I’ve been grieving.  The full process: denial, bargaining, depression, anger, tears . . .   I’ve really been knocked onto the floor.  Hard.  I lost something very important to me. 

 So I’ve been thinking about this.  What have I lost?  Most important of everything was love, receiving it, participating in it.  It’s not that someone has stopped loving me, it’s that what’s been lost was the evidence of love and that “being” in it was what I, looking back, most valued.

There’s more to it, which I don’t want to blog about.  And there is the whole aspect of giving my love, but I guess that doesn’t feel like a loss in the same way.

I realize that I let that love make me very happy and that I gave it importance.

So what am I going to put in its place?  Is there anything that can inspire me the same way?  Anybody?  I must have done some serious grieving (which I have) to come out the other side and start asking practical emotional questions like this. 

For what was only a moment, really, I gained inspiration from what proved to be a transitory and unreliable source.  Causing me to see what a precarious position I’m in if I so depend.

OK, and this is the place where some pious soul would tell me that the love of God is the only constant and reliable source.  Sorry, I have not experienced it as reliable.  I mean I am not able to feel it, depend on it, receive it.  I believe in love and creation and healing energy, but I need something more immediate and active.  God’s love doesn’t seem to work that way for me unless I delude myself which I am no good at doing.

What I need is to improve my own relationship with myself.  I’ve forgotten some of what I learned at Kripalu about loving myself.  I need to be friend to myself, care for myself, give myself space.  And not the platitudes usually issued about that stuff, but actually having a relationship with myself better, like actually having a two way engagement between observer/caring self and emotional being self.  So that my observer self is not just “know theyself”ing but giving back too, and I am allowing myself to receive.

Now I’m realizing all the various modes of relationship I can have with myself: scorn, compassion, anger, disappointment, acceptance, delight.  What other people do for me is show me other ways to be in relationship with me.  Sometimes it’s hard to transform one of those relationships and I get stuck, perhaps because I’m trying to avoid it.

So I guess this post is a prayer.  That I might do better at giving love back to myself.

I guess this means I’m finally done bargaining and all the rest, I think, but then I remember the little chart in my stages of grief coursework where the arrow points back in a helix, circling back almost to begin the stages over again.