Heartbreak

1. Take refuge in your bed.
2. Cry, till the tears stop (this will take a few days).
3. Don’t listen to slow songs.
4. Delete their number from your phone even though it is memorized on your fingertips.
5. Don’t look at old photos.
6. Find the closest ice cream shop and treat yourself to two scoops of mint chocolate chip. The mint will calm your heart, you deserve the chocolate.
7. Buy new bed sheets.
8. Collect all the gifts, t-shirts, and everything with their smell on it and drop it off at a donation center.
9. Plan a trip.
10. Perfect the art of smiling and nodding when someone brings their name up in conversation.
11. Start a new project.
12. Whatever you do, do not call.
13. Do not beg for what does not want to stay.
14. Stop crying at some point.
15. Allow yourself to feel foolish for believing you could’ve built the rest of your life in someone else’s stomach.
16. Breathe.

-Rupi Kaur

I will tell you about selfish people. Even when they know they will hurt you they walk into your life to taste you because you are the type of being they don’t want to miss out on. You are too much shine to not be felt. So when they have gotten a good look at everything you have to offer. When they have taken your skin your hair your secrets with them. When they realize how real this is. How much of a storm you are and it hits them.

That is when the cowardice sets in. That is when the person you thought they were is replaced by the sad reality of what they are. That is when they lose every fighting bone in their body and leave after saying you will find better than me. You will stand there naked with half of them still hidden somewhere inside you and sob. Asking them why they did it. Why they forced you to love them when they had no intention of loving you back and they’ll say something along the line of I just had to try. I had to give it a chance. It was you after all. But that isn’t romantic. It isn’t sweet. The idea that they were so engulfed by your existence they had to risk breaking it for the sake of knowing they weren’t the one missing out. Your existence meant that little next to their curiosity of you.

That is the thing about selfish people. They gamble entire beings, entire souls to please their own. One second they are holding you like the world in their lap and the next they have belittled you to a mere picture. A moment. Something of the past. One second. They swallow you up and whisper they want to spend the rest of their life with you. But the moment they sense fear. They are already halfway out the door. Without having the nerve to let you go with grace. As if the human heart means that little to them.

And after all this. After all of the taking. The nerve. Isn’t it sad and funny how people have more guts these days to undress you with their fingers than they do to pick up the phone and call. Apologize for the loss. And this is how you lose her.

-Rupi Kaur

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

-Haruki Murakami

Healing is f*#king messy. It’s alienation. It’s detachment. It’s batshit crazy. It’s jet-black inky darkness. It makes you ache for the void and mundane. You want to quit everything, but you can’t. You won’t. Not now. No baby, not ever. Because even though it aches the mother of all aches, you’ve changed. Underneath all the bullshit, there you are. Brand new. Born again. An angel of earth who’s woken up to their cosmic mission. And you ain’t ever going back. And, there’s more like you out there. We’re waking up right next to you in the dark, wild one. So don’t worry about fixing any part of you and let your wicked shambles raise the goddamn roof on this whole thing.

-Tanya Markul

Heartbreak isn’t beautiful. It isn’t f*#king poetry, it’s not staying up ‘til 4 am listening to sad songs. It’s breaking down in the middle of a busy street. It’s seeing their face in all the people you pass by. It’s feeling okay for weeks at a time and then all of a sudden, you feel the ghost of their lips on your neck and then you’re choking on memories of their presence. It’s waking up from dreams of them coming back and screaming in the middle of the night because your chest aches like a rotting tooth. Stop romanticizing pain. Stop using people like they’re objects. A heart isn’t a cigarette. You can’t just light it up and then stomp it out when you’re done. Don’t act like anything about heartbreak is beautiful because I wouldn’t wish that feeling upon my worst of enemies.

-Author Unknown

This is the kind of prayer that God answers. We can’t pray that He makes our lives free of problems; this won’t happen, and it is probably just as well. We can’t ask Him to make us and those we love immune to disease, because He can’t do that. We can’t ask Him to weave a magic spell around us so that bad things will only happen to other people, and never to us. People who pray for miracles usually don’t get miracles any more than children who pray for bicycles, good grades, or boyfriends get them as a result of praying. But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of what they have lost, very often find their prayers answered. They discover that they have more strength, more courage than they ever knew themselves to have. Where did they get it? I would like to think that their prayers helped them tap hidden reserves of faith and courage which were not available to them before. The widow who asks me on the day of her husband’s funeral “What do I have to live for now?”, yet in the course of the ensuing weeks finds reasons to wake up in the morning and look forward to the day; the man who has lost his job or closed his business and says to me, “Rabbi, I’m too old and tired to start all over again,” but starts over again nonetheless—where did they get the strength, the hope, the optimism that they did not have on the day they asked those questions? I would like to believe that they received those things from the context of a concerned community, people who made it clear to them that they cared, and from the knowledge that God is at the side of the afflicted and the downcast.

-Rabbi Harold Kushner

I don’t know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes. It is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, “Well, if I’d known better I’d have done better,” that’s all. So you say to yourself, “I’m sorry.”

If we all hold onto the mistake, we can’t see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror. We can’t see what we’re capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one’s own self. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don’t have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell, we should never teach.

-Maya Angelou

When I understand that life is moving on.

When I see that living is doing what comes next.

I discover that hurting is a part of life, but not all of life.

When I allow the hurting to happen and then do what comes next, I discover that just as there is hurt, there is also joy.

Sometimes I am happy and sometimes I am sad, but at all times I am confronted by what comes next.

When happy, do what’s next. When sad, do what’s next.

-Rami M. Shapiro

You will lose someone you can’t live without, your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly, that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

-Anne Lamott

Our God and God of our fathers and mothers, as the flames burn, wreaking havoc upon our forests, our homes, our firefighters, our sense of security, we turn to You for comfort and support. Help us to differentiate between flames of destruction and light that shows us Your way.

We know that flames can destroy. A people decimated once, twice and more, having passed through infernos set by humans filled with hate, we remember the destructive abilities of these flames. Keep us far from apocalyptic thoughts, for we know that You ask us to care for this world, an awesome responsibility.

We also know that we can seek You in the flames. We recall Your Loving Hand, guiding us in our infancy: in a burning bush, You spoke to Moses, sending him to lead our people out of slavery, in a pillar of fire, You led our people through the wilderness to the Promised Land, with black fire on white fire, You wrote the Torah, our guide for living in this world. Through Your light, we found our way.

Be with us now, these smoke and fire-filled days. Draw us close to those harmed by these flames, hearing their cries, responding to their needs.

Lead us to support those who fight the fires, who care for the displaced, who bring healing to those suffering. Though our attention spans seem so short, may we be slow to forget those in danger. And please bring cooling wind and rain from the heavenly realms to Northern California.

And may we all embrace at least one lesson spoken aloud by so many who – facing the flames – rushed to pack up their valuables: that memories of love and of time spent with family and friends are priceless, holy and sacred. This can never be taken away. As we rush to meet the challenge of living in this imperfect world of ours, may we slow down enough to cherish those who are truly valuable – kadosh/holy – to us.

Baruch ata adonai, hamavdil bein kodesh l’chol.

Blessed are You, O God, who differentiates between the truly valuable and everything else.

-Rabbi Paul Kipnes

• The way they leave tells you everything.
  -Rupi Kaur
• You are your own soul mate.
  -Rupi Kaur
• Do not look for healing at the feet of those who broke you.
  -Rupi Kaur
• Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself.
  -Rupi Kaur
• If you were born with the weakness to fall, you were born with the strength to rise.
  -Rupi Kaur
• I know it’s hard believe me. I know it feels like tomorrow will never come and today will be the most difficult day to get through, but I swear you will get through. The hurt will pass as it always does if you give it time and let it so let it go slowly like a broken promise. Let it go.
  -Rupi Kaur
• Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes. Including you.
  -Anne Lamott
• You let time pass. That’s the cure. You survive the days. You float like a rabid ghost through the weeks. You cry, wallow, lament and scratch your way back up through the months. And then one day, you find yourself alone on a bench in the sun. You close your eyes and lean your head back and you realize you’re okay.
  -Cheryl Strayed
• When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them. That you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them. That you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them. The word for that is healing.
  -Cheryl Strayed
• Today I decided to forgive you. Not because you apologized, or because you acknowledged the pain that you caused me, but because my soul deserves peace.
  -Najwa Zebian
• The goal of spirituality is the bringing together of seeing, hearing, and doing into one whole person. It is to see yourself mirrored in the heavens above and to realize that the Holy One created you personally to help complete the work of repairing the world.
  -Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
• Sometimes I feel I am on the edge. Sometimes I feel like giving in. Sometimes life seems a battle that I will never win. Somehow I find the strength to carry on each day. For I know around the corner a better life is on its way.
  -John F Connor
• Look, I really don’t want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you’re alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death.  And therefore, as I see it, if you’re quiet, you’re not living.  You’ve got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy and colorful and lively.
  -Mel Brooks
• Healing comes with sharing. It takes courage to share our burdens. To really let another know our heartache and when it is met with a true desire to listen. Compassion and love. Healing happens not entirely, not immediately, but there is healing in knowing you are not alone.
  -Author Unknown