I feel for your heartbreak. There’s no doubt about it, heartbreak is hard. Harder still when the foundation on which you stand is unstable. When so many of your eggs are put into the relationship basket, should it break, you’re left with so little.

There’s new strength and resiliency in using this experience to learn to let go and look down below your feet. To truly let go without any expectation of what may or may not happen and accepting whatever comes without rhyme or reason. To find your own goodness, strength, love of self, interdependence with the world, peace, and quiet. Not to cling to the last person, this person, or the next person, but allow people to flow in and out of your life like the kisses of a butterfly that sits on your wrist just for a moment and then flutters away. To try to hold onto to it too tightly and it’s brittle wings will be crushed.

Hope can be a beautiful and gentle spiritual experience, but be careful when hope becomes craving, unrequited desire, grasping, begging, pleading, spinning in circles wondering why oh why! – that only leads to pain and suffering. I should love him, he should love me, we should be together, so much should-ing yourself and others, wanting for things to be as they are not. That’s a tale-tell sign that it’s not hope your feeling, but rather unhealthy attachment to an ideal or fantasy that may not exist.

Take this opportunity to learn about yourself and your relationship with relationships. Believe me, there’s a better way to go through life, to love, and be loved. Although it will never be pain free, taking this time to build a stronger foundation, you won’t fall into despair so easily.

The heart, body, and mind can insist like a small child throwing a temper tantrum, but that doesn’t mean we have to capitulate to those fits. We’ve been hurt, it hurts, it’s painful, but what we really need is to give ourselves a big hug, self-soothing, and self-compassion.

I believe that you can love someone fully without surrendering yourself completely, still remaining on firm ground, true to your values, and secure in your independence, secure in the knowing that if for whatever reason you couldn’t be together, you as an individual are still a whole and complete human being who will live on to have new experiences, find new loves, and overcome whatever challenges life throws at you.

Nothing lasts forever – all good things come to and end. And although there is pain in that ending which needs a little soothing and compassion , there is also beauty, growth, renewal, and rebirth into a higher state of being with strength and confidence.