Rumi, you have written so many poems, and there is a fragment of one that forever stands out in my mind; it catches my heart and gives me pause. I repeat it often, and, if anyone has had substantive conversations with me and/or regularly reads my column, these words will be familiar: "Break my heart. Oh, break it again, so I can love more fully."

I so understand these lines in response to the big playing-field events like the Tsunami, Katrina, Darfur and other atrocities; they make perfect sense. When we witness those realities, our feelings of compassion, connection and communion build in intensity like a runaway train. There is no stopping us. We are filled with an emotional force seemingly greater than ourselves; we respond to the pain and suffering with rushing feelings that torpedo out of the constraints of our daily, automatic hearts.

And, just as you wrote, Rumi, the heart responds by breaking open anew; it bursts out of its regular, everyday container and becomes super-sized. The heart now requires a larger vessel to hold its expanded and amplified emotions. Indeed, the heart can "love more fully." This I understand.

However, does this same wisdom hold for the small screen? Here is my conundrum:

Rumi, I realize your poems were written as sacred and ecstatic verses to the Beloved. However, Rumi, some human hearts are breaking because of our beloveds, and, unlike your Beloved, these are beloveds with a small "b" as in beings, human beings.

Could I not argue that love is love? Does it matter if our love is directed towards the divine godhead or the divinely created human sitting across the table from us?

The reason I ask is that some of us are awash in goodbyes, some more tender than others. In these goodbyes, it does not feel like there is more love. In fact, it decidedly feels like there are less of those loving feelings because there is the acute reality of loss.

I realize that goodbyes are part and parcel of life, just as with nature, with its cycle of life, death and rebirth.

Nonetheless, given our very human natures, goodbyes can be difficult, one-sided, welcomed, satisfying, terrifying, poignant, bittersweet and, to your point, Rumi, heartrending.

I was in a café yesterday and overheard a gentleman touchingly discuss his father's recent passing. And even my own good editor is dealing with the death anniversary of her mom. Our friend Birdie wrote that her husband asked for a divorce.

There are folks in California who have lost everything; they have been stripped to their very essences. There have been far too many suicides as of late that have left loved ones staggering in shock and disbelief. And there are friendships that have, seemingly out-of-nowhere, unraveled and left people bruised and confused.

As a darling Celtic client of mine, now in service to the angels, once said, "Life is doing life," and life is doing endings, too.

These endings make me think of, yet again, the concept of soul contracts.

Soul contracts are those pre-arranged soul sorties where you agree to connect and, eventually, disconnect with various someones or somethings, all in the pursuit of soul growth and evolution.

The theory is that, as souls, we raise our little soul hands for assorted soul-building experiences, and what better way to fortify a soul than to put it through its paces with the demands of relationships. Relationships of every type are, by practice, the penultimate teaching tool of the soul.

For example, I once had a landlord who was quite masterful at making me crazy. I became a sputtering idiot in response to his outrageousness. I felt completely powerless and out of control. This landlord called the office one night and told me it was against the law for me to see my psychotherapy clients in the evening. And he also reasoned that the gaping holes in the roof were a maintenance problem for me to handle, as opposed to a landlord building repair. You get the idea.

This supposed landlord from hell was actually a terrific soul contract. He allowed me to step up to the plate, so to speak, to end an old childhood dynamic and to assert my rights. Once I understood the lesson and the steps I needed to take, our relationship ended fairly quickly (in fact, six months earlier than the lease indicated) and reasonably. I got it, and I got out. Soul contracts are a lot like that; they can end abruptly.

So, Rumi, vis-à-vis the assorted endings and finales, you would, undoubtedly, agree that they pull at the heartstrings. And the fact that there is a "good" in goodbye is certainly not lost on you. So, how do these goodbyes become good? What has to happen or transpire to make the letting go less painful?

Here's what I think you would tell me if you were sitting here and we were sharing the sacred wine and some tasty hors d'oeuvres:

You would simply tell me everything is soul work; everything is about union with the divine and seeing the divine hand in everything; and, most importantly, every time the heart breaks open, it makes room for the divine to enter.

Am I to interpret that as pain leads me to the divine? I can see you chuckling, Rumi. Well, I get where that might be true. When we humans are in need, we tend to invoke the presence of the gods we know. We do look for something bigger and beyond our ken to help us make sense of the depths of our despair.

However, I think your real point is that the more love that opens our heart, the greater the capacity there is for more and more compassion and kindness and understanding. It is a bit like developing lung capacity; with practice, you can breathe a great deal deeper. With heart practice, I would guess I could then feel a great deal deeper.

I would also venture a guess that once a heart is broken and broken again, it does not shrink back to its nascent size. And a wider and wider heart can only lead to more love, right?

And would you concur, Rumi, that love can be seen as a synonym for the presence of God? And would you also agree that the high vibratory, all-inclusive, never-judgmental unconditional love is about as godlike as we human beings can become?

So, I tip my glass to you, Rumi. You are right: It does take some heartbreak, some loss and endings and even some good goodbyes, to not so gently nudge us toward that place of greater love, and greater God.

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Dr. Adele Ryan McDowell, Ph.D., is a psychologist, empath, and shaman who likes looking at life with the big viewfinder. Her e-mail address is {email ARMCDOWELL@aol.com}ARMCDOWELL@aol.com{/email}. © copyright 2007 by Adele Ryan McDowell