How to feel loved even when a relationship ends
7 days ago I made one of the hardest decisions of my life.
A decision made for love, but a choice that really seemed to be set up to take love away from me.
7 days ago, I helped my best friend of 17-years, my heart companion, my soul dog, die.
She wasn’t sick. Just old.
Her body no longer worked the way it needed for her to
Be the vibrant, jubilant, beautiful being she had always been.
And although I didn’t know it at the time, inside I became very afraid that Love was going to leave me… again.
Love had certainly felt like it had left before – when my father died, when my engagement ended abruptly, and in the times previous best friends became people I no longer talked to.
Through my previous experiences with love and loss, I had come to believe that when people leave, so does the love. Which has also caused me to believe that as humans, we will do most anything to avoid feeling the pain associated with feeling the loss of love. Or sometimes we will do everything to run straight into and sit in the pain, suffering to make ourselves feel alive and connected to the one that has left.
As I made the choice this time around to let someone I love go, what I found were two beliefs around love and loss – one that served me and one – a love lie — that just caused me great suffering, that I thought we all could benefit from getting to the real truth.
LOVE BELIEF
The thought of losing love is one of the scariest things we face as human beings.
This is true.
LOVE LIE
When a relationship ends or a person leaves our lives, the love dies. The love leaves with them.
This is totally false.
It is true that if you input a belief into your mind that tells you “Love is gone! Love has been taken away!” you will feel pain, excruciating suffering kind of pain.
Because just like we need air to breathe, we need love to live.
Anyone who has had the experience of losing someone they love deeply can attest to feeling like the wind was knocked out of them, because it was.