A beautiful teacher I am blessed to sit with tells a story that many of us know all too well....
There are two potential partners in a your life. Both love you with everything they have. They show their love in the exact same ways and to the exact degree.
One of them you're completely head over heels in love with, and the other you're not interested in at all. Now imagine both of these people stop loving you all of a sudden. They're no longer interested, or they disappear from your life.
How do you feel about both of them?
The lost love of the first one, who you are totally in love with, devastated you. The one who loved you as equally but whom you never loved disappears from your life without any pain at all.
Why is this?
When you're heartbroken, experiencing the loss of a love so great, it's not the loss of the person that hurts. You see, each person loved you the same. It's the loss of that tangible expression of your capacity to love.
When your heart busts with love and excitement when falling for another, it's you falling in love with your capacity to love another human being. When it's gone, we think we have to mourn the loss of love, but we haven't lost it. We still contain it. Our great Loves and losses teach us how much we can love... and how wonderful it feels to love. We can have relief from pain from simply realizing that we haven't lost that capacity. We can still feel it for that person, and direct it towards others.
Dr. Jen Riegle is a Naturopathic Doctor (ND) who practices in Santa Rosa, CA. Dr. Jen specializes in women's health, infertility, and oncofertility. If you live in the Bay Area and would like to make an appointment, you may schedule on our website or by calling (707)-243-8998.