A NEW LOVE
A new love is not only a new beginning. We carry into it all our old stuff – whatever we may tell ourselves that this time it is different. Our carry-on luggage is in the overhead compartment of our heart ship – in the limbic system of our brain. Housed there it has no sense of time or place – it just feels, and bonds and attaches, remembers, and repeats until healing in body and mind slowly shifts outmoded relationship patterns. These were built one disconnection at a time.
One way to think about these patterns is as existential issues. A new love won’t answer the existential questions we all face but it does give a temporary reprieve. Existential dilemmas are like the scaffolding of the life you are building – your own life path walked in your own two feet. The seven issues below shape all our relationships!
- Loving involves pain and, ultimately, abandonment or separation
- Suddenly or gradually, we will lose our physical abilities
- Regardless of how we are treated, we are responsible for how we express our feelings
- As we get older, more and more people become sexually ineligible or uninterested in us
- We have made life choices with consequences we don’t like
- We can’t prevent the people we love from making mistakes or suffering
- Some people who have mistreated us are going to get away with it