“Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of Heaven.”
― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
It’s not easy to extend love when you’re not being loved in return. We can be selfish creatures, unwilling to love unless we know that love will come back to us.
So after a breakup, especially one we don’t want, it’s a challenge to stay in a loving place. It’s a choice we can make, but it goes against all our instincts.
It’s a natural reaction to want to strike back when a man withdraws his love from us. We want to lash out and inflict the pain we’re feeling back onto him. We will blame him and curse him. We’ll call him heartless, cold and immature. We do all this and more to defend ourselves from the pain of rejection.
We attempt to appease our feelings by attacking, believing we’ll at least feel better if we’re not alone in our misery. When they withdraw their love we react by doing the same to them. The old “tit for tat.”
The truth of this strategy is that it is the easy way out. All this does is take us away from love and make us miserable. We forget any good we had in the past and call everything
we experienced a failure. After a breakup the hurt can be overwhelming and all consuming that we become unable to connect with our better selves.
But what if we go against nature and take the high road? Is it possible for us to rise above the hurt? What if we let ourselves feel the pain and yet choose to love anyway?
We can choose to do this but it’s not simple, not the easy way. It’s much easier to shut off our feelings and to stop being vulnerable to love. It takes the best part of ourselves to stay open when we’ve been wounded so deeply. Sometimes the hard road is the most direct to the destination we want to go.
Holding a loving space in our heart and our mind has nothing to do with the man who hurt us. It’s a shift in consciousness we make about that person without them ever having to know. It’s a change in perception where we stop making how they feel about us wrong. It’s how we experience unconditional love and it heals us.
When we take this more difficult path, we’re no longer at war with him or our pain. Feelings of rejection dissolve as our barriers to love fall away and our heart opens. The love we generate helps expand into more love.
One of my favorite quotes is by Henry David Thoreau,”There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
I have this quote in the signature of every email I send out. It’s such an important reminder: love begets more love.
As Marianne Williamson says, when we feel love we are in heaven, don’t we all want that?
Release what’s been standing in the way of finding your special someone.
Dear Virginia,
with deep respect, I want to thank you for your website °°°
It contains such a wealth of wisdom, such an enriching amount of viewpoints – all under the heading of love – that I see in it a most valuable “Academy” for women to grow tremendously in an otherwise manly dominated arena.
It transcends mere feminism which sadly has become sometimes even a curse word – and leads into true gender equality – championed by strong women who are aware of their very own power to enrich the lives of their beloved men.
Thank you, too, for your book. It’s a nutshell full of deep deep wisdom.
Maria