I guess all this to ask, how do you guys keep faith. How do you trust that there is love out there for you? Maybe this is the type of questions that hit you once you reach 30?

Great Questions.

My observation is that such questions arise after a painful breakup and in the second half of life. What is Love, what’s love got to do with it… ‘it’ being faith in life, and knowing it as love…

Reminds me of the resent movie Collateral Beauty where the main character defiantly accuse, Death, Love and Time for what is ultimately his loss of Faith in life.

My observation that to answer the question of how to keep ones faith this thing we call love one should take some time to define for themselves what they mean by faith and love.

Faith is a difficult concept to define because it’s about not knowing and acting as if anyway – Fear is to courage as doubt is to faith. It is often in times when we do not know and even doubt that we discover the truth of our faith (what we lean on to move us through)

Today many I think equate faith with having to be certain in belief (and so become fanatical).
There is a difference Acting within the certainty of one’s Faith (that life is Love) and having to be certain of one belief and call it faith in order to act correctly.

Certainty does not require a Faith but times of uncertainty does. Such an understanding I think allows one to act with a strong even certain intention yet with humility and openness to learn.

For example some said that because Mother Teresa expressed moments of doubt about God’s love, plan, justice… (Understandably) that she had lost her faith. BI don’t think so – even though she did not always understand she continued to act ‘as if’ (not a fake it to you make it thing) but an authentic ‘as if’, she leaned on her faith that God/life was/is love especially at times of doubt. And the remarkable thing was that in doing so she became the experience of Love and grace for those she served!

Interestingly In fairy tales the question is often symbolized as being a key and interestingly the question and the doors it open is often more important than finding ‘a’ answer. If you are open to the method of symbolic language fairy tales can teach us a lot about love.

Like dreams using the method each character in a story represents a part of the person reading it. For example the search of the prince for the princes is a uniting of action with being, feeling with thinking… Love within a bond that contends with both living in the world, the stuff of life, and the soul/being connection with ourselves and another. Is that what you mean when you talk about the love you hope to find/experience?

Love is out there for you though and now that you are have asked the question you are called to the hero’s journey to discover where the question leads. Note that the question leads and that you cannot force it to an answer of your making. I think you will find that you will ‘find’ love in ways you did not expect

Anyway sorry if that didn’t make any sense

book suggestions

I really liked Clarissa Pinkola Estés story skeletor women
https://awakeningwomen.com/2010/07/04/skeleton-woman-a-love-story/
Which is wonderfully expanded in her book Woman Who Run with the Wolves

The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love – by Carol Gilligan is also quite illumining
Gilligan asks “why is love so often associated with tragedy. Why are our experiences of pleasure so often shadowed by loss? And can we change these patterns?

I would also recommend How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly by David Richo

Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer. ― Joseph Campbell

The search for purpose… The folly of the 21 century self help movement. I say that because more often than not it leads to despair and stuckness.

The problem in my opinion is that the idea of purpose and meaning is subjective and personal yet most people tend to try to measure it in objective ways usually involving the need for validation outside of our self. I have not met anyone that has not sucked at measuring experience.

After my own search for purpose/meaning I have come to the conclusion that any philosophical or psychological search for purpose can only end in the absurd.

In philosophy, “the Absurd” refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any. In this context absurd does not mean “logically impossible”, but rather “humanly impossible”. The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously.

Purpose and meaning like air cannot be grasped and is not something that can be searched for, these concepts can only be experienced and lived. To experience purpose and meaning one must stop looking. (Stop the seeking experience and in that space experience the moment as is and ones involvement with it – that is meaning, that is purpose)

I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
― Joseph Campbell

I have found my guides in books though like you would love to meet a mentor in the desert or woods

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl – Frankl concludes that the meaning of life is found in every moment of living; life never ceases to have meaning, even in suffering and death.

Learning to Fall – The Blessings of an Imperfect Life by Philip Simmons

“We do not have a say in all that befalls us, but we do have a say in the shape of our own character. Character, too often, is something others feel we must have beaten into us. Truth is, much of our character is under no one’s control but is shaped haphazardly by our families, our communities, and our culture—not to mention the genetic foll of the dice by which we’re made to begin with. But increasingly as we reach adulthood, we come to see character as a matter of choice. We choose practices and principles that share our character, building either a sound vessel or a weak one. We choose friends whose qualities we wish to develop or preserve in ourselves. Religious faith and spiritual practice are thought to strengthen this vessel, creating a sound container for our developing relationship to mystery, suffering, and the Divine. Life throws things at us that we cannot predict and cannot control. What we can control is who we are along the way.”

“When we accept our impermanence, letting go of our attachment to things as they are, we open ourselves to grace. When we can stand calmly in the face of our passing away, when we have the courage to look even into the face of a child and say, ‘This flower, too, will fade and be no more,’when we can sense the nearness of death and feel its rightness equally with birth, then we will have crossed over to that farther shore where death can hold no fear for us, where we will know the measure of the eternal that is ours in this life.
We all have within us this capacity for wonder, this ability to break the bonds of ordinary awareness and sense that though our lives are fleeting and transitory, we are part of something larger, eternal and unchanging.”
– Philip Simmons

Came across a blog by Connie Zweig that I found interesting

Meeting The Shadow At Midlife

“To live with shadow awareness is to turn away from the peaks toward the valleys, away from the heights and the rarified air toward the depths and the dark and the dense. It is to turn toward the unpleasant thoughts, hidden fantasies, marginal feelings that are taboo. Our secret lust, greed, envy, rage. To live with shadow awareness is to move our eyes from up to down, to relinquish the clarity of blue-sky thinking for the uncertain murkiness of a foggy morning.” That is so beautiful, and yet we live in a culture that’s addicted to blue-sky thinking. So how can people begin to open themselves to the shadow in their lives?

“The Greeks had a name for this downward path: katabasis, or descent. Our ancient forebears understood that we needed not only to fly above with the birds, lightly and full of grace, but also to crawl beneath with the snakes, slowly, silently, on our bellies. We do not choose this lower path; it chooses us. At midlife, we do not have depression; rather, depression has us. And if we can allow the ego to take a back seat and go along for the ride, then the real journey can begin: depression can become descent; the refusal to go down can become the choice to go down. And the appointment with the shadow can be kept” – conniezweig

“it is hard to know whether they are regretting their decision”… after a break-up there is a part of all of us that, no matter the nature of the break-up, wants/needs to believe/think the other regrets.

Of course such questions about the ‘other’ after a breakup are a distraction from the real work that needs to be done for personal healing. What the other person does after a break-up is not about us. Still…

My observation and experiences is that when it comes to break-ups and how genders respond or react to them the experiences are often interchangeable so it probably best not to generalize and associate one way of reacting as being gender based.

For example my own experience appears to be the opposite of yours as it was my girlfriend that broke up with me and within months found another. On my darker days I imagined if she ever regretted the decision, if she hurt as much as I hurt… but those questions never help. Even now writing about it, I feel an old sense of betrayal rise. Was the love she professed a lie. Is love a lie…

When reading your post the thought came to mind of a need to reconcile the objective language and symbolic language when it comes to describing the expected, assumed, actual experience of the world.

For example the idea of Santa Claus being real or not real. The stories are real, the guys dressing up as him each year are real, and more importantly the idea of Santa is real in that it is related to. Does Santa have to objectively exist to be real and only then related to? Our answer to that question say about our experiences being a shame or not.

You might find the book Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski helpful as well as the work of Joseph Campbell.

How do I continue to work with the ego, rather than fighting it?

Great question.
I think to answer that question we need to understanding what the ego is and isn’t.

In the west we tend to over identify with the ego while in the East the ego viewed as something to be nullified. Both ways I think get us into trouble if we are expected to live in the world.

In my opinion the ego is a valid and important part of the whole that is the Self.
The ego is not the self but a part of the Self, A part of the team through which we become aware, we become consciousness of self and set intentions. We work then do not to identify with the ego nor however do we negate it. (Fight it)

Ultimately the ego is the part of ourselves that acts mostly as an observer and means through which we set intention. (The ego consciousness should not to try to control the intention only set it, observe, adjust, repeat…)

Once we stop identifying our sense of Self with our ego consciousness, the ego becomes not the captain of the ship but the navigation and communication system. Communication between the conscious and unconscious, the objective and subjective, the inner and the outer…

It is the ego through which we set our course, retrieve and store our charts/memories and pays attention. Paying attention in a way that is a doing by not doing – not labeling or measuring our thoughts as in I’m a bad person because I am a bad piano player… note the difference between labeling thoughts as bad or good and labeling an experience of some moment of time that we felt as bad or good. When we label our thoughts we have the tendency to label our ego which if identified as the self we become.

By paying attention and observing we learn we are more than the sum of our parts, more than ego consciousness and the labels/measurements we make. We learn to forgive our self’s for our failings and as we forgive ourselves, others.
Life becomes less hectic as we strive and live our truths as we know them to be in the moment, open to learning. We breathe.