Can I honor my disappointment?

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
It's not warm when she's away
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And she's always gone too long
Anytime she's goes away

-  Bill Withers

When we think of grief, we think of how we feel after we lose someone to death, or a serious break up or divorce.

In western society, if its not a major loss, the advice is to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, move on quickly, distract yourself, or get on with it.

And those tactics have their place.

They are needed in the balancing act of living life, the seesaw of grief and moving on. We don’t want to wallow in the past, of what we feel we lost, and get stuck there, nor do we want to swing to the other end too fast where we are just focused on moving on. While moving forward is a great antidote to loss, we must also make time to grieve what is lost, so we can’t achieve balance.

Our rational mind can encourage us to put it behind us, move on as if it didn’t affect us or hurt us in some way. We can minimize it, which is known as grief judging, meaning we can minimize our grief or feel like we shouldn't be experiencing it.

It's the ego stepping in, calling the shots. Our pride stands on high alert. It does its job to protect us from any pain or discomfort. It wants us to minimize the loss immediately, to move on unaffected, resilient. But the problem is, the ego can’t do its job alone—it must collaborate with our heart, our emotion (the energy that has been in motion).

When we pour our energy into someone or some venture, why wouldn’t that be a big deal if we lost it? Why would we minimize it? (Hint: to protect ourselves, to manage ourselves well, and because it’s a great coping mechanism); however, Newton’s famous third law of physics is, “For every action, there is an equal and opposition reaction.” We must apply this law of physics to our hearts, our hopes, and understand what must be reckoned with. A loss of something we loved demands an equal and opposite reaction. Brushing it under the rug or minimizing it does not honor ourselves, or the experiences of our heart. Our hearts tell a different story, and we must listen to them, even if the truth is uncomfortable.

Let’s say you like someone for a long time, and it doesn’t work out, our ego says, “Next.” Like a general in charge, it says, we've been here before, we know how to handle this. We have the skills and the experience. It looks ahead and outward, but that logic, that strategy bypasses the truth of our hearts, all the emotional energy we created leading up to that disappointment or loss. We must not ignore it or it will linger in our energetic field.

While we may not show it to the world, or to others, as it might not be appropriate, we must at the very least acknowledge it to ourselves.

We not only deserve that level of self-honesty, but we need it to clear our heart space. And maybe that’s the point of living, to learn the facets and edges of our heart? Without this exploration of love and loss, do we do ourselves a disservice?

In a toughen-up society, it's counter culture to feel and grieve. The question then becomes, how do we allow for this? How do we make space for this grieving process when it’s not really allowed, even by ourselves?

Well, we can start by simply acknowledging the sheer, raw, truth of our feelings. Not what we think we should feel, what our minds want us to feel or not feel, or what others think, but how we truly feel. We must sit with ourselves, our emotion (energy in motion) and face our feelings.

We can take an hour for ourselves a few times a week where we contemplate the situation, or write our feelings down on paper, express it in a painting or express it in some form of art, and talk to a trusted friend about it.

Everything that we love in this world, that we put positive energy toward, is a force of love, small or large, and we must give ourselves the grace to honor any sadness, the absence of what brought us sunshine, and also realize we will feel it again in the future. We don't have control over when or how. Only then can we move on with more open hearts, more intention and less emotional baggage weighing us down. Only then can we find true balance on that seesaw of life.

Essentially, we must honor that being alive is a lesson of joy and love, and with that comes loss and disappointment, for life and death are inextricably linked and happen on many scales of existence.

Whether it’s the loss of a job, a hope, a lifestyle, a physical capability, a certain vision for our lives, a relationship—we must honestly feel the grief relative to the experience itself. It truly, and naturally, deserves the equal and opposite reaction, so we can let ourselves organically move on to the next experience.

And the truth is, love is an experience within us as much as it can be shared with another, and that love then never leaves, even if it changes (nothing is created or destroyed, it only changes shape). To grieve is an exercise in self-knowledge, in the deep experience of life, the wide scope of feeling, and the deep passages and red crevices our our beating hearts.

Soul-Prompt: How can I grieve disappointment or loss? How can I make time to truly honor my feelings instead of trying to minimize or ignore them, no matter if it seems irrational or unacceptable?