The Gift of a Broken Heart

By Bob Tracey

For some it comes as a throbbing, aching sensation in the chest. For others, a gray, fogging cloud of numbness that leaves us grasping to feel anything at all. However we feel it, we have all shared in the experience of a broken heart.

Our hearts break when we lose someone or something we love. As life goes on, it seems like it becomes nothing more than an endless string of heartbreaks. We ask ourselves, when will it all end? When will love come and stay?

Recently, my father died, and in my despair I reached out to an intuitive, energy healer whose tender ministries led me to a place inside myself I can only call a state of grace. While in this state I attracted to my side the sweetest and most beautiful woman I have ever known...

It seems she was married for a very long time to a man who treated her best when he ignored her. In fact, he didn't even kiss her for the last eight years of their marriage.

I'll never forget our first kiss. I took her face in my hands and our lips found that which we all yearn for. Our beginning was a time of effortless harmony and peaceful passion such as I have never known, and had never even dreamed of. I felt my broken heart begin to heal.

Perhaps the heartbreaks of her life had left her safely numb for so long that the astonishing and joyful intimacy we shared was too much or too soon. Perhaps I'll never really know why, but before long I felt her precious and perfect feminine presence fade from my life, one excrutiatingly painful moment at a time, until one day, she was gone.

I felt my heart break again, and more intensely than ever before. I felt it so deeply I could almost hear it. And then suddenly, in this barren and forsaken aloneness, I discovered something beautiful. I found that I still loved her, and my love was now so pure and powerful that I could continue to love her in our apartness, without needing anything in return.

Again, I felt my heart begin to heal, but I sensed something completely new. Yes, my heart was broken, but it was broken open, and it has remained this way. I find now that I am brimming and bursting with love. The simplest things in life are imbued with a beauty that sometimes leaves me breathless, and my tears of loss are now tears of joy.

I feel like a crystal, eternal spring from which love surges and bubbles into the world. There is no end to it, no end to me.

All my life I have sought love, and every heartbreak along the way has brought me one step closer to this source which I realize has always been right here inside me. Now as my sacred self overflows into the world, my deepest desire is simply to share this love in every way that I can.

I miss her and our perfect togetherness, but I bless her now for the gift of my broken open heart.