Apart from our day to day sorrows lives a Sorrow of immense proportions. A Sorrow that acknowledges birth, life, death and the unborn as one living whole. A Sorrow which includes life and its forms in all their beautiful and terrible expressions. A Sorrow which embraces the entirety of our human experience. This Sorrow lives in deepest caverns of our heart. It invites us to be daring and selfless enough to plunge into its profound heartbreak. To open to this Sorrow is to let it widen the love spring of our hearts. It readies our hearts for an unimaginable love for it is the birthing of embodied wisdom and compassion.
Without giving ourselves to this Sorrow, we cut off the possibility for unconditional love to be born right inside of our humanness. And it is a birthing indeed, for like any birth it is a profound process. It requires time, patience and care. To give yourself to this process will inevitably and fundamentally transform you. This Sorrow is the readying of the heart to be able to include the opposites of life and death as one living whole.
To feel this existential Sorrow leads to a very embodied experience of inclusion, which is to say it leads to unconditional love. Your very flesh, cell by cell gets rinsed with the tears of what the Sorrow knows and what this love beholds. It blesses what has been and teaches us how to truly let it go, so we could allow and celebrate life for the mystery it is. It humbles you, placing you in right relationship with all of life.
When opposites are held and known as one living thing, such as beauty and horror, agony and bliss, misery and elation, you, your heart and soul expand beyond one or the other, while ever more intimately including both. To not only hold these opposites, but feel them, to be one with them, has immense generative power. It’s not that we simply go beyond the two, it is that when these opposites come to mean the same thing to your heart, an invisible yet very real force begins to radiate.
Another way we can conceive of this Sorrow, is to see it as the other side of love - its other inseparable half. By inviting this Sorrow in, we welcome in love. By becoming both - existential Sorrow and unconditional love, we open ourselves to the possibility of a true life - one that is guided, informed, and consciously lived by the whole. This Sorrow is such an immense encounter, that if we dare to truly meet it, there is nothing that we can’t include and it is this inclusion that signifies the arrival of an all encompassing love.
