Earlier this week, I wrote a little bit about how love can be hard sometimes.  How do we stay loving, kind and compassionate when things get hard? When fear rears its ugly head? When stress happens?  When the challenges keep coming? When misunderstandings occur?  When boundaries get crossed? When the shit hits the fan? When people leave us?  Today I want to talk about shit, grief, projections, relationship challenges and letting go.

Shit happens. The “shit” often comes as a “challenge”.  When we are in the middle of these challenges, it is hard to see them as the gifts they have the potential to be in our lives.  Getting to the place where we see the “shit as a gift” is part of our evolutionary path. It is one of those places in life where, if we can practice seeing through a lens of love, we can begin to see the gifts that these experiences provide for us as lessons and experiences that ultimately bring us closer to love.  I see them as soul lessons and soul agreements.

We have the potential to be very complicated beings.  We are the sum of all of our experiences.  We attach meaning to everything.  And we filter our experiences through the meaning we assign to people, places, and things. Misunderstandings, projections, and incorrect interpretations happen all the time.  It’s a wonder how we have the ability to maintain deep and loving relationships in our lives when we assign meaning that is based on our own judgments, interpretations, and projections.

Those of us who are highly sensitive and empathic have more of a challenge here than folks who naturally have strong energetic boundaries.  An empathic person may sense things easier than someone who is less sensitive. People who are highly sensitive and/or empathic feel things more deeply than others.  One of the challenges they have is to learn to have stronger energetic boundaries to help them make sense of what they are experiencing.

We all have intuition, not just empathic and highly sensitive people.  Our ancestors honored these intuitive gifts and  knew how to navigate their intuition, it was a part of life.  It’s in our DNA.   Our intuition, our own inner wisdom, is designed to help us in many ways.  It is meant to protect us, to guide us and to help us to make better decisions.  Learning how to trust our intuition is one of the best gifts we can give to ourselves.

A few years ago, my cat Lulu did not come home one night. After a couple of days, I was a wreck. A friend of mine recommended that I speak with a woman who is an animal intuitive.  I reached out to this mutual friend,  and she told me that Lulu had died. The thought of losing my sweet cat, who I adored, at only 4 years old made me feel very sad.  It was challenging moving forward during this period.  We had flyers up in the neighborhood and received several calls from folks who thought they saw Lulu.  Everytime we got a lead on Lulu, we followed up on it.   It was challenging to keep the hope up during this time.

Luckily, Lulu was found alive three weeks later under a neighbor’s house.  He had seen the flyer and had been hearing a cat’s meow.  Thankfully, he put it together and realized that the meow may have been from Lulu!  I was very grateful that he called me.  Lulu was super skinny, but she was still alive and very happy to come back home.

Before we found Lulu, I was faced with a challenge…. Do I follow what the highly revered expert tells me as truth or do I trust my own intuition and keep hoping we would find her?

 

 

We all have that “sixth sense”, and even the most highly trained intuitive and empathic people will, at times, misinterpret what they are sensing.  It happens to the best of us.

It happens for a number of reasons, and often it is simply placing meaning on something that is based on our own filters and projections.  I try to keep myself in the present as much as possible. I practice energy tools on a daily basis.  Just like brushing my teeth, I am going to ground myself, get present and turn inward to clear my energy.  There are fewer energetic cobwebs in the present.

Relationship challenges happen often because of misinterpretations.  I lost a dear friendship last year over what I believe to be a big misunderstanding and an unfortunate set of circumstances.  I was so sad at the time. Now I see how much I learned from the experience.  Relationships shift and change as we evolve. Sometimes it is a timing thing.  Sometimes it is a capacity thing.  And sometimes, no matter how hard we try to “make things right” we simply can’t.  Sometimes we are meant to come together for a specific reason or season, and then part ways and move forward on our own paths. Sometimes we meet up again later.

Every situation is different.  In this particular situation with my friend, the right thing was to let go; to consciously take a break from the relationship.  It was painful, sad and confusing to me at the time.  In retrospect, a year later, I see that there were so many rich gifts. One of them was an awareness that I was carrying grief that was completely separate from this person.  “Losing” the friendship activated some old and unprocessed grief that was ready to be released. Thankfully, I had support to help me navigate through this. It took time.  It was intensely uncomfortable at times. I did my best to own what was mine.  I became clear on what was not mine and learned so much from letting go. The entire experience was a catalyst for some deep healing. Even though I am no longer in touch with this friend, I will always value the connection we shared and the many gifts that came from it.  I am a better person as a result of the friendship.  And who knows what the future holds?

 Let go, and if people are meant to come back into our lives, they will.  Be grateful for the experiences, the joy-filled times and also we can see that we are learning our soul lessons. We can still think kindly of them and send blessings their way.

Love still lives on.  Sometimes the best thing we can do is let go. “If you love somebody, feel free to set them free”  Sting

Gently Moving Forward,