Love and Grief

Every lover knows, to allow the magic of love to exist fully in our lives, we must accept it’s own dark lover; grief. And I’m not just talking death and ex’s, I mean in every aspect of loving life. In the hard choices, the unknown, in our fears, our scary or secret desires. In aging, and changing and continuous growth. In the moments we forget ourselves, act out of character, or need to forgive ourselves, or others.

Grief has this habit of hiding behind our feelings of guilt, shame and regret. It pokes at all our unfinished business and the chances we haven’t taken, and it stokes the fire of our harshest emotions. When we see grief within every aspect of change in our lives, even for the positive, we understand that ignoring it only strengthens this hold of judgement on our daily actions. Grief may serve as our jailer, or it can set us free.

To live with our fullest range of emotion and make decisions in alignment with our intuition and truest self, we sit with our grief. Deeper still, we may find gratitude with grief, as a teacher and guide. Then, to the deepest well of all, unconditional love and acceptance for all our darkest parts and all the elements of love and grief within us.

Our big feelings aren’t ugly or undeserving, our needs are never too much, they are simply trying to communicate, like a frightened child calling out to us from the dark. With understanding and time, we create an internal infrastructure of care to provide our own self real safety and comfort; so those cries won’t fade to silence and transform into self-loathing, malice, bitterness... which, in the end, just need our love too. It is our true nature to love, and so it is our honor as lovers to grieve.