The Only Thing That Hurts
The only thing that hurts in this world is me withholding my love.
This is a nuance of breakups, deaths, and other losses that is independent of the story attachments. It is a grief apart from the dissolution of hopes, dreams, and fantasy.
This is the suffering of suddenly withholding loving action and expression which has become a routine practice of offering love. This is what happens when relationship breaks down, when we reshape the practices and habits of honoring the love we feel inside, for this person and for the world.
Without someone to look in the eyes in the morning, to hug and to kiss, to call or even to text, love quickly backs up in the holding tanks. It spills out as grief.
In this moment, opportunities to love remain infinite, they're always infinite. But we are practiced in a particular pattern of expression, and it's not easy to immediately forge new paths, especially the way so many of us exist in a dearth of community to begin with. Even moreso with the story-layer of grief lying on top of this fundament.
Just like there are infinite businesses you might start, there are infinite expressions to love. Just like any business you start, there are patterns and practices to every expression of love which you must know or learn in order for that channel to be fruitful.
The habit and practice of expressing and exchanging love is interactive. It is much easier for most of us, given how we are socialized and neurally structured, to do this with other humans.
For most of us, the loss of a partner is the loss of 80% or more of our regular channel of loving expression toward other humans.
Recovering this level of relational interaction, given the way our culture is literally and socially structured, is a LONG road. Spiritual practice can ease this backed up withholding, yet this is something we also find ourselves alienated from in times such as these. Anyway, spiritual practice is weaker without a community in which to LIVE that practice.
The change is already here. We can't keep up the lie of independence, and we can no longer pretend one person is community enough.
If loss has brought you low in the last 2-3 years, just know we are all collecting at the bottom. We will rise again together, with a network strong enough to hold real space for all the grief of being human.
A crisis of loneliness is an action-potential of community. Eyes on the prize.
