The wisdom we need often comes from surprising places. Mine came to me while I was doing a Peloton ride. Sweat was mixing with tears as I moved to the music, and Emma Lovewell told me that I am not brokenhearted; I am wholehearted.
I needed to hear those words at that moment. I have been feeling brokenhearted. So much so that I had chosen a mood ride from a new series Peloton introduced. I chose the mood of Sad because I didn’t have the energy for anything else.
My feelings were about more than a relationship ending. It encompassed all of life’s disappointments — big and small, the ones that crack us wide open and the ones that bruise but fade away. I felt them all. Even though I love my life, there was room inside it to wonder why some things I wanted hadn’t worked out at all. I wondered if they ever would.
I’m a former therapist. I know the value of reframing our thoughts to change our mindset. I listened to Lovewell’s words of wisdom and considered them.
Did my heart feel broken or overwhelmed with feeling? If I stopped to consider it, I could tell that the idea of being wholehearted rather than brokenhearted makes sense. My heart wasn’t broken into jagged pieces. It was overflowing — with love, with grief, with disappointment. The feelings were pouring out, and they weren’t escaping because the vessel was broken but because I feel things deeply.
Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.
~Jamie Anderson
It may seem to be a matter of semantics, but reframing is more than that. It’s offering ourselves a new perspective — one that empowers us. A broken heart is flawed and needs fixing. It makes us, in turn, damaged goods. When we think of ourselves this way, we begin to believe that there’s something wrong with us. We take the pain of life’s disappointments — whether that’s a failed relationship or a career setback — and we draw conclusions about who we are as individuals.
If we’re not careful, that broken heart can come to define us. We set off into the world with a narrative that we haven’t gotten a fair shake. This person or that one let us down. This job or that failed to meet our expectations. Our perception of a past skewed against us begins to sabotage our present. It becomes a cycle of pain.
But if we are wholehearted, we are already all that we need. We are whole with full hearts. We don’t need to go out and find glue to hold us together. We are together. We don’t need to search for any missing pieces. We are complete on our own. We’re just feeling all the feelings.
You’re not doing life wrong; you’re doing it right. If there’s any secret you’re missing, it’s that doing it right is just really hard. Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling.
~Glennon Doyle
It’s hard to sit with sadness, loneliness, or disappointment. They are challenging feelings, but they can also be used to help us grow. We can’t truly learn our lessons if we’re always running from the discomfort of how we feel. We need to sit with it and feel it. We need to be vulnerable. If we can do this, the feelings will pass. We just have to give it time.
When we see ourselves as wholehearted instead of brokenhearted, we begin to acknowledge the beauty of feeling so much. It doesn’t actually feel beautiful when we’re stuck in our grief or pain. But to be able to hold so much feeling for other people is an incredible gift.
I am familiar with the idea of wholehearted living from the work of Brené Brown, but I still have looked at my heart as broken. I’ve looked at myself as broken. It’s easy when we’re feeling defeated to look back at our lives and pick out all the parts of it that didn’t work out like we wanted. Yet, we can just as easily count the instances where life gave us more than we ever asked for or gifted us with moments of beauty we never expected.
Wholehearted living is about engaging with our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion and connection to wake up in the morning and think, ‘No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough.’ It’s going to bed at night thinking, ‘Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.’
~Brené Brown
Today, I am not telling myself I have a broken heart. I’m telling myself this instead: I feel so much that my heart overflows. My heart is full of feeling, but I am whole.
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Crystal