Let’s talk about love
We humans are curious creatures, full of paradoxes. We want to fit in, to be accepted, welcomed and embraced, while living a life of freedom, choice and authenticity. We can be surrounded by others and yet feel completely alone. It takes so much courage to truly be yourself. To stand, two feet planted, and say, this is who I am and what I stand for; this is how I live, this is who and how I love.
Three years ago, I left my partner of six years. We’d moved interstate together, bought a house together, been through a pandemic together - I’d invested heavily in this partnership and thought we would go the distance, despite all the challenges. I was desperate to make it work and took so much responsibility to make it happen - if I just tried a little harder, worked on myself a little more, made things easier for him, it would get better.
I fought against my inner knowing for a long time because I was so afraid of losing the hard-won connection and intimacy we’d earned. In the end, we had irreconcilable differences that I’ll write about another time. (We had a very healing separation, I’m friends with him and his new partner, and a surrogate aunty to their baby. It’s a great story :) )
In the three years since that relationship ended, I’ve unpacked everything I thought I knew about love, and rewritten my own love story. A big part of healing my heart was learning how to truly grieve, to surrender and feel the excruciating pain of loss, and in that pain, fall through a doorway more deeply into love.
Healing our heart is a courageous act. To transform the pain of past hurt into love, we must embrace the truth of our vulnerability - that we have evolved for love and connection (it’s a life-giving survival need for humans) - and that love and connection means we are open to the possibility of being hurt, because we have no control over the actions of those we love.
When we fight against this truth, and we fight against feeling the pain of past loss, hurt and disappointment - our grief - it gets stuck. We become brittle, more likely to break, and we build barriers against the love that we need to survive. We end up in patterns where we get enough connection to survive, but not really enough to thrive; where we accept crumbs of connection or poor behaviour from others because we think that’s all that’s possible.
When we accept and welcome the truth of our vulnerability, we don’t fight against love, and we don’t fight against pain. We allow ourselves to feel it. And in the feeling of it, we grow our heart muscle. We grow strength and capacity for feeling. Our heart becomes a vessel that is resilient, capable of being deeply touched by beauty and pain without being overwhelmed, more able to let experiences of love and loss move us and grow us and shape us. We flow with life more.
We fight against feeling grief because most of us have been isolated in our big feelings, they felt too big or overwhelming to feel, and our body’s survival mechanism is to shut down and store them for a time when it’s safe to open up and feel again.
In most western cultures, grief is something to hide or be ashamed of - we fight it. As a result, most people struggle to ‘be with’ our grief because it triggers their own unprocessed pain, so when we take our feelings to them, they shut us down, reinforcing that our grief or big feelings are too much, and we stay stuck and isolated.
The thing is, we need connection to survive. And, our bodies have evolved to co-regulate - to support each other to keep big feelings moving, so we don’t get stuck.
When we feel our feelings in the company of someone who knows it’s safe to feel big feelings, who can hold space for us, our body will naturally start to move and release, and it feels good.
When we feel our feelings in shared space, we realise we are not alone, our feelings are not too much, and we can have this human experience together. Grieving becomes a way to honour the love we felt, a sign of our beautiful humanity, and a path to deeper connection, not something to be ashamed of.
Grieving together is body, heart and soul medicine. Our bones know how to grieve together, because our ancestors did - we just need a space to remember in.
I’ve created a grief ritual for healing the heart. It’s called Empty Out and Open Up to Love. You can read more about it here.
