There are times in life when we have to be alone.
If we cannot be alone, then we cannot plumb the depths of our souls and work out the dark places that have a stranglehold on our sovereignty, our deep belonging to life. Yet, unless we also partner, we don’t get to have a light shined into our deepest wounds.
Many in fact, partner non-stop precisely to avoid being alone. In heartbreak they may discover all they have avoided.
A fear of one’s depths, especially the wounded parts (which, ironically, is a fear of greater vibrancy, love, wholeness, creativity, belonging, compassion, and courage) causes us to search for these precious parts of ourselves largely in others.
Whether “other” becomes a mirror of our own fracture, or a crutch to continue avoiding our full selves, depends upon if we are interested in our depths to begin with. The pain of relationship love can be the only entry for love to penetrate denial, which can break us open to what we likely would not have been open to otherwise—or what I describe as “what we wouldn’t choose on a sunny day.”
Heartbreak is the mother of healing and integration. It dissipates the more we stay with it. This is how pain transforms us. We don’t transform pain; we allow it to change us. When it is done transforming us, it dissipates. In contrast, if we avoid our heartbreak, we solidify our suffering as the perpetuation of pain we have not befriended and thereby lessened by allowing it to have its way with us.
So we can allow the wound to become a gateway. And the pain of love can be what secretly comes to save us. This is why the broken-open heart is a spiritual opportunity of the deepest, most rich, and robust form. All one has to do is make friends with its pain to be shown the way.
But an ignorance of the dark and a refusal to do the deep difficult work of entering core pain in the name of healing and wholeness (which is why to do it at all) often masquerades with the tag line “Wholeness is inside you,” or “All you need is inside you.” But one cannot arrive at that wholeness or enlightenment or whatever you want to call it, on the path of bliss alone. We get the answers and our body-psyche-hearts back by doing the tough, heart-filling and emptying work in our depths.
Because we live in a world that discourages this path—from the American dream mentality, the pleasure and happiness craze, to the New-Age external light-seeking obsession—we have left the underworld of ourselves, which corresponds with our dear Earth (called “hell” by the religious thieves who are afraid of their own darkness and don’t want you to discover yours), in grave jeopardy.
This is our world. Look around. It is the precipice of the climate crisis we find ourselves upon.
The world especially needs our dark love now—our healthy remorse, shame, guilt, tears, our grief, our deep pause and reflection . . . which foster wisdom, compassion, passion, empathy, simplicity, the power to go without, and deep abiding love—which each one of us can engage as our own inner work.
All this is in addition to the goodness we already have access to, which I call “the love we already have in hand.” The dark work is “the love we don’t have in hand,” which when we do the deep work, augments the love we have in hand. Yin and Yang.
All this engenders not literal aloneness, the vision of the hermit or the recluse or the one shy for relationship, but the one who becomes passionately engaged with the world in general. One who brings their wholeness to the table for the possibility of becoming more whole in relationship with others. Yin and Yang.
But easy light, or even semi-difficult light, is not enough. We must mine the deep, difficult light for the dark, which is simply to embrace and be transformed by our concealed and tucked away core wounds. This is to embody the power of the sacred feminine, the Great Mother, so that we become Earth while still alive, and once again.
