The purest forms of love are unconditional love, wide open pathways between two souls where love can travel instantly with great force and reaction. The soul contains our conscience which tries to protect us from danger, and an unconditional wide open pathway for love to flow out of our soul is a very great danger. As a result of life, our souls develop self protective controls over the flow of love, both into and out from our soul.
Trust is the fundamental flow control of love
In the early days of a relationship based in love, each lover will chose exactly the type and volume of love that they will unconditionally offer this new lover over the forming pathway. The flow control applied on both sides of the pathway is trust.
Trust is where we decide if something is desired by our soul or dangerous to our soul. As a result, in a healthy early love, there is a natural limitation on how much of what kind of love you will gift to a lover or friend, followed by their receiving flow control of desirable or dangerous.
To love, we must both trust ourselves and each other.
Basic rules of love’s flow
Pure love is meant to be gifted unconditionally, with no expectation of acceptance or of a return of similar or different type or quantity of love from the friend or lover that you gift your love to. The unconditional part of love is what makes it much easier for the receiver to accept the gift, any conditions become a weight we carry, an undefined debt we owe. An unconditional gift of our love is basically our expression of our trust in the friend or lover we give our love to. This trust opens the pathways between our souls that allow love to flow with fewer restrictions.
When love, consciously or subconsciously leaves your soul, if that love is not received and accepted by the intended soul it will fade away and the energy of that love will be lost to both lovers. This happens when there are obstacles in the delivery and acceptance of our gifts of love. Often these obstacles are called walls, which are representations of impenetrable scars on our souls from past love injury by other lovers, or by broken trust in this current love. These “walls” are absolute flow controls set to completely stop the inbound flow of love as a self protective measure, and they are very hard to tear down because they require a rebuilding of trust. People who have these walls, these scars from love that block inbound love, also have strict limits on how much love they will allow to flow out of their souls. This is compounded by the inbound walls seriously restricting acceptance of love, and their soul can become self-starved of love to the point of panic.
The nightmare lover is the one that is hungry for love, the one that really seems to need what you offer, the one that has wide open acceptance of your unconditional love, but they also have walls blocking trust and very limited flow of love back to you. These are hoarders of love. These relationships become exhausting and draining because they slowly empty your soul of love, and you can’t see past their walls that have resulted from life’s scars, or the scars left by failed lovers.
Trusting love
So how is all this related to grief?
No love, no grief. Deep love, deep and complicated grief.
Lover or friend, we grieve those who we have trusted in sharing our love, those who have opened their souls to us and that sharing of love has caused us to open our souls to them.
In the deeply honest trusting love of those who we will grieve the flow controls of trust have disappeared. Often we say things like “They are an open book” about someone who trusts us with the contents of most or all of their soul.
We always initially see death as a betrayal of our trust in the Universe. The Universe has caused a trusted loved one to die, and we have this gaping wound in our soul where we were connected to their soul. The love we would send their way is now spilling out of that wound and we long ago forgot where the flow control to stop the flow is.
The process is the same whether the grief is for a life lost, or for a love lost. The sense of despair and fear comes from watching our souls spill love that we feel will be forever lost. Almost immediately we begin building walls, because if we can’t trust life or love, then we need walls. Those walls might protect and stop the flow of love out of your soul, but they often completely block the flow of love back into your soul.
After our son was killed in a firefighter water rescue training accident in 2005, my soul emptied completely and I build solid walls around me. We shared an unconditional and deep love, we had even discussed the possibility of line of duty death as he chose firefighting as a way to give back to the community he grew up in. We had done everything right, we had talked openly about accepting the risks, my last words to him were; “I love you, see you after practice”.
The Universe had betrayed my son and our family. Life became lonely and dark, but worse there was little hope of refilling my soul with love because I had closed off and built walls.
Your grief, its depth and intensity, will be based largely on how freely the love you shared flowed. If you loved well, you will grieve deeply, know that this is a great honour based in the trust of someone who knew you. Your goal is to tear down walls, to end your anger at the unfeeling Universe, to reduce your fear, to heal your soul without building solid walls that deny you future love..
This story is a long way from the happy ending that is today. Not a perfect ending, but a happy one. You can get there too, it will take time and it will take conscious thought and unconscious work that might exhaust you, but your soul wants to heal, your souls naturally wants to fill with love, your soul naturally wants enough love to share with others that you have chosen and will choose to share love with.
When your soul has finished healing, you will have been part of one of life’s great miracles, the rebirth of your own loving life. That is a marvel, a sight worth seeing, and one that doesn’t happen without grief.