We’ve all been there in one way or another: We start a relationship with high hopes and newfound happiness, and for a while it seems like maybe this could be the one, but inevitably reality sets in and everything comes crashing down with a mighty thud.
What happened? Sometimes we don’t even know for sure what went wrong. Like pulling a loose thread from a favorite sweater, the whole fabric unweaves and our heart is laid bare.
Then comes the pain, the sadness, and the tears. The smile we couldn’t wipe off our face with sandpaper when things were going well is now nowhere to be found, seemingly not even retraceable with the strongest microscope or telescope.
The negative emotions of the failure have neutralized the positive emotions of the success, but even more so they may have given rise to feelings of worthlessness or futility.
The prospect of love gave us reason to love ourselves even more, and now the reality of the lack of love gives us reason hate ourselves even more.
If we were to be truly honest, we might also admit that we end up hating ourselves at deeper levels than we ever love ourselves.
How do we do that? Why do we do it? These are questions that begin to perplex us, and the answers are not easy to find.
But find them we must, or we doom ourselves to repeat the same experiences over and over again.
It’s a truth of life that we recycle certain situations, or recreate them in different ways, whenever we don’t learn the lesson that is inherent in the experience.
To many of us, life has a way of making the experiences tougher, rougher, and more impactful the more times we repeat it.
If the universe could talk to us in words, it likely would say, “Okay, you haven’t learned the lesson yet?
Well, here it is again in a different way, more dramatic this time. I’ll keep aiming at deeper and deeper levels of your being until the lesson registers.
The ensuing pain will be less and less tolerable. And if I have to mess up your entire life to make you get it, that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
In a battle of will against the universe, we will always end up losing. So why even engage in that battle?
The paradox is that the only way to win at love is to surrender to the greater wisdom of the universe.
And the way to surrender is to listen to your intuition. The lesson we need to learn from pain is that it challenges our ego sufficiently to get us to attune ourselves to our intuition.
Pain will destroy us to the point that we have to resort to our intuition in order to survive.
Only when we find the courage to discard the shackles of our ego – often when our survival instinct is triggered – will we also find the wisdom to accede to the counsel of wisdom.
Pain is not the enemy. Pain is the vehicle that takes us deeper into ourselves.
If we allow that voyage to take us where we may never have gone before, we will discover new worlds within us that we never imagined existed. And yet 
they’ve been there all along.
We’ve unfortunately kept ourselves too busy focusing on the wrong things to have ever identified the right things.
But when “everything comes crashing down with a mighty thud,” the time has arrived to take from pain what it gives us.
Let’s understand that pain will keep on giving until we accept its invitation.
We’ve all been there in one way or another. And we will return there in one way or another.
Until we decide to go somewhere else. Then we can weave a new reality that is more in accord with our deepest desires.
The relationships we will start might still not work out in the end, but at least we will start from a stronger stance, with a deeper presence.
Sooner or later, because of the lessons we’ve learned from pain, we will start a loving relationship that will never end – with our truest essence.
The rest, well, the universe will provide the right partner who resonates with our truest essence. All we need to do is follow our intuition.
Easier said than done? Maybe. But at some point it will become easier done than said. And that eventuality is worth all the pain it takes to get us there.
