June 7, 2024 • 23 mins
what if brokenheartedness wasn’t something to get through, but an honored & trusted guide toward interconnectedness, courage, and grief as catalyst for heartfelt action?
in this episode we explore the wild paradox of love and sorrow, and the transformative power of embracing both…love in the time of broken hearts. dana shares her own personal heartbreak stories—including her biggest—plus, some reminder practices for how to slowdown and tune into the tender life experience of grief AKA the risk of living & loving!
~show notes~
- Living by the Word: a collection of essays, Alice Walker (“Nobody Was Supposed to Survive”—referenced MOVE Bombing essay)
- enter to win a free coaching session ~ when you leave a 5-star rating (only) and a written review, you'll be entered into a monthly drawing for a free 90-min coaching session with dana (value of $388). DM (@danablix instagram) or email a screenshot of your submission—take it right before you hit submit—along with the review name/title. winner announcements will be made across platforms!
/// sound-editing/design ~ rose blakelock, theme song ~ kat ottosen, cover art ~ natalee miller ///
@danablix on ig 😭 feeling the pull for coaching support? go to danabalicki.com for inner/outer transformation 🖐️⭐️ leave a 5-star rating & review to be entered in a monthly raffle for a free coaching session (details in show notes) 🎁 share this with your favorite boo-hooer 😭
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Crying in my jacuzzi.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Back in late 2004, maybe early 2005, I was living
in Culver City and my boyfriendof many years had broken up with
me and I was at this cafe.
It was just a rainy, rainy dayand I was reading Alice Walker's
collection of essays Living bythe Word, and there's this one
essay called no One Was Supposedto Survive, about the bombing
(01:00):
of the Move house inPhiladelphia.
The Move community was a blackback to the land community and
the Philadelphia police bombedtheir house, killing 11 people,
several children, and at thattime I was in the full swing of
activism and organizinganti-imperialist and organizing
(01:23):
anti-imperialist, anti-war.
I was not unfamiliar with thecruelty and supremacist nature
of the United States governmentand all of its sentinels, but I
certainly wasn't immune to it.
And at the end of the essaythere's a poem and there's this
line that says and I too,fucking yes, sing America.
(01:46):
And I still remember readingthose words on the page and
feeling so angry and sick andheartbroken at all the ways
people have dominated,dehumanized, oppressed each
other over time, recognized,oppressed each other over time.
(02:08):
And I got up, left the cafe andthere was a man near my car, an
older man, and he had this bigbag he was digging through and
he was soaking wet and I don'tremember if it was like on his
bag or a jacket or a piece ofclothing, but I thought he was a
vet, probably a Vietnam vet,and I asked him if I could get
him anything or help him out andhe just asked for a bagel and
coffee or something like that.
(02:28):
And when I brought it out andhanded it to him, I was hit with
this wave of stench of feces.
And then our hands weretouching His skin, just felt
like it was so wet it was goingto just fall off the bone.
We talked for a bit and then Igot in my car and drove around
(03:03):
the block but I had to pull overbecause I was crying so hard
and it was raining so hard thatI couldn't really see anything
and I felt torn open, like in mybody, and I looked into this
tear, I turned to it and thiscrack in reality and I could
just see everything.
(03:24):
I felt like I could see thisman that he could have been my
dad, or at the very least he wassomeone's son and he had
definitely been uncared for byhis country, but also that he
had been a soldier in the racistVietnam War bombing and the
surely white police officers andthen the black bodies of the
(03:46):
MOVE family members, as Alicewas describing them in her essay
.
Eleven eleven were killed onMay 13th 1985, including five
children.
And in 1985, I was somewhererunning around being a
four-year-old my dad was alittle younger than I am now and
(04:07):
I felt everyone or everythingthat had been failed by the
system, even the people thatmaybe thought they were winning
or being cared for in some way,because states can't care for
people or they don't.
And then, thinking of theemails that we'd recently
received at the anti-warorganization I worked for, from
(04:27):
our contacts in Fallujah, wherethe United States government was
dropping white phosphorus,which is a war crime, and Iraqis
being driven out of their homes, bombed out of their homes,
into the desert in winter, andthen the frantic hustle to raise
funds for blankets and tentsand stoves and food.
(04:48):
And then the tiny reflection ofmy own heartbreak as the life I
thought I was going to havewith this man had evaporated.
I could see all these worlds inthe one world Through this web
of heartbreak.
I could touch all the things,the pluriverse, all the
(05:14):
realities simultaneously, thisweb of interconnection,
interbeing through heartbreak.
It was a revelation and utterdespair.
Zero stars, do not recommend.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
But also 10 out of 10 would recommend.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, both.
And if we take Alice's word,the way forward is with a broken
heart.
In the Spanish proverb, theonly heart worth having is a
broken one.
Then I think we're all right ontrack.
Having a broken heart can meanthat you took the risk of loving
(06:04):
to begin with, and poets andsages through the centuries will
absolutely tell us that we arecourageous for daring to love.
Maybe that's true.
I do see a lot of folks outthere in the world who are not
(06:27):
necessarily willing to love.
They're not willing to love thePalestinian people.
Too risky.
They weren't willing to lovethe Iraqi people or the Afghan
people.
Too far away, too different,too brown, too whatever, too
foreign.
It's risky to love or to careto open one's heart to another,
(06:59):
to ones we'll never know.
I mean, woo, that's somethingthat people will never see,
never meet, maybe never fullyunderstand, though it's worth
making the effort ofunderstanding.
But the risk is that heartbreak, and heartbreak is shaping.
I was shaped by the heartbreakthat I just told you about.
(07:21):
That was actually over thecourse of many, many years and,
honestly, has maybe never reallystopped.
I have never really stoppedbeing heartbroken and I think
there were definitely times whenI pushed it down and away and
then times it came back up right.
Whatever we push down into ourshadow will always come back up.
(07:45):
It doesn't go away Just becausewe push it away.
Resistance is still anenergetic connection.
What we resist persists.
So I could push it away, but itwas always going to come back
up.
At a certain point I had tobecome willing to be heartbroken
, which meant that I had to bewilling to grieve.
(08:06):
I feel like we got a bigcollective lesson on grief
during COVID.
I mean, I think we got a lot oflessons over the past few years
, but one of them on grief andcollective grief and releasing
ideas of what we thought wouldbe what we thought we'd be, what
we thought was going to happen,the pain of losing so many, the
(08:29):
pain of our lives taking newshapes that we hadn't expected
or wanted.
And our culture is not verygood at grieving.
I think we all kind of knowthat one.
I would say Western culture.
That's what I, when I'm sayingour culture, I'm saying, like
our over-culture, dominantculture that shapes us and has
(08:52):
roots in capitalism and whitesupremacy, deep colonial roots
of separation and all of itslittle tendrils of influence
that we all feel all the time,in the systems we live inside of
, in the ways we communicate andinteract, the ways we feel
(09:13):
about ourselves in the world.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Oh hi, it's me, the librarian.
I don't often chime in here,but I heard Dana talking about
overculture, which is actually aterm coined by Dr Clarissa
Pinkoli Estes, and in a lovelyessay from 2017, she says I
(09:39):
coined the word over-culture tomean the larger society, which
often attempts to tell girls,women and elders what we ought,
should and must be do act, butand as you know, often the
deeper wild nature saysotherwise, for the wild,
(10:00):
instinctual nature is wise andwild, both with innate gifts and
creative callings, allfollowing the naturally
insightful voice of the trueself, rather than the often
one-inch-deep over-culturesvoice that values uniformity and
(10:24):
only pre-authorized dancing.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
That's all for now.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
See you at the library.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
It's been a really important practice for me to
grieve.
Last month that meant asking mypartner to vacate the premises
while I just laid on the floorand howled and cried and made
noises to just presence theintensity of emotions and
sadness and pain that I wasfeeling, that I do feel about
the genocide of the Palestinianpeople.
(11:06):
I know there are many genocidesgoing on in the world.
I have a much longer, deeperpersonal connection to Palestine
as an activist as, havingvisited there and visited there
recently, as much as I'm turningtowards the grief and then
trying to take that grief andhonor it and give it space and
(11:30):
not make it right or wrong or orjudge it in any way or coddle
it really in any way, to be inrelationship with it and then to
allow that grief to compost andto allow some, some little
seedlings of hope to exist andthat to turn into action.
(11:52):
Allow them to exist side byside, embracing the paradox.
I mean that is what I work onwith my clients all the time,
and myself and my own littleheart, we're holding grief and
hope together, not a requirementbut an invitation, because
again in our over-c, overculture, there's an over focus
(12:14):
on joy and happiness andemotions that are seen as
positive and light and aresistance and rejection of more
negative, bad emotions.
I mean this in the spiritualinner work world, the healing
(12:34):
industry, the wealth andhellness industry, the
neoliberalized healing culture,only ride the high vibes, stay
out the low vibes, man, I mean,the gems are in the dark.
I think we do all thatexpansive, what some people call
(12:58):
light work, to plunge into thedepths, personally and
collectively.
If that expansion is to keepexpanding, to just keep feeling
good, good, good and to deny thedepth of emotion that we all
experience, that's joy,supremacy.
(13:19):
No, fucking thank you.
In traditional Chinese medicine, joy is only one of the five
core emotions and it's the onlyone that we might put in the
like high vibe category.
So this is why, in heartbreakthere is richness for us, there
(13:39):
is perhaps courage, and I meancourage to risk yes, courage to
risk being heartbroken, butcourage to become more of who
you are by embracing themultitudes, the multitudeness oh
, that's a good word All theparts of your existence, of
being, yes, a human.
(14:02):
We're not even beinganthropocentric here, but I know
you know, because I don't knowwho else is listening to this
podcast Could be a whole crew ofrocks and flowers out there
that tune in regularly.
Hi guys, I really appreciateyou.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Keep listening.
I know the library just droppedin, so I thought I would too.
It's me Connie, your friendlyneighborhood quantum worm.
It's me Tani, your friendlyneighborhood quantum worm, and I
have plenty of rock friendsthat just love grinding my
jacuzzi.
So if you have any rock friendsor liking friends, those crazy
(14:42):
bastards, just feel free toshare this podcast with them or
go ahead and rate and reviewwherever you are listening.
Anywho, gotta toot with them.
Or go ahead and rate and reviewwherever you are listening.
And who got a two?
Speaker 2 (14:56):
To honor our complexity, not just as humans,
which is plenty, but as beingson the planet, in a web of
experience, in the pluriverse,in the many worlds that are in
this one world, and not one ofthem is the correct world.
(15:19):
Again, our overculture wouldnot agree with that and look the
overculture.
A gentle being man.
Everything has agency.
A gentle being man, everythinghas agency if we honor that we
(15:40):
are in a web of experience ofbeings and we honor the range of
our experience, the range ofour emotions, in the same way
that we can honor the seasons,that we can honor A tree goes
through different forms andprocesses in every season, and
that it all has its place andits function, Like nothing in it
(16:04):
is extra or random orsuperfluous, random or
superfluous.
And that our brokenheartedness,our grief, our sadness, our
relief, our shutdowns, rightLike our trauma responses, like
(16:26):
none of it is wrong, is anaccident, is a problem that our
brokenheartedness has a reasonfor existing.
Maybe it even has agency.
What if it has somethingprofound to teach us, as opposed
to just something to getthrough and get over?
I mean, my biggest heartbreakhas been the world.
(16:50):
No man has broken my heart.
The way the world has bell hooksrates in her book all about
love.
Everywhere we learn that loveis important and yet we are
bombarded by its failure in therealm of the political, among
(17:10):
the religious, in our familiesand in our romantic lives.
We see little indication thatlove informs decisions,
strengthens our understanding ofcommunity or keeps us together.
This bleak picture in no wayalters the nature of our longing
.
We still hope that love willprevail.
(17:30):
We still believe in love'spromise.
So your brokenheartedness isproof of love, is proof of life.
And if we want to splash aroundin some Zen Buddhism, the heart
full of love is also the heartabsent of love.
Empty, oh emptiness.
(17:51):
All things inter-are,inter-being.
The heart that is full of loveis also the heart that is empty
of love.
Nothing exists in a vacuum.
Our broken hearts are onlybroken because they existed in
the first place, because therewas something to break.
(18:12):
Put your hand over your heart.
How is your heart?
Just breathe into it.
How is your heart?
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Broken full empty.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Let your heartbreak guide you.
So what if ourbrokenheartedness has a purpose,
or even just has agency, likeit's a thing that we're
interacting with, that we canhave relationship with?
It's not an accident, it's nota throwaway, it's not just
something to get through as fastas possible, that to be shaped
(19:14):
by it is maybe the point.
It is maybe the point.
How are you being shaped byyour broken heart?
Who are you becoming?
I mean hint hint more ofyourself, but who are you
becoming because of your brokenheart?
And then, if we're all out herewith broken hearts, having
(19:47):
risked that, that's beautiful.
Being willing to be shaped byhurt, by pain, by sadness, by
discomfort, that's living, getaway from it and you don't ever
really get to know it.
What if that right there, yourwillingness to be brokenhearted,
that right there, yourwillingness to be brokenhearted,
to be in that pain, to beshaped by that, is the only way
(20:11):
you will ever understand andhave any understanding with the
people that you will never meet,that you are concerned about or
raising funds for or standingin solidarity with or talking
and having fucking uncomfortableconversations with your friends
and family and community aboutwhat if that broken heart is the
only actual understanding thatyou will ever have with them.
(20:33):
Why would you ever turn awayfrom that?
I don't have a monopoly on this,on how to do it with all the
grace, all the time, and I don'texpect you to either.
I don't expect anyone to.
I think grace is something thatwe can cultivate and maybe that
(20:55):
understanding will never beeasy and maybe, just maybe, that
is part of our continuedmagnificent evolution, because
look at how many things willnever be easy.
Addressing systemic racism,that's never going to be super
easy.
Chill, no big deal.
(21:16):
It's not designed to be.
If it were easy, then it wouldnbig deal it's not designed to
be.
If it were easy, then itwouldn't exist.
It's complex and maybeheartbreak is just always
stepping forward as a guide, asa teacher, to not just show us
how to get through it, but to bein relationship with it, with
(21:40):
ourselves, with each other, ingreat discomfort, woo.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
You feel me.
Let your soul be crushed.
Let your heart be broken.
Let yourself be changed.
Let your relationship be broken.
Let yourself be changed.
Let your relationship to yourego.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
That's been trying so hard to protect you let that
grow and evolve.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Find compassion for the parts of you that are scared
.
There are so many parts.
It's okay.
Guard the pain of others withcompassion.
Turn your heartbreak intoaction.
(22:46):
Crying in my jacuzzi, if youenjoyed what we did here today,
go over to wherever it is thatyou are listening to this
podcast and give us a rating.
As many stars, five, as yourheart desires.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Five stars, though Theme music and other musical
bits by the very talented KatOtteson, Sound design and
editing by the effervescent RoseBlakelock.
Thank you, thank you.
Thank you so much for beinghere.
I look forward to playing withyou more in my jacuzzi.
That sounded dirtier than Imeant it, but you know what I
(23:33):
mean.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Thank you.
Crying in my jacuzzi.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Back in late 2004, maybe early 2005, I was living
in Culver City and my boyfriendof many years had broken up with
me and I was at this cafe.
It was just a rainy, rainy dayand I was reading Alice Walker's
collection of essays Living bythe Word, and there's this one
essay called no One Was Supposedto Survive, about the bombing
(01:00):
of the Move house inPhiladelphia.
The Move community was a blackback to the land community and
the Philadelphia police bombedtheir house, killing 11 people,
several children, and at thattime I was in the full swing of
activism and organizinganti-imperialist and organizing
(01:23):
anti-imperialist, anti-war.
I was not unfamiliar with thecruelty and supremacist nature
of the United States governmentand all of its sentinels, but I
certainly wasn't immune to it.
And at the end of the essaythere's a poem and there's this
line that says and I too,fucking yes, sing America.
(01:46):
And I still remember readingthose words on the page and
feeling so angry and sick andheartbroken at all the ways
people have dominated,dehumanized, oppressed each
other over time, recognized,oppressed each other over time.
(02:08):
And I got up, left the cafe andthere was a man near my car, an
older man, and he had this bigbag he was digging through and
he was soaking wet and I don'tremember if it was like on his
bag or a jacket or a piece ofclothing, but I thought he was a
vet, probably a Vietnam vet,and I asked him if I could get
him anything or help him out andhe just asked for a bagel and
coffee or something like that.
(02:28):
And when I brought it out andhanded it to him, I was hit with
this wave of stench of feces.
And then our hands weretouching His skin, just felt
like it was so wet it was goingto just fall off the bone.
We talked for a bit and then Igot in my car and drove around
(03:03):
the block but I had to pull overbecause I was crying so hard
and it was raining so hard thatI couldn't really see anything
and I felt torn open, like in mybody, and I looked into this
tear, I turned to it and thiscrack in reality and I could
just see everything.
(03:24):
I felt like I could see thisman that he could have been my
dad, or at the very least he wassomeone's son and he had
definitely been uncared for byhis country, but also that he
had been a soldier in the racistVietnam War bombing and the
surely white police officers andthen the black bodies of the
(03:46):
MOVE family members, as Alicewas describing them in her essay
.
Eleven eleven were killed onMay 13th 1985, including five
children.
And in 1985, I was somewhererunning around being a
four-year-old my dad was alittle younger than I am now and
(04:07):
I felt everyone or everythingthat had been failed by the
system, even the people thatmaybe thought they were winning
or being cared for in some way,because states can't care for
people or they don't.
And then, thinking of theemails that we'd recently
received at the anti-warorganization I worked for, from
(04:27):
our contacts in Fallujah, wherethe United States government was
dropping white phosphorus,which is a war crime, and Iraqis
being driven out of their homes, bombed out of their homes,
into the desert in winter, andthen the frantic hustle to raise
funds for blankets and tentsand stoves and food.
(04:48):
And then the tiny reflection ofmy own heartbreak as the life I
thought I was going to havewith this man had evaporated.
I could see all these worlds inthe one world Through this web
of heartbreak.
I could touch all the things,the pluriverse, all the
(05:14):
realities simultaneously, thisweb of interconnection,
interbeing through heartbreak.
It was a revelation and utterdespair.
Zero stars, do not recommend.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
But also 10 out of 10 would recommend.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, both.
And if we take Alice's word,the way forward is with a broken
heart.
In the Spanish proverb, theonly heart worth having is a
broken one.
Then I think we're all right ontrack.
Having a broken heart can meanthat you took the risk of loving
(06:04):
to begin with, and poets andsages through the centuries will
absolutely tell us that we arecourageous for daring to love.
Maybe that's true.
I do see a lot of folks outthere in the world who are not
(06:27):
necessarily willing to love.
They're not willing to love thePalestinian people.
Too risky.
They weren't willing to lovethe Iraqi people or the Afghan
people.
Too far away, too different,too brown, too whatever, too
foreign.
It's risky to love or to careto open one's heart to another,
(06:59):
to ones we'll never know.
I mean, woo, that's somethingthat people will never see,
never meet, maybe never fullyunderstand, though it's worth
making the effort ofunderstanding.
But the risk is that heartbreak, and heartbreak is shaping.
I was shaped by the heartbreakthat I just told you about.
(07:21):
That was actually over thecourse of many, many years and,
honestly, has maybe never reallystopped.
I have never really stoppedbeing heartbroken and I think
there were definitely times whenI pushed it down and away and
then times it came back up right.
Whatever we push down into ourshadow will always come back up.
(07:45):
It doesn't go away Just becausewe push it away.
Resistance is still anenergetic connection.
What we resist persists.
So I could push it away, but itwas always going to come back
up.
At a certain point I had tobecome willing to be heartbroken
, which meant that I had to bewilling to grieve.
(08:06):
I feel like we got a bigcollective lesson on grief
during COVID.
I mean, I think we got a lot oflessons over the past few years
, but one of them on grief andcollective grief and releasing
ideas of what we thought wouldbe what we thought we'd be, what
we thought was going to happen,the pain of losing so many, the
(08:29):
pain of our lives taking newshapes that we hadn't expected
or wanted.
And our culture is not verygood at grieving.
I think we all kind of knowthat one.
I would say Western culture.
That's what I, when I'm sayingour culture, I'm saying, like
our over-culture, dominantculture that shapes us and has
(08:52):
roots in capitalism and whitesupremacy, deep colonial roots
of separation and all of itslittle tendrils of influence
that we all feel all the time,in the systems we live inside of
, in the ways we communicate andinteract, the ways we feel
(09:13):
about ourselves in the world.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Oh hi, it's me, the librarian.
I don't often chime in here,but I heard Dana talking about
overculture, which is actually aterm coined by Dr Clarissa
Pinkoli Estes, and in a lovelyessay from 2017, she says I
(09:39):
coined the word over-culture tomean the larger society, which
often attempts to tell girls,women and elders what we ought,
should and must be do act, butand as you know, often the
deeper wild nature saysotherwise, for the wild,
(10:00):
instinctual nature is wise andwild, both with innate gifts and
creative callings, allfollowing the naturally
insightful voice of the trueself, rather than the often
one-inch-deep over-culturesvoice that values uniformity and
(10:24):
only pre-authorized dancing.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
That's all for now.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
See you at the library.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
It's been a really important practice for me to
grieve.
Last month that meant asking mypartner to vacate the premises
while I just laid on the floorand howled and cried and made
noises to just presence theintensity of emotions and
sadness and pain that I wasfeeling, that I do feel about
the genocide of the Palestinianpeople.
(11:06):
I know there are many genocidesgoing on in the world.
I have a much longer, deeperpersonal connection to Palestine
as an activist as, havingvisited there and visited there
recently, as much as I'm turningtowards the grief and then
trying to take that grief andhonor it and give it space and
(11:30):
not make it right or wrong or orjudge it in any way or coddle
it really in any way, to be inrelationship with it and then to
allow that grief to compost andto allow some, some little
seedlings of hope to exist andthat to turn into action.
(11:52):
Allow them to exist side byside, embracing the paradox.
I mean that is what I work onwith my clients all the time,
and myself and my own littleheart, we're holding grief and
hope together, not a requirementbut an invitation, because
again in our over-c, overculture, there's an over focus
(12:14):
on joy and happiness andemotions that are seen as
positive and light and aresistance and rejection of more
negative, bad emotions.
I mean this in the spiritualinner work world, the healing
(12:34):
industry, the wealth andhellness industry, the
neoliberalized healing culture,only ride the high vibes, stay
out the low vibes, man, I mean,the gems are in the dark.
I think we do all thatexpansive, what some people call
(12:58):
light work, to plunge into thedepths, personally and
collectively.
If that expansion is to keepexpanding, to just keep feeling
good, good, good and to deny thedepth of emotion that we all
experience, that's joy,supremacy.
(13:19):
No, fucking thank you.
In traditional Chinese medicine, joy is only one of the five
core emotions and it's the onlyone that we might put in the
like high vibe category.
So this is why, in heartbreakthere is richness for us, there
(13:39):
is perhaps courage, and I meancourage to risk yes, courage to
risk being heartbroken, butcourage to become more of who
you are by embracing themultitudes, the multitudeness oh
, that's a good word All theparts of your existence, of
being, yes, a human.
(14:02):
We're not even beinganthropocentric here, but I know
you know, because I don't knowwho else is listening to this
podcast Could be a whole crew ofrocks and flowers out there
that tune in regularly.
Hi guys, I really appreciateyou.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Keep listening.
I know the library just droppedin, so I thought I would too.
It's me Connie, your friendlyneighborhood quantum worm.
It's me Tani, your friendlyneighborhood quantum worm, and I
have plenty of rock friendsthat just love grinding my
jacuzzi.
So if you have any rock friendsor liking friends, those crazy
(14:42):
bastards, just feel free toshare this podcast with them or
go ahead and rate and reviewwherever you are listening.
Anywho, gotta toot with them.
Or go ahead and rate and reviewwherever you are listening.
And who got a two?
Speaker 2 (14:56):
To honor our complexity, not just as humans,
which is plenty, but as beingson the planet, in a web of
experience, in the pluriverse,in the many worlds that are in
this one world, and not one ofthem is the correct world.
(15:19):
Again, our overculture wouldnot agree with that and look the
overculture.
A gentle being man.
Everything has agency.
A gentle being man, everythinghas agency if we honor that we
(15:40):
are in a web of experience ofbeings and we honor the range of
our experience, the range ofour emotions, in the same way
that we can honor the seasons,that we can honor A tree goes
through different forms andprocesses in every season, and
that it all has its place andits function, Like nothing in it
(16:04):
is extra or random orsuperfluous, random or
superfluous.
And that our brokenheartedness,our grief, our sadness, our
relief, our shutdowns, rightLike our trauma responses, like
(16:26):
none of it is wrong, is anaccident, is a problem that our
brokenheartedness has a reasonfor existing.
Maybe it even has agency.
What if it has somethingprofound to teach us, as opposed
to just something to getthrough and get over?
I mean, my biggest heartbreakhas been the world.
(16:50):
No man has broken my heart.
The way the world has bell hooksrates in her book all about
love.
Everywhere we learn that loveis important and yet we are
bombarded by its failure in therealm of the political, among
(17:10):
the religious, in our familiesand in our romantic lives.
We see little indication thatlove informs decisions,
strengthens our understanding ofcommunity or keeps us together.
This bleak picture in no wayalters the nature of our longing
.
We still hope that love willprevail.
(17:30):
We still believe in love'spromise.
So your brokenheartedness isproof of love, is proof of life.
And if we want to splash aroundin some Zen Buddhism, the heart
full of love is also the heartabsent of love.
Empty, oh emptiness.
(17:51):
All things inter-are,inter-being.
The heart that is full of loveis also the heart that is empty
of love.
Nothing exists in a vacuum.
Our broken hearts are onlybroken because they existed in
the first place, because therewas something to break.
(18:12):
Put your hand over your heart.
How is your heart?
Just breathe into it.
How is your heart?
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Broken full empty.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Let your heartbreak guide you.
So what if ourbrokenheartedness has a purpose,
or even just has agency, likeit's a thing that we're
interacting with, that we canhave relationship with?
It's not an accident, it's nota throwaway, it's not just
something to get through as fastas possible, that to be shaped
(19:14):
by it is maybe the point.
It is maybe the point.
How are you being shaped byyour broken heart?
Who are you becoming?
I mean hint hint more ofyourself, but who are you
becoming because of your brokenheart?
And then, if we're all out herewith broken hearts, having
(19:47):
risked that, that's beautiful.
Being willing to be shaped byhurt, by pain, by sadness, by
discomfort, that's living, getaway from it and you don't ever
really get to know it.
What if that right there, yourwillingness to be brokenhearted,
that right there, yourwillingness to be brokenhearted,
to be in that pain, to beshaped by that, is the only way
(20:11):
you will ever understand andhave any understanding with the
people that you will never meet,that you are concerned about or
raising funds for or standingin solidarity with or talking
and having fucking uncomfortableconversations with your friends
and family and community aboutwhat if that broken heart is the
only actual understanding thatyou will ever have with them.
(20:33):
Why would you ever turn awayfrom that?
I don't have a monopoly on this,on how to do it with all the
grace, all the time, and I don'texpect you to either.
I don't expect anyone to.
I think grace is something thatwe can cultivate and maybe that
(20:55):
understanding will never beeasy and maybe, just maybe, that
is part of our continuedmagnificent evolution, because
look at how many things willnever be easy.
Addressing systemic racism,that's never going to be super
easy.
Chill, no big deal.
(21:16):
It's not designed to be.
If it were easy, then it wouldnbig deal it's not designed to
be.
If it were easy, then itwouldn't exist.
It's complex and maybeheartbreak is just always
stepping forward as a guide, asa teacher, to not just show us
how to get through it, but to bein relationship with it, with
(21:40):
ourselves, with each other, ingreat discomfort, woo.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
You feel me.
Let your soul be crushed.
Let your heart be broken.
Let yourself be changed.
Let your relationship be broken.
Let yourself be changed.
Let your relationship to yourego.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
That's been trying so hard to protect you let that
grow and evolve.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Find compassion for the parts of you that are scared
.
There are so many parts.
It's okay.
Guard the pain of others withcompassion.
Turn your heartbreak intoaction.
(22:46):
Crying in my jacuzzi, if youenjoyed what we did here today,
go over to wherever it is thatyou are listening to this
podcast and give us a rating.
As many stars, five, as yourheart desires.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Five stars, though Theme music and other musical
bits by the very talented KatOtteson, Sound design and
editing by the effervescent RoseBlakelock.
Thank you, thank you.
Thank you so much for beinghere.
I look forward to playing withyou more in my jacuzzi.
That sounded dirtier than Imeant it, but you know what I
(23:33):
mean.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Thank you.
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