The Heart Expands To Hold It All

Life is undeniably beautiful and undeniably painful but the heart can expand to hold it all.

If you are breathing you have been hurt at some point by something or someone. Maybe it was loss, maybe it was betrayal, maybe it was a dream that was dashed, a sickness that took a toll on your spirit, words that were spoken or unspoken.

I’ve heard before that a broken heart sometimes can be a gift. It is the honor of loving and being loved.

But how can we carry ourselves through life with a heart that feels shattered in pieces?

Often in our deep despair we find ourselves shaken awake in what matters most and we come to the understanding that life is not only woven with both grace and grief but is also beautifully impermanent.

We realize we can be whole with a broken heart by learning to walk with grief, and to carry that sadness and broken heartedness as a practice-a practice we can begin to cultivate and let integrate into our full essence of being. So powerful this practice of inviting our complete awareness to accept our grief and our heartache fully, and to allow that awareness to wrap around and integrate into the very fabric of our existence.

To hold us in the now.

Through the practice of yoga on the mat we have the capacity to fill these shapes with heart, with breath, with intention-to pour our full awareness into them.

We have the invitation to find our hearts over and over and over again.

Not only are we shaping our lives on the mat in this way, but we are also shaping our lives off the mat. We are filling each moment of our lives with the heart of who we are and the wholeness of who we have always been.

We try to meet our struggles and embody the places and spaces that are broken or raw, that hurt, or have needed to be healed.

We are held in the dance of our lives embracing the wave of breath, the glimpse of grace, the glory of grief. It’s all together.

Let your practice on your mat and off your mat wrap you in all that matters, in the truth and gorgeous understanding of a broken heart that keeps beating, that keeps loving, that keeps living awake and aware.

Allow yourself to sit with acceptance for your full humanity in moments that feel impossible to bear witness to.

When we can learn to hold this pain of heart with compassion rather than comparison with faith instead of fear with healing intention rather than resistance we begin to give ourselves a certain permission to feel that sadness and to explore it-to see the teaching in it.

We are not just this body, these thoughts, this moment in time. We trust there is something greater we are a part of and that that part of me is whole and that part of you is whole and it’s fullness is woven together through this dance of impermanence and divinity shifting and shaping, twisting and twirling.

This moment is always dissolving into the next.

This breath is always coming and is always going.

Life is undeniably beautiful and undeniably painful and neither last but as we meet each moment fully we begin to discover the heart can expand to hold it all.

-Brigitte