Beneath the Armour: The unstoppable heart.

‘I’m unstoppable, I’m unstoppable today’, sings Sia. ‘I’m invincible, I win every single game,’ she lies.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the song, released some 6 years ago. It just lights me up with a resolve to crush every obstacle, real or imagined, that raises its weak and ugly head and threatens to drag my invincible spirit down into the dumps. The ‘armour’ feels good. Showing others how ‘strong’ I am, feels even better! Oh yeah!  Posing as ‘invincible’. ‘so powerful’, ‘unstoppable’, really helps. I feel armoured, shielded, unbreakable.

For a while.

Posing as ‘invincible’ is hard work.  The reality is, much like the ‘Porsche with no brakes’, I am bound to crash, sooner or later, headlong,  into the wall of what ever it is I am trying to run into or away from.  And somewhere during the course of a day, the armour I’ve put on is going to weigh me down. Make it necessary to take it off. Put it down.  And breathe. Phew! It’s so heavy.

Honestly,  I am here today, not to discredit the warlike, self preservative instinct that Sia’s song inspires in every insecure and doubting heart, nor to propose the need to drop one’s boundaries and defences completely to guard and protect one’s right to privacy, autonomy and ownership, but perhaps shift my readers’ focus on what actually Sia’s armour, is trying to protect. The fact of the matter is, that underlying the armour, lies the defenceless, unarmoured vulnerable self;  the injured, bruised and battered authentic self that is afraid of showing everyone how strong it is (not).  And so, instead of flinching under the weight of one’s armour that one has put on to protect it; of faking it in the hope of making it, and in the process getting exhausted of posing as something we are not, i.e. invincible, this blogpost wishes to take the armour off; shed the many defences and pretences of invincibility and look straight in the eye at the naked vulnerable self, shivering and shaking underneath it.

There’s a reason why we don’t have an exo-skeleton.  Unlike crabs or clams, us humans literally or shall we say biologically, are not designed to wear the dead calcifications of the bony and stony armour of invincibility and strength, to protect our soft flesh. Soft flesh outside, bony skeleton inside. Right? Some may disagree and insist the heart is inside the ribcage, protected and shielded and while I want to roll my eyes at that, let’s move on and  let’s just say of course it is! What then?  Let’s take the next metaphorical leap and come to the heart as the symbol and seat of love and longing, desire and desolation.

• Does shielding and guarding this shivering and shaking heart, instead of opening it up to love, serve anyone?
• When has it actually helped to act all invincible and strong,  in the face of  love?

The problem with that of course is what happens when one does open oneself to the experience of love. Much like the hard shelled seeds we plant in the ground, love is a seed of need. A seed of need that aches and longs to soften, in the right hands, so that it can sprout, grow and blossom. What actually melts through the armour of the shell and breaks it open is not more armour, but rain.  It is soft gentle rain, that comes to soften and shed the hard shell and expose the soft flesh of each seed, that lies waiting, in the darkness, waiting to breathe, come alive and be.

Love is rain.  And each one of us is waiting. For it to rain.  Aching and longing for an other to find their way into our heart, as effortlessly as rain, and seep into our most desolate, loneliest corners of our most vulnerable self and bring it to life. And as they do, it sighs with an unspoken relief, the kind that one feels when it rains after a long spell of hot summer days.

And when it rains, the heart comes to life.  It breathes. It grows.  And we feel whole.

For a while.

Disillusionment in love hits hard.  And it hits everyone. It makes everyone face at first, the shocking, and then, the inevitable realisation of the pain, uncertainty and constant work that love requires of us.  The ease with which the heart initially basks in the spring rain of a relationship, becomes less as it begins to get sucked into the work that needs to be done in the summer to nurture and support the relationship and make it grow.  By autumn, it is time to collect and gather the fruits of the heart’s labours and rejoice in the burdens of apple picking the best of what came out of it. Surviving the winter of a relationship through its many adversities is no easy feat.  The best of them hold on in the face of loss, separation and lack. They do not let go as the bitter icy cold fingers of wintry trials clutch the heart and threaten to freeze it. On the other hand, there are others, not so strong and unstoppable, who burn out, or are frost bitten, and give up, tired of the exhaustion that comes when they are forced to look for unappealing excuses and reasons to stay.

The scope of this blogpost does not wish to dwell on the ones who choose to stay. The merits and challenges of long term committed relationships are left to another day.  Let’s look instead at the ones who choose to leave, who choose to end it. And who are left with the heavy task of moving forward from it.

The reality is that in the wake of the destructive trail that love leaves behind, Sia’s song makes sense to many.  The pain that lovers cause as they first familiarize themselves with the most intimate recesses of a lover’s mind, body and soul, and then pull out,  leaves behind the deepest wounds. The deeper the connection, the more the pain. It only makes sense, therefore,  that we stop opening our hearts to all that makes it so vulnerable to damage. We shield it and armour it and close all access to it. After all, it is most safe when guarded, locked and secured.

And so we choose to continue to live

With a heart

Without love

Without rain. 

For a while.

How long it takes for someone to move forward after a break up varies. Some do, some don’t. The question is not when to move on, but how.

• Is there any value in detachment, in shutting the heart and securing it against the daggers that love is bound to throw at you sooner or later?
• Is there any value in exploring the value of vulnerability in moving forward from a heart break?
• How risky is it to open oneself up again to the daggers that love hides in its cloak as it enters the vulnerable shaking heart? 
• While Sia claims there is no value in taking our ‘sunglasses’ off, ‘let[ting] our feelings show’, is that true? And if so, for how long?

In Jonah Hill’s 2022 documentary, ‘Stutz’, available on Netflix, his therapist, Phil Stutz explains, ‘Failure, weakness and vulnerability is like a connector. It is a signal that you give out to the world that says, I need you. I can’t do this by myself.’  According to him, ‘you can’t move forward without being vulnerable’. And he is not the only one. A plethora of research by Brene Brown, Esther Perrell and the many relationship experts reveals the importance of opening oneself up to vulnerability. Avoidance and anxiety is no longer the solution.  The pain caused by closing oneself to love, and turning bitter and resentful in the process, does not serve the broken heart well. Please note that I in no way wish to undermine the hurt suffered by so many of us, including myself, who have shattered to pieces under the catastrophic weight of all that comes in the path of love. Love has and continues to literally break not only the heart, but one’s back, spirit and soul and so without offending anyone who has suffered at the hands of it, I continue with my sincerest desire to plod through the hurt, the pillars of resentment and regret, guided by an intuition that tells me the heart wants more. And I must push through to find out what it is. 

I find a clue in Sadhguru’s book Karma: A Yogi’s Guide to crafting your destiny, published in 2021. In Chapter 2 of his book, titled, ‘Volition, The basis of Karma’, Sadhguru rips apart the myth of ‘detachment’  and avoidance that Sia’s song offers as an alternative to the ones afraid of being vulnerable. He advises to the more daring ones, like myself,  the dangers of  a ‘selective’ ‘involvement with life’, which makes us carefully choose experiences to engage with, based on our likes and dislikes. This living half-a-life mindset, avoiding the experiences we dread, or armouring ourselves up to best defend ourselves against them, comes from a place of fear, the fear of suffering.  A lot of ‘life sapping philosophies of denial and detachment’ have circulated in the past and continue to do so today, hoping to keep us safe and away from suffering. Sadhguru believes that this is useless. According to him,  it is through our ‘compulsive’ reactions to pain that we breed suffering and determine the level of our suffering. The truth is that it is in choosing to respond ‘conscious[ly]’ and not ‘compulsive[ly]’ to pain that we free ourselves of the need to assign to every painful experience a significance that makes us suffer.  If a choice is made to be ‘conscious’ instead of ‘compulsive’ every experience of pain will not need to be armed up against.

Sadhguru points out to the value in baring it all and opening oneself to all the experiences that make us vulnerable, instead of hiding and shielding ourselves from them. The ones who have the courage and the vulnerability needed to engage ‘consciously’ with the more than fifty shades of human relationships, will discover the many truths that underpin them all.  Anyone who chooses to open their heart to love and experience, according to Stutz, has to accept the ‘reality’ of the constant presence of  ‘pain, uncertainty and constant work’, all of which are essential for us to grow. It is wise to understand the significance of the word ‘constant’ in the above equation which forms our reality and it is with this understanding that one comes to the informed conclusion that there are and never can be ‘absolutes’ in human relationships. There can be no guarantee. Only an expiry date.  Anyone who wishes to stay around long enough will be able to look deep into the heart of all that is collaterally built and lost in the constructive and destructive trail of a relationship of love and consciously accept it with all its possibilities and limitations.  There is no single human relationship that can or ever will fill the heart to the brim.  Only gratitude can and does. 

The heart knows this. And wants to take the grateful, loving heart, which has the courage to follow it, all the way home.  Again Sadhguru suggests a way forward to those who want to follow it home. There is value in not being selective in choosing life’s experiences or shielding ourselves from them. A  failed relationship, a break up, disillusionment in love, must not prevent one from consciously embracing the many adversities and painful experiences that life offers. Ouch it is. Painful as it sounds, Sadhguru promises that the point of each wound in the armour of a vulnerable heart will actually be the door through which the heart will actually open up to the many emotional, social and spiritual dimensions that await the one who is willing to arrive at and push through this door.  And it is through these deeply spiritual dimensions that we can learn to access and connect to our deepest and most valuable truths.  

While most of my reading and writing has been an inquiry into the many truths that the doors of love have led me to,  all of it has come about as a result of allowing myself to look deep and sometimes, compulsively and at others, consciously, into the suffering of my shivering and shaking vulnerable heart.  The more I courageously experience all that life throws at me, with an open heart, the more I learn about the values of being vulnerable. But for this to be of value, I have to take initiative. And it is through this hearty engagement with the many painful entanglements that I have had the pain and the pleasure of stumbling across in my life that I have found and created some wonderful relationships, and some deeply valuable human connections. With every initiative or leap of faith I take in opening a door to an Other, I open myself to the hurt and the pain as well as the joy and the truths, of my self and others, who are waiting for us to find each other. With each new relationship, new experience,  I grow in empathy, I build the awareness  needed to respect others and more importantly myself and I appreciate the honest lessons learnt from the pain of each gaping wound, left from the hearty engagements with past or present relationships. And with each awareness or lesson learnt, I move one step closer to the heart of my truth and the truth of my heart.

And as I embrace the many enriching lessons learnt from entangling myself with life, in this blessed space of meaning making,  I am quite clear about the answer to each of the following questions:

• Do I wish to armour myself and avoid those many opportunities of learning the truths about my mysterious heart?  
• Do I want to limit my heart to what is safe and manageable so that I never know the depths to which I can sink, nor the heights to which I can fly?
• Do I want to close myself to the opportunities of finding genuine human connections, deep and meaningful support and friendships that come to hold me up when the rocks of love, I have depended on forever, fall to pieces?

The answer is no.

The heart wishes to give, as Rumi says, to any ‘expanding soul’, all that ‘a diminishing world’ takes away from it. And I know I can only expand if I shed my armour,  open my heart and allow it to expand in the face of all that life has to offer.

And as it pours, and I soak in it,  I feel unstoppable.  I was never meant to be invincible or win every game, so I don’t hesitate. I reach out. To family, to friends, to neighbours, to strangers, to new people, to the birds in my backyard, the trees that stand tall in the distance and the blue sky that beckons with its expansiveness.  I seek to hold it within me. And so I embrace and build the capacity of my heart to ask, to feel, to give, to share and to receive. And with each connection, I strengthen and extend and expand the network that supports me and that I have the honour of supporting in turn.

It is within this network of arteries and veins, an intricate web of support, that the heart continues to beat. In this ribcage of mine. And in yours.

Unstoppable.

For a while.