It’s hard to put these personal kinds of trials into proper perspective because we are dealing with the operations of two worlds at once, and when we only see the world of our pain and the “person” responsible for it, we are dead in the water, literally.

Yes, there is someone who hurt us badly; yes, there is rage and regret, and all the stormy emotions that attend such losses. But, there is another story behind this one. We also live — should we choose to become truly conscious and caring beings — in a world where physical relationships are intended to teach us about spiritual realms….where worldly affection is meant to be a stepping stone to higher love.

In this instance, when we are hurt badly, the higher lesson hidden within it is this: it’s time to let go of who and what we have been up until the moment of our loss. And “how” do we know this is true, and that there is something good in the bad we are going through? Because events in themselves are not painful; it is our present level of self that gets leveled by clinging to what can’t remain in our lives for reasons that can only be understood after we let go of that level of ourselves that only knows itself through some opposite.

Losses in life cause us to suffer as they do because we are yet to let go of the level of self that believes it’s nothing without the “other.”

Yes, it hurts to be left behind, or lied to!

Yes, there is grief and anger…those knee-jerk reactions that rush in and rule the heart and mind that feel so wrongly compromised. But, and the point is this, the higher lesson in these times is that who we really are is not meant to be defined by the other; it’s inevitable that a divided mind (and heart) must suffer its unseen dependency. Yet, how else can this self-compromising state of secret attachment ever be seen (and realized) if not through the loss of what it clings to?

The lesson in any loss, if we will agree to learn it, is that in the world above us, we are the other…and the only way to know this is true, the only way to realize that love never dies, but only changes form and expression, is to die to the part of us that insists on its level of love in spite of the pain that comes with it.