Surrendering to the Heartbreak
When your heart breaks, surrender.
Let it break you open. Let it expand your capacity for what’s hard and what hurts, as well as your ability to love even more deeply. Let it create more space inside you to feel all there is to feel. Truly, deeply, fully.
Grief comes in waves, both big and small. And I’ve learned over the years to just surrender to them as fully as possible. To allow them to do exactly what they’re meant to do: take me out at the knees… leave me in a mess of tears on the kitchen floor… devastate me completely.
We’re so afraid that the darkness and the depth of these emotions will consume us, and they will. But that won’t be the end of us. We won’t die. It’s simply the beginning of what comes next (though the rebirth can be all things painful). It’s the process of healing wholly and completely, as much as we’re able and meant to from each loss we walk through.
There have been many times over the years that I was certain it was going to kill me. Feeling everything so intensely. I was raw and broken and my heart physically ached. And still, I knew in my bones there was nothing else to do but drop in further. Nothing else to do but feel it all fully.
The more fully we feel what’s hard and what hurts, the more quickly we’re able to move it. To shift it into something else. To make space for whatever we’re meant to receive inside the pocket our loss leaves.
It doesn’t mean we forget.
It doesn’t mean the grief ever truly stops.
It doesn’t mean our hearts ever fully mend.
But we’re able to get back up and carry it into what comes next with us. We’re able to face forward—hearts open—and give our all to the next chapter. To becoming who we’re here to be and doing the work we’re here to do. To finding our right people, the places and spaces we’re meant to occupy.
All goodbyes lead to new hellos.
All death leads to some form of rebirth.
All darkness is eventually met by light.
You will survive it.
And you will be better for it.
But it will be hard and it will hurt first.
And that’s okay.
Surrender.
