Is love real? Can we trust it? How to love again when you're sure you never can
by Ask a Healer
Not loving feels safer sometimes. Doesn't it?
When our choices to love end up with painful consequences, some of us decide not to love.
Maybe we don't even decide that consciously. We just evolve into beings with guarded hearts; we stop letting anyone get that close. Yet, the yearning to love and be loved isn't so simple to quell.
Is love real? Where is real love found? And how do you find love again, after losing the love you thought would never end?
From the mouth of babes.....What is Love?
"When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth." Billy - age 4
Opening the Heart Closed in Pain
It was a moment so filled with devastation that my body couldn't contain it.
I seemed to be melting out of the very form of my body, while sitting there at the kitchen table that day.
There was an odd, almost indescribable sense of there being no vacuum anymore, around my body; no place where air met skin. I disappeared.
My mind was short-circuited and speech impossible. It wasn't just that my mouth wouldn't move; even if I could have shaken off the paralysis, I didn't know words to say.
It was over.
The relationship that I had fully embraced 7 years prior, believing it would last for the rest of my life, was suddenly, shockingly and irrevocably over.
The bond of love I believed was indestructible had just been obliterated by the atomic bomb of betrayal and almost nothing remained of it.
Never mind that I should have seen the bomb coming. Never mind that I could have taken steps to avert total destruction.
It was over in an instant and my big Self knew it but could not let my self know it.
For three horrid weeks, I kept feeding my mind the steroid of hope......I can get over this; I can move on past this; He will change; He loves me; This will heal....... until, not unlike an athlete that collapses on the field because her heart gives out from the abuse, I collapsed into a pain so deep that I thought death would be preferrable. When loving hurts Is that the price of loving? Is love real at all or was I deluded for those years into thinking love could last forever? That love could overcome even soul-level differences?
I didn't consciously ask those questions of myself but, based on my behavior, I must have believed life was over for me, as well as love.
Looking back now, almost 7 years later, I am surprised I did not die. I certainly gave my immune system every opportunity to quit. I no longer cared what I ate, where I lived, what I did with my day, or how I looked.
I understand, to my very core, the meaning of saying someone died of a broken heart. I almost did choose death over what I thought would be never-ending grief.
Opening to love once more
How did I make my way back to loving again?
Well, I got by with a little help from my friends.....a lot of help. When I could not remember who I was, they reminded me. When I could not think of reasons to
live, they called and encouraged conversation or sat without words, for many silent minutes on the other end of the phone, just there.
At some point, I began to heal this decision to give up on life the same way I've healed every other spiritual breakdown in my consciousness....by surrender to it and ownership of it.
I finally accepted the situation, every ounce of it, as something I co-created with the other people involved. I finally stopped blaming and hating and raging and just sat with it until I owned it.
It's what we resist at all costs....sitting with our reality til we own it.
We'd rather fight hell and half of Georgia than simply accept what is, as being created by us and co-created with others, from the highest level of consciousness each person could access at the time. We are always doing the best we can so judgment is a useless process.
Owning our experiences is vital to understanding why we chose them in the first place and it's really the only way we can grow spiritually and learn how to embrace more joyful choices in the future.
"When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you." Karen - age 7
Joy springing from tragedy has never been, in my life, an instantaneous process. Maybe it can be but, for me, it's been about walking through whatever resistance I have to being me. I don't like knowing I deliberately, at a soul level, chose a situation that resulted in terrible pain and loss. Yet, the path to a renewal of love and joy, has always been through that realization.
What are you really angry about? ===>>> When moodiness about love causes mental disorder
The Shamanic Experience that started my journey toward the inevitable release of my most intimate, soul-level relationship. I knew something was coming.....I just didn't know what ..... The Pipe
