Recipes for Broken Hearts

The heart is a complex instrument, in need of constant maintenance as it beats over the course of a lifetime. More than a physical organ pumping blood, the heart functions as a locus of identity and loss, connecting the mind, soul, and body and bridging material and spiritual worlds. It also plays a core role in art, as it “produces imaginative awareness and comprehensive intuition of the mysterious and the miraculous.”1 In many mystical traditions, the heart is the key to connecting with the higher frequency of the divine. Perhaps even more so than the brain, the heart contains an “imaginative intelligence that is so powerful that it can change the world in what it manifests through the combination of knowing and loving… Art facilitates insights into how humans participate in worldmaking—how our words, thoughts, and actions impact us, as well as how we shape and are shaped by our environments.”2 The heart’s pervasive awareness means that we feel it breaking with extreme intensity. Many of our environments today are teeming with heartbreak—from environment collapse to conflicts and polarization. Like any form of rupture, heartbreak can be a dynamic space for transformation. It is one of our greatest teachers, a universal experience that can be felt both individually and collectively and that links us to all times and places, especially through creative expression.

insights into how humans participate in worldmaking—how our words, thoughts, and actions impact us, as well as how we shape and are shaped by our environments.”2 The heart’s pervasive awareness means that we feel it breaking with extreme intensity. Many of our environments today are teeming with heartbreak—from environment collapse to conflicts and polarization. Like any form of rupture, heartbreak can be a dynamic space for transformation. It is one of our greatest teachers, a universal experience that can be felt both individually and collectively and that links us to all times and places, especially through creative expression.

The heart’s creative power comes into view when we look to thenth-century Bukhara, a time and place that can offer us many ways of mending heartbreaks. Bukhara in the tenth century was home to Ibn Sina, a polymath known as the father of modern medicine whose contributions to science and philosophy are vast. Located in the heart of Central Asia in modern-day Uzbekistan, Bukhara was an intellectual and economic center along the Silk Roads, a place where religious and cultural traditions from all corners of the world commingled to produce a rich atmosphere of learning, craft, and artistic production. That atmosphere of vigorous intellectual exchange is reflected in Ibn Sina’s correspondence with another great polymath of the Islamic Golden Age Al-Beruni, as well as in the writings of the great Sufis who lived there in subsequent centuries. For more than a millennium Bukhara has been a place where people came together to find togetherness in the quest of a better life through a search for spiritual, intellectual and worldly knowledge.