Dear Readers,
Heartbreak sucks. I’ve had heartbreaks so bad my arms ached because my heart was in so much pain. Heartbreaks so consuming I couldn’t sleep for days, couldn’t take a deep breath. I once had a heartbreak so complete I lost faith in the entire universe and decided the god of my understanding was cruel and unworthy of my trust.
That heartbreak changed my life.
Just when I thought the pain would never end, I fell into restless sleep one night and found myself dreaming. I was on Pfeiffer Beach in Big Sur, watching a figure approach from the distance, dressed head to toe in black silk. A raven. It was Gabrielle Roth—the raven mother herself, my teacher. Her son was the man who had broken my heart.
Gabrielle taught us to dance our prayers, a meditation practice for a moving generation called “the five rhythms.” Of course it would be her walking toward me.
As she drew closer, I saw she carried something in her arms. A wedding dress. The dress of every marriage fantasy I’d ever harbored deep within me. When she stood directly before me, she handed it to me and said, “Sylvia, dance the marriage to yourself.”
I danced the medicine my heartbreak needed. Like a sundance or a raindance, but for self-love. I married myself in that dream, in a swirl of white. What I learned I didn’t yet have words for, but it was the first step in my slow recovery from love addiction.
Love addiction is everywhere in our culture—the plot of every rom-com ever made. We don’t talk about it. If anything, we feed it deeper into each other.
It has taken me decades to understand sobriety in the context of love. Like all sobriety, the key is recognizing we’ve made something—anything—a higher power than the divine itself. Reclaiming that is a profound act of self-love, and in that self-love lives the most potent seed of awakening I’ve ever known.
I have come to honor heartbreak. It’s one of the best portals to the divine. It stops us, breaks us, humbles us, extends us into a territory of grief as vast, cold, and empty as a Montana field in late fall. And it’s the vastness of that grief that finally pushes us out of our sealed-up log cabin and into the dark night. We feel the immense grief and have nowhere else to bring it, so we bring it to the field itself. We breathe the crisp, dry, cold air into our lungs and feel gratitude for that breath. Then we finally, finally turn our heads up to the Montana night sky and are shattered by a million infinite stars.
That is how the divine works with us. It finds the places we’re most afraid to break open and does the job for us. Heartbreak hurts because it’s supposed to. An incurable hurt. You can either repress it, flatten yourself, numb out—or you can let it rip. If you let the pain rip you all the way open, that’s exactly where the alchemy begins.
Sobriety in love is on my mind this week because I just finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book, All the Way to the River. In the book, she exposes her own journey of sobriety from love addiction. For someone who became famous for one of the great love stories of all time, her willingness to expose herself so honestly is remarkable. She’s apparently being skewered by literary critics, which reminds me of when someone once criticized a friend of mine—a life coach—for lacking formal credentials. My response was, “That guy without fancy diplomas is out there saving lives. What are you doing to save lives?” Her book will save lives.
I applaud Gilbert for throwing a lifeline.
And for you, dear reader, if you’re suffering heartbreak: congratulations.
You are one step closer to knowing the infinite love that you are—love that can never be broken, never be taken, and is always enough.
In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia
