Love, Dating and How to Deal With the Broken Heart

Everybody's heart will be broken at some time during his or her life. This truth was brought home to me recently when the long distance relationship I was involved in began to unravel as the reality of mutual commitments and shared responsibilities for children with ex partners eventually became evident. I am a fifty-year-old father of two beautiful and challenging teenagers. I have been happily single for these past 3 years. Earlier this year I decided it was time to open my heart to the possibility of a loving, conscious relationship. Within weeks I had found my partner or, more accurately, we had found each other. We began our long distance dating which involved a five-hour plane journey and settling into each other's rhythms and time zones.

I won't go into the details of the painful split; suffice to say that we have managed to remain close and supportive friends. So what growth and learning was I able to glean from my recent romance and a broken heart as a mature and, I hope, emotionally intelligent man.

Some time after the initial flight or fight response to the heartache, I was lucky enough to be able to step back and observe the process. I became aware how in the past my strategy for avoiding the misery of emotional pain had been to go on holiday, launch into a rebound relationship, get drunk or reach for the remote control. Anything rather than face the misery.

It has been my experience that in the quest for pleasure I had spent an enormous amount of time running from what was painful. In the place of this conditioning I had overlooked the transformative power of standing in what was coming up for me on my emotional horizon.

I decided to stand my ground and said to myself; "This time I'm not moving. If my heart is going to break, let it break completely. I am meeting the hurt just as it is, without the story of what I should or she should have done." What I discovered in that broken heart was my core which is just perfect the way it is. I found peace and bliss with nothing broken, nothing to fix and plenty of room to grow and learn.

How the process works

o Allow yourself to go right to the core, feeling the hurt, rejection or jealousy.

o Be thankful for the opportunity to feel the wound because it has triggered a catalytic process.

o The memories of all who have hurt you, humiliated and rejected you work their way to surface. You will start to relive those memories.

o Allow yourself to innocently feel all the despair with nothing excluded and allow your heart to be broken deeper than ever before, without any story of what should have happened or what he/she said etc.

o Stay with it no matter what; an amazing thing is about to happen.

We discover a treasure: the pain becomes a catalyst that sparks a transformation. The hurt is reshaped, remodeled and amazingly the pain is converted into joy and the suffering transformed into bliss.

I am reminded of the 13th-Century poet and great mystic Rumi's paradox:

"I saw Grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out: 'It tastes sweet, does it not?'

'You've caught me,' Grief answered, 'and you've ruined my business. How can I sell sorrow when you know it's a blessing?"

Sorrow can be a blessing; the cup of sorrow can taste sweet. It's during times of heartbreak, struggle and challenge that we grow the most. The strongest steel has to go through the hottest furnace. When we allow the light to come in, darkness doesn't have any other choice but to leave.

Martyn Bray (CTACC) is Principle Coach at Openpresence Life Coaching.

For more free advice visit http://openpresence-life-coaching.com/