This one was a bit heavier to write. But the concept was so meaningful to me, I know it will be to others who are suffering as well. If that is you, I manifest you find some comfort in my words and experience.
How could this happen? She was so healthy and happy, how could cancer come in all of the sudden and take her away from me in only a few months? Is this even real? How am I going to survive without her?
These questions surfaced regularly over the months following my fiance’s passing. I felt like I was anchored to the ocean floor, desperate for a breath of air, but unwilling to release the shackles that I thought kept me connected to Karina. I felt like happiness would take me away from her or somehow diminish our love. How could I ever move on?
The answer, I found, was that I don’t need to. Moving on, to me, implies that I cut off the love connection with Karina and let it go. Instead, I discovered the concept of moving forward. The love isn’t gone. It never will be. In fact, the love that I shared with Karina is now my greatest asset. By moving forward, I am able to reclaim that love energy, expand my heart’s capacity, and create space for more love in my life.
Karina is not gone. She has just transformed energetic states. By moving forward, I walk with her in my heart, in my gut, in my mind, guiding and inspiring me at a level that she couldn’t while in physical form.
This energy is extremely valuable to me. And the only way I get to keep it and utilize it to enhance my life is to grieve regularly with intention and courage. In the first few weeks after she passed, it was vitally important for me to be fully present with the grief while the connection to her was still so strong. With daily grieving guided by regular therapy, and resisting avoidant actions such as medication, drugs, or alcohol, I assimilated that love energy in a profound way.
After all, grief is love without a place to go. In grieving, I collect that love and transform it into Love, the universal recognition that we are, always have been, and always will be One. By moving forward, this Love becomes a superpower. It allows me to find gratitude, understanding, perspective, acceptance, and eventually happiness, despite external circumstances.
I was struggling, confused, as to how I could still be so sad also while understanding Karina’s true immortality. My humanness still feels the loss, still recognizes that I won’t ever get to see my favorite person again. I still feel the sadness of losing my future wife, mother of my future children, best friend, and lover.
Integration has helped me reconcile this. We have a Higher Self, that is the observer of our thoughts and feelings and the seat of our intuition, which understands death is just an energetic shift. But we also have a variety of other selves that crave human connection, validation, physical pleasure, etc. Integration is the connection of the Higher Self with the other selves. It is the reunification of all aspects of ourself, back to how it was before social conditioning taught us to fracture and compartmentalize.
I found that I was jumping back and forth, going from a feeling of Higher understanding to a state of disbelief, anger, and intense sadness. My work in integration is to connect with my Higher Self while present in my self that desires companionship and suffers from the loss. By integrating my Higher Self in this state, the sadness softens and gratitude takes its place. It is a daily process, and likely a lifelong one.
What happened happened. The loss, the trauma, and all the incredibly challenging experiences along the way are apart of my story. I don’t want to disconnect from that intensity, I don’t want to move on from it. I want to move forward with it. Because, as intensely challenging as it was, that experience is the genesis of extraordinary strength. It is a tool kit full of perspectives that inspire a happier, healthier, and more connected life. It is the inspiration for this blog. It is now my most cherished possession.
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