That Which Awaits Your Return, Is You

Becoming a fragment of Life’s heart.

Hello dear reader,

How are you this week? Have you welcomed yourself?

The Lone Wolf by Alfred Von Wierusz-Kowalski (Polish, 1849-1915)

Our hearts, like molten iron, blaze through the endless cycle of becoming and undoing—forged into the shape of our hopes, then melted back into the shapelessness of bare truth. Like untempered metal, a heart shielded from the heat of life cannot be shaped by love.

Love is a paradox. The deeper we love, the greater our grief. And yet, as David R. Hawkins writes, “the more loving we are, the less vulnerable we are to grief and loss, and the less we need to seek attachments.”

Can love, when freed from attachment, become vast enough to hold even our deepest sorrows?

This is what I have been discussing with my dear readers over the past three weeks since publishing Love Is The Portal to Unselfing. We have spoken of love and loss, grief and healing, the quiet, nurturing love that remains, and the illusions we must release.

Here, I share two of these conversations—one about grieving love versus grieving attachment, and the other about how love can be manipulated and how we reclaim it within ourselves.

Both are shared with the agreement of the readers who brought their tender, loving hearts to these discussions.

May I welcome you into this ongoing conversation.

Conversation One: Enter the hearth in your soul

[On the paradox that loving more makes us less vulnerable to the pain of loss].

BM:

Interesting take. I am not sure I agree.

I was thinking specifically about the parent-child relationship. People often say that the bond between a parent and child is something that cannot truly be understood until it happens to you. Many forms of love may feel this way—first love, a soulmate connection—but the parent-child bond seems to be the deepest of all.

What I am trying to express is that deep grief is usually reserved for family—whether it is biological family or someone we love so profoundly that they become family to us. Perhaps a best friend.

Even if a close friend loses a child, I would grieve for them, but not in the way they would grieve. Within a week or two, I would move forward with my life, still sad for their loss, but not consumed by it. Meanwhile, they may grieve their child’s loss for the rest of their lives. They may never fully recover.

It seems that the deeper the love, the greater the vulnerability to grief. That is the risk of loving greatly.

Maybe I am misunderstanding something here, Justyna? Feel free to correct me if I have missed the intended perspective. Thank you!

JC:

Thank you so much for bringing this struggle into the conversation, B.

It does seem contradictory to say that loving deeply makes us less vulnerable to the pain of loss. After all, as you write, the more fully and acutely we love someone, the greater our despair when they are gone.

And yet, after enough losses (though for some, perhaps one is enough—for me, it certainly was not), we begin to observe something perhaps unexpected: the love itself does not leave.

We see that we still love our special person even when they are no longer near us in their physical form—whether through passing or the quiet severance of time that brings a relationship to an end. And sometimes, we realise this love sustains us—offering strength, vitality, perhaps even joy. We might begin to suspect, then, that because this love endures, it is inseparable from us and from the person we grew to cherish: the essence.

This is why, when grieving, we are often advised to write letters to those we have lost—even if we cannot, or should not, send them. Why do we do this, if not out of love?

Since love remains, then grief is not a product of love itself but of attachment—the way we hold onto a person, a role, or an identity that once filled a space within us, making us feel lovable, worthy, important, or fulfilled.

If we truly grieved only for the person and not for how they made us feel, would we grieve at all? Perhaps we would simply rejoice in a love that does not subject itself to time, to circumstance, or to possession.

The process of grieving through writing letters is, in truth, an exercise in holding both the hurt that arises from our smaller self (attachment) and the unyielding, untethered love that emanates from our higher self. It is a contradiction, but over time, it becomes easier to hold it without inner resistance.

I hope this clarifies my understanding a little better. Please let me know if you have any questions or thoughts you would like to share!

BM:

Very well expressed. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree with this perspective! (Not that my agreement truly matters!)

I was watching a show recently about consciousness and the idea that it exists beyond the body—near-death experiences (NDEs), astral projection, and similar phenomena. As a follower of Christ, I believe His followers will have eternal life, and that drastically shifts how one perceives death.

I am sorry for any loss you have experienced. I also apologise if my understanding is lacking. I truly appreciate your insights and the time you have taken to share them with me.

Lately, I have been reflecting on a question: Is there a hierarchy or gradient of importance in love? As a believer in God—and that God not only manifests love but perhaps is love—it follows that God’s love must be the highest, purest form of love.

By contrast, human love often seems flawed, tangled with self-interest, unconscious motives, or even manipulation. Some might reject a love that is sincere and pure simply due to superficial reasons—physical appearance, status, or fear of vulnerability. Others might embrace a love that is deceptive or self-serving, drawn more to attraction than to truth.

I also wonder: Does greater knowledge make love more cynical? The more a person learns about human nature, expectations, and disappointments, the more skeptical they may become. In contrast, an animal—such as a dog, who lacks human complexity—might express the purest form of love, free from fear, doubt, or ulterior motives.

I would be interested in your thoughts on this.

JC:

What a great discussion! :) Thank you for offering it, B! 🙏

The way I see it, love is like sunlight—impartial, abundant, and ever-present. God’s love, then, could be likened to the sun or direct sunlight—unobscured, touching all things.

We, too, contain this boundless love, but we carry clouds that obscure its light—limiting beliefs, prejudice, anger, jealousy, and especially fear. Acting in unloving ways does not mean we are incapable of God-like love; it means we do harm because we have moved ourselves away from this light. And among those we have harmed, we are the ones who often suffer the most deep within our beings.

Once we begin to let go of the blocks that keep us from resting in the boundlessness of universal love, we can see that it is, indeed, our truest and deepest nature. The energy once used to feed “negative” emotional states can be freed to shine as the energy of love.

Is there a gradient or hierarchy of love, then? From our ordinary perspective, perhaps—since we encounter beings of varying degrees of love, from the incredibly loving (like dogs, as you mentioned) to those who seem utterly unloving. On a deeper level, however, love has no gradient. It is equally available to all of us in its full potential and greatness, regardless of who we are.

Hope this is helpful! :)

Conversation two: Sorrow will remain faithful to itself

J:

I would be interested in your thoughts on people who seem incapable of love—those who manipulate or weaponise our love for their own gain.

It feels as though love, by nature, must keep flowing, finding its way past such people rather than remaining trapped in them.

I also struggle with the idea that “you can only love someone as much as you love yourself.” It is a difficult concept to fully grasp.

What are your thoughts on this?

JC:

Deeply grateful, J, for you asking such important and difficult questions!

Let me try to answer them to the best of my ability.

In my view, everyone can love and yearns to love. Many of us are, however, too afraid to open ourselves to the vulnerability that love requires, so we shield ourselves with behaviours that often appear hurtful, rude, selfish, or upsetting to others.

I will not go too far into hypothetical scenarios here, as I have learned that it is often best to stop where the other person asks us to—if they push us away, we listen. More often than not, their actions are reflections of their own insecurities and fears and say little to nothing about us—unless, of course, we have done something hurtful to them, in which case self-examination is necessary.

That said, I do not want to overlook the real pain caused by those who manipulate love, bending it into something that serves only themselves. Love, by nature, flows freely—it cannot be hoarded, controlled, or wielded as a weapon without distorting itself.

When someone exploits our love for their own gain, it can leave us doubting whether love itself is safe to give. But love does not diminish because someone struggles to receive it with care. It remains ours to offer, though sometimes the wisest thing we can do is to offer it from a distance.

In my own challenges of this nature, I have learned that completely withdrawing love from others is never the right answer. After all, how can we command love to cease when it is the very essence of our being?

The truth is, we cannot help but love. However, as I mentioned, some people are best loved from a distance—if their presence wounds us, then distance may be the most loving choice of all. Moving on—letting go of attachments, arrangements, and commitments—is sometimes necessary for our own well-being (and often theirs too). But that does not mean we must stop loving them.

The key distinction here is between holding onto attachment under the name of love and truly loving someone despite their actions. I choose my words carefully here because I do not mean to suggest staying in harmful relationships or justifying another’s behaviour for the sake of love.

Deep love is full of wisdom; it seeks no harm—neither to those we love nor to ourselves. It also does not need to prove anything to anyone. At times, it is the strongest when it is quiet.

As for the saying you mention, I suppose it is a question of the depth and vastness of love. We can, of course, love others more or less than we love ourselves, but self-love gradually softens us into the recognition that no being is separate from us.

True self-love, I have found, often comes after we have been humbled beyond self-delusion—when we have seen that we are capable of both the terrible and the beautiful. Standing in this truth, we can embrace our whole selves and, in doing so, recognise another within us: sharing with respect both their faults and virtues. This is when we can love more fully and honestly.

Softening and deepening into ourselves, we also come to understand that no one else can make us truly happy, fulfilled, or loved. We stop placing that expectation on others, and in turn, we offer ourselves more kindness and warmth, whether in a relationship or not. This often inspires others to do the same.

When we love ourselves, our worth is no longer tied to how others perceive us, which allows us to love without excessive fear. In that sense, I do believe we can only love another to the extent that we have learned (and dared) to love ourselves.

I hope this is helpful! Please let me know if you would like me to explain something more deeply :)

J:

Yes, I think what I am really getting at is attachment to another person, rather than universal love for all. How do you let that go—if you even can or need to? Once you love someone, that love does not simply vanish.

But when you have been conditioned to believe someone loves you—through their words, through the push and pull of hot and cold behaviour that creates an addictive cycle—you begin to question what you were really part of. Was it love, or was it the illusion of love?

Then comes the difficult part: removing our own projections of that person. What if I was the only one in love all along? What if what they loved about me was not me, but rather how much I loved them?

Without a healthy foundation of early attachment, we often mistake excitement for love, confusing the butterflies a person gives us for something meaningful—when in reality, those butterflies may have been a warning. Perhaps we make love too accessible, offering it freely to those who take it for granted. We become too easily manipulated.

I think I am now much more drawn to quiet love, like you said—the kind that does not demand or prove itself. And if, as some believe, we are all frequency, only attracting our energetic opposite, what does that say about me and the space I was in when I found this person? Growth inevitably leads to awareness: revealing a person’s true character, allowing honesty and love to uncover what was previously hidden.

Perhaps separation is the only way to truly understand what it means to be loved by oneself.

And maybe love between two people cannot exist without service to a higher love—something greater than just the two of them.

JC:

I believe we largely love others for how much they love us, for the way they make us feel, for how they fill in our gaps. We seek others because we feel incomplete in ourselves. And love is well known to be one of the strongest addictions of all :)

In separation from our beloved, we can observe how the mind behaves, desperately trying to recreate the image and feeling of what is now gone—either by intensifying the colours of memories and torturing us with them or by constructing hypothetical future scenarios.

It is a maddening experience, but if approached with tenderness and perhaps even a touch of bittersweet humour, we can see it for what it truly is: the process of uncoupling, of recovering from the constant supply of the intoxicating substance personified by our beloved.

As for manipulation and making love too accessible—love is often wrapped in fear. Loving makes us vulnerable, exposed. We want to trust that the other will not hurt us as we open our hearts wide for them to see their contents, to inhabit them, but we know very well it is a gamble, a great risk.

We might, and likely will, be hurt. What we can do is ensure we take care of ourselves and tend to our own needs—even if that means walking away from a dynamic that brings us more harm than contentment.

Growth, as you write, reveals where we still need healing, where our wounds call in those who will mirror and magnify them.

I believe we can learn to love ourselves within a relationship, but I agree that periods of solitude are indispensable to the process. They teach us how to feel “enough” within ourselves. They show us where we feel incomplete and call us to fill those gaps—not placing the burden of this impossible task upon another.

J:

Cognitively, I can see both the good and the bad. I know I was being used and manipulated. I know it had to end for me to recognise my worth and understand that I deserve more. But still, my heart aches from the process.

Maybe it is nostalgia—imagining it was better than it actually was. I know that is a common side effect of gaslighting, mixed with my own projections.

I used to believe that love meant enduring hard times together—that staying through the pain was proof of love. But in reality, it was just abuse, and it was destroying me. 😔 I also see now that I completely lost myself in the relationship, which means I could not have been a healthy partner either.

I have relived the exact trauma my parents put me through, just now with my ex. And so, I have had to learn and unlearn so much—how to heal my nervous system, how to let go of the pain stored in my body, how to free myself from fear. Surely this has to be better for me and my children in the long run.

Maybe that was the whole point of it all. It has forced me to confront my own shortcomings and, in doing so, has brought me closer to God. You are right—I was asking for the impossible from a partner. I had to be pushed out in order to see things from a different perspective. Now, I have to learn what it truly means to love myself. As you said, I need solitude for that.

I absolutely love the way you write. Your words connect with me in a way few others have. And now you have introduced me to David Whyte! Double cool. Poetry and art are the only things keeping me sane right now.

I have been trying to explore what love truly is—the different kinds. I know there is universal love, what I believe to be God. I have felt it before, during a tantric yoga session—my body healing in waves of orange light, and in that moment, I held no bitterness, no regret. Only pure love. It was beautiful.

I know I have unconditional love for my children, no matter what they do. But romantic love? That feels terrifying now. I cannot simply stop loving someone, because if I could, then was it ever really love? But at the same time, it is exhausting to keep reminiscing.

How can a relationship go from someone telling you they are your soulmate to waking up one day not even recognising them—or yourself? This has surfaced all my childhood trauma. Even the people closest to me seemed to be working against me. I have researched everything. I have watched all the Richard Grannon videos.

I understand that maybe this experience was necessary for me to wake up. But what now? Who or what was I in love with? Where has it gone? How do I turn that love inward? Was it just an addiction all along?

How do I become so zen that everything—the good and the bad—just washes over me?

Do I need to learn how to love someone properly? Or simply learn their love language? Was I really that asleep, that naïve? Did I need a narcissist to pull me out of myself?

I feel like we are all living in some kind of mirror dimension, only attracting our subconscious fears—like some Jungian nightmare. I am going to try reading Marie-Louise von Franz, and hopefully, I can push through the procrastination and start building a life again.

Finding other writers who have been through similar experiences—reading their work, writing my own—has saved my life. The camaraderie, the validation, the reassurance that I am not alone, that I am not crazy. It has helped me make sense of the insanity of this world and all the trauma I have carried.

But the quiet, introspective moments—those are still the hardest.

Thank you for listening, and for taking the time to respond.

JC:

J, I’m so sorry you are moving through this pain. And I feel honoured that you’ve entrusted me with your heart’s weight and felt safe enough to open up. I find that there is something sacred in the act of laying one’s wounds bare—not for them to be solved, but so that they can finally be seen. Thank you for letting me hold this space for you.

I can understand the place you find yourself in because I, too, was met with a similar life-quake truth—that perhaps I didn't know the person I came to love so deeply and entirely, as I thought I did. In my own process of healing and sense-making, I came to some realisations that I would like to share here with you.

First of all, I hope you can see that the love you gave was real. What came to inhabit your heart was not an illusion, but a truth of what you saw in your person, what they allowed you to see, what they believed themselves to be. It was real because your love was true and honest. So real, in fact, that even now, you feel its weight in your bones and stomach. If love were false, it would not wound so deeply. Even if, in the end, they turned away from it, your love was never wasted. Their actions don’t disqualify it.

And yet, letting go does not need to mean unloving. It is just that perhaps our felt sense of this love transforms. Healing does not demand of you erasing what was felt, only that you find in yourself a courage to allow its form to shift.

Once, the love you had was an intimate belonging, a world enclosed within two souls entwined, a home in which you both got to curl up and unfold over and over, knowing it were safe and welcoming to do so. Today, that love, as real as ever, must unfurl into something vaster—making room for distance and for release, making space for you and the deeper self you are returning to.

To love fully does not mean to grasp, nor does it mean to shackle ourselves to the past, hoping to preserve what has already set itself in its own way. Rather, it means to let our love transform, little by little; to let it breathe. Love does not need to be held in place to remain real. It does not need to stay in one form to be honoured—as excruciatingly painful and agonising it can be at times to let it move, it is through this movement, the widening, deepening, that we can finally see it truly holds it all.

Our felt sense of this transforming love can be very bittersweet at first—because we would wish for the relationship to continue and grow as beautifully as it originally seemed to be capable of. Instead, we need to learn to accept the fact of its end. Loving, then, means embracing all of our person, including the ways they hurt us, but offering the kindness and loving embrace to ourselves as well, so we feel strong enough to walk away and heal.

You ask how to become so “zen” that it all washes over you—the joy and the sorrow alike. I used to think peace meant being untouched, as if I could reach a state where life’s currents would move around me but never through me.

But I have learned that peace isn’t in escaping feeling. Rather, it lies in allowing it to move through us, to touch us to the core, without gripping onto it, without adding weight to it with the mind’s endless narratives about what it means. We are meant to be affected. The practice is not in whether we feel, but in whether we meet our emotions with presence or resistance.

When we choose to let emotions rise to the surface of our consciousness fully and hold an impartial space for them under the light of our awareness, we will soon watch them fade away, leaving behind a sense of lightness, peace, safety.

All that is asked of us is to sit with these emotions as they are, without trying to alter them, condemning them, or fearing them. Then, they move through us and pass—often sooner than we expect. A sadness that might have lingered for days can, when truly felt and wholly surrendered to, shift in minutes, an hour—because it was never asking to be carried, only to be witnessed.

What keeps pain lingering is not the pain itself—it is our ongoing resistance to it, the fear of feeling fully. Of course, we might feel sad again, but it won't be the same emotion. So we are becoming lighter and lighter.

As much as I didn't like it at first, I came to realise that "being zen" might simply mean "being able to hold space for the beauty and terror"— and still loving life with all its living expressions. Perhaps even loving it more.

I know, it is scary to welcome some of our emotions in their entirety. To feel so deeply. It can be nearly unbearable at times, so painful and heart-shredding that we feel like we’re about to fall apart into pieces, explode, that we want to tear our hearts out of our chests or our minds out of our heads just not to feel this excruciating pain anymore.

There were days I thought I wouldn’t survive it, pressed to the floor under the impossible weight of my emotions, when my heart felt too shattered to hold even a moment more. But every time, just as I was pushed right to the edge of my breaking point, something gave way. When I felt like I can't take it anymore, I'd usually give up the fight, I'd let go of resistance, and that's when a transformation could finally take place. There is a greater wisdom in our sorrow—a law unto itself.

What I’m trying to say is that this pain, as unbearable as it is, is not your undoing into meaninglessness. Through being broken open, you are reshaped—not into someone lesser, but into a version of you that is freer, fuller, and lighter. You are not meant to emerge the same, of course. Would you even want that? This is the path that is finally leading you home—back to your essential self.

Loving ourselves to the other side of the ocean of suffering means letting ourselves be washed clean—and trusting that what’s left is more than enough to fulfil us.

It is true that, as you write, some people come into our lives not to stay, but to teach us—to wake us. And we, too, have been their teachers in return. It is not only that others presence (or departure) transforms our lives, but we do the same for them. We are just as unforgettable and life-changing as they are.

It’s wonderful to hear that you have found solace in the words of writers who help you make sense of this alchemization that’s taking place within you. And I hope you see that, even now, your own words hold that same potential—that your story, too, will reach others, serving as light in someone else’s darkness. Even as you seek healing, you are already offering it.

You will move through this, I know it. You will find lightness again. And when you do, it will not be because you forced yourself to let go of your love, or because time dulled the pain—but because you allowed yourself to feel everything as it comes, to let it move through you, and you found ways to love yourself through it all.

Each day, you step steadily into the vast and tender unknown, where your life unfolds into its inevitable beauty.

As Rumi once wrote, “Your task is not to seek for love, but to merely seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

Love is not just an experience—it is an unfolding, an unraveling, a quiet homecoming to ourselves. When untethered, it holds everything—the beauty, the terror, the grief, the letting go. And still, it makes us feel safe and abundant—not through attachment to what surrounds us, but through the realisation that it is our very life force, the essence of ourselves and all beings. It prevails—not something to acquire, hold onto, or release. True love, unattached, does not “lose” anything.

In these conversations, we explored love’s contradictions: how it can break us open and still make us whole, how it can be wielded as both a balm and a blade, how it can tether us to grief yet set us free.

Loss may seem like the absence of another, yet if we follow it to its depths, it reveals something greater—an invitation to shed the self that existed only within their presence. It aids us in confronting the spaces they once filled and realising that, in truth, they were never the source of our love—only its mirror.

Perhaps love was never meant to be possessed. What if, instead, it was something we learned to embody fully—which remains long after the form it once took has disappeared?

The greatest gift of love may not be in holding on, but in allowing it to move through us—transforming, expanding, deepening. We are never exiled from love’s lands, for it belongs to us as surely as breath itself. In fact, it is the very breath that animates our bodies and souls.

Below, two poems (one featured, one linked) that speak to this great paradox of love:

For Grief by John O’Donohue:

When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you gets fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence.

Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.

Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.

There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.

Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.

It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And, when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time.

— And remember: That which awaits your return, is you.

The second poem I would like to offer here won’t be featured so as not to overwhelm the spaces you hold both for yourself and me here.

If you wish to reach for more, I highly recommend finishing the read with Kahlil Gibran’s On Love—a timeless meditation on love’s boundless nature, its joys and sorrows, and the way it shapes and refines us through both presence and loss. It offers a deepening of the themes explored here, inviting reflection on love not as possession, but as a force that transforms and completes us.

Thank you for being here.

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This week, Poland celebrated the so-called “Fat Thursday”—a nationally recognised day dedicated to indulging in pączki—plump doughnuts usually filled with rose marmalade. We place orders at bakeries in advance, stand in long lines to get our share, gather with friends and family for little feasts, and spend the day licking powdered sugar or icing from our fingers. And yes, of course, I celebrated :)

A question to you, dear reader:

What kind of love do you wish to carry forward?