Getting out of the Way of Love, Part II
Last week I was ruminating about how we often INADVERTENTLY block the flow of love in our lives. It’s so easy to get caught up in things like fear, judgment or grief which keep us from our own pure essence – love.
And then I stumbled across that song – You Can’t Hurry Love. Yep so true. And guess what you can’t hurry grief either. It can’t be rushed up and out of your life no matter how much you don’t want to feel it.
I want to share a few things I learned about grief in hopes it doesn’t keep you from your own access to love. Because that pain of grief – when we rush past it, submerge it, avoid it, do everything we can to NOT feel it – results in a clear barrier to what we really want, the experience of genuine love.
So if you like me have had some life experience, you’ve most certainly been in the face of grief. And I’ll tell you what I learned after many rounds of facing it:
It is a gift to allow yourself to feel what you do without judgment, censorship, commentary or holding back. No matter how many times it shows up.
There is a difference between allowing a grief to move through you, being felt fully and telling yourself (or others) a story over and over to perpetuate pain and deepen the wound you are trying to heal.
Learning to be conscious of your own compassion for what you are experiencing is a profound healing tool.
There isn’t a prescribed path for going through the stages of grief. You may not feel them all or there may not seem to be an order or sequence to what you experience. In fact how grief shows up in your life might not make sense at all, but feelings aren’t based on logic and can’t be argued with. Let it unfold as it does.
The gift of paying attention to your grief is that you have the chance to let it show itself to you – to teach you what you have loved, what was important to you, what you regret, what you wish for more of, what you will cherish always, what you have had to surrender to, let go of and more.
Grief most often shows up when you have had no control over things in your life. And the one choice you have left in grief is - how will you relate to YOU when you feel it? Is there some compassion, kindness or gentleness that you can reach for, along side your pain?
The good news is: We all have a capacity in a part of ourselves to simultaneously feel the grief and our heart’s softness. The bad news is: it definitely takes practice to learn to regularly access it.
You might have touched that part of your wise self or not, but consider this – the heart continually calls for love despite all of life’s vicissitudes, and it is healed by that which it seeks.
May you find that you can feel the touch of love – even in your darkest moment of loss. Because even the effort to look for it, you guide your heart into a more gentle and open path that will bring you access to the potential for outrageous love over the choice of shutting down, hiding, protecting and closing the heart.
The original song from the Supremes https://youtu.be/fQ7uXX9K7Sk
The Phil Collins remake https://youtu.be/upnrXooMh4s
