“Love” is a word that is referenced weekly in my office; rarely, however, do I hear what is being described as being related to love. Instead, when someone says they love someone, for example, they are typically describing something quite the opposite: an intense dependence rooted in fear and desperation, where the intensity of the fear has become the mistaken counterfeit. There is often a very constricting, obsessive, controlling and possessive quality to it, with genuine qualities of love such as peace, joy, safety, compassion, curiosity, understanding, connection, play and excitement, to name a few, are nowhere to be found in the description.
In order to become someone who can both give and receive love freely; more is required of us than having a strong desire alone. Unfortunately, the capacity for genuine love requires that we enter into a non-negotiable contract with grief. Simply put, we cannot have any more than we can handle losing in this lifetime, making grief a fundamental and non-negotiable prerequisite to love. Further, it is our level of skill or competency with grief that stretches our capacity for love. You see: The greater the love we allow into our hearts, the more devastating the heartache that will come when it’s time to say goodbye, something every human being will have to do with everything they hold dear in this lifetime.
In an unconscious attempt to avoid future heartache, many people now choose (often unconsciously) to avoid true love at all costs, even though they so desperately crave it and will never be fully fulfilled without it. Tragically, the unwillingness to cosign with grief keeps them from ever being able to meet this deeply fundamental human need. I have known many people who will not let themselves be psychologically touched in any deep and meaningful way because where there is a genuine, intimate connection (love), there must be equal room for the significant pain when it’s time to let go of the connection (grief). And again, the deeper the connection, the deeper the sorrow that is to come. There is simply no way around it: it is the price we must be willing to pay at the end of a loving experience.
Generally speaking, most people are not well-versed in the practice of grief because a genuine encounter with grief is seen as producing strong “negative” emotion, with many describing such expression as a “weakness,” or an “ugly” experience (yes, I’ve heard this too many times). In our modern-day obsessive-compulsive drive toward the “light,” and “positive” emotional experience and expression only, access to true love and the capacity for authentic positive experience has largely been foreclosed upon, and the deleterious consequences are certainly manifest and far-reaching, both for the individual and the society at large.
My heart breaks for those who so deeply desire to both give and receive love. I watch them wrestle tirelessly to achieve such capacity, but the common unwillingness to engage in any deep and meaningful grief work leaves the majority coming up short. In the business of love, we are not allowed to take out a loan for more that we can afford to pay back. A wonderful man and shaman, the late Howard Lawler, once told me while I was working with him at his Ayahuasca retreat center in the Peruvian Amazon Basin many years ago, that the spirit world operates on reciprocity. In this context, I believe this means that to be blessed with the gift of love, we must be willing to pay it back with a broken heart in the future.
Today, when someone comes to work with me and I hear or see a deep longing for love, even self-love, they are universally resisting the physical-emotional expression of unmetabolized grief. Most people never want to appear or be seen as “messy,” and grief work is certainly messy, very messy (if it’s authentic, in accordance with the human condition). Further, most people do not want to “lose control” and grief cannot be domesticated or controlled in the ways most people would prefer. Where grief is concerned, a complete surrender to the innate physical-emotional expression is necessary in order to fully process the material held in a broken heart, no matter the time that may have passed. Many people are deeply concerned about what they will look and how they will be perceived in this often terrifying, broken-down, and temporarily destabilizing state, and so, if they understand what is needed at all, they also prefer to go it alone—to not be seen by anyone else in the process (as most people learned as young children these types of emotional experiences and expressions were NOT welcome and frequently led to rejection or admonishment)—and yet, perhaps most disappointing of all, to be metabolized; that is, transformed and cleared, grief requires a compassionate witness with their capacity for love enabled, which is not an easy thing to find in modern times as well.
As adults, we have the choice of becoming a gracious host to grief and the divine nature of the human condition we’ve been blessed to experience, thus becoming open to giving and receiving love once again, but I am not seeing many people willing to open up to the great pain of significant loss that’s part of the deal. Instead, I have witnessed greater and greater efforts towards denial and suppression. Further, in recent years, I have also noticed a very troubling, related phenomenon: where there was once a tiny allowance for a sliver of grief-related emotional expression at funerals, quite sadly, that too is now being replaced with a more “up-beat” counterfeit: the “celebration of life” event. No more funerals. No more room for even a modicum of grief. Once more, the possibilities for love are continually traded away due to our refusal to be welcoming hosts to grief when the loss comes. Tragic.
And as I close this piece, I’d like to offer one final point: As briefly touched on earlier, please know that time alone will never heal the wounds of significant loss. While time is a variable in the equation, without being willing to become a practitioner of grief, time will only give you the opportunity to further deny your needs in the pursuit of more and more avoidance and distraction techniques (commonly read: addictive-compulsive behaviors, for example). Rest assured, however: no matter how many layers of avoidance or distraction you develop, grief will never stop chasing you down. Like the dearest, most loyal friend and ally you could ever have, grief does not want you to miss out on the opportunity to experience the greatest, most amazing and special potential of the human experience before time runs out.