Love’s Lesson: 3 Notes on Moving Past Lost Love

Posted on October 1, 2017

“I think it is lost…..but nothing is ever lost nor can be lost. The body sluggish, aged, cold, the ember left from earlier fires shall duly flame again.” – Walt Whitman

Moving past lost love

We never lose love. Whether it brought us great pain or sweet pleasure, her touch is something that sticks within us. Love is not something that we can claw or corrode from our soul.

I have often wished that there was a delete option to remove painful memories, yet my true challenge was to love that hurt for everything it taught me and to find a show of grace and wisdom through my pain. Pain and inner grief is our great awakener. We soak people into our space, take them into our hearts, and build our dreams around their presence. Yet the most authentic lesson of love is to pour love into all our empty spaces- those created by others and ourselves, and to build our own dreams, independently through our inner sanctuary and deep strength. We are only able to share with others what we have entrusted and nurtured within ourselves first.

Perhaps you never truly mend from a broken love or one that you could not hold onto. Love is deeply profound, it always changes and transforms us in some way. We realise the depth of that love and her impact to shape us once she leaves through love’s open door. Love that does not stay its course keeps surging through our bones, flowing like water through our bloodstream, and remains carved into the mosaic of our minds. Love transforms us through the blueprint of her pain and her glory.

When lover’s are lost or do not stay, we can choose to find the beauty in what remains. Rather than deny the memory, we can claim it as ours. Our own unique blessing.

“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”- Kahlil Gibran

1. Embrace the hurt

Pretending that we aren’t affected by love is a betrayal of love’s true nature. When we suffer a painful experience, our instinct is to protect our emotional wound and the sorrow it aroused. As much as it hurts, the only way we can work through the pain is by accepting it and lighting our way through it. Nothing is permanent; we can transition our sorrow to find some sense of peace and clarity within. Every measure of love presents a lesson for us to learn and evolve from.

There is no rewind button or delete mode on inner grief and we cannot extract someone from our soul. Unresolved pain becomes a poison to our spirit, like a karmic bind to what has hurt us. Yet when we encapsulate our hurt in a higher octave of love it allows us to sift through what helps us to move forward and what doesn’t.

“Love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere. We simply have to accept it, because it is what nourishes our existence. If we reject it, we die of hunger, because we lack courage to stretch out a hand and pluck the fruit from the branches of the tree of life. We have to take love where we find it, even if it means hours, days, weeks of disappointments and sadness” – Paulo Coelho

2. Recognise what you deserve

When we focus on the sadness of a lost love we remain caged in its memory. However, when we deal with the sorrow we can forge an enlightened perception of that forsaken love. We often fall into the seemingly wrong relationships for the right reasons. Perhaps we need every failed relationship to highlight what we truly desire from the right ones. We only discover what we deeply want and fundamentally deserve after we have wrestled with everything we did not want or was not a match for our higher intentions. Everything has a purpose, and the people that we actually love the most are the ones that can bring us to our emotional truth. Even if it means hurting us in the process. From another perspective, maybe we are the lesson for that person, because we were the right fit for their own personal or spiritual growth.

Real love never dies; it transcends and transforms; changes in illustration and beauty, but the truth of it always resides within us. Love is full of hope, ignited and bursting to be seen. We can comeback stronger from love’s failed collisions and learn what it means to never settle for less than our hearts courageous call.

“Though lovers be lost, love shall not; and death shall have no dominion” – Dylan Thomas

3. Find a positive outlet or direction

We can tend to all our inner wounds with great emotional courage in order to move forward. The biggest knocks can inspire us to get back off the floor and find our way to rise beautifully through the shadows of what has come to pass. All that energy can move us to a place of deeper intelligence and we become our own wise sage. We can seek to find something positive through the pain, rekindle our hearts, and instil within ourselves a greater resiliency to bounce back and trace a new trajectory for ourselves. Losing someone you love hurts, but you only lose what is not meant for you. What does not last is a stepping stone to another route, a new direction, or greater purpose. A new way forward that we may not even be aware of until we retrospect as the dots connect on our journey.

We find the beauty and light in the pain when we choose to release the harsh judgement and sorrowful connections that keep us chained to it. Rather than close our hearts, we can choose to embed within them that life’s duality is a measure of sadness and joy, pain and pleasure, and risk and reward.

“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Love is like the subtle wings of a butterfly; beautiful and unique, bold and bewitching. Rather than place our ability to fly upon someone else’s force and stay of love, we can appreciate the colours that they add, yet trust in our own innate magic and wonder to faithfully gather flight.