Yesterday I spent time in the company of a women who struck me as intelligent, beautiful, artistic, mature, vulnerable, and deeply spiritual. As I became aware of attraction and longing, a nagging voice warned of the betrayal I’d commit if I were to even think about letting go of sadness and the memory of The One I’ve been grieving over these past seventeen months.
The Buddha taught that by becoming aware of desire, we free ourselves from identifying with it. “Longing, felt fully, carries us to belonging,” writes Tara Brach–
“The more times we traverse this path … the more the longing for love becomes a gateway into love itself. Our longing doesn’t disappear, nor does the need for others. But by opening into the well of desire—again and again—we come to trust the boundless love that is its source.”
print source: Brach, T. (2003). Radical acceptance: embracing your life with the heart of a buddha. Bantam Books, p. 156.
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As I became aware of longing to arise, a nagging voice warned of the betrayal I’d commit if I were to even think about letting go of sadness and the memory of The One I’ve been grieving over…
The heart is “big enough” for all these things: sadness, sensed betrayal, guilt, fear, past and present longings and on and on and on…
I know you know. I’m just reflecting your soul. (smile)
Let yourself love and love it all.
Namaste.
Thank you .. you say that I know. well … on tuesday i touched on types of knowledge, borrowed and self-acquired. so it is with loving everything, with making the container large enough to hold seemingly opposing views and feelings. thanks to your comment/reminder, I’m beginning to hold grieving over the lost love and the possiblity of another (just as deeply) in the same heartbeat.
this comment arrived in a round-about way:
it isn’t possible to love and part … You can transmutate love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. E. M. Forester
I enjoy the comments of the readers as much as i enjoy what is written each day –
Talking about love, it seems, brings the most response – a theme common to us all.