How Do You Mend A Broken Heart?
Mind the Gap Between Body and Soul
The Doc says I have a broken heart but no worries! He can fix it with some cool tools and ten good minutes!
What??? It just took me decades and this guy could’a done it in ten minutes? I’m so lost in the mind-body duality.
He’s a cardiac electrophysiologist. No kidding, that’s his job title. He rolls around on a custom-made leather stool and makes minimal eye contact. I can’t understand what he is saying because he speaks a foreign language called Science.
He explains that he is going to heal my heart with electrical pulses and glass tubes. It’s incomprehensible, so I tune out and look at the colorful diagrams of the human heart on the walls.
A few minutes later I sense I can understand him now and tune back in. Oh yeah, he’s talking about himself. Right, the arrogant doctor archetype. He gets to the disclaimer section, the usual morbid explanations of all the ways this elective procedure can maim and kill you, but his voice has an unexpected warmth to it.
Is he happy to talk about all the risks? No, it’s something else. He’s explaining all the improvements to the procedure he has invented, what scholarly articles he’s published about his breakthroughs, and why his patients don’t suffer from the usual side effects.
Ah, he’s happy because he is talking about himself.
I sneak a suspicious look at my physician husband, who signals we’ll handle this later. I silently agree and wait for the wrap-up.
The plan is to stick a wire and some glass tubes in my leg and send them up into my heart. Then he’ll poke around for “a few minutes”, find the “hot spots” in my heart muscle that are misfiring and shoot in electrical energy to burn the errant cells. Scar tissue will form which will essentially be dead. That’s good because it won’t transmit the offending signals.
Translation:
1. you mend a broken heart with a piece of wire
2. heartburn isn’t a bug, it’s a cure
3. scar tissue is good for you
Finally, he delivers the wrap-up. After the anesthesia, he’s going in there to “fix my heart” and then I’ll be “good to go!”
Obviously, I am not on my home planet.
After we leave the office, my husband says, “Remember, we don’t care about his soul. We care that he has good hands for a medical mechanic.” Another body and soul duality. This surgeon is such a great maintenance man, he’ll have my heart running in tip-top shape in ten minutes.
That’s not the heart I know.
My heart doesn’t have a place in the physical plane. My heart is an essence, a center, a being-ness. Think The Matrix but instead call it The Metaphor. That’s where my heart is.
My metaphoric heart is healed now. It took decades of concentration and effort with no anesthesia. I had to face the moments when the pain was inflicted, relive the wounding, analyze the scar tissue and the dead pieces. It sucked. It took a long time. It’s over, or as over as I can imagine in one lifetime, and the journey was beyond challenging. It worked.
What if instead of the slow healing of the metaphoric heart, we could flip sides on the duality? What if we could go into our metaphysical heart and heal it in a few minutes? Could we get the benefits without all the suffering? Would we still have the music in our hearts?
TAKE ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE OF MY HEART
The doctor is literally going to take a piece of my heart and kill it.
When Janis Joplin sings it, you hear it, yes, but you also feel it. You feel her pain, the depth of the emotions, and most of all, the extraordinary courage of showing the world how broken we all are.
The experience of Janis Joplin’s heartbreak is a sublime pain. I’ve sung along with her with my totally out-of-tune voice, making a sound that might injure nearby innocents, and felt so much better. I was miserable, that’s true, but I wasn’t alone. She was expressing my misery in that moment. I was human and, through her performance, I was strangely in touch with my fellow humans.
The song says, “I suffer and it is okay”. It can connect us to everyone else, grant us the grace of company and the compassion of our fellow souls here on this earth.
Strangely, that song has a physical reality to me and I can experience the heart in both body and soul. Are there other ways to connect the two?
BORN WITH A BROKEN HEART
I grew up in a house filled with blues music, and it was the perfect accompaniment for my life. Blues songs are all about suffering, but they also bring some light.
Consider Born With A Broken Heart by Kenny Wayne Shepard, a great and utterly despairing song. What if we are born broken-hearted?
It would have its advantages. We’d know about the damage ab initio. We’d start doing the repair work much earlier and have decades more time to enjoy life post-repair.
If we’re born that way, then, hell, it’s not our fault that we are broken. We could stop all the self-flagellation. We wouldn’t feel the shame or the blame. Like a friendly No-Fault Divorce, it would be a friendly No-Fault Heartbreak. A fast and easy recovery. Sign me up!
I believed I was born with a broken heart because I could not remember a time when my heart didn’t hurt. Then I asked my beloved Aunt Alice about what I was like when I was very young. “Oh, you were the happiest kid. You walked into a room and it was all sunshine.”
Oh crap. No quick fix for me. I was born happy, then suffered the heartbreak, then had to figure out what heartbreak is, and only then got on the road to recovery.
The work of self-repair is daunting and can’t be rushed. It is also the journey of the soul in this life. We don’t like being heartbroken, but there is never a deeper, richer time in our lives than when we go into that black sea of despair. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s very much alive, even before we find the light.
When we find that light, we drop all the baggage and all the work we had to do to keep the pain of our brokenness controlled and below our consciousness. Maybe, just maybe, we are more vibrant and alive than ever before.
OH HAPPY DAY
Play the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ version of the 18th-century gospel song Oh Happy Day. Can you listen to it sitting down? I can’t. I always jump up, dance, sing badly, forget words, forget myself, and surrender to joy.
Maybe other people can feel such joy without the hard preparatory work of healing their hearts, but I can’t imagine it. For me, that level of joy is also an expression of the depth of our feelings and the elation we experience when our heart is mended and we have cast off all the blame and limitations we carried before.
Mending our hearts is a rich, deep, difficult, wonderful, exuberant journey.
If we could jump the duality divide and repair our broken hearts in a few minutes, we’d gain a lot of time, I think, but lose the richness of the journey. That’s too high a price. I’d pass.
THE BRIDGE
Can we bridge the divide between our physical and emotional hearts? There are plenty of songs about it, but the better metaphor is in the musical element “the bridge,” which is the connection between the specificity of a verse, and the more emotional and central chorus.
Maybe it’s all about the bridge. Maybe it’s not about the duality, but the sequence in the song and the sequence of the healing.
When I hear Janis Joplin singing “Piece of my Heart” these days, I don’t think much about bad boyfriends of the past. I think of the duality. I think of the physical contract that is in a file drawer somewhere in my house. It’s her original recording contract, signed by her and my father in perky blue ink. It connects me to him and the love of the blues and the richness of creativity that he gave me.
And he gave me the physical heart to go with it. I inherited his heart defect.
I was in fact born with a broken physical heart. It wasn’t discovered until recently. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for it to be found. Maybe it’s not a duality but rather an order of attack. It’s about the sequence, from verse to chorus.
For me, the emotional heart had to be mended first.
Then, and only then, was I ready for the second step. Only when all the emotional work had cleared a path to a bountiful life was I ready for the high-speed miracle cure. Only then could the clean-up crew of doctor-mechanics sweep in, burn out the detritus, and finish up the mending of the broken heart in ten minutes flat.
That’s how you mend a broken heart.
Do you think there’s a connection between the physical and emotional heart?
Leave a comment below or visit my website to let me know!
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