Many people are feeling lost right now. Sexually, most people are either in shut down or overdrive and little in between. Feeling a little smothered in small spaces with others, or feeling lonely and disconnected.
The truth is that we are grieving the loss that is happening…not only the very present and real one right now, but what we will go back to after this sheltering in place is over.
Life will never be the same and there is a deep loss in that.
I have been thinking about what is birthed out of loss. There is no greater human experience than love and loss—two sides of the same coin.
To deeply love is to be willing to deeply lose the thing, person or animal you love. Try as we might to extend and expand our time here, our physical lives are finite. Many of us are losing actual people and animals we care about right now.
Many relationships will not survive this. Living this way is: 1) Making us see each other and the issues in our relationships more acutely, and, 2) Making it clear we are in places and relationships we just don’t want to be in as we take stock of our lives and what is really important to us.
I have found that there is always a catharsis that bursts out of the grief of loss if we follow it all the way through. To love deeply is to grieve just as deeply.
Women often contact me when they are sorting through the rubble of a marriage or long-term relationship that has ended. The makings of a profound rebirth are always there: a new freedom, opportunities to do things they could not do before, reimagining a dating life, exploring sex again, getting to know who they are without this relationship that defined them for a good long time.
If a person is determined, they will grow into something bigger and give themselves the things they had not had before. They will claim their birthright and own their life and their sexuality in a new way. They will come home.
The homecoming is bittersweet. The void where something or someone else once was is palpable, and voids always seek to be filled. It’s how the universe works.
We all have voids right now we get to fill—and fill them we will, either consciously with what is really important to us, or unconsciously with things and people who can distract us from feeling what we really feel.
We will all be in some rubble and many of us are as we already face tremendous loss. There is creative energy that gets to come online and bring us all through this in ways we may never have accepted.
The clearing out that makes room for all of who you are when another has gone can be magical, transformative, powerful. Claiming your love for yourself after losing someone you love to divorce, death or quarantine is the ultimate act of self-possession, courage and self-determination. As you say goodbye, the opportunity to open to something bigger emerges.
Fight it or surrender to it and see what grows.
When I went through my divorce and lost my beloved life partner, the grief was huge. There was a day when I was home alone and just cried and let it out for hours, digging deep down into the well of grief, getting to what felt like the bottom.
And at the bottom I found profound compassion and connection: I felt connected to every person who had ever lost a loved one, every mother who had lost a child, every grieving soul who was hurting, and that opened in me enormous compassion for myself and every being in this world.
I felt a profound oneness with all living things and that grief was part of the fabric of life. That cathartic day allowed me to move forward in love and kindness to myself and my former partner and to earnestly begin to build the life I wanted and was here to live.
We all get to build something new right now. It’s gonna look really different. There’s going to be amazing art. We will come together again.
There is a slowing down and a quiet in the place of loss, and simultaneously a quickening, as life continues to move around and in you, urging you forward to keep living. We don’t have that quickening around us right now. We have anxiety but it’s actually quiet which gives us time for the grief, all the feels and contemplation.
All we have is this moment. Sink your teeth into life and feel it full on. Show up full throttle now. This is what you have. This is the sweetness. This presence. Get off your device. Be with the one you are with right now. Feel the aliveness in everything around you, the flutter of wings and the sway of trees. The warmth of sun and the dream that burns in you to come forth. Do it today.
May you find your rebirth as you emerge out of your grief and loss, knowing nothing is ever lost, it lives in you.
It is the in-and-out breath of giving and receiving, opening and closing, dancing and resting, loving and being loved. Come home to yourself in those moments of emptying out and know that a rebirth is right around the corner.
Want to go on a powerful group journey of rebirth? Join us for Fire Woman 2020. It will be unlike anything I’ve ever offered before and I am grateful for the constrictions that are allowing tremendous creativity to come through me and our miraculous team. We want you in our circle.
