The Holiday Season is over. The rush of the shopping, wrapping presents, meeting with families, friends, in-laws, parties, and more have ended. You are tired and glad, in some ways, that you can finally take time to relax. One thing is missing though. Your loved one who has passed into eternity the year before is still not with you. You long to have him/her with you even if it meant caring for them hours on end. This emptiness is a void not even the Holiday Season could fill. And yet, you have to face the long year ahead of you without the support and love of someone who was once at your side.
Facing the challenges of living without a loved on is tough especially when you are alone. It can seem as though the loneliness, isolation, and desire to go on is a mountain too hard to climb. Each step of the way in living through your grief is like being half way up a mountain and wondering if the next step is worth it.. There are moments when a person's grief can even make you lose the joy in living. You may even wonder if others are noticing you may be simply going through the motions of living.
Loneliness, isolation, and desire are vital components in the grief cycle. Each step of the way, a person finds him/herself taking a journey into the heart and soul of creation. Perhaps, we may even realize that this journey into the depths of who we are allows us to know that death does not end the relationship we had with our loved ones who have passed on into spirit. We may begin to understand a part of ourselves in a way that never occurred to us when our loved one was alive..
Loneliness
is a terrible feeling. The loss of our loved one can make our heart ache, and even, hurt. We may be around a crowd of people and still feel as though a part of something special to us is missing. Yet, loneliness creates an awareness inside us enabling a vacuum to take place in our heart. In the feeling of emptiness lies an opportunity. Within every opportunity we have choices. The choices we make in this quality of our attention create a path. This path creates a life. Congratulate yourself. A part of you has survived one of life's greatest obstacles.
Isolation
contains seeds of attention giving you room to grow. If you were to plant a seed, the seed needs room to grow. The attention and movements toward planting seeds of awareness grows out of loneliness or being with yourself. If you gave yourself time to get to know yourself again and rediscovered your on uniqueness in your time of loneliness, you may find isolation awareness a time to get your priorities in order in a way that makes sense to your personality. From this place inside you, you can marvel at the new you that is springing forth into your daily living.
Desire
is living life as you wish. As you can see, loneliness and isolation are necessary steps in the grieving process allowing your desires to care for yourself by honoring your authentic self to be revealed. Desire contains bursts of energy and information created inside you during your movement through grief. The words and intentions inside you make themselves known at this point. You may wish to share this part of yourself with others at this point. A new you will have emerged.
Care giving is a wonderful thing. It is very fulfilling to our hearts. A touch of the hand to those in need, a smile given to those who need their hearts cared for, or simply just being there with and for someone who may find living a difficult matter to face. Our hearts touch places within us our hands cannot touch. It is the place where souls meet one another and discover that the things in life that really matter are the things in life that isn't matter.
Care giving can also take place inside us. Our words inside us are are living and breathing substances. They are filled with energy and information. They bring thoughts into things and can literally love a human heart. Take care of yourself in this place. No one else can touch this place apart from the very wisdom that has created us. And, believe me when I tell you this: "There will never be another you in the history or the future of time. You are unlike anyone that will walk the face of the earth ever again. Make sure you really know this inside yourself and take care of this part of you for no one can and will ever be able to replace what you bring to this world. You can't put a price tag on this. You are priceless."
The holidays are filled with moments in time recalled in tranquility. Such wonder and grace are not usually allotted to us over the course of the year. We tend to focus much of our time and energy to simply making a living and finding times of joy to spend our time through recreation, family, and friends.
When we enter into the Holiday season of the year, there is something about the season of fall and winter that naturally turns our attention inward. We become reflective and embrace experiences of living within our heart. Experiences pondered in the heart create an atmosphere, a notion, a feeling, a spirit. This enables us to remain open to what is to come.
Anticipation of the Holiday Season brings with it an opportunity for us to open our heart into what is to come. This opening of our heart allows us to feel genuine feelings of joy and of sorrow. Our past losses remind us how lonely we can be in the future without those we have loved and those who have loved us.
The anticipation of such pain, often is, self inflicted. A deeper look at our lives reveals something much different. For as we age, we come to realize through our memories the greater force in our lives bringing all life into being and those we come into contact with called relationships. This greater force in our lives is Our Creator.
The Gifts we receive during the Holiday Season come in many packages. Sometimes our packages are stuffed in gift wrappings given to us by those we love and those who love us. Some gifts come in a moment spent with our friends, our parents, our children and our grandchildren.
When you peal off the layers that exist in a single moment with those you love during the Holidays, you will find there in the core of that experience the spirit of your heart infusing within that moment unconditional love. Authentic Love does not try to change one’s life. Authentic Love embraces life as it is. This kind of trust requires us to find our strength, our hope, and our love in the heart of God. When you came into this world, you knew how to love unconditionally as an infant. Everyone was drawn to you because you knew how to embrace the world as it was in that moment. You were not attempting to draw in the past or force a future that cannot exist. You simply loved everyone that was in your life and in that moment.
“A little child shall lead them.” Could it be that the secret to living through the Holiday Season is still found in a little infant? On Christmas Day or any Holiday designated to be Sacred, a child awakens to an opportunity of living fully in the moment. The anticipation of the day, the gifts received with love, and the spirit of what brings the heart alive infuses tremendous love throughout the room for those this child is around. As adults, we feel their joy and long to have some of that in ourselves.
Perhaps, there is a place inside us that remembers such joy. Behind all the losses in our lives is a grand revelation. Life reveals to us in our darkest hours that even death itself “cannot” and “will not” end the relationships we have. Through unconditional love, we find the magic of the Holiday Season bringing to us an extraordinary gift. The acceptance of life as it is in the present. Such a &ldquoresent” when opened creates a gift that is met with Eternal Love. And, “the greatest of these is Love.”
The first gift of Christmas is the "Belief" that it lives in your heart. You need to have the heart of a child to believe in something you cannot see. It is this kind of hope beyond hope that makes the heart of a child so strong. It is so strong that the adults who witness their purity melt into a sea of bliss not made with human hands. Here, a miracle happens. The heart of an adult softens into the moments lived out as a child and a time whereby you once believed yourself in miracles.
When
I think of the word,
"Mother," many things
come into my mind.
My own
sweet mother, of course,
who to me, will always be
the perfect
embodiment of
motherhood. I
think, too, of myself,
for I am the mother
of three, the step-mother
...
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