“Your imaginative and prescient will change into clear solely while you look into your coronary heart … Who seems exterior desires; who seems inside awakens.” ~Carl Jung
There’s nothing fairly like an undesirable breakup to tear your coronary heart open and convey you nose to nose together with your deepest shadows.
No less than, that’s the way it was for me.
Practically six years in the past, on a usually heat and sunny Saturday October afternoon in Los Angeles, I used to be mendacity on the ground of my condo, wallowing to my then-boyfriend on the telephone about how the whole lot in my life appeared to simply be hitting partitions: My profession was hitting a ceiling, our relationship felt stagnant, the path of my life itself was hazy and imprecise.
It wasn’t the primary time we’d had a dialog like this, however this time was totally different. On this present day, for causes I can solely ascribe to the best mysteries of life, the middle bearing the burden of all of it started to unravel on the seams—with an extended, deep sigh after at the least an hour of getting nowhere, he spoke, “I feel we must always break up.”
My thoughts couldn’t have fathomed listening to these phrases. Our relationship, irrespective of how dangerous it was, didn’t have an finish in my thoughts. We had been related, we had discovered one thing inside each other—one thing particular and distinctive—and he had rekindled a sense of aliveness in me that I didn’t wish to let go of. It was merely unthinkable to me that what I had discovered with him would ever come to an finish.
However—as will ultimately occur to us all at one level in life or one other, whether or not it’s a breakup, lack of a cherished one, or one thing else—the unthinkable occurred.
I want I might say that a part of me discovered aid within the second; that the a part of me that knew issues weren’t completely proper got here to floor to inform me, sure, it is a good factor.
As an alternative, I entered full denial.
I listened to his phrases, and after grappling my means via the rest of that dialog, I hung up, went to mattress, and cried myself to sleep.
In my head, as a result of I used to be nonetheless so enraptured by a fantasy of “this will’t probably ever finish,” this was only a hurdle. It was part of our path that will see us separating for a second, however in the end coming again collectively once more.
My thoughts merely didn’t wish to let go.
In actual fact, it couldn’t, as a result of that’s what occurs when the unthinkable happens. A thoughts hooked up to a selected end result can’t comprehend another end result, as something aside from what it has imagined appears like a menace to your survival.
That relationship, irrespective of what number of crimson flags continued all through our two and a half years collectively—by no means having stated “I like you” to at least one one other, at all times feeling like I used to be simply attempting to show myself, persistently being informed “can’t you simply be extra of this or much less of that,” to call only a few—was a matter of survival for me. With out it, my thoughts thought I’d actually die.
On reflection, I can clearly see I used to be a lady hooked up.
The connection had been a lifeline for me once we first met. Contemporary on the heels of dropping my dad, that man got here into my life and made me really feel one thing when life had all however misplaced feeling. With out him, I assumed I’d lose all of it (the irony being, after all, {that a} relationship born in attachment will lose all of it anyway).
Our relationship had been constructed on a shaky basis of codependency and fleeting bodily chemistry, and having by no means skilled a very wholesome relationship earlier than, I couldn’t make sense of how a connection that had as soon as felt so alive couldn’t be in some way mounted or saved. Breaking apart was merely not a state of affairs that existed in my worldview.
Past the Unthinkable
I want to say that you don’t, in actual fact, die when the unthinkable occurs. However the fact is, you type of do.
That’s, at the least part of you does.
Maybe extra precisely acknowledged, a model of who you’ve recognized your self to be up till that time begins to wither and asks to be let go.
It’s the a part of you that thinks you could keep in a relationship that isn’t empowering you, or the a part of you that thinks you could keep in a dead-end job that’s out of alignment together with your coronary heart’s wishes, or it could even be the a part of you that thinks you can’t say no to buddies who in the end don’t carry out your finest.
No matter state of affairs is most related to your present scenario, the attachment to staying someplace that isn’t empowering on your coronary heart and soul is in the end a mirrored image of the way you as soon as realized issues wanted to be so as so that you can survive.
It’s no coincidence or shock, then, that when the factor you might be hooked up to is ripped away, what’s left is a gaping gap into the depth of your shadow. In the event you’ve by no means confronted your shadow earlier than, it might probably really feel terrifying to take action. That’s the reason, as was my expertise, we regularly discover ourselves in a state of denial about what has occurred.
Denial permits us to hold on to what was as an alternative of dealing with what is. And what is, is that this—a doorway into your very personal path of soul initiation; a second during which you might be given a option to both keep the way you’ve been or face what has been swept into darkness in an effort to start to be free.
The Threshold of a Soul Encounter
For me, that doorway got here one week later once I awoke the next Saturday morning and located myself dealing with a tough fact I had not but seen or recognized: Alone for the primary time, I really had no thought what to do with myself or the way to spend my time.
It hit me like a ton of bricks. There, standing within the toilet that morning and watching myself within the mirror, I reached the edge of all nice soul encounters: I noticed I merely couldn’t preserve residing this manner any longer.
I might now not bear the burden; the middle had formally damaged.
Not figuring out what else to do, I grabbed my journal, sat on my sofa, and commenced to jot down concerning the expertise of the breakup and all of the ideas and emotions I had encountered over the previous week.
And that’s when it occurred.
It got here like a flash of lightning. As I used to be recounting a scene from just a few days prior once I’d run into my newly ex-boyfriend and felt my temper drop from feeling considerably okay to feeling excruciating ache and despair, I observed that my response to seeing him was to retreat inward. I noticed in that second one thing that I had by no means been in a position to see earlier than: If you retreat, you may’t really feel the ache anymore.
The feeling of retreating to in the end being withdrawn was one thing I’d felt many instances in my life earlier than, however it wasn’t till that second that I noticed the withdrawal was a type of self-protection: So as to cease feeling any ache that part of me thought I wouldn’t be capable of survive, I merely eliminated myself from it.
As I continued to journal, I started to see how for a lot of my grownup life, I had made decisions to keep away from feeling ache. Like staying in a relationship that wasn’t good for my coronary heart for a lot too lengthy, I typically opted for the perceived security of what was acquainted as an alternative of being true to myself by making decisions that honored my coronary heart.
After I actually bought to the underside of it, I noticed that the ache I had skilled that I had so diligently been avoiding through the years stemmed from believing that there was one thing exterior of myself that might deem me worthy of affection and acceptance.
I had lengthy been residing as a lady frightened of being rejected and unloved to the purpose the place I would actually die, and it confirmed.
Finally, it was in these pages that I started connecting the dots of my life and the way I’d come to be somebody who stayed in a relationship out of concern slightly than actual love.
Maybe extra straight put, I used to be assembly my shadow.
The Encounter is Simply the Starting
The insights I gained that day didn’t, sadly, make the whole lot in my life instantly fall into place and really feel higher once more. What they did do, nonetheless, was leap begin my journey into actual therapeutic and internal development on a stage I had by no means been in a position to entry earlier than. That day, on my lounge couch, standing in entrance of life’s metaphorical extensive open plain, I used to be given the present of assembly my soul.
The trail hasn’t been straightforward, however dealing with your shadows and getting acquainted together with your soul isn’t meant to be. It’s meant to shake you to your core, to make you face the components of your self you’ve been too afraid to have a look at and be taught to befriend them in an effort to uncover the energy, knowledge, and coronary heart you didn’t even know you had.
Following the decision of my soul to honor my coronary heart took time, endurance, gentleness, assist, curiosity, and a complete lot of observe and religion to see myself via the darkness, however the rewards have been candy: Now not routinely shutting down on the first signal of ache, I now know that the love I had been so afraid of not getting was inside me the entire time, simply ready to be recognized.
It’s been simply over six years because the breakup, and I can say with the utmost confidence, it’s been price each phrase journaled, each tear shed, and each painful second encountered on the way in which down and again.
In the long run, you might not willingly select the onerous issues that occur in your life (I actually wouldn’t have chosen to be damaged up with on the time), however while you discover the material of your actuality beginning to rip on the seams, and you might be standing on the precipice of the very depths of your soul, you might be being given one in all life’s best presents: to fulfill your self as you might be and, in the end, to know your self as you got here right here to be.
