Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide

Finding Your True North

A page from one of my sketchbooks: 8.5” x 11.25”

Last week, on the recommendation of a friend, I watched a video interview from the lovely Center for Action and Contemplation with episcopal priest Adam Bucko called “Let Your Heartbreak be Your Guide.”

And now I can’t get it out of my mind.

What Matters Most

Adam Bucko’s invitation to let your heartbreak be your guide is both intriguing and stirring because, as he mentions in the video, Western culture mostly emphasizes the importance of following your bliss or living your passion.

As an artist, just trying to live your passion in a culture that doesn’t really care about art can feel hard enough, let alone introducing heartbreak into the equation.

And yet, when I listened, it landed hard.

Now, before you start worrying that by watching this video, you’re just going to be told that you aren’t really allowed to finally follow your passion after all these years of trying desperately to hang onto it, and instead you just have to focus on the needs of others, let me say, “hold on!”

Because he’s not saying to ignore your passion. Rather, I think he’s inviting you to use your heartbreak as a compass for finding out what out matters most in life so that your passion has a righteous place to land, allowing it to then transform and expand into being a service to the world as much as being a personal expression.

To do this is to connect the hopes and dreams you have for yourself and your individual life to the larger human condition.

He even says, at one point, that he thinks it’s most helpful to ask ourselves two questions in tandem:

1. What breaks your heart? And,

2. What makes you feel truly alive?

These are giant questions that I think get to the heart of both your personal lived experiences on the planet and your inherent nature—those ways you naturally shine.

And even though he has lived an inspiring life of great service and sacrifice in different parts of the world, I don’t think he’s saying that’s what everyone needs to do when they ask themselves, “What breaks my heart?”

Being of service can look a lot of different ways. It’s just important to find your way.

A Personal True North

A couple of my personal obsessions are 1) being truly free and 2) being fully expressed. These seem like very selfish obsessions on the surface, but I am hoping they are not.

When I talk about being free, I don’t mean having no ties. I mean unshackling myself from my limiting beliefs, from feelings of unworthiness, from pettiness, from self-doubt and childhood and generational wounds.

When I talk about being fully expressed, I don’t just mean making the best art I can. I mean my sense of…hmm, duty? perhaps…to engage as completely as possible in the life I’ve been given. I’m not talking about filling bucket lists, but rather, to be present to the truth of my life to the best of my ability and to love it as hard as I can.

And to experience the joy of that.

As I was watching this video and thinking about my own choices, I realized that these two obsessions of mine do stem from heartbreak: that of having a ridiculously talented mother who negated herself and her abilities—sometimes profoundly—and who found ways big and small of ‘checking out’ of her life until she got the biggest checkout card of all, called Alzheimer’s.

Even with all the education and talent and privilege that she’d been given, even with all her accomplishments, she’d gotten to the end of her life never really believing a compliment, never really feeling loved, never considering herself good enough, and always somehow moving the goal posts so that she didn’t measure up.

And, of course, she unwittingly taught that pattern to her children. Ever since watching her talents slowly disappear into dementia without her ever truly acknowledging them or enjoying them, it’s been my objective to get around that unfortunate training and honor my own life and enjoy my own gifts and talents as much as possible.

To do less than that is, I feel, to disrespect life itself.

And so, from my heartbreak, I have spent my adult life with a mission to heal myself, to grow, to be brave when I’m scared, to have faith in the future, and to embrace my particular existence as fully as possible.

And over the years, as I continue to lift away translucent layer after translucent layer of the onion skin that is my confusion and fear, it shows me how much more is possible. When I get a little braver, I see how much more bravery is possible. When I forgive myself for making a mistake, I glimpse a little more the magnitude of how gracious and merciful forgiveness can be.

And each step of this process leads me to access more and more of what Adam Bucko calls “the joy beyond heartbreak.” And the more I experience joy, the more I understand that it is something quite different from extreme happiness. I perceive it as something more like gravity—a sacred law of the universe.

And nothing spurs a person forward more than a taste of that truism.

Thank you, heartbreak.

And now I ask you:

What breaks your heart? What makes you feel most alive?

Leave a comment or hit reply, I’d love to hear.

(And if you’re too private for commenting, but you appreciated this post, I’d love it if you’d hit that little heart below my picture. It’s such a help.)