Guts, Grace & Gusto

Life is all about relationships. As coauthor of Get Along with Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere I passionately pursue strategies for crafting quality connections within my networks, as well as recommend them to my readers and audiences. My personal and professional energy is devoted to nudging people in the direction of their desires to take steps toward their bliss.

Today I connected with friend reeling from a break-up. For nearly a year, she had been suspended in a near-bliss state. Then, as magically as it had ignited, it was over. A relationship can be pure bliss for a time and then transmutes into a different reality. Hearts are often haunted by questions arising along life’s winding path of connections and disconnections—-the “What-if’s?” “What happened?” and “Where did the magic go?”

Contained within the collection of stories in Dancing through Life with Guts, Grace & Gusto are some of enduring heartbreak, of relationships ending and the dance, thought never to end, changes. While we know life is totally unpredictable in matters of the heart, we often expect different outcomes than what we experience.
Relationships will inevitably encounter shifts; some can be weathered, while others cannot. Even those filled with such vibrancy for eons may not endure. Life is so fluid, and different needs may surface to meet changing realities.

Our minds make up a long list of reasons whether or not to love, but we can never fool our hearts. Pain arises from the loss of expressing our authentic selves with another and feeling safe to do so, along with all the losses that accompany a break-up. If only we could hold on to another’s heart, so ours isn’t broken! But that’s not then love, that’s attachment out of an ego need. Being in a relationship when it’s no longer good for both, isn’t good. Period. Both will fall into a state of suffering, masked by false commitment.

I have come to appreciate the questions of The Work by Byron Katie. Who would you be without your thoughts that love can never come again? What would life be like for you without those thoughts? How would you choose to live? What would you choose to experience? Living a realistic life begins with the recognition that we each create our reality. www.TheWork.org.

Life is for fully expressing all we are and the very essence of each of us is love. That is what each soul yearns for—union with another loving spirit. Withholding that expression is death to vitality. Heartbreak pierces the heart wide open—a desire to protect it from future pain, a natural reaction. Yet, only by risking to open the heart again, will you be able to embrace the possibility for authentic connection and relishing once again the delights of bliss.

Labels: break-ups, heartache, relationships