I want to talk with you about something personal.
Pull up a chair. Curl up with a tea.
I want to talk to you about Grief.
I’m talking about a grief that’s beyond your control or outside circumstances.
It’s the kind of grief when you’ve lost something inside yourself.
Thanks to the help of a wonderful counsellor, it recently became clear to me that being in a loving relationship with a soul mate who I build and create with is more of a priority to me than having a child at all costs. Yet I do desire to be with someone who’s at least willing and open to exploring options for parenthood together… and that meant possibly letting go of the relationship I was in.
Before that clarity showed itself, I felt many things.
And the most poignant of those things was Grief.
At first Grief showed up as what you might expect, the loss of the years that I was physically fertile without the pressure of a biological clock.
But underneath that was the grief of not being in the right relationships.
Any time you feel a pang of loss and ask why? What’s the lesson? Things get clear.
You start to see how you can take responsibility for your choices along the way.
And that’s what happened when I crawled under the loss of time.
And there I saw it. I was grieving the loss of all the times, including recently, when I unconsciously believed it was “too much to ask for” the entire package of love and co-creation I truly desired to experience. So I grieved that feeling of: Undeserving.
As soon as I got that clarity, I could take responsibility for my part in the ‘outside circumstances’, and see how my lack of believing in my own deservingness was something to heal, and not something to blame on myself, the “Universe”, or any relationship I’d been in.
Taking responsibility meant forgiving myself for not even knowing how much this belief held me back.
Forgiveness, the ultimate soothing healing balm.
Street Art by Hush
The wily thing about Grief is that no one wants to feel it. Diving into the wells of loss doesn’t exactly sound like a gung-ho New Year’s Eve party.
It takes daring to swim in the harbor of your grief for all the times you’ve TRIED to get what you want, all the times you may have dared greatly, committed 100%, taken leaps of faith beyond your comfort zone, and all the times you believed, or wanted to believe that THIS TIME you wouldn’t let an old story run your life.
Feeling grief takes letting go of all the heartbreaking loss, rearing its head around the corner, seemingly confirming and validating, that you can’t actually get what you want. It takes acknowledging all the times you’ve told yourself, you might as well be ‘realistic’ and minimize all future risks, because setting your sights on your heart’s desire didn’t seem to get you further than suffering and licking your wounds.
When you play safe, you stay in your comfort zone and you stay in control.
If you’re in a committed relationship, you might become more like buddies instead of lovers.
If you’re dating, you might start to make demands to validate your relationship, or you push your lover away, not really believing in their love.
If you’re single, you might attract people who protect themselves as much as you do, or you don’t date at all, leaving it up to chance, fate and the Universe. You become passive and resigned to your fate. Or exhausted from trying to change it.
I know because I’ve been in all of those situations, protecting myself from being disappointed.
So better to ‘not believe’ in possibility at all. It keeps you safe from the grief that you vowed you’d never ever, ever, ever subject yourself to feeling again.
But the truth is, avoiding that horrible painful thing called Grief will dig its nails into your heart, preventing you from believing that you CAN and deserve to have what you want.
So next time the “WHY IS THIS HAPPENING AGAIN?” meets you at the doorstep, don’t distract yourself looking for solutions or action plans.
Just stay there. Feel the hissy fit. Feel your indignance. Feel a 2-year-old’s sense of entitled rage, gnawing at your heart, scratching the surface of your grief. Most importantly, move it though your body. Dance, run, yell, scream.
This takes courage, yes. It takes grit, yes. And it takes bucket loads of grace to feel pain and still proceed through the comparatively mundane motions of the day-to-day, that pale in comparison to the inner experience you’re having.
It’s worth it because believing you can’t have something that your soul deeply desires is inhumane.
Photo by Candace Smith
Sometimes love is like an obstacle course. You’ll get options volleying around you like a pinball machine, and unless you take the time to feel and stay on course with your deservingness, you may be just mindlessly pulling back the pinball machine chord over and over again and ‘hoping for the best’, and then wondering why the love you’ve been envisioning for years “hasn’t come to you yet.”
Love takes surrendering to control.
Surrendering means feeling EVERYTHING, including the things that are hard to feel.
Shifting the mechanics of your heart into a deep visceral knowing that you not only deserve to have what you desire, but that you’re worth fighting for that desire every step of the way, means surrendering to grieving your losses and disappointments, while loving yourself through it.
Dear brave lady, heal your heart and stand up for what she’s built for.
There’s gold in grief.
Grief is the opening to change.
When grief is no longer buried, you have it to hold in your hands.
And when you see it like that, there’s an opening for forgiveness.
And self-forgiveness gives you space to deservingly receive whatever you desire.
[bctt tweet=”Forgiveness is a gushing fountain that will burst through the glass ceiling to all that you desire and most importantly, deserve.
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As we pass into another year, take time to feel what’s really true.
Celebrate your courage.
Grieve. Forgive. Receive.
Be an ambassador for the country of You.
Have and Hold Everything You Desire Deeply.
You Deserve It.
