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A couple of days ago, I saw footage from Gaza that I wish I had never needed to see.
Children in situations no child should ever have to experience. I will spare you the details. They are not necessary here.
But I could feel what I was seeing physically.
My chest hurt. My stomach turned. There was a heaviness that did not disappear when I put my phone down. My heart broke, quite literally it seemed, for people I have never met.
And I found myself thinking about heartbreak.
We usually speak about heartbreak in relation to love. A relationship ending. A divorce. Someone leaving. Someone betraying us. A friendship falling apart. The loss of someone we love.
But a heart can break in many ways.
It can break because somebody you trusted deeply hurt you.
It can break because life did not unfold the way you thought it would.
It can break because somebody you love is suffering and you cannot take their suffering away.
And it can break because you witness what human beings are capable of doing to one another.
Sometimes I would rather not see it.
I think most of us know that impulse.
Close the screen. Change the subject. Distract yourself. Carry on with the day.
There is only so much a human heart can hold.
And yet I also don't want to become oblivious.
I don't want my own need to feel comfortable to become a reason to stop seeing another person's suffering.
So maybe the question is not:
How do I stop my heart from breaking?
Maybe the question is:
How do I allow my heart to break without allowing it to close?
There is a subtle misunderstanding that can enter spiritual practice.
We begin practicing because we want peace, and somewhere along the way we may start believing that peace means no longer being disturbed.
That if we meditate enough, breathe well enough or understand enough philosophy, eventually life will stop getting underneath our skin.
I don't think that is what yoga is asking from us.
Yoga does not teach us to become untouched.
It teaches us to become aware.
And awareness includes what hurts.
Patañjali speaks in Yoga Sūtra 1.33 about maitrī, karuṇā, muditā and upekṣā: friendliness, compassion, joy and equanimity.
Karuṇā matters here.
Compassion in the presence of suffering.
The willingness to let somebody else's pain matter.
But alongside compassion sits something equally important: upekṣā.
Equanimity.
And I think this word can easily be misunderstood.
Equanimity is not indifference.
It does not mean becoming emotionally flat or standing at a safe distance from life.
It means remaining steady enough to see clearly.
To feel without immediately drowning in what we feel.
To care without losing all capacity to respond.
That difference matters.
When heartbreak enters our lives, there is often a pull toward one of two extremes.
We can shut down.
Or we can disappear completely into what we feel.
Neither leaves much room for clarity.
Yoga offers another possibility.
Not less feeling.
More space around the feeling.
There is grief, but there is also the awareness of grief.
There is anger, but there is also the part of us that can observe the anger moving through the body.
There is heartbreak, but heartbreak does not have to become the whole of who we are.
This is one of the things I value most about practice.
You begin to notice that an emotion can be enormous without being permanent.
It can move through the chest, the throat, the belly.
It can make the breath shallow.
It can bring tears.
It can change the whole texture of a day.
And still, somewhere beneath all of that movement, there can be a small amount of space.
Not a cold distance.
Not detachment in the sense of not caring.
Just enough space to stay present.
Sometimes we talk about heartbreak as though it exists only in our thoughts.
But the body often tells the truth first.
A tightening across the chest.
A lump in the throat.
A sinking feeling in the belly.
A heaviness in the limbs.
A breath that suddenly becomes smaller.
This is one reason the physical side of yoga can be so valuable.
Not because a posture fixes grief.
It doesn't.
But practice can help us become more intimate with sensation.
We learn to notice without immediately reacting.
To remain close to the breath when something becomes uncomfortable.
To soften what can soften without demanding that everything disappears.
And sometimes that is enough.
Not healing in one dramatic moment.
Just the beginning of being able to stay with ourselves.
There is another quality from yoga philosophy that feels important here: viveka, discernment.
Because caring about suffering does not mean we must absorb every image, every story, every tragedy until we are unable to function.
There is a difference between witnessing and endlessly exposing ourselves.
There is a difference between staying informed and overwhelming the nervous system.
There is a difference between turning away because something is unbearable and consciously stepping back so that we can return with clarity.
This discernment is difficult.
There is no perfect formula. At least, not one that I have found yet.
Sometimes the right thing is to keep looking.
Sometimes it is to put the phone away.
Sometimes it is to speak.
Sometimes it is to act.
Sometimes it is to sit quietly and allow ourselves to feel what we have just seen.
The important thing, perhaps, is that stepping back does not become forgetting.
Rest does not have to become indifference.
Ahiṃsā, being in the state of non-harming, is the first of Patañjali's yamas.
We often translate it as non-violence and kindness, but it reaches further than simply being nice.
It teaches us to become sensitive to suffering.
Our own and that of others.
And sensitivity is not always comfortable.
When we really allow ourselves to see another human being, it becomes harder to reduce suffering to something distant or abstract.
But ahiṃsā must include ourselves too.
There is no virtue in breaking our own nervous system open again and again in the name of caring.
We are allowed to rest.
We are allowed to laugh.
We are allowed to enjoy dinner with the people we love.
We are allowed to walk outside on a beautiful day while terrible things are happening elsewhere.
Joy is not betrayal.
Rest is not indifference.
In fact, sometimes they are what allow us to remain human enough to keep caring.
We speak a lot about healing.
Healing heartbreak.
Healing betrayal.
Healing grief.
Healing ourselves.
But perhaps healing does not always mean becoming the person you were before something happened.
Some experiences change us.
Maybe they should.
When somebody betrays us, we may become more discerning about trust.
When we lose someone, our understanding of love changes.
When we witness suffering, perhaps we become less willing to take ordinary safety for granted.
A healed heart is not necessarily an untouched heart.
It may be a heart that carries scars.
A heart that knows more than it did before.
A heart that has been broken and somehow has not become hard.
There is something very human in that.
And, to me, something very yogic too.
There are days when practice steadies us.
There are also days when we arrive on the mat already carrying more than usual.
On those days, yoga does not need to repair us.
Sometimes the practice is simply the place where we stop running from what we feel.
We breathe.
We move.
We sit.
We notice.
Maybe tears come.
Maybe they don't.
Maybe nothing profound happens at all.
And that is fine.
Because the purpose is not to manufacture peace.
It is to become more honest about what is actually here.
And then, eventually, we step off the mat again.
Back into our families.
Our communities.
Our work.
Our choices.
Our world.
Because if yoga only makes us peaceful in a quiet room but does not make us more sensitive to the lives around us, then I think something is missing.
The inner practice should not remove us from the world.
It should help us meet it more grounded and consciously.
I don't know how to see children suffering without my heart breaking.
And I am not sure I want to learn how.
I want to know how to care for myself enough that I do not drown in everything that is wrong with the world.
I want to know when to put the screen down.
I want to breathe, practise, sleep, laugh, love my family and notice the ordinary beauty of my own life.
But I don't want peace at the price of no longer feeling.
Maybe this is part of what yoga can teach us.
Not how to protect the heart from life.
How to make enough space inside ourselves for life to touch us deeply without destroying our capacity to remain present.
To feel grief without becoming only grief.
To feel anger without becoming only anger.
To experience heartbreak without allowing heartbreak to become hardness.
We do not practise so that nothing can reach us anymore.
We practise so that when something does reach us, deeply and painfully, we can remain here.
With tenderness.
With clarity.
With enough steadiness to respond.
And with a heart that, even after breaking, remains open.
Namas-té,
Ine
