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June 25 - July 4, 2020
Every intimacy carries, secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. MAYA ANGELOU
Life’s not always fair. Sometimes you can get a splinter even sliding down a rainbow. CHERRALEA MORGEN
a breakup is nothing short of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a complete spiritual awakening.
If life gives us rocks, it’s our choice whether to build a bridge or a wall. ANONYMOUS
We who have experienced it know that romantic love is a fall-in, crawl-out proposition. MARTHA BECK
“Don’t celebrate the union of two people who’ve been married for fifty years until you understand what that relationship has done to their souls.”
Failure is just another name for much of real life. MARGARET ATWOOD
Just at the time we need support and connection the most, we’re apt to crawl under the covers and cower, consumed with feelings of social inadequacy.
Shame derives its power from being unspeakable. BRENÉ BROWN
serial monogamy has now become the norm, suggesting that most of us will have two or three significant relationships in our lifetimes.
Rather than define the value of our relationships by the overly simplistic question “How long did it last?” that we instead begin to ask questions like “What wisdom have I gained?” and “What have I learned about love that I can now apply moving forward?”
Rather than allow us to do the sensible thing and turn our attention toward starting a new life, our brains are hardwired to increase our desire for the one we are losing, keeping us torturously entangled, as we desperately try to turn the Titanic around in a frenzied and highly focused state of craving, want, and longing.
Love withdrawal perfectly mirrors drug withdrawal, and is often accompanied by the same reckless and destructive impulses as the ones that land drug addicts, desperate to get high, behind bars.
Hating someone you’ve loved to try to remove them from your psyche is akin to the primitive medical practice of giving someone a lobotomy to help rid them of depression.
In the brain’s world, better to have a negative bond than the existential death of no bond at all.
Deeply traumatized and left feeling like the victim of a crime, Janet was saddled with the burdensome task of picking shrapnel from her psyche for many months afterward.
The external breakup may be quick, but the inner one rarely is.
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. ANDY WARHOL
Every way that you’ve given away your power, denied your own deeper knowing, put someone else’s feelings and needs before your own, stayed embedded in a victimized story, or settled for less in life—all of it is now up for review. You have nowhere to hide. Life has broken you open and it is violently, mercilessly forcing you to evolve, to develop, and to grow.
“There is a crack in everything./That’s how the light gets in.”
The only way to outrun the sorrow of losing the attentions and affections of the person you have loved is to use the fierce and fiery pain of it to catalyze your own awakening and propel you to become the person you were born to be.
Unfairly, nature seems to have designed it so that the one person in the whole world who can best calm us down when we’re terrified is unfortunately the same person who is terrifying us.
If Dianna behaved vindictively as was her impulse, how might her angry actions impact any romantic relationship she might hope to have in the future? Did she really want to give Brian and his lover the power to determine the kind of human being that she herself would become?
She decided to set an intention to use this breakdown to evolve beyond her old, painful patterns of feeling so alone in life, and became determined to use this breakup as the catalyst for a whole new life.
I do not want the peace which passeth understanding. I want the understanding which bringeth peace.
She decided that the losses of her past would not determine what was possible in her future, and she began identifying new ways of relating to others that held the possibility of creating a different story.
Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that’s all. MITCH ALBOM
The lessons of love can be costly and the price of wisdom steep. Yet, these initially unwelcomed tutorials hold seeds of great potential to liberate us to live more authentic and meaningful lives.
Karma, as it was originally defined, means that each action we take is like planting a seed that will grow into a particular result.
There are flowers everywhere for those who bother to look. HENRI MATISSE
Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth “You owe me.” Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.
As we continually find ourselves in a state of letting go of the lives that we have for the possibility of gaining the lives we might create, it behooves us to learn the art of healthy completion, in order to reap the benefits in all areas of our lives.
When you are walking through the blackest of nights, and journeying through the thick of the woods, all there is to do, really, is to learn to love the silent softness of the moonlight, as Life miraculously finds a way to light your way home one step at a time.
The older you grow, the more you realize that one half of you can firmly believe what the other half equally firmly refuses. CONSTANCE HOLME
After months or years of walking on eggshells for fear of upsetting their partner, chronically being misunderstood or not heard, or feeling diminished each time one opens his or her mouth, one or both people simply stop talking.
Maybe they have tolerated living in a war zone for so long that they’ve come to think that it’s normal to argue over every little detail of life.
The letting go of hope can feel like a funeral dirge, initiating a cascade of grief just as surely as if you broke up yesterday.
Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them. PAULO COELHO
As tempting as it may be to become obsessed by someone else’s poor behavior, ultimately this breakup is about you. By keeping your primary attention on yourself, you’ll get to use this experience as a springboard for a whole new life.
Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
A breakup is one of our more underrated traumas, and there are surprisingly few resources for those suffering from the bone-crunching shock of it.
Sorrow was like the wind. It came in gusts. MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS
Ineffective grieving happens when you allow your pain to calcify your heart closed and fixate your identity as someone who is alone, unwanted, or abused.
Where once he was Jesus, now he’s Judas. Where she was the Eve to your Adam, now she’s just plain evil.
unparalleled. For big rage means there’s big energy to fuel the determination and drive required to make important life changes.
If nothing else, the depression you may feel at love’s end is a tribute to the value of love, admonishing you to hold your exchange as sacred and not easily toss it aside.
Even if you’re feeling devalued and dismissed by the one you’ve loved, your depression is telling you that the bond you shared mattered.
Something within you is yearning to be born, and it may need the purging of a thousand tears to do so.
Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart do not know how to laugh either. GOLDA MEIR
