The Price

If THE PRICE we pay for love is grief every now and then, then THE PRICE we pay for no love is a lifetime of fear.

The choice is ours.

Grief is shitful to process, that’s for damned sure. None of us enjoy the heartache that follows the loss of a loved one. I don’t know about you but for me after an intimate relationship has ended I have vowed every time not to allow myself to ever be that vulnerable again. Ever. When our heart takes a bullet of loss through the death of a loved one, a betrayal or from neglect the grief is emotionally immobilizing for quite some time.

THE PRICE we pay for investing in an intimate relationship with ourselves too also means we are signing up for grief homework from time to time. Learning as we age to not just befriend our authentic selves, but to be as loyal, compassionate and loving towards ourselves as we are to our intimate others is not always easy. However THE PRICE we pay for bulshitting ourselves and others is much higher than grief. Grief is finite. However a lifetime living in fear of ever loving anyone or anything again is an infinite hell

If we decide to keep ourselves safe from vulnerability, we are then destined to hunt obsessively for emotional decoys, weapons of mass distraction. However, feelings of hopelessness, depression, a habit of criticism, looking for the flaws and addictions are THE PRICE we pay when we hide from our heartfelt deepest desires to feel safe and surrendered in love.

Once we have learned how to endure, process and recover from grief, we become Emotionally Fitter. When we have loved and lost, grieved and healed we are gifted with a deeper gratitude and a braver heart. Healthy grieving is an active process that we all need help with. If we ignore the self-care required to grieve THE PRICE we pay is remaining immobilized and emotionally frozen, feeling numb and on pause.

I have done a great deal of deliberate grieving over the past five decades of my life. Like many of us I have needed to grieve the loss of innocence in my childhood, parental death and marital death. Refusing to do the work and process my grief dominoed the birth of full-blown addictions. There is always an inevitable PRICE we pay for emotional self-negligence especially when it comes to fronting up to face our deepest grief head on. Grief won’t just go away. We cannot bury it long-term, we’ve got to grow up and face it or it will bury us in a lifetime of fear and misery. It just is not true that we just need to give our grief time. Sure time is an element in building Emotional Fitness like it is when we choose to build our physical fitness, but time alone does diddlysquat. We’ve got to show up and do the work. Regardless of whether we are grieving a lifestyle (for me booze and drugs were a complete lifestyle and me loyal emotional lovers) a country, our innocence when we were kids, a career, or our children leaving our nest. Death and feelings of emotional abandonment through betrayal, natural rites of passage or emotional negligence are all deep blows of loss to our hearts.

THE PRICE is too high to ignore the grief that comes with the loss of love. Grieving any loss is important because it allows us to ‘free-up’ the emotional energy still clinging to the lost person, place or experience. Once we have processed our grief we can then re-invest that loving energy elsewhere. Until we become willing to grieve we will find emotionally reinvesting difficult; a part of us remains tied to the past.

Grieving is not forgetting. Nor is it drowning in tears. Healthy grieving results in an ability to remember the importance of our lost love or lifestyle but with a newfound sense of peace, rather than immobilizing pain. So here is a little checklist for you to review if you or someone you care about is feeling still emotionally numb, frozen and putting their love and life on pause

Asking for help from intimate friends, family, or a therapist is imperative as active listening from a safe person is powerful in processing and releasing our grief
We’ve gotta become willing to acknowledge and express the full range of feelings we experience as a result of the loss; Denial, anger, sadness, jealousy and guilt
Baby steps need to be gently but deliberately taken in adjusting to a life in which the lost person, object, or experience is absent just one day at a time as it helps create our new routines
Deliberately and willing saying good-bye just a little more everyday, to ritualize our movement to a new peace with the loss.
Active, healthy grieving requires balancing the time we spend directly working on our grief with the time we spend coping with our day-to-day life
The amount of time we spend with others and the time we spend alone needs to remain flexible however, focusing too strongly on any single side of these pairings will get us off-track.
We’ve got to become willing to accept the finality of the loss;
Giving ourselves permission to start to plan, and allow ourselves to enjoy some good times without guilt.
Plant ourselves in wise old Mother Nature
Do something to help someone else, focusing on supporting others nourishes our heart as we begin to reinvest in loving humanity and life again

So today’s Word Vitamin unpacks THE PRICING schedule when it comes to love, loss and life. Everything we do or don’t choose has either a financial, intellectual, emotional, sexual, spiritual or physical cost on this planet. We need to carefully decide when it’s wise to invest and when it’s not. The buck stops with us. We are always responsible for our adult choices.

To love or not to love?

To grieve or not to grieve?

To feel everything or feel nothing?

Once we know we can survive grief, we can choose love and experience all of our feelings with confidence.

The beauty of THE PRICE of love is that it will cost us our ego. Often. If we become Emotionally Fit at putting love before our ego, the world is our oyster. We can choose from the top shelf in love and life and enjoy it, one moment, one day at time as long as we live.

What do you choose?

Lotsa love Cynthia xxx

This Word Vitamin is an excerpt from my latest bookset “The Four Seasons of the Heart”. If you would like to order your own full set of Daily Word Vitamins one for each day of the year, in book form for yourself or as a gift for someone you care about just click on the SHOP tab and place your order.