This too shall pass,
And I will be whole again.
My heart will be healed,
And I will be returned to the loving arms of grace, Where I am fully embraced.
In the midst of life’s heartaches, we must find the eyes to see beyond our current situation. The fact remains that we are going to have tough times. People are going to die. We are going to lose love. We are going to struggle. We can pray until we are blue in the face for things to be different, but most of the time we are powerless to stop heartache, because it is an inevitable part of life. Creation and destruction, life and death, good times and bad times… If you have a father who is riddled with cancer, there is probably a 99 percent chance that he is going to die. Praying for him not to, although you could do it, is a prayer that you can’t expect God to answer. But what you can pray for, what you do have influence over, is for you to be the strongest, most centered and loving person possible during those times. You can pray for the courage to love through your fear, to allow love in through other sources. You can pray for enough love in your heart so you can grieve in a healthy way.
You can pray for your loved one to find comfort, to have faith, to have an easy passing. What you do have power over, what you do need, is the understanding that this is life, that this too shall pass, and that an all-loving grace is with you and supports you in transcending the moment, enabling you to see beyond your current circumstances. The mantra “This too shall pass” lifts your consciousness so you can look at your life five days or five months out and know that you’re going to be okay. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
Suffering, heartache, and agony come from our inability to process all our emotions. If we were to just let our fear be there without any resistance it would pass us by at some point, like a cloud floating by. If our anger were as welcome as our joy, it would be just a feeling inside us rather than an emotion that takes over our entire being. We would be able to be separate from it, observing its nature, observing ourselves, rather than becoming one with it. All the emotions that come our way at times of distress are there to teach us and guide us and give us the spiritual wisdom we need to move forward. But when we get caught up in all these emotions, become one with them, allow them to take over our thought process and our right to make conscious choices, we do the exact opposite of what wants to happen naturally.
Why do we do this? Because we take all our experiences so personally. We believe that the events of our life are somehow created and co-created by us, and because of this, we become attached to reality as we’ve known it, and we resist it changing.
We become attached to the people in our life, our relationships, and the forms they take. We become attached to outer situations as well as inner states, and this attachment is what will ultimately cause us pain and suffering.
It’s one of those cosmic paradoxes that, if we fail to understand, will trick us every time. We are to be open, loving, and inviting to situations, people, and experiences, but we must also be open to losing these same situations, people, and experiences. We could feel pissed off at God just for this alone.
How is this fair? It seems like a setup, to be open to everything while knowing that at any time it may be ripped away from us. And since it is very human to hold on it is in our genetic makeup to attach it makes it even harder to let go. Just when we think we are doing fine, things change. People leave, die, and betray us. We lose a friend, a lover, a job, get taken for some of our earnings or get snubbed by a coworker. We lose our health, our energy, our dignity, and the elasticity in our skin. With each passing day we get closer to death, and all the drama of everyday life robs us of being present to what we have right now.
We must breathe into that. Ultimately we must reclaim our power to process challenging events so that we can move on.
Yes, this is our opportunity and our challenge. Heartache will give us new life or it will speed up our internal death—the death of our dreams, our hopes, our joys, and our ambitions. We are in charge of this part of our life, and we get to choose.
Go ahead, choose. This is your opportunity. This is as good a time as any to say goodbye to any love you have lost in any form, whether a friend, a job, a lover, a family member, an opportunity, or an addiction.
from Debbie Ford, Heartbreak
