine.  Maybe it’s at church.  We are often afraid of feeling this ache and feeling deeply that we try to move away from it, get rid of it, and medicate it.

I remember reading Mark Epstein’s book, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, a number of years ago in graduate school and thinking, “Yes, that’s exactly it.  We are so afraid of falling apart that we try to keep ourselves together.”

And yet beneath this scurrying for control and having everything organized in our outside life – from the kitchen island to our children’s closets – is this fear of falling apart.  There is this fear of our hearts breaking wide open.  There is this fear of feeling so very much that it overwhelms us and we lose it.

So we try to avoid “it” at all costs.

Of course this takes a huge amount of energy.  I tell my clients that it is like trying to constantly keep a beach ball down in the water.  Ironically, this “holding down” and “trying to keep at bay” taxes our internal system.

And yet, when we have the sacred space to skillfully allow “the ache”, the fear, and the emotions to finally be felt – drip by drip, little by little – we find that what is “falling apart” are the old beliefs and false stories.  We find that, ironically, in allowing our hearts to “break wide open,” we experience the healing and transforming power of tenderness, rawness, and realness.

This is real living.  This is freedom.

How do you “let the heart break”?  How do you begin to allow yourself to “feel the ache” – little by little?

Last week at mass, I let the tears fall.  I can’t recall exactly what stirred my heart — some quiet gesture of tenderness, some silent moment of beauty.  But I decided to not override the impulse to cry.  So I cried.  And it felt good.  Cleansing.

I was letting my heart be touched.  I was letting my heart feel.  I was letting my heart break open.

I’m really not interested in “keeping it all together” anymore.  My soul wants freedom.  And there’s the growing realization in me that life is finite.  I don’t have “all the time in the world.”  And so that makes this very moment holy.  It is a sacred opportunity to stop overriding what the soul and body know we need.  It’s an opportunity to let ourselves be moved by beauty and the fleeting moments of delight, kindness, grace, and compassion.

How do we let ourselves feel what we are trying to constantly NOT feel?!

Stop overriding.

This is what I talk to clients about.  This is what I am learning to do in more deeply and conscious ways.  Stop overriding the impulses of the body to move and make sounds.  Stop overriding the wisdom you hear from Deep Within you, dismissing it as “impossible,” or “crazy.”

Let your heart open little by little each day to build the habit to let your body dance or cry, moan or rest, and let your heart breathe freedom.

This ache, this “breaking open,” is a holy invitation to inner freedom.