Lessons in Love: Always take a chance to say “I love you!”

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I woke up quite early this morning. Strictly speaking I do not know whether I woke up or whether I was really woken up by a dream. It was one of those very real dreams, the one you want to go back to and complete it. In it I was with my best male friend, whom I really was in love with. I was just telling him what an important part of my life he had been, and how much I had cared, and I'd just been about to say ''I love you'' to him when a group of other friends arrived and I woke up. A sweet lingering feeling of nostalgia, of a moment of shared tenderness building towards culmination and then the end. I woke up before those three beautiful - yet sometimes so difficult to say - words ''I love you'' ever had a chance to come out, forever staying inside of me.

The friend I was dreaming of is not alive any more he's been dead for over 23 years. He died when he was just 23 years old, and I last saw him on his 23rd birthday. I woke him up on that Sunday morning 23^rd June 1991. He was a bit grumpy to be woken up, yet happy that I remembered his birthday. We spent a couple of hours chatting, I do not remember what about, but I certainly remember that I did not express the depth of feelings I had for him, thinking ''well, it is not a right moment'', I guess thinking maybe I could do it some other time, and of course not expressing it because I was scared of how he would receive those words, I feared being rejected. At that time I was young, inexperienced and I believed that if I had ever expressed my love to him and if he did not feel the same, although nowadays I am convinced he was as much in love with me as  I was with him, it would have been the end of our friendship. The end of our friendship came anyway, not from our choosing, but nevertheless it came. Less than five months after I last had seen him he was dead, killed in the war, that left our town and country ravaged, at the same time stopping his and changing my life forever. He was dead and I did not have any more chances to utter those words directly to him, no more chances to share the beauty of my love with him while looking into his eyes.

From where I stand in my life now I know that my love for him was not wasted, true love never is. It took me time to transform my grief, it took some deep mourning, but I learned to open my heart wider. I learned that love has to be lived through expression and that irrespective whether it is received with open arms or not by others the very act of sharing it is the act of loving and this has nothing to do with others and their reactions, but everything to do with ourselves. I learned that every time we take a chance to say I love you we also give ourselves a chance to enrich ourselves, to live and experience joy of simply loving.

However, in our modern culture, as well as classic literature, there has been too much focus on suffering from non-returned love, on love being worth giving only if it is received and returned, materialised, so to speak, in a form of ever lasting exclusive romantic relationship between two people. This focus narrows love almost to a barter. I give you that much love and for that you need to return so much back to me and only when this and other conditions are fulfilled, only then we are going to call it love and maybe dare to venture in it. This narrow focus misses the entire point, the most intrinsic quality of true love - it is unconditional. This means that the very beauty of love is in giving and sharing it openly without condition.

Beautiful as it may sound it is not always easy to practice. In our western societies, in which we have so many conditioned believes put in our heads about what love should or should not be, we spend so much time concentrating on what ifs, protecting ourselves from hurt to the point that we miss experiencing easy and uncomplicated flow of love. By protecting from potential hurt we miss a simple joy of loving and we miss a chance of enriching our own and someone else's life by letting them know that we love them. However, when we do allow ourselves to experience this flow of love then we are also free to express it with simple words of ''I love you" without needing to hear those words reflected back to us, we just let love flow.

Since I've heard of Željko's death all those years ago, choosing and expressing love has been my personal vow to my self and my way of honouring love for my friend, of course every now end then he needs to pop up in my dreams to remind me to 'stay on course'. I choose to interpret the above dream as a reminder to keep expressing my love, to keep sharing it and taking every chance I have to say ''I love you!'' to those around me who have been enriching me by their presence in my life. I choose to see this dream as a lesson in love, a reminder from my friend Željko, to take every chance I have to express love because I never know whether that chance would be the last one to say to that person, looking directly into their eyes: ''my life has been enriched for having known you'' and simply adding ''I love you!''

I hope that you can find in your life a reminder for yourself, which could help you to choose love the next time you are at that point of choice between succumbing to your fear of rejection on one side and love and its expression on the other.

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Apart from my own coaching practice I also give relationship workshops and retreats together with my partner Jerry Zondervan for more info please click here.

Feel the pain, heal and find love for the lost one

I wanted to write this particular blog for two reasons. One is as a memory of my loving mum who died almost 6 years ago. And the second is to share my process of grieving, what I've learned from it and how it's helped my inner growth with hope that my story may also help others who are going through a similar process.

Like most of you out there I have had a fair share of loss in my life, such as, for example, my home town being destroyed in a civil war, my best male friend being executed in the very same war and more. I tried to cope with it, go through it in the best way I knew how. In the past, more often then not, I tried to avoid the pain. I tried to rationalise it and I would get busy with life which, of course, is never too short of opportunities to keep you busy.

From all those previous experiences I have learned that we can never avoid pain, it always catches up with you in the end, and sometimes, in the meantime it affect your health as well. I've also learned that the only way to heal is through pain. Still, until my mum's death I had somehow always tried to postpone the process of grieving and of course experiencing pain, sadness and mourning that go with it, hoping that it would go away or heal with time. It never does. I've learned that the only way to heal pain to actively engage with it. This grieving process that I am about to share with you was the first time that I really allowed myself to fully feel whatever I felt in the moment I experienced it. I even consciously made sure I created the space in me and time for the process, for my grieving to unravel in the way it needed to.

On the 11^th of February this year it will be exactly 6 years since that early morning when I received a call from my dad telling me that my mum died. Her death was sudden, unexpected and a shock, mum was only 66 years old. Only the day before my mum and I had spoken on the phone, laughed, joked and finished the conversation with ‘I love you’ and I sent her blow kisses through the receiver in the same way I had always done with her before ending a call. One may label blow kisses as childish, yet for me it represented the level of playfulness, warmth, intimacy, and love I was able to share with her. Would I have changed anything, if I had known that this was to be our last conversation? No, not a thing.

Still, just like that from one day to the next my loving Mama was not here any more. In those first weeks the thought of 'never again' was the hardest to bear for me. I understood it, but I still could not fully comprehended that I would never again be able to hug her, see her, or call her on the phone. There would be no more long Sunday morning telephone chats I so loved. I knew that this would be a process, of acceptance, of getting used to what is, of grieving. I also knew or rather felt that my mum was still with me. Somehow my mum’s presence and love was coming back to me albeit indirectly through the care and love of close friends and colleagues who were all there for me in the first month of my grieving process.

I also remember that in the first weeks I was questioning the fact that I had experienced only a few moments of real deep sadness since mum died. It was as if I was expecting something else, and indeed I was. On one side I thought that I was expected by others to feel differently, more sad, more depressed, and on the other side I was expecting that I should have been experiencing greater pain or greater sadness. In other words I was worried that I was not really grieving, as if it was not quite right or enough to feel enormous love in my heart, and to feel peaceful and OK. Even though I knew that grieving was a process (after all I was a trained counsellor), still I had an idea of what grieving should have looked like. Well, I am happy to say that through my own process I have learned that there is no prescribed rule. Grieving is different for every individual, because we are all different, and because each person we grieve for is different from all others we grieved for before, and because with each of these individuals we created a very unique relationship. Hence, every time we grieve for someone we grieve in a unique way. 

 

One thing that was different for me this time in my grieving process for my Mama was the awareness of my thoughts, feelings and needs in the present moment. I was consciously practising regularly ‘tuning-in’ with myself to check what went on inside me and what feelings were lurking under the surface needing to come out.

At the same time a big part of the grieving process was the understanding that the acceptance of my mum's death, was also a process which was unfolding in stages at its own pace. First came the shock of hearing that mum died, and the funeral, then the idea that she was not alive any more, yet I was still holding on her spirit and I was even feeling her presence, especially when I was still in my home town after the funeral. Then in the second month after her death it really truly dawned on me that Mama was no longer with us. To start with I understood the mental concept, but I did not truly accept it until several weeks after she died, and even then I was not able to completely accept it. It is like the awareness of it was happening in stages. The part of acceptance that I experienced in the first few weeks was a very reasoned, cognitive understanding of my Mum's death. This is a necessary part of the process yet it really is only the first step towards the full acceptance. And then the time came when the realization of loss was starting to hit my whole being and the whole being was just finding it hard to believe and accept. This realization was hurting not only emotionally, but physically as well.

I did not need to worry any longer about not experiencing the deep sadness. The time came when I was ready to cry and it was painful, leaving me without breath. I cried while cycling to work, I cried under the shower and I experienced feeling helpless, like a small child and alone. Even though there were many good friends ready to support me in my process, only I, alone, could meet and experience the depth of my pain. When this pain started coming out it felt excruciating. However, I was not trying to avoid it I just let it come up, I let it all out. Only a few times I screamed from pain, but mostly I just felt deep, deep sadness and a deep need to let tears roll.

The one of my biggest growth point from this grieving process has been the realization that because I did not fear the pain and I trusted my ability to deal with the amount of pain I did let my self ‘wallow’ in it and I was able to slowly go deeper. The deeper I went the greater the need became to go even deeper in and through the pain until I touched the point where I felt a shift, the pain started feeling warm. I dared to meet my pain and go through it without any guarantee of how long this journey would be and what I would find at the other end. Well, without even knowing whether there was the other end. Indeed, there was the other end, and what I found there was a deep all encompassing love. I felt peaceful.

This happened sometime at the end of the summer, approximately six months after my mum died.

It was an amazing experience and it had an enormous impact on my growth. Through my own experience I learned that the only way to deal with whatever feelings we have is to live them to the full. Irrespective of how hard and painful at times it may be, just live them moment by moment, just let them be, without resistance without putting any time limit, or a judgment/label (good or bad, positive or negative) or an expectation on it. Felling your pain and mourning your loss is not only necessary, if you wish to live a full healthy life, but it is definitely worth it. At the end you will come to peace with the death of the loved one and you will also rediscover the love that connect you with that person which will, therefore, stay with you forever.

Trust in your nature and let yourself feel whatever is alive in you in this moment...

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