The themes of love and loss touch a deep, universal human experience. They can occupy you for years, lift you up or weigh you down. Much depends on the perspective you take. One thing is certain: transformation is possible through loss and love. Once you have processed them, you walk through your life on a different, more loving level.
Let me begin with a few personal questions. Take a moment for yourself to reflect.
- Do you remember moments in your life when an experience of loss eventually brought you an unexpected form of love and growth?
- Has this changed you in some way?
- What has that change given you?
- Has your change been meaningful for others?
- Would you want to go back to the person you were before you grew?
What have you discovered about the relationship between love and loss in your own life?
Love and loss
Love and loss are an inevitable part of life. They are inextricably linked and dance through the events that shape the story of your life. Sometimes they seem like two sides of the same coin. Love can be a source of joy, while an experience of loss is painful. You feel vulnerable. Then again, love can feel painful and loss can feel like a liberation.
Love and loss dance together. One lets you fly, the other teaches you to land.
Love, loss and life lessons
You will probably recognise the examples below. My intention is not to explain them at length, but to show how love, loss and life lessons are woven together into one inseparable whole.
Example 1: A relationship ends.
Because of the love that is present, the relationship brims with warmth, connection, playfulness, tenderness and growth between the people involved. When the relationship comes to an end, this loss can cause a great deal of pain, insecurity, anger or sorrow. Life does not want you to drown in that, but to use it as a springboard to learn how to let go. You can develop self-love and resilience and, step by step, build a new sense of trust. You have integrated one of life’s lessons. That is the intention.
Loss is not the end of love, but an invitation to discover love in a different form.
Example 2: A loved one dies.
Missing the physical presence, the voice, the smile, the little habits and the warmth of a loved one can be an extremely painful experience that makes you feel as if the ground is giving way beneath your feet. An unpredictable path of grief and growth lies ahead of you. Love does not focus only on the absence, but cherishes the beautiful memories and the special bond you had with that person. Walking the path of grief consciously teaches you to live life consciously and to appreciate what is there. It helps you find the strength to carry on with the other person’s legacy in your heart. Suffering slowly comes to rest and once again makes room for joy.
Grieving is the bridge between love and wisdom.
Example 3: Grown-up children leave home.
When children leave home, a lot changes. Your primary role as carer is over. It can feel as though the warm nest you built is empty and you cannot immediately find your way. If you are not prepared for it, or if you have always been entirely at your children’s service, you end up with the ‘empty nest feeling’. Love, however, is proud, because your children are going their own way and are able to stand on their own two feet. They are now building a new nest of their own in which to grow and flourish. An unknown phase of your life begins. You learn that love does not ‘possess’ but ‘supports’. That is a fundamental difference that sets both you and your children free. What is more, space opens up to give new shape to your own identity and to get to know undiscovered sides of yourself.
Example 4: You lose your job.
Losing your job can shake you to your foundations. Your security, your status and your familiar working environment fall away. From a place of love, however, you can look back with satisfaction on what you achieved in your previous job. You are given the chance to reinvent yourself and to walk other paths from which new and often better opportunities arise. Life challenges you to discover that your identity does not depend entirely on your work. Your identity is a state of BEING that is present within you.
Life is like a school with endless opportunities. It is where you learn life lessons.
Example 5: You are getting older or you have health problems
When your health lets you down or you experience all kinds of complaints as you age, you are confronted with your limitations and decline. Your independence is under threat and you may come to depend on outside help. Love, however, invites you to look with gratitude at everything your body has made possible for you and at what it can still do now. It is a lesson in accepting what is. The control you always thought you had to hold on to can be released in favour of surrender. The importance of being present in the here and now becomes ever clearer.
Everything is part of a bigger picture
It helps you integrate life lessons when you are aware that you are much more than your thoughts, your emotions and your body. You are a being of energy, of Light and of Conscious-BEING that is part of the great universal web of life. If you can look from that place, it becomes much easier to transform your life themes and turn them into wisdom.
The dynamics of love and loss in systemic work
There is no family system that exists without both experiences, love and loss. When love prevails, it will be shared and passed on, and this will be palpable. The same happens with an experience of loss. The energy, and the way in which the loss is digested, can travel through the family for generations. Subsequent generations remain loyal to patterns of unprocessed grief. This is an unconscious process that is carried along and holds you back from letting love flow. Yet we long for a loving life. To achieve this, it is important to acknowledge and integrate old experiences of loss, even if you did not live through them yourself. This can be a stubborn process. Systemic constellations or family constellations can help you with it.
Family constellations are a wonderful method for loosening entangled loyalties, acknowledging what has happened and ultimately integrating it. It is an experiential method, not something you think up. Already during the constellation, you feel the moment love flows through the veins of the family again. These are not empty words. You feel more loving in the way you treat yourself and others. You have grown from your pain into a broader Conscious-BEING. You get different things out of life than before. It is as if the sun shines more brightly and the colours are more vivid.
Loss transforms into wisdom
What was once pain will one day become wisdom.
What was once loss will one day become a source of love.
At a certain point you have no choice but to let go, just as trees cannot help but let go of their leaves. Letting go is a sublime art. You have not forgotten what happened, but the event no longer stirs up stormy emotional waves in you. It has become a calm sea. You have come to rest. Where you would once have drowned in the waves, you now have an overview of the wide sea. The setting sun symbolises the loss within a natural cycle, while at the same time it holds the promise of a new day. Your insights translate into words of wisdom that help others calm the storms within themselves. You have opened your heart to soul-inspired wisdom.
Hilde Van Bulck
Awareness Architect — Systemic constellation facilitator, trainer and consultant
Speaker — Author
Director of the scientific department for education and constellations at Constellators International
