1. We are attracted to people that feel familiar on an energetic level - which means (until we start clearing our emotional process) people that emotionally / vibrationally feel like our parents did when we were very little kids.  At a certain point in my process I realized that if I met a woman who felt like my soul mate, that the chances were pretty huge that she was one more unavailable woman that fit my pattern of being attracted to someone who would reinforce the message that I wasn't good enough, that I was unlovable.  Until we start releasing the hurt, sadness, rage, shame, terror - the emotional grief energy - from our childhoods we will keep having dysfunctional relationships.

I don't remember anything that he said to me that day - what I do remember is that as I sat in his house watching him pack I had a feeling, and a visual image, that I had just opened Pandora's Box - the monsters were loose now and I would never be able shut that box again.

Doing the grief work is absolutely terrifying.  The word I came up with to describe how I felt was terrif---ingfying.  It felt like if I ever really owned the pain, I would end up crying in a rubber room for the rest of my life.  That if I ever really owned the rage, I would just go up and down the street shooting people.  That is not what happened.  The Spirit guided me through the process and gave me the resources I needed to release great quantities of that pent up, pressurized emotional energy.  To release enough to start learning who I really am, to start seeing my path more clearly, and to start forgiving myself and learning about love.

I still need to do the grieving/energy release work from time to time.  There is still a hole in my soul - a seemingly bottomless abyss of wish-to-die-pain, shame, and unbearable suffering.   But it is a much smaller hole and I don't have to visit it very often.

The wounds don't go away.  They have less power to dictate my life as I heal.  I needed to own that wounded part of me in order to start getting to know, and have compassion for, me.  I also needed to learn to have a balance because we can't live in those feelings.  We need to own them and honor them in order to own and honor ourselves - but then we need to learn to have internal boundaries that will allow us to find some balance in our life, allow us to trust the process and our Higher Power.

We are on a Spiritual journey - and the Force is with us.  It will help and guide us as we face the terror of owning how painful our human experience has been.  The more we are able to feel and release the feelings/emotional energy, the more clearly we can tune into the emotional energy that is Truth - and Love, Light, Joy, Beauty - coming from The Source Energy.

next: Grief, Love, and Fear of Intimacy