After enduring my first serious heart break, I decided to share my experience with my readers. For anyone that has ever had a break up, you know that you are never the same again. Many people never fully integrate the pain of their experience. Moving on can have many meanings, but until we fully come to terms with our own individuality, our vulnerabilities and the natural order of the universe, it is virtually impossible for us to integrate the heavy, dense and painful experience.

I use the word integrate to counter the process of resistance. We exist in a reality where pain is “bad” and should be avoided at all costs. Thus, we numb our suffering by filling the void that our ex-partner leaves behind with other people, more activities, substance abuse and most often gossip and negative self talk. As a result of this negative spiral of resistance we never learn to fully integrate our feelings and the experience and we become “tainted”. While time eventually does heal us, it is important that we take the opportunity that the break up gives us: to get to know ourselves completely bare, just as we are.

To do this we must first allow ourselves to grieve. This should be done alone, preferably with the help of a journal, exercise, art, a spiritual practice or even music. The reason we want to let grief into our life and experience it fully, is because it has the power to transform and alchemize. Grief creates depth and depth creates inspiration, but also wisdom. In our aloneness we slowly learn to fall back in love with ourselves. We learn about what we fear, we process new perspectives; we become more fully and authentically focused on our true happiness.

The most important aspect that I want to address about break ups is “fear”. I mentioned earlier that people become “tainted” because they have been so burned, that they close their heart off from letting someone new in. We close our heart, because we don’t want to experience pain, because we see pain as unpleasant. When we fearlessly enter heartbreak and allow ourselves the space to mourn, cry, yell, express our innermost soul, we create a deep intimacy with our authentic self–the self that is scared, hurt and needs to be loved. When we close ourselves off and push away the universe–that is a sign that we are pushing our own true self away as well.

Many relationships in the Aquarian age will have many difficulties and most of them will be falling apart. This is because of the highly individualistic nature that is being cultivated in society. As a result of this uprise in self-sufficiency, the human is becoming more fearful and distanced from their true self. As we become hungrier for self-realization, knowledge and evolution, most of us will lose our idea of oneness. We will experience deep attachments to people as we strive to get the external world to fill our inner voids. We will ironically begin to fear the very independence we are seeking. As we fail to realize that we are the creators of our own divine reality, true love will move farther and farther away from us, until it exists as an idealistic illusion. How do we move through this?

This answer is to love. We must love with abandon. We must be so open to all of life, to ourselves and to all people that the desire to love is greater than the fear that paralyzes us. We must trust ourselves to have an open heart. We must continue to open our bare soul to new people. We must move past our “ideal structures” and allow the universe to merge infinitely with our concepts of possibility. This means that we don’t have an agenda. Our only agenda is an outright devotion to living an open life, where we are not bound by what could go wrong. We must allow ourselves to feel in this new world. We must feel anger, fear, loneliness, grief, peace, joy, gratitude. It doesn’t matter what we feel, as long as we feel it fully.

I promise you that when you continue to love fully, and abandon yourself into the everlasting arms of the open universe you will realize that you were, are and always will be this love that you are seeking.