The Crack and the Light: Notes on Becoming the Vessel

Since that exquisite pain experience a few weeks ago, I’ve been sitting in quiet reflection, letting it teach me instead of running from it. Two weeks ago, I came to a realization that felt simple yet world-shifting: pain is what breaks us so that love can be poured into the incarnated vessel. How profound this paradox truly is.

I am beginning to see pain not as punishment or mere preparation but as sacred initiation. The surrender to it, and the moment when love begins to pour in, is what creates that exquisite, almost unbearable feeling, the one that hurts and heals at once.

And so, I began to wonder: why do we fear this? Why do we reject it? What is it within the human psyche that struggles to accept the very love we are all yearning for?

There is a sacred tremor that comes before revelation, a cracking open of what the mind has spent years fortifying. We call it pain, but perhaps it is the soul’s way of expanding the vessel.

For years, I noticed how deeply my body responded to unseen forces, the pull of the sun, the rhythm of magnetic storms, the quiet hum of solar flares. I began tracking these cycles, realizing that my body often reacted before the world did. What once felt like sensitivity or anomaly, I now understand as a meeting of biology and spirit: the body translating the language of the cosmos through sensation. A sacred conversation between my inner and outer worlds.

The human psyche, however, does not trust such openings easily. It was built for survival, not transcendence. It measures safety by what is familiar, even if the familiar has kept us small. So when love begins to pour in; not the tender, romantic kind, but the vast, molten current of divine remembrance, the mind panics. It tightens its grip and whispers, This is too much; you will lose yourself.

And in a way, it’s right. We do lose something.... The false self, the persona that learned to please, the mask that said “I’m fine. ”They dissolve under the weight of truth.

When I wrote Constellations Don’t Obey Lines, I didn’t realize it was my vessel cracking. The pain a stranger’s insult had stirred became the light coming in, and my response; vulnerable and raw, was the sound of that crack widening. My boundaries of logic, control, and linear understanding were splitting open to make room for a new geometry of being, one that doesn’t fit inside tidy boxes of reason. It hurt. It still does. But within that pain, I felt something exquisite: a softness I had never allowed myself to feel. Love was finally pouring in, and my entire system has been recalibrating to hold it.

That is the sacred initiation, the one no teacher, therapist, or religion can prepare you for. The moment when pain ceases to be the enemy and becomes the anointing oil. It breaks us so that love has somewhere to land.

But why do we fear it so much?

Why do we coil in contraction when love asks us to expand?

Because love; true love, not attachment or idealization, dismantles every wall we have built to survive. It asks us to reopen the doors we once sealed shut to keep the world from hurting us again. It doesn’t soothe the ego; it calls it to die.

And even symbolic death terrifies the human psyche.

So we close. We rationalize, numb, distract, or retreat into familiar loops of sorrow. We turn the pain inward, mistaking contraction for protection. We convince ourselves that isolation will keep us safe, but it only keeps us separate.

The irony is that love does not disappear when we shut down, it waits. Patiently. Silently. In the very ache we avoid. The same pain that depresses us holds the seed of our liberation, if only we dare to meet it with presence instead of resistance.

Our journey, then, is not to escape pain nor conquer it, but to recognize it as the sacred threshold through which love learns to enter.

To feel the exquisite ache is to say yes to the paradox: that love and pain are not opposites but partners in awakening. Pain cracks the vessel; love fills the space. Pain humbles; love expands. Pain reveals where love has not yet reached.

In the song, I wrote that pain is the chalice, the sacred design that breaks the vessel so light can align. But once the light enters, what remains is not emptiness, but space for love to fill. This essay lives in that quiet afterglow, the space where the breaking becomes becoming.

Our work is to transmute, not transcend. To allow pain to teach us how to soften, not harden. To remember that the ache in our chest is not proof of our brokenness but evidence that our heart is still alive, still capable of becoming more.

Every fracture becomes a constellation when viewed from enough distance.

The lines we once drew to separate our wounds from our wisdom start to blur, revealing the greater pattern; the entire cosmos inside the human heart.

Integration

So for the past 2 weeks I find myself in the space between; the quiet after the quake, where integration unfolds in silence. I am finding that I no longer rush to fix or interpret what is breaking open within me. I sit with it, listening. Just as the stars hum before dawn, my spirit hums with new awareness.

I suppose this is not the time for striving, but for allowing, for letting the love that entered through the cracks find its way into every forgotten corner of my soul and now, the part of me that once feared the flood is learning to float and ride the waves of understanding.

The contraction has softened into trust and surrender.

I understand now that initiation is not a single moment of awakening but an ongoing embodiment, a rhythm of opening, breaking, receiving, and becoming.

And in this rhythm, I am no longer afraid.

The vessel that once feared being shattered has become the very chalice through which love will continue to pour.

Author’s Note

If these words found their way to you, perhaps it’s because you, too, are standing at the edge of your own breaking. May you remember that pain does not come to punish, but to prepare; not to end you, but to open you.

Every ache is a doorway, every fracture a place where love is waiting to pour through.

Thank you for walking a few steps of this journey with me, for allowing my words to meet you where you are. Writing this was both remembrance and release, a reminder that the light doesn’t ask us to be unbroken, only to be willing.

With tenderness,

☥

The song is out there now, ready to be held, heard, and owned with love. Buy it today!

Where Love Pours In

CA$2.95

Buy Now